I have to admit, I never thought I would see the day when gay marriage was legal in Iowa before it was legal in California.

I am simultaneously pleased and embarrassed.

My favorite line from the LA Times article:

According to the Des Moines Register article linked above, Iowa requires more than the momentary populist backlash [emphasis mine] needed in California to put a law beyond judicial review by passing a constitutional amendment.

It reminds me of an article written by a famous architectural critic about the building of the de Young in San Francisco. The comment was about SF politics, but applies in these circumstances as well – he described the process as one that values pique over all other forms of input.

Democracy, mob rule. Have we lost the distinction here?

All you impending brides out there (and no, I’m not sure if a bride can be “impending,” but I like the way it sounds), listen up. Learn from my mistakes, grasshopper. Don’t just choose the first wedding website you find because it’s big and well-known, and then get stuck with its incredibly sub-par planning and management tools. And by ‘get stuck,’ I mean, ’send everyone there to RSVP, so you can’t move your page.’

Reasons to avoid theknot.com:

• Worst URL ever for your wedding webpage: theknot.com/mywedding/BridesName&GroomsName. When you are marrying someone with a polysyllabic surname, this is just useless. Thankfully my fiance offered a redirect from his own site, with a much simpler URL.
• Crap budgeter. Most online wedding budgeters calculate a certain percentage of your budget to be spent on food, flowers, whatever. If you spend more or less than that in any one category, a good calculator will automatically re-budget each other category, distributing the remaining budget according to that same percentage. But once you’ve told the Knot how much you spent in Category X, that becomes the final number, and it adjusts nothing. You don’t even get to see how far under or over budget you are in any category; it just tells you how much money, total, is left over.
• No tracking of guest options. The Knot offers you a chance to give your guests options to choose from when they RSVP (like, say, chicken or fish for the entree, or in my case, whether or not they are attending a party the night before). When your guests RSVP, you are sent an email telling you which option they’ve chosen–and that is your only chance to track it. There is nowhere else in the guest manager to see how many guests have chosen option A and how many have chosen option B. I’ve been forced to ask my fiance to keep a separate spreadsheet, which sort of defeats the purpose of tracking this all in one place.
• Ghost guests. Not all of us can afford to add ‘and guest’ to our wedding invitations. Yes, some people have been invited alone. But guess how many email addresses are required when a single guest RSVPs?
• Wedding website downgrade. What a fool I was to accept their offer of a “free upgrade” to their new wedding webpage system, which now puts weird white space around my images and uses teensy fonts that you can’t resize.
• Worst customer service ever. When the Knot customer service team eventually bothers to get back to you, the first thing they do is send you a link to the completely inadequate Help Center on the website. If you’re really special, they will take the time to copy and paste instructions that do not relate to your question. When you patiently explain that they have not remotely answered or even addressed your problem, after a few more days they will offer you another non-answer and thank you kindly for your feedback.

You’re welcome, jackasses!

Yes, it’s the first week of spring, but I’ll tell you what really makes me feel refreshed and renewed:

A little reminder that the good guys are in charge now.

I know the economy hasn’t exactly climbed out of its hidey-hole, but this kind of thing sure puts a spring in my step.

Sniff.

So what, now I’m supposed to go out on Friday nights now, or something?

Well, maybe not just yet.

Yes, I have been in a wedding- and work-induced hibernation for nearly two months. But boy do I fit into that dress. (So far.)

And what could nudge me back to the surface better than the best interview Jon Stewart has ever done?

Now, I have worshiped at the TDS altar ever since Indecision 2000, waaay back in the day. I have been mightily impressed with Jon & Co. for many years; I particularly remember an excellent interview in which he handed John Bolton his ass.

Last night, however, I feel that the man stepped into Mike Wallace territory. If you haven’t enjoyed already, please do so.

Eight years ago, I was already twitchy in my first job out of college, and was waiting to hear back from Georgetown about grad school. I’d gotten so caught up in the hideous aftermath of the 2000 elections that I thought DC would be a great place for a burgeoning political junkie like myself, even if I had to put up with a moron in office.

Four years and a couple months ago, I cried the morning after the election, when Kerry conceded Ohio. Then I packed up my U-Haul, after four generally excellent years in DC despite the criminally dangerous mental case in charge.

I moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area, seeking to reinvent myself. Rather like the country itself, I spent most of the Bush era struggling through a second (come to think of it, perhaps a first) adolescence. I bounced around among jobs, identities and men, trying to find the life I wanted.

Today, ladies and gentlemen, most of us have survived the Bush administration, with the tragic exception of thousands of servicemembers and scores of thousands of Iraqis.

As for me, I’ve left my corporate job to join a startup–and who knew it would turn out to be the safer option, after a round of layoffs? I’m staring 30 in the face without too many problems; the economy’s taking a bite out of all of us, but I’m keeping local merchants afloat with my impending nuptials. (Spending money is Bush-era patriotism, I know, but it’ll take some time to adjust, and the gown was on sale…)

Today I have a partner by my side for whom I’m grateful every single day, and a company whose success or failure depends in large part on me.

I’m too much of a “realist” to expect constant rainbows and butterflies from the next eight years, personally, professionally or nationally. I don’t expect anything to be smooth sailing from here on out just because I’m about to be married, well-employed and a member of the ruling political party.

But with the judicious application of intelligence, hard work, love and commitment, I expect some things to change around here.

Here goes, America!

So who needs blogging when you’re spending two weeks digesting the Christmas ham?

Today, however, I’ve been pulled out of my ham-, wedding- and work-induced zombie state to bring you this valuable public service announcement instruction.

Go here.

Vote for this.

“This,” for those of you who don’t like following unknown links, is a proposal on change.org for revitalizing America’s refugee programs. There are a number of parts to this proposal but here is the gist:

There are a lot of people homeless and stateless out there. (I won’t even go into how much of it is our fault. [Answer: a lot.]) We have the resources to help them, and improve our shredded international reputation in the process.

So, to recap: Go here. Vote!

…awesome.

Boy, November seems to have gotten away from me. Up to my ears in a new job and a freelance job on the side, plus packing up the apartment for a temporary move and, you know, that whole wedding planning nonsense. But despite my despondency regarding Prop 8, it seems the holiday season has started early this year (and I don’t just mean the ads). We’ve got all kinds of shiny under the tree already!

• CA supreme court agrees to hear the challenges to Prop 8. This is great news, though the case is a long shot. Not because of the validity of the challenge, which I, with my total lack of legal expertise, consider damn near ironclad. It’s because the court has a history of turning these arguments down. But it’s a step in the right direction: at least they’re hearing the case.
• Hillary Clinton to be nominated Secretary of Awesome.
• Henry Waxman wrests control of the Senate Energy and Commerce Committee away from John “Detroit Carmakers Keep My Testicles in a Jar on Their Desks” Dingell, a Democrat in name only. Suddenly, we have an even better chance of getting real energy efficiency legislation passed. Bonus: Slate’s excellent headline on the topic.
• Obama plans to nominate some guy from New York that everyone loves to be Treasury Secretary. Stock market wets itself with joy.

Things are looking up, people!

On a day when even states like Virginia and Florida turned their backs on bigotry and prejudice, California has kept it alive and well with the passage of Proposition 8 (nearly assured at this point, with 95% of precincts reporting). Discrimination against gays and lesbians will now be written into the state constitution.

On a day when I should be rejoicing, or at least more cheerfully nursing my hangover, I am so ashamed of my state. I’m ashamed of the 52% of the CA population who clearly have no shame themselves, sucking up out-of-state Mormon propaganda and imposing their hateful beliefs on the civil rights of an entire state.

I can hardly imagine how many people in California proudly cast a ballot yesterday for our nation’s first biracial president and then turned around and voted to strip their neighbors of fundamental constitutional rights. I’m sure they did so without noting the irony that Obama’s parents’ marriage would once have been illegal, for basically the same reasons that gay marriage is illegal today: the ick factor disguised as religious zealotry.

So thanks, Mormon church propagandists, for ruining California’s constitution by pretending that your religious beliefs are somehow more important than civil rights. It’s also kind of ironic that the LDS church is such a believer in “one man, one woman”… I guess there’s no bigot zealot like a convert.

UPDATE: In a sad irony that was predicted by a few perceptive pundits last month, it does appear that the overwhelming minority turnout in CA, which in all other respects is a wonderful thing, probably put the nail in the coffin due to the very low support for gay rights in the African-American community.

It is tragic that this group, so recently victims of completely legal discrimination in this area, has chosen to perpetuate the cycle this year. It puts a dark cloud over this otherwise bright, sunshiny day.

I live in California, and I’m getting married next year. My fiance is a man. So, this is not a problem, regardless of what happens on Nov. 4.

But for lots of my friends, colleagues and fellow citizens, the turnout of religious fundamentalists to vote against equality could doom their chances of getting legally married in their home state.

Thanks in no small part to Jerry Brown, who re-worded Prop 8 to make it more accurate, we stand a good chance of retaining hard-won equality in California. But the New York Times reports that out-of-state religious leaders have poured money and effort into California in hopes of enshrining inequality in our state constitution. (And what’s Connecticut, chopped liver?)

And they aren’t taking the high road. Their ads have been filled with outright lies, claiming that churches which refuse to perform gay marriages will be penalized (not true) or that “gay marriage will be taught in kindergarten,” whatever that even means.

I have said a hundred times — and once I think it even got through to a conservative guy who hadn’t thought of it that way — that the issue of gay marriage is absolutely no different from the issue of interracial marriage. The argument against the latter was also religiously based; people argued that God had put the races on different continents because he didn’t want us to intermingle.

In fact, a 74-year-old in Virginia was quoted in the Times saying just that… TWO WEEKS AGO:

“I would think of him as I would of another of mixed race,” said Glenn Reynolds [referring to Obama], 74, a retired textile worker in Martinsville, Va., and a former supervisor at a Goodyear plant. “God taught the children of Israel not to intermarry. You should be proud of what you are, and not intermarry.”

I don’t think anyone today (except Glenn Reynolds and his ilk) would argue that the Supreme Court should have waited until everyone felt OK with interracial marriage to legalize it. If that were the case, I’m sure it would still be illegal in more than a few states.

The same is true of gay marriage. Your squeamishness (and that’s really what it is, disguised as religious belief) does not trump any other citizen’s right to the full privileges of civil and cultural society (not to mention legal rights). Permitting two people who love each other to get married has NO DISCERNIBLE IMPACT on your marriage, my marriage or anyone else’s marriage.

Which “demeans” the institute of marriage more? The wedding of a committed, loving couple of the same gender, or a drive-thru Vegas chapel open to any two people of the opposite sex? Sure, some same-sex couples will get married for the wrong reasons, or divorce, or cheat on each other, or have nasty custody battles.

Just like straight couples do.

You would think that social conservatives would jump at the chance to welcome more people into the fold of committed monogamy and child-rearing, instead of hysterically trying to keep “those people” out.

I have a lot of hope. A year in which the crazed right-wing fundamentalist vice-presidential candidate is forced to say that being gay isn’t wrong is a good year, and a much better year than four years ago in that regard.

But next week, here in California, it’s the progressives who will be standing up for family values.