oh your poor feelings

After months of waiting for the verdict, people across the country who believe in equality and fairness were delighted today when Judge Vaughn Walker overturned California's Proposition 8 which made marriage inequality in California the law of the land.  Prior to prop 8, for a very short time, gay couples in California were allowed to be equal citizens in terms of marriage rights, and a few thousand couples married the person they love.  Prop 8 closed that like a closet door slamming shut.

A very few states in the US allow same sex couples to marry, and a very few allow same sex couples to attain something not entirely unlike marriage, often known as a domestic partnership.  Like school segregation before Brown vs. Board of Education, gay people were, and in too many states still are, separate but not equal.

Some people who oppose marriage equality will self righteously and infuriatingly pretend that marriage is something a man and a woman do in order to then begin bearing children so that they can have a family.  They see marriage as a holy and sacred thing that is the only way in which children are brought into the world, and they insist that the only good way for children to be conceived, born and raised is through this myth that they so want to be true.

Possibly the most infuriating argument now that prop 8 has been overturned is their decrying the "activist judge" who invalidated the votes of seven million Californians who wanted to maintain the charade that all children are born into loving families with parents of opposing genders and are raised in a quaint fifties style sort of perfection that never really ever existed.

And this argument is one that angers me so much because they conveniently ignore reality.  Okay, so they consistently ignore reality.  They ignore that children are in fact now and have been being raised by gay parents, by single parents and even are adopted and raised by parents with whom they share no actual genetic heritage beyond mere humanity. 

So, back to that seven million now disenfranchised voters in California who have to deal with the idea, solely in their slow bigoted minds, that their democracy has failed them.  What these anti equality people fail to realize, or what they so easily ignore because the light burns, is that the vote wasn't seven million to zero.  The vote, according to this page at Wikipedia was more like 7,001,084 for taking away the right to marry the person you love to 6,401,482 who believe that marriage is a fundamental right that should be available to all.

Somehow the right to equality and the votes of 6.5 million people just don't happen to matter as much as fear mongering, deception and animus.  And honestly, if you just don't like gay people have the fucking balls to say so.  Quit hiding behind your Bible or your church or your platitudes.  Own your bigotry.  Quit pretending that you're going to be in any way effected.  Quit shitting on all those kids who don't have the fortune to be married into a family that involves a couple lucky enough to have found "the one" the first time around.  Quit fucking with other people's lives.  Quit forcing us to fight you over and over again.  Just fuck off!

from whence come I

Thanks to Christine for this one.  I played with what it asked for as I suspect most people do.  I didn't mean for it to be as negative seeming as it seems to seem, but maybe I'm just looking at it the way I tend.  At the same time, if does come across as negative I have to remind myself that I didn't want to spend too much time with each line.  I wanted this thing to come out of me in a way that I felt was being honest.

And then I remember and must accept that I over analyze everything, that I edit a lot, that I want to present things in a way that I'm at least okay, if not happy, with.  I'm never altogether happy about it.  But it's done, and that's all I can say for now.


And all that being said, I give you the thing below.  It's called Where I'm From and is basically  a set of writing prompts.  It wasn't really fun, but if you want to play along go HERE.

I am from old toys from older brothers and out of style clothes.
I am from the white ranch style house where in the summer, if you would just lie still in bed you wouldn't be so hot and could get to sleep.
I am from the dogwood, the red clay, the pines and kudzu.
I am from setting the table and sitting down as a family for sandwiches and listening to Larry Munson on the radio while watching the game on tv with the sound turned down, from being one of many brothers so that we're all always and forever a Hullboy.
I am from the not really talking or being heard.
From because I said to.
I am from the same pew every single service, Sunday morning and night and Wednesday night, and missions conference and revival, men's prayer meeting.
I'm from South Dekalb and iced tea being the first thing I ever learned to make in the kitchen.
From only ever really knowing as family my parents and brothers, a couple of cousins and their parents, from a grandmother I never really remember liking as much as I liked that a night spent at her house meant a certain freedom.
I am from a random assortment of pictures at my parent's house as well as the new collections on the internet as the family I have moves into the twenty first century.