Same-sex marriage in CA
I meant to mention: yesterday, the California state Senate voted to legalize same-sex marriage. "It is the first time a state legislative body in the United States has voluntarily voted to approve same-sex marriage," says that article. (As opposed to being pushed by the courts.)
It's unclear how that bill will do in the state Assembly, and I have a feeling that the Governor won't sign it even if it does reach him. So I suspect this is more a symbolic victory than a real one.
Still, pretty cool.
I had been wondering why the bill itself is full of crossed-out stuff about fish and game. Turns out that they used a practice called gut-and-amend to take a fish-and-game bill, remove all the language in it, and replace it with the language of the marriage bill. Wacky.
Another aspect I'm not entirely thrilled with: the bill is called the "Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act." I mean, yeah, go us for re-appropriating the "marriage protection" rhetoric and one-upping it with religious freedom, and now we can be the ones saying "Wait, you're saying you're opposed to protecting marriage? And you don't like religious freedom?" But I don't much like that kind of tactic regardless of which side is doing it.
Speaking of confusing language, while I was looking for some of the above info I happened across an op-ed piece titled "Native Americans shouldn't be wed to battle against same-sex marriage." At first I thought the headline was suggesting that Native Americans were marrying each other in an attempt to somehow battle against same-sex marriage, which I found very confusing. But it turns out that "wed to" is being used in its metaphorical sense. It's a pun, get it? Anyway, the article has some interesting (but possibly oversimplified) stuff about same-sex relationships in modern Native American contexts.
One more thing: last week, the California Supreme Court ruled that (to quote an article about it) "lesbian and gay partners who plan a family and raise a child together should be considered legal parents after a breakup." Interesting.
