IMHO In My Humble Opinion

Judith Warner writes about the aftermath of Prop 8.

There are protests around the country tomorrow. I'm hoping to be able to attend the one in New York City.

I've spent most of my time since August 5 in California, to get involved with the battle against Proposition 8. I haven't really said all that much publicly for a variety of reasons (for one thing, I didn't want to get pestered by people to act as a spokesperson for the campaign, especially since that wasn't really my role.)

About 6 weeks before the election I got tapped to take over the technical aspects of the campaign's online presence. This involved some interesting work involving blogger outreach and outreach on social networking sites, some work analyzing data that made me feel nostalgic for the time I was working at Google doing web log analytics, and some work that I'd rather have had someone else do (waking up at 1:30 in the morning to figure out how to stop a DDoS attack on the web site is the prime example.)

In spite of the fact that we lost this election, the campaign managed to do some amazing things. We managed to raise $40 million, a lot of it online from small donors. Eight years ago, California voted 61-39 to prevent marriage equality; the vote earlier this month was 52-48.

Sure, I think the campaign made some mistakes. If you engage me in a private conversation, I might even tell you what I think some of them were. But for the most part, what I want to say right now is that I just spent the last 6 weeks working with some of the most amazing people I've ever worked with (and given my previous experiences at Harvey Mudd College and Google, that's one of the biggest compliments I can give.)

I'm planning on staying involved in this; we may have lost this election, but some day the United States of America will recognize that all of its citizens deserve full equality. And when I say that, I'm not just talking about equality for gay people, but also equality for transgender people, for women, for African Americans, for the disabled, for anyone who might not be able to get their voices heard because they're in a segment of the population that's too small to have power.

If you haven't yet, go out and vote.

And if you live in California, vote No on 8.

I think I disagree with John Cleese here; I still think Michael's funnier than Sarah. But he's still got a point:

(I wish I had more time to blog right now, but I'm crazy busy, so these quick little posts will have to do.)

Yes We Can (Hold Babies). This site is hilarious.

This is something I've written up as an e-mail that I've been sending to a lot of people in my address book.

I've never written an e-mail that I've intended to send to everyone I know, and I hope never to do it again. But in November we're going to have the most important election so far in my lifetime for my civil rights. I'm not talking about the Obama/McCain matchup (although that one's important too) but rather California's vote on Proposition 8.

What is at issue on November 4 is my right to marry the person I love. If you're straight, you get to live in a world where you get to assume that someday, when you meet someone who's right for you, you can settle down and have kids, raise a family, visit each other in the hospital when you're sick, not be taxed on supporting each other, and have society respect the fact that you're making a commitment to each other.

I can't.

Well, I can't in the state where I live, but I can in the state where I was born (unless Prop 8 passes.) And that's one of the reasons why Proposition 8 is so important to defeat: as one of the leaders of the most homophobic organizations out there says, "If we lose California, if they defeat the marriage amendment, I'm afraid that the culture war is over."

New York's legislature is close to allowing same sex civil marriage rights. New Jersey is in the process of reconsidering its civil union law that fails to provide the equality its courts ruled for. Iowa's supreme court is waiting to issue a ruling on same sex civil marriage. And they're all waiting to see what happens in California; unless we defeat this proposition, getting equality in these states will be set back for years.

The result of this race is probably the difference between the federal government recognizing my right to marry the person I love in the next 15 years, or having to wait 50 years. It's going to happen some day:
people in my generation get that it's not right to take away people's rights, even if they might be uncomfortable with the idea of actually participating in a same sex wedding ceremony. But if Proposition 8 passes, I'm going to have to wait until I'm my grandparents' age before I get society to recognize that I'm not a second class citizen. And I'd really like to give my mother the opportunity to see me get married some day, and have it mean the same thing as the weddings my brothers have had.

So, what am I asking you to do?

• At the very least, if you live in California, vote NO on Prop 8. It's not too late to register to vote; the deadline this year in California is October 20, and just to make it easy, you can get the form online at
  http://www.sos.ca.gov/nvrc/fedform/
• Tell all of your friends who live in California that they need to vote NO on Prop 8.
• Donate to the campaign at
  https://secure.ga4.org/01/equalityforall
  I have given more money to this campaign than I've ever given to a political campaign ever in my life, and after talking directly to the people directly in charge of the campaign, I know that every dollar raised at this point will make a difference.
• And if you're really looking for more to do, please visit
  http://www.noonprop8.com/home

I occasionally get interesting e-mail. Often times it relates to chaos theory, since I've had a page up on the topic for well over a decade now. But today's weird e-mails were interesting for a couple of reasons: they're actually related to politics, and came to an e-mail address that, as far as I know, hasn't been on the web for months.

Does this mean that someone is actually spamming blog e-mails with this message? Using e-mail addresses that they collected months (or years) ago? Or do I actually have an audience that only now felt there was something important to send me a message about?

Anyhow, here's the e-mail:

The President is expected to explain government's life saving boat for American residents.

Government wants $700 Billion dollars of tax payers money to buy troubled assets from financial institutes.

99% of the people are saying NO to that.

President Bush will explain why government needs to do so.

Watch Presidnet Bush on any major TV channel Today, Wednesday, at 8 p.m. Central time.

I'm not sure that the 99% statistic is correct, but it's close enough, I suppose: there's bipartisan support for spending a bit more time thinking about the bailout scheme. Then again, there's bipartisan support for passing something right away (what, is this PATRIOT II? Come on, Congress, didn't you learn anything over the last 8 years?)

Anyhow, I missed Bush's address, but I'm listening to it now online. It's a bit predictable given Bush's history of economic policy.

Sometime over the last couple of years, I turned into someone who is into politics.

I never really intended this to happen, but I've long felt that as a citizen of this country, one should care at least a little bit about politics. And now I'm actually working for a political campaign to keep marriage rights, in the national leadership of a group creating social spaces to talk about progressive politics, and generally trying to keep up with all things political.

I've had a couple of interesting IM conversations today.

• Conversation one: a friend of mine, who's currently in school, has a conversation with me. Shortly after we have a short conversation about what I'm doing to try and make sure I can get married some day, she asks "So who are you voting for? I don't know who I'm going to vote for."

  Now, I know for a fact that she doesn't live and breathe politics like I do, but she was honestly asking this question. Clearly, she doesn't read my blog (Previously and previously.) Not that I expect her to; my readership is minimal and I'm writing this more as a way of organizing my thoughts and venting than anything else. But I find it amazing that she is unsure at this point, given what I know of her priorities. (She's about as on-board the "gay people deserve equal rights" train as most of my friends, is worried about taxes, and health care, and Obama is a clear win in all three of these categories.) I've stopped watching mainstream media (except for the occasional clip on the Daily Show) but I didn't realize that it had gotten this bad.

  After I apologized for ranting about the differences between McCain and Obama, she actually thanked me for explaining my point of view, because she hadn't been getting anything that helped her make up her mind.

• Conversation two: a college friend, responding to my status message about proposition 8 said, "Damn you, I hadn't been planning to vote." He moved to Canada from California, but is still a US citizen (I had wondered how voter registration worked in situations like this; I guess now I know.)

  It amazes me that it was my little status message that prompted this: he was three years ahead of me, and it's not like we keep in touch very often (about once a year we have an e-mail exchange; I think I've seen him twice in person since I graduated.) Is it really possible that nobody else managed to convince him that this election would be important? Am I really his "political friend"?

I guess somehow I did turn into that person. How can I deny it, when last week at a bar I lectured a friend who I hadn't seen in a couple of years on the history of the same sex marriage debate in California?

The US Court of Appeals has decided that it's okay for the Agriculture Department to forbid a company from testing its cows for mad cow disease. Currently, the USDA tests about 1% of cows for mad cow disease, and it has only found 3 cases in the US.

The basis the judge used to make this determination? That the Agriculture Department is allowed to regulate disease treatment, and that diagnosis is part of treatment. (Never mind that the test is done on dead animals, and that the only real treatment option left at that point is destroying the meat.)

So why would the government want to reduce testing for a fatal, incurable disease? Because the test is expensive, and if some company decides to advertise that its cows are free of this disease, then other beef producers will have to start testing more of their cows. I can't find good numbers on how much the test costs online, but I've seen numbers ranging from about $20 to $200. I'm guessing that the number is going down over time (and would go down substantially if we actually started testing more cows). My back of the envelope calculation tells me that this test would add somewhere between 30 cents and 3 dollars per pound to the price of beef at this price.

At the lower end of that spectrum, I'm willing to pay a bit extra for some safety (with policies like this one, I know my government isn't doing much to make my food safer, as long as food producers get to keep their profits high...) Of course, the real answer is to stop feeding cows ground meat: they're herbivores that evolved to eat grass, and their digestive system doesn't deal well with much else, in spite of what meat producers decide to feed them. As far as I understand it, the way mad cow disease is spread from cow to cow is by the cows eating infected cow meat.

Of course, disallowing the practice of feeding what's left over from the slaughterhouse to cows would also likely increase the price of beef. Never mind that it would keep our meat supply healthier (mad cow disease isn't the only disease that infects what comes out of our slaughterhouses...)

This morning in my e-mail inbox was a link to a post about "the first federally recognized same-sex marriage".

Now, I'm not really an expert on this kind of law, but my reading of the relevant portion of DOMA makes me think that the federal government is going to be doing any recognizing of this particular marriage. (That's like saying if a Native American tribe started allowing polygamy that those relationships would be recognized as marriage in US Federal law.)

Just because a Native American tribe is a sovereign nation within the United States, and there's some sort of federal recognition that the Native American nation can do things it own way doesn't mean that it's magically going to overwrite DOMA. This is a different situation than a state legalizing same-sex marriage, but I don't see how it's substantially different. Perhaps it provides another avenue to challenge the constitutionality of DOMA. (I think that's unlikely, since there's a lot more in the Constitution about states than sovereign nations.)

So I don't think a legal loophole has been discovered here. But I am glad to see that we can add at least one more jurisdiction that's being sensible and recognizing that gender boundaries aren't the right way to decide who ought to be allowed to marry.