Rose Knows

This morning, the California Supreme Court ruled to uphold Proposition 8, which amended the California state constitution to ban same-sex marriages. They also ruled that the 18,000 marriages performed before the ban were still valid.

As a civil rights-loving Californian, I’m disappointed in this ruling, but as a lifelong follower of California politics I’m not at all surprised. The question before the court was not specifically about same-sex marriages. It was about whether, under California law, the voters can amend the state constitution with a simple majority on a ballot referendum. In the decision, the justices take great pains to note what the case in question was about:

Regardless of our views as individuals on this question of policy, we recognize as judges and as a court our responsibility to confine our consideration to a determination of the constitutional validity and legal
effect of the measure in question. It bears emphasis in this regard that our role is limited to interpreting and applying the principles and rules embodied in the California Constitution, setting aside our own personal beliefs and values. (p. 3)

In a sense, petitioners’ and the Attorney General’s complaint is that it is just too easy to amend the California Constitution through the initiative process. But it is not a proper function of this court to curtail that process; we are constitutionally bound to uphold it. If the process for amending the Constitution is to be restricted . . . this is an effort that the people themselves may undertake through the process of amending their Constitution in order to impose further limitations upon their own power of initiative. (pp. 12-13)

(You can read the decision in its entirety on the Court’s site. There’s also an in-page version at laist.com. If you care about politics in California, you really should peruse it.)

In other words: The Court’s hands are tied by precedent. If we Californians don’t like the system, we should get off our asses and change it. ‘Cause heaven knows, the system is screwy. Take it from Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He’s in Sacramento right now, trying to preserve funding for cities in the California state budget. His take:: “[W]hen a bare majority can strip away a fundamental right - yet it takes a two-thirds vote to pass a budget - then our system is fundamentally broken.” He should know; he’s a former speaker of the state Assembly who wants to be Governor some day. Why anyone would want to try to be governor of this state, I don’t know; it’s less a state than a collection of several industries clamoring for money. Schwarzenegger’s starting to look like he’d like to un-recall Gray Davis. (Gray Davis, sipping a margarita on a Century City patio: “Oh, HELL, no. You wanted it; you deal with it. Hey, how’s that budget going?” Arnold: “Shut up.” Gray: “Hey, you know what would be a great way to raise some revenue for the state? Start doing same-sex marriages again! That’ll bring in the tourist dollars.” Arnold: “SHUT. UP.”)

Two pieces of good news, though. First of all, the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed prior to the election are still valid, because there’s nothing in the amendment that can be construed as making them retroactively invalid. The people behind Proposition 8 like to use skewed perceptions and scare tactics to convince voters that if same-sex marriage is permitted, all matter of calamity will befall our society. The continued existence of those marriages will just continue to show how stupid that argument is.

Second, things are changing. Prop 8 put the issue on the national table in a way that nothing else had previously, and the more people talk about it, the more they realize that the only reason not to allow same-sex marriage is that some people don’t like it.

As I noted in a previous post, the younger someone is, the more likely they are to support same-sex marriage. Among voters under the age of 30, the approval rating is 66%, and it’s just a matter of time before the demographics shift enough to win back same-sex marriage in California.

How long? Political stats guru Nate Silver is glad you asked. He recently crunched some numbers, picked out the important variables, and concluded that same-sex marriage bans are losing ground by about 2% a year. Given the narrow margin by which Proposition 8 passed, he figures that the California electorate would vote to repeal it in 2010 if it were on the ballot.

So, let’s get cracking, my fellow Californians - especially you doggedly single straights like me. Because this isn’t just about same-sex marriage rights. It’s about the preservation and extension of civil rights in all areas, to everyone in the state. You can’t legislate reality. A bunch of people not liking something should not be sufficient grounds for revocation of its existence. If it were, we would live in a world with no baseball or Russian literature. And that would suck. Especially the part about the baseball.

Q: Kris Allen. Over Adam Lambert. Really?

A: Apparently so.

I don’t usually pay much attention to American Idol, but this year I’ve had a lot of couch time to fill. Still, I think I could have addressed the final outcome without watching a single episode. It was a numbers thing, plain and simple.

Since Fox doesn’t release vote breakdowns, the best I have to work with is DialIdol.com reports. DialIdol uses an admittedly unscientific method of sampling Idol voters, but their predictions are usually spot-on.

Accounting for margin of error, the penultimate week’s voting breakdown showed a virtual three-way tie. With one of those performers eliminated, this theoretically leaves a third of the votes up for grabs.

The eliminee, of course, was Danny Gokey. Danny Gokey, who was as wholesome as he was bland. I mean, the guy looked genuinely thrilled to be singing with Lionel Richie during the season finale. Danny Gokey has no Elvis in him.

The majority of Gokey’s votes were not going to go to the guy who seemingly spent the whole season auditioning to be the new lead singer of Queen. If they couldn’t vote for the guy who might get through that godawful “No Boundaries” song with conviction, at least there was a finalist who could almost make it through with a straight face. You know what Adam was probably saying to Kris at the very end there? “Congratulations, man. Have fun singing ‘No Boundaries’ every night!” Isn’t it curious how Idol’s judges say they want to find an original voice, and then the producers make the winner sing some boring pseudo-inspirational pablum every single year? Oh, show. You’re funny even when you don’t mean to be. But I digress.

When I say that most of Gokey’s voters were going to prefer Kris over Adam, I’m saying that from a purely stylistic perspective. The is has nothing to do with personal style or sexual orientation, and everything to do with the fact that Adam Lambert’s style is about as opposite from Danny Gokey’s as one can get. Kris Allen’s performances just sound more like Gokey’s. The finalists were both one-trick ponies, which is not a bad thing to be when you’re trying to make music that people will buy. Judging from the vote, more people prefer stripping-down to amping-up.

Much has been made of the sexual orientation issue. (Adam’s not officially out, but he’s not exactly in, either.) I don’t think it affected the voting. Idol’s viewership skews young. There’s no reliable way of tracking Idol votes by age, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the younger viewers are the most active voters. Older viewers have other things to do with their time, like watching their 401(k)s dwindle, or voting for Dancing with the Stars.

Meanwhile, recent polling shows that the younger someone is, the more likely they are to support same-sex marriage. For example, the take-away from a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll:

Sixty-six percent of adults under age 30 support gay marriage. That drops to 48 percent of adults age 30 to 64 – and plummets to just 28 percent among senior citizens.

I don’t think it’s a big leap to infer that if someone supports same-sex marriage, they’re probably cool with the overall idea that someone might love, and/or lust after, someone of the same gender. (Note that I am not implying that if someone is against same-sex marriage, they’re homophobic - though if you take a look at the poll, I think you find a significant correlation.) There may be a segment of the Idol viewership that wouldn’t vote for Adam because he wears eyeliner, but the demographic odds are that they’re pretty small. In other words, they didn’t not vote for Adam because he looks like an ersatz Freddie Mercury. They didn’t vote for him because he sounds like one. They’d rather go with the ersatz singer of the Plain White T’s. And that’s just a matter of personal taste. Not my taste, but I’ll take either one of them over the ersatz Lionel Richie. That would just be wrong.

Q: Why do we drink that awful Maneshewitz wine at Passover? — D.

A: Not one of the classic four questions, but close enough. As the Passover seder is obsessed with the number four, I have four answers for you. Pick and choose at your whim.

1. To remind us of the suffering of our ancestors. If matzo and syrupy wine were good enough for our forebears in the desert, the Old Country and Brooklyn, it’s good enough for us.
2. Because kids always want to try wine, and the taste is enough to keep them off the sauce well into college. Well, high school, at least.
3. Because even though there are actual good-tasting kosher-for-Passover wines out there, none of them hold the charoset together quite as well as the sticky standby.
4. Because after four cups of wine, who cares what anything tastes like? This also explains that weird tart-like dessert with the jam spots on top. As does reply number one.

Please excuse the unannounced hiatus. Turns out that surgery can knock you out for a while.

I have a backlog of questions to get through, but don’t let that stop you from sending in yours. I make no guarantees about answering them in the order received. I’m a little snippy like that.

Also, it seems that a bunch of comments disappeared. Really, everything goes to hell when I’m not around to run it. So feel free to re-comment on old posts, so it looks like people actually read this. (They do. They just don’t want to re-break the comment ice. Be bold.)

Q: What’s a smoke editor? — Ali

A: A video effects editor who uses the Smoke non-linear editing system.

Yeah, I know. Pretty dull to those of us who don’t do visual effects editing. But there you go.

Q: How can I get a job in the Obama administration? — Job-seeker

A: They do seem to be the only ones hiring, don’t they?

For high-level positions, it helps to be a former candidate for the Democratic nomination; a governor or senator who plays well with people on both sides of the aisle; or a senior staffer on the Obama campaign. Come January, it might help if you’re a hypoallergenic puppy in need of a good home.

The rest of us can apply via change.gov. According to the confirmation email I got, the administration will keep applications on hand well after the election - so even if you don’t get an administration job, you could still put “considered for position in Obama adminstration” on your resume. It’s a better talking point than your certificate in some technology that hasn’t been applicable since 1996.

Q: What, exactly, is going on with the economy, and should I worry about it? — Char (and, probably, you)

A: People have been asking me this question, or close variations thereof, for a couple of months now. I keep trying to write answers, but by the time I finish, something’s changed. So I am officially throwing up my hands, making some general statements, and pointing you to some places where people can explain things more frequently and thoroughly than I can.

Much of the American economy runs on credit, and I’m not just talking about our Visa bills. Companies need some cash, so they go to banks. Banks loan them huge amounts of money. Companies do whatever they needed to do with the dough, and pay it back with interest. As long as the companies can pay back that money as promised, everyone’s happy.

This worked for a while. And then the whole mortgage thing happened. Lenders enticed people to buy houses with no money down and manageable interest rates for the first couple-few years, and a lot of people who thought they weren’t in the financial position to buy houses were happy to believe that they suddenly, miraculously were. Higher rates in the future? Oh, don’t worry your pretty little heads, dearies. Just sign on the line. You can refinance in a few years when housing prices go up and your house is worth more.

House prices. Bubble. Pop. Oops.

Up until this point, mortgages were considered pretty safe debts to have scheduled to be paid back to you, so there was this whole market where lenders and investors were selling and buying the risk involved. So people start defaulting, and suddenly you have all these investors who’ve taken hits. That’s not good. (I’m having a hard time getting into more detail than that. If you want the down-and-dirty, check out this Wikipedia page.) Oh, and it doesn’t help that a lot of those financial companies seem less concerned about their shareholders than they do in paying almost unfathomable sums to their top levels of management.

Meanwhile, the price of oil kept getting ratcheted up and up, which impacted everything from global food production to the American auto industry, until that little commodities-specific bubble popped because people just plain couldn’t afford to keep playing.

So: Consumers with less money. Financial institutions taking hits and getting skittish, and having bizarre internal priorities — so, less money getting put back into the market. Take cover, kids. If you can afford cover, that is: Odds are higher and higher that you’re not working, or are underemployed.

Should you worry? Probably. But, honestly, I don’t think it’s worth it to work up any more than your usual low-lying dread about how you’re going to pay for everything. The market’s going to be careening around for a while. You’re probably just happy that gas prices are creeping down enough that you won’t have to charge your power bill to your overextended MasterCard this month. Lay low for a while. Don’t make any major purchases that you don’t need to make. Pay your rent, save anything you can, and hope you don’t get sick. ‘Cause that would really wipe you out.

So that, there, is my attempt to generalize. For actual information, I recommend:

• This American Life’s episodes The Giant Pool of Money and Another Frightening Show About the Economy
• NPR’s Planet Money podcast
• Economic crisis of 2008 on Wikipedia

If you have more resources for the masses, please send them along. And if you can explain this mishegas better than I can, or have clarifications or corrections, post those as well. For now, I’m going to check the job boards again, to be followed by curling up into a ball and trying to fit myself under my bed.

Q: Is the Large Hadron Collider going to whip up a black hole that eats the planet? — Felix

A: Highly doubtful. But if it does, and we’re all suddenly converted into disconnected atoms, at least no one will be able to whine, “Told you so”. That would just be annoying.

Q: What’s up with the vice presidential nominee picks? — Joseph (and a whole bunch of other people)

A: The recent announcement of major party running mates shows how two teams can face the same issue and come up with very different results.

In this case, both campaigns wanted to fill gaps in their candidate’s public perception.

The Obama campaign conducted a classic job search: They held interviews, conducted background checks, and in the end picked the best match for the position out of the pool of submissions.

The McCain campaign came up with a list of demographic groups in which they weren’t doing as well as they thought they should, figured out what would appeal to those groups, and fed the criteria into Karl Rove’s old Select-O-Matic. Out popped Sarah Palin.

Right away, Gov. Palin gave a speech in which she strongly implied that disaffected female Hillary voters should vote the McCain/Palin ticket because Palin’s a woman. For why I find this insulting, see my other blog, here or here. (It’s a sidebar to the question at hand, and I already went through the trouble of posting it anyway. And by “the trouble of posting” I mean “the effort to hit some keys and buttons”.)

Now, the question is, did the McCain team pick her in good faith, or is it another Harriet Miers thing? As you may recall, a couple years back, one of the President’s Supreme Court nominees was someone whose primary real-world qualification was that she would appeal to the evangelical voters that Bush needed to have on his side for the 2006 elections. She stayed in the running exactly long enough to get noticed, then pulled out. Evangelicals cheered anyway.

There’s a rather interesting side discussion over whether McCain’s campaign properly vetted Palin: The campaign says they did, but they didn’t seem to contact anyone in politics or the business community. And there’s something very curious about a campaign waiting until the day before the VP announcement to send a team of investigators to the candidate’s home state. This lends credence to the theory — bolstered by people close to the candidacy speaking on terms of anonymity — that McCain wanted to pick Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge, but had to concede that neither of them were conservative enough to please the voters he was in danger of losing. Specifically, neither of them was sufficiently anti-abortion.

As I write this, word comes out that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, and that young Bristol plans to keep the baby. From what I hear, mood on the convention floor — from the delegates who think it’s more important to preen than to volunteer — is jubilant: She’s going to have the baby! That’s the only thing that matters! That proves that her mom is totally pro-life! Which means McCain isn’t just pandering and social conservatives should vote for him! Let’s raise $10 million this weekend! …Never mind that whole hurricane thing, or that if a Democrat candidate’s kid was going to have a baby the delegates would probably view it as a parental failing, or how Bristol shows even less sign of being pregnant now than she did at the time when, according to some theories, she was pregnant with the kid who is being called her little brother. There is a very cynical part of me that wonders if Bristol’s being forced into pregnancy padding as punishment for some private misdeed.

(As for the aforementioned theories: I’m really not sure what to make of them. Though I do think it’s interesting that Gov. Palin showed no outward signs of pregnancy during her seventh month; flew after her water broke; and was back at work three days after delivering a baby with special needs. O… kay. I don’t know, maybe she’s just Superwoman.)

So: Is Sarah Palin going to hang with the ticket for the long haul, or is she going to drop out after she’s shored up evangelical support but before she gets thoroughly raked over the coals? We’ll know soon enough. It’s been less than a week, and there are already allegations of serious impropriety in the dismissal of the state’s Public Safety Comisioner. There’s that past membership in the Alaska Independence Party to deal with. And who knows what else might come to light now that Palin is under scrutiny? Visit intrade.net for the latest odds on whether Palin with withdraw, and pass the popcorn.

As for Joe Biden: He perfectly complements Obama. He’s more experienced, particularly on foreign policy; perceived as more working-class; and generally the sort of guy you’d want to sit next to on the train. He’s been running for President off and on for over 20 years now, so he knows the drill. He has, apparently, been properly vetted. What’s not to like?

Oh, right: He’s not Hillary Clinton.

Okay, disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters, gather ’round. Let’s have a talk. I know you love her, and that some of you are really disappointed. Fine; it’s your right to feel however you want. But there was no political reason to pick Hillary, and a whole lot of reasons not to. That’s just reality. The McCain campaign thinks your hurt feelings will push you to vote for the Republican ticket, even though their platform directly contradicts so many of Hillary’s position. You’re the only one who can decide whether it’s more important to vote with your heart or your head.

Sorry for the recent lack of posts.  I’ll be back on track soon. In the meantime, please keep those questions coming.

Thanks.  Totally sincere air smooches!