Thursday, November 06, 2008

You know who I love?


Besides my wife and kids, I mean.... I love Jerry Brown. I loved him when he was mayor of Oakland, I love him now that he is California's attorney general. I love that he (like me) believes that people, by and large are fundamentally stupid. Not mean, just ignorant and easily swayed by emotional appeals. Some of you may or may not remember this but a few months ago when this whole Prop 8 thing was really gearing up for it's wave of polarizing silliness, Jerry Brown changed the title of the proposition to explicitly state that it is about taking away the rights of a minority group. Now, while at the time, this was posited as a "clarification" it is now a fundamental action point in the lawsuit that has been recently introduced to the CA Supreme court by the ACLU and Lambda group inso much as you can't actually just decide by a simple majority to 1) make fundamental changes to the constitution (that takes a 2/3 vote by the legislature first before it ever goes to "the people") and 2)You can't actually discriminate at a constitutional level against a legally defined and thereby protected minority group. In the previous Supreme court ruling the question was whether or not sexual identity qualifies as a "protected class" in the same way that race and gender do" and the answer was (an admittedly gray-area) "yes" meaning that marriage between two adults in this particular protected class was allowed. Proposition 8 tried to skirt this whole sexual identity thing by acting as though sexual identity had nothing to do with it, instead it was simply saying that across the board, same-gendered partners regardless of sexual identity shouldn't be allowed to get legally hitched which, of course is ridiculous but at the same time is exactly the sort of crazy legal-loopholeness that people like Jerry Brown anticipated and, to the extent that they could, engineered a pretty compelling Plan B around waaaaaay before our fundamentally ignorant electorant got their grubby paws on their ballots. And please don't think I'm excluding myself from the teeming mass of knee-jerk voters! I voted for at least two Props and one person based on little more than they sounded good (and in one case because the argument against included the words "protecting against {sic} the illegals accessing the system" which not only offended my sense grammatical exactitude but just plain pissed me off!) I'm just glad that there are folks in positions of policy-crafting and sheparding power who are also sort of looking out for and planning around those guaranteed-to-be-needed Plan B, C and Ds....

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