wickedqueen.net

Obviously, I am excited about the newly elected Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, particularly the surprising victory of Claire McCaskill over Jim Talent in Missouri, which certainly no member of my Missouri-based family expected. While I am often disappointed in Democrats,* I rarely suspect that they would happily march me straight into the ocean if they got the chance. If they all actually represented these “San Francisco values” I keep hearing decried, I would be content.

I wasn’t surprised that Wisconsin retained its Democrats. I was surprised that Wisconsin voted to both ban gay marriage and recommend the reinstatement of the death penalty.

I’m not sure why. I was quite surprised that Arizona DIDN’T ban gay marriage, after all; “marriage” seems to be such a loaded term that people who might otherwise be reasonable go crazy and start acting like civil marriage is just EXACTLY LIKE a big church wedding with the POPE, and how dare we try to force people to act against their religious beliefs? As if a legal contract allowing you to inherit someone’s property, file taxes jointly with them, and visit them in the hospital when they’re dying had anything directly to do with God.

It’s Madison, I guess. It’s the only place I’ve lived in Wisconsin and even though I know that the rest of the state is just the same old insular (semi)rural Midwest, I imagine it as being so much better than Missouri, home state to Rush Limbaugh, that I am always surprised by things like this. Missouri, of course, has already passed a gay marriage ban, which was no surprise at all, but this time around they not only replaced the incumbent Republican senator with a female Democrat, they also raised the minimum wage and welcomed stem cell research to the state. I never thought I’d be happier with Missouri election results than Wisconsin ones.

The death penalty advisory referendum in Wisconsin, incidentally, was apparently so unimportant that CNN didn’t even include it on the list of issues that you could track on their election tracker. Wisconsin hasn’t had the notoriously unequally applied, totally ineffective as a deterrent death penalty for over 100 years. It was abolished in 1853, yet nobody thinks that trying to reinstate it is a big deal?

It looks like it passed by a similar margin to the marriage amendment–somewhere between 55-60% voting yes, from the preliminary results I was able to find. This isn’t as bad, as say, Tennessee’s gay marriage ban, which passed with over 80% of the votes. Clearly it is a more moderate climate. But the end result is the same: discrimination enshrined in the state constitution. It’s hard to get tremendously excited about the Democrats’ majority in Congress when faced with such immediate evidence of how mostly Democratic votes still /= MY values.

Of course, in two months I’ll be in Massachusetts.** I may be extraordinarily slow and scruffy by East Coast standards, but at least they have Kennedys.

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*In 2000, I voted for the socialist presidential candidate, and I am SORRY, okay? Given that I was still voting in Missouri at the time–via absentee ballot from Tokyo–my Gore vote might actually have made a difference.

**I learned to spell Mississippi; I can learn to spell this.