Not surprisingly, Berkeley and San Francisco vote to urge Bush’s impeachment!
San Francisco was one of two Bay Area cities in which voters could call for Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to be impeached. Neither San Francisco voters nor their counterparts in Berkeley passed up the chance — San Francisco’s Prop. J won, 59 percent to 41 percent, while in Berkeley, Measure H easily won with nearly 70 percent of the vote.
Also not a surprise: gay marriage banned in 7 of 8 states, as expected (AZ the exception)*. But both Human Rights Campaign and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force folks read the AZ victory, and the narrowing margin on the losses, as a plus. NGLTF’s press release says:
Anti-marriage amendments were on the ballot in eight states and were approved in seven of the eight, but by significantly lower margins than in past years. In 2004, there were 11 anti-marriage amendments on the November ballot, and in only two of them did opposition top 40 percent: Oregon (43 percent) and Michigan (41 percent). Early this morning, five out of the eight states topped 40 percent, including Arizona, Colorado, South Dakota, Virginia and Wisconsin.
“It’s clear that fear-mongering around same-sex marriage by the GOP and the extreme Christian right is fizzling out,†said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. “It doesn’t have the juice it had just two years ago — people are getting sick of it.â€
Amen to that. And way to see the glass as a quarter full, rather than three-quarters empty. Forty years from now all this hooey will be source of retroactive shame, as anti-misegenation laws are now. Same story: the closer they became to being struck down, a flurry of legislation swept around to ensure they stayed put; at the time of the historic 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia, popular sentiment was even more anti-misegenation than the current anti-gay marriage sentiment. [An interesting comparison of states’ laws on both issues is collected here by a Canadian college student/Libertarianish political cartoonist/listmaker.] I might not live to see the last anti-gay marriage statute struck down, but my kids will – that is, global climatalogical calamities notwithstanding. Which is the point: we all have bigger fish to fry. Lest the fish themselves start boiling.
* [Later note: AZ insiders don’t read the vote as a sign that a majority love gay people, so much as that a majority don’t want to vote away benefits from oldster domestic partners. Says one writer, the next such gay marriage ban proposition will be better worded, and will win. See this piece in Slate for more… Another DailyKos diarist sees it as a series of factors some of which may, some of which may not be replicable.]
I love your part of the country… voting to ask to impeach and remove W… that MUST have felt good, even if, you know, it’s not actually going to work.
I keep telling myself that all these malicious laws are just a sign of fear and failure on the part of the bigots. And I also keep reminding myself that most “average” Americans don’t understand the true legal status of gay people and families, and that once they understand they are appalled and (usually) become allies. Still, one-by-one education is just so tedious. Better than the alternative, MUCH better, but I am not the most patient of people. I just keep looking at my daughter and telling myself, “the world will look different by the time she’s old enough to notice and act… and if it doesn’t, she’ll work to make it so.”