California: You are monsters
Sorry for the knee-jerkiness of this post--I wrote it up early this morning with 91% of the precincts called in (95% now and the percentages are still the same) on Prop 8. This is purely therapeutic for me.
A message to California:
Know what, I'm not even blaming the conservative religious vote. We already knew they wouldn't make the separation between (old) church and state; I'm not laying it on them.
No, this is because self-proclaimed "forward thinking" progressive Californians used their vote to alleviate their visceral reaction to the idea of gays in love and what that entails to their preconceived notions of sex and gender. They can talk a big game about believing equal rights for all, I'm pretty sure they genuinely think they believe it, they probably even work rather happily alongside gay people or "have gay friends", but in the privacy of a voting booth, can't shake the gut feeling of, "Well, it is kind of gross.."
Well congratulations, your inability to consolidate What's Right and Just with Things You Don't Like have rolled our great state back to the 1950s, which you've evidently learned nothing from. Gay couples had the state-given right to marry for half a year in our state; what great, fearful societal harms resulted from this? What deterioration of culture or violation of families' rights occurred? That's right: none.
California, you've deliberately, knowingly and willingly moved to make second-class citizens of your fellow man in the eyes of the state. I hope that makes you feel even half as shitty as it actually makes you.
I hope (oh irony), as is being predicted, that this measure won't be retroactive. I hope every gay couple who married between June and today will make it well heard that their marriage IS exactly the same as straight couples'.
My heart goes out to the gay couples in Arkansas, Arizona, and Florida as well. I'm sorry to say I expected it, but then they're not states well known for their progressive choices. California is though, and for this to happen in 2008 is shameful, embarrassing, and monstrous.
You know, I was rather proud of this old state: saying I lived in California, talking about the example it provided to other states and the strides forward it had made. In the last eight years, my country may have been a domestic disaster and an international joke. But my state, I was always proud to call home.
You've finally made me ashamed to live here.
No love,
Me.
*sigh* If I'm to be honest with myself, I kind of expected this too. It didn't make the reality any less hard, and I still ended up crying myself to sleep (wtf who does that), even after a whole evening spent periodically bursting into tears like a melodramatic asshole. I don't even know why I'm taking this so poorly--if marriage is ever to be an option in my life, the state isn't telling me that I can't have it. I broke the news (prematurely) to one of my closest gay friends last night, and he was the one comforting me. There's.. something fundamentally wrong with that.
In spite of my above despairing attitude, I know this isn't over. I want a cultural revolution. I want discourse and decision making based on actual civil terms and not religious and social rhetoric. I want all of my friends to have truly equal representation under the eyes of the goddamn law. I want to be proud to live in this state again. So we've got some work to do.
A message to California:
Know what, I'm not even blaming the conservative religious vote. We already knew they wouldn't make the separation between (old) church and state; I'm not laying it on them.
No, this is because self-proclaimed "forward thinking" progressive Californians used their vote to alleviate their visceral reaction to the idea of gays in love and what that entails to their preconceived notions of sex and gender. They can talk a big game about believing equal rights for all, I'm pretty sure they genuinely think they believe it, they probably even work rather happily alongside gay people or "have gay friends", but in the privacy of a voting booth, can't shake the gut feeling of, "Well, it is kind of gross.."
Well congratulations, your inability to consolidate What's Right and Just with Things You Don't Like have rolled our great state back to the 1950s, which you've evidently learned nothing from. Gay couples had the state-given right to marry for half a year in our state; what great, fearful societal harms resulted from this? What deterioration of culture or violation of families' rights occurred? That's right: none.
California, you've deliberately, knowingly and willingly moved to make second-class citizens of your fellow man in the eyes of the state. I hope that makes you feel even half as shitty as it actually makes you.
I hope (oh irony), as is being predicted, that this measure won't be retroactive. I hope every gay couple who married between June and today will make it well heard that their marriage IS exactly the same as straight couples'.
My heart goes out to the gay couples in Arkansas, Arizona, and Florida as well. I'm sorry to say I expected it, but then they're not states well known for their progressive choices. California is though, and for this to happen in 2008 is shameful, embarrassing, and monstrous.
You know, I was rather proud of this old state: saying I lived in California, talking about the example it provided to other states and the strides forward it had made. In the last eight years, my country may have been a domestic disaster and an international joke. But my state, I was always proud to call home.
You've finally made me ashamed to live here.
No love,
Me.
*sigh* If I'm to be honest with myself, I kind of expected this too. It didn't make the reality any less hard, and I still ended up crying myself to sleep (wtf who does that), even after a whole evening spent periodically bursting into tears like a melodramatic asshole. I don't even know why I'm taking this so poorly--if marriage is ever to be an option in my life, the state isn't telling me that I can't have it. I broke the news (prematurely) to one of my closest gay friends last night, and he was the one comforting me. There's.. something fundamentally wrong with that.
In spite of my above despairing attitude, I know this isn't over. I want a cultural revolution. I want discourse and decision making based on actual civil terms and not religious and social rhetoric. I want all of my friends to have truly equal representation under the eyes of the goddamn law. I want to be proud to live in this state again. So we've got some work to do.