I heart my country and my blue, blue state
In case you haven't heard, Colorado's electoral votes went to Obama. At the Dems party, the cheer when it was announced was just as loud as the cheer half an hour earlier when the election was called. We also elected a second Democratic senator and ousted Marilyn Musgrave, one of the most conservative members of Congress. So, to recap: Colorado voted for Obama, has a Democratic governor, both houses of the state legislature, both senators, and five out of seven congressmen. (And voted down, resoundingly, the amendment that would define a fertilized egg as a person.) Red state, my ass.
ETA, because I meant to put this in: For those of you who are wondering what to do with your lives, now that you're not obsessively refreshing fivethirtyeight and electoral-vote.com: this interactive map at the NYT is sucking up all my time. The really cool thing is the "voting shifts" map that compares the 2008 vote, on a county-by-county basis, to 2004 or any earlier year back to 1992. Short version: discounting AZ and AK as states with a personal stake in the election, the entire country has moved to the blue, except for one very distinctive band across the middle southeast.
http://change.gov ♥ ♥ ♥
Super Obama World!
In less heart-y news, everyone on my flist (and me, too) is justifiably upset about California's Proposition 8. penknife has an excellent essay on why gay marriage is such a hard sell in the US here, which I see is already up to four pages of comments, so you have probably seen it already. But it's worth pointing to again. My own opinion is that "marriage" is a loaded word. A lot of people have suggested, "well, have civil unions for everyone, which covers the legal aspects, and then let people get married in the church if they like." The problem with this is that marriage is not just a religious but a social institution. My husband and I, atheists, got married by a friend who was a mail-order minister in the Universal Life Church - the one you get by sending $5 to the box number in the ad in the back of Rolling Stone.We wrote our own service that mentioned God not at all. But I would fight fiercely the idea that what we have, or what we should have, is a civil union rather than a marriage. The word is important to us, and to our families, and to the way they and the rest of the world views our relationship. And that is why the gay people I know would rather have a "marriage" than a "civil union," and why the socially-liberal-but-maybe-the-slightest-bit-uneasy-with-homosexuality people I know would rather have gay people have "civil unions" rather than "marriage."
And, in non-political but still interesting news:
Women who get migraines are 30% less likely to get breast cancer
9 words that don't mean what you think. At Cracked Magazine, illustrated with random pictures of bikini cleavage (really, WTF?) so possibly NSFW.
ETA, because I meant to put this in: For those of you who are wondering what to do with your lives, now that you're not obsessively refreshing fivethirtyeight and electoral-vote.com: this interactive map at the NYT is sucking up all my time. The really cool thing is the "voting shifts" map that compares the 2008 vote, on a county-by-county basis, to 2004 or any earlier year back to 1992. Short version: discounting AZ and AK as states with a personal stake in the election, the entire country has moved to the blue, except for one very distinctive band across the middle southeast.
http://change.gov ♥ ♥ ♥
Super Obama World!
In less heart-y news, everyone on my flist (and me, too) is justifiably upset about California's Proposition 8. penknife has an excellent essay on why gay marriage is such a hard sell in the US here, which I see is already up to four pages of comments, so you have probably seen it already. But it's worth pointing to again. My own opinion is that "marriage" is a loaded word. A lot of people have suggested, "well, have civil unions for everyone, which covers the legal aspects, and then let people get married in the church if they like." The problem with this is that marriage is not just a religious but a social institution. My husband and I, atheists, got married by a friend who was a mail-order minister in the Universal Life Church - the one you get by sending $5 to the box number in the ad in the back of Rolling Stone.We wrote our own service that mentioned God not at all. But I would fight fiercely the idea that what we have, or what we should have, is a civil union rather than a marriage. The word is important to us, and to our families, and to the way they and the rest of the world views our relationship. And that is why the gay people I know would rather have a "marriage" than a "civil union," and why the socially-liberal-but-maybe-the-slightest-bit-uneasy-with-homosexuality people I know would rather have gay people have "civil unions" rather than "marriage."
And, in non-political but still interesting news:
Women who get migraines are 30% less likely to get breast cancer
9 words that don't mean what you think. At Cracked Magazine, illustrated with random pictures of bikini cleavage (really, WTF?) so possibly NSFW.