In loving, living memory, John Melançon 1928 – 2007
Status
Recent blog posts
- How to kill a popular government institution with us since the founding of the country before everyone's eyes
- Evil Neighbor Blues
- My grandfather is doing fantastic
- Update on Housing Demolotions in Bangalore, India
- In which the hospital attempts to fulfill my grandfather's death wish
- Update on Alfred Natkin from Cape Cod Hospital
- Doing What One Can Do
- Proposition 37 Million Dollars
- Andrew Judson Grice (1969-2012)
- Peasants and migrant workers rising up, organizing, and even winning in repressive China
Front-paged Notes
Journal
User login
Search
Syndicate
Equal rights to marry lost (for now) in California and kept in Massachusetts, the why, how, and what now
Fri, 2008/12/26 - 7:19am — Benjamin Melançon
With the caveat of not trusting any polls too much, especially as the demographic slices get smaller...
Why Prop 8 Won, by Richard Kim
If exit polls are to be believed, some 70 percent of African-Americans voted Yes on 8, as did 52 percent of Latinos and 49 percent of Asians; each of these demographics went heavily for Obama, blacks by a 94-to-6 margin. Los Angeles County, heavily minority, went 50-50 on Prop 8. These results have shocked gay activists, who knew from earlier polls that black voters favored Prop 8, but they were seeing much smaller margins, closer to 50 percent.
Do read the whole thing:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081124/kim
I have long hoped that the GLBTQQI movement would define itself in solidarity with all other oppressed groups, would make economic equality and opposition to all discrimination part of its fight also. I said as much and may have written this somewhere after Massachusetts' Supreme Judicial Court gave everyone equal right to marry. Queer rights activists may be able to offer some organizational resources they were developing to the economically disadvantaged, who had what it looked like they would need: numbers. The legislature intervened to keep it off the ballot that year, and I think even if it were put on now it would be safe. Men have married men and women women for several years now, and lo and behold, the world hasn't ended and hardly anyone's noticed. The same would have happened in California. Indeed, I think if the media had really covered the historic 18,000 marriages made in the brief window of equality under the law, enough people would have voted to keep the rights even with the very short turnaround.
But radical outreach and real solidarity is what's needed to advance this cause of justice, like so many others.
For now, we can support places like http://speakoutboston.org
Make feelings known... http://poxyd.livejournal.com/136322.html
And organize: http://jointheimpact.com/
[P.S. Yes this note was started a month ago on my computer. It is now free on the internet and I can close one more text editor window...) Other resources welcome.
I make a living doing web design and development with a great team
The Agaric Design Collective
I'm trying to make possible a worldwide nonviolent revolution for justice, liberty, and making more good things doable.
People Who Give a Damn
Created and maintained by
Favorite Quotations
We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.