Having a very political day. [ Which means this has atypical levels of political content. ]

[kiya]

Which I normally try to avoid at most costs.

On the other hand, the SJC's clarifying decision on marriages in the Commonwealth came down today, which means that there's a lot of handwaving and shouting about it going on, and I can't resist putting my oar in occasionally. This has not yet been revealed to be Stupid and engaging me in pointless flamewarage, which . . . sort of surprises me.

It occurs to me that I can probably get good voting information out of how various candidates deal with this one. (I commented the other day that the only way I could feel in good conscience able to vote for someone using "defense of marriage" rhetoric was if the alternative was having civilization wiped out by an asteroid, and I'd need to ask the asteroid some pointed questions about its composition and social policies first.) I should check the news for Statements.


Also, with eerie predictability, I went off on my two Stars-and-Stripes-related rants, one about the meaningfulness of the Flag Code and the other about flag burning. Fortunately, this isn't the sort of subject that comes up a lot in conversation, because I get set off on this one with the predictability of kicking the doctor in the shin when she whacks me on the knee with a hammer.


Okay, that's enough politics for probably a couple of months. We now return you to your regularly scheduled wordcount, semi-philosophical nattering, incoherence, and cat stories.

Comments

[rainfallsautumn.livejournal.com]

Not to sound like an idiot, but what exactly happened? I keep trying to click on stories about this, but my dialup is seriously acting up today. Anything with as much graphic content as text is simply NOT going to load right now.

*is amused at the mental image of you querying an asteroid*

[kiya]

A few months ago the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (basically the Commonwealth's equivalent of the Supreme Court) responded to about a half-dozen same-sex couples by saying that their being denied marriage certificates violated the Massachusetts Constitution (I think we have an ERA and have major sex-based discrimination statutes). They said to the legislature, basically, "You have six months to fix this in law; otherwise the ruling will just override existing law."

The legistlature hemmed, hawed, and write the SJC a note in I think Devember saying, 'We have this proposed civil unions legislation, will that be acceptable?'

The SJC voted 4-2-1 today to say "Nope. We said marriage. Civil unions are separate-but-equal, and we said the state didn't have any justified reason to distinguish." (The 2 disagreed, and the 1 said, roughly, 'I don't like ruling on things before they're actually law, guys.')

Re:

[rainfallsautumn.livejournal.com]

Meant to thank you earlier, got distracted. Thank you. :) I really need to get cable internet in here, the dialup burps are driving me crazy.

Good for Mass. :) Going to lead to no end of ideological fratricide in both parties, but people's relationships are really none of the government's darn business.