Thursday, May 02, 2013

I'd be joining you, I vividly remember a day....

Congratulations, Rhode Island, on becoming the most recent state to recognize Marriage Equality.

If you look at a map of the USA, and you'll see that in every Presidential election in the last 20 years (all 6 of them), every state in the northeast above the Potomac River has voted for the Democrat (except for New Hampshire in 2000 [and thanks a LOT Granite State for giving us Bush and everything that resulted]).

Currently, all of these same states has some form of marriage equality or civil union. Except one.

Why hello there and welcome to my home state of Pennsylvania!

While I would love to say Pennsylvania will soon be entering the 21st Century and granting equal civil right to ALL it's citizens...I gotta tell ya I don't see it anytime soon.

Yeah, PA's a blue state, but there are HORDES of people outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh that really do, like Obama said, "Cling to their guns and religion".  And dont hear a lot of people around here that DO vote Democratic, say anything positive about marriage equality.  And frankly, with the state Republican Party in charge of both houses of the legislature and the governor's mansion (although with his low approval ratings and poll numbers, I really don't see Corbett still living there in January 2015), and a HUGE portion of that Republican Party fully in the grip of the far right wingnuts, the chances of a marriage equality bill even getting a vote in is practically nil.

No, I think it's much more likely that PA's discriminatory marriage laws will be overturned by a decision of the Supreme Court before the state itself does it.

However, having said that, let me add that 10 years ago, gay sex by consenting adults in private was still illegal in huge swaths of the USA, and no state had either gay marriage or civil unions.  So the amazingly rapid change of the whole situation frankly floors me.  But in a good way.

At any rate, Congrats Rhode Island!

POLT

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks Polt! It was a long, long fight but the fight is finally over.

Now I can move on to other things, like maybe lobbying our legislature to stop giving away the candy store to banks and instead start investing in the tech sector.

And then there's the deregulation of electric and gas utilities in the state. I want it repealed. I want STRONG regulation of public utilities.

And there are a bunch of other pet peeves I have. Plus I sort of enjoy the political theater a bit too much. Don't ever want to run per se, but I do love rattling their cages ever so much.