I am having a hard time understanding why the protests didn't start as soon as Prop 8 was added to the ballot. Why wait until it was voted down before protesting it as a violation of someones rights? If it truly is a violation of rights, why was it allowed on the ballot? Was there protests before the vote and the news media kept it quite, maybe because it makes a better news story after it was voted down? And another thing, why does, what a person does in their private life, if it are harming no one nor if what they do does not violate anothers persons rights, why does voters need to be involved? It's really no one elses business.
You have known me for many years Don and you know how I hate self righteous people and hypocrites, well, it looks like California votes are some of the biggest hypocrites of all. I mean, the the majority of them did vote for "change" right?
Well, good luck to you on this. I am afraid it won't go the way you hope. Maybe it will though.
Later man,
Wm
 

A big problem was complacency: everybody thought Prop 8 was doomed to fail, so the effort to stop it never had much momentum.

Re: rights, that's the question raised in the court case that the California Supreme Court just accepted. The California Constitution draws a line between an "amendment" (adds something new; requires citizen's initiative plus 50% of voters) versus a "revision" (undoes something existing; requires citizen's initiative, plus 67% of both houses of state legislature, *then* 50% of voters), and because the gay marriage ruling decided that gay people are a "suspect class" (i.e. laws that single out gay people should be automatically suspected of discrimination) there's a very good chance that the Supreme Court will strike it down as a violation of the amendment process.

Since the Prop 8 signature drive happened *before* the gay marriage ruling, nobody caught the "revision" vs "amendment" problem until after the fact. The Attorney General *should've* refused to certify the signatures and put it on the ballot, on the grounds that it was now a "revision" and it was no longer in his power to accept it as-is. But that didn't happen because he didn't think about it at the time.

Honestly, though, I'm not as worried about this one as I was about Kansas. Kansas will never repeal their amendment within my lifetime. They might be forced into it by the "full faith and credit" clause of the Federal Constitution (the one that forced Nevada's no-fault divorce on the other 49 states), but I see Kansas keeping it until well after my lifetime as a symbolic protest. California, on the other hand, will probably repeal this ban in 2010. We only lost 48-52. Throw in a concerted get-out-the-vote effort, do a better job of putting the message out, and we can close that spread easily.

Re: Obama, I'm not sure that I buy it. Liberals of all races voted overwhelmingly against 8, conservatives of all races voted overwhelmingly for 8. It's much more of a liberal-vs-conservative issue (in the social sense, not the economic sense), or perhaps a young-vs-old issue. The 70% number was from one exit poll by CNN that asked *maybe* a few hundred black people from *maybe* a dozen or two neighborhoods. Exit polls are too flaky to rely on.