The State of Gay in the U.S.A.

The ongoing series here at the k+b.

It was a big week, lets dive right in

Sunday 

 Ooopsie!  Vice President goes on Meet the Press and accidental lets fly that he just loves the gays, all but sang " Marry Me, Bill ." Mr. Vice President, finger on the pulse of America, gave all credit to Will and Grace.......
I don'e believe for one second that this was off the cuff or NOT planned, but that is just old jaded Kyle.
The interwebs go batshit crazy!, or at least we thought they did.

Tuesday

North Carolina holds its primary, and tosses on the ballot Prop 1 which will double secret ban the gay marriage, enshrining the already illegal same sex marriage in the North Carolina Constitution.

 Anyone paying attention  knew going to it pass. I was only hoping it would be under 60%. In the end, it went down a NOM crowing hard, 61% to 39%, not the margin I had hopped for, but see, darn close. 

LINK to a great interactive map

For some UNKNOWN reason, every gay with a facebook account, lost their collective shit, really. Gnashing of teeth and ripping of close like you have not seen since Ave. Q beat Wicked for best Musical. People just went nuts. I totally did not get it, a) I knew it was coming, and b) it was like the 30th (i really don't the number, I could google, but so could you...) state to do so, and its the Bible Belt.

" We are going to boycott North Carolina". " The DNC must move their convention"...The Tarheel state became hate central . 

Ya'll know that , seriously, I like NOTHING better than a big pile of steaming election results to pour over with my morning coffee. Even in bitter defeat, I was in high cotton seeing the who and what of this election.

BUT, this one threw me a little. This is North Carolina , that glorious morning in 2008 when a red state had gone blue for then President Obama, overlay the two, hard to wrap your head around....

North Carolina is very much like Georgia, that two state thing, urban pockets with in the 19th century mind set. Only N.C. has its fabled triangle < the big brown blob in the green map > , and a coast load of retirees. See that largest county there on the bottom in blue? That is Robeson County. Which in 2008 was:

• OBAMA 56.6% with 22, 315   v   McCain 42.8% with 16,823

BUT TUESDAY 

• YES ( anti gay ) 86% with 20,740   v     NO ( pro gay ) 14% with 3,311.

I am just putting these numbers out there, more or less working through them here on the blog with you. A real shocker here is that these are Democrats, because ONLY 2881 votes were cast in Robeson Co. for all four GOPers that were on the ballot. AND , even the 86% is still only 15.4 % of the county.

I got in a tiny kerfuffle on fb when I wrote this:

According to my admittedly weak politics-nerd math 13.5 % of the people of North Carolina voted FOR prop one yesterday . So everyone stop all ready with the sturm und drang and "boycott North Carolina" and use that energy to figure out where our side went wrong in getting the message out to 13.6% of the population.....

and then after being reprimanded about my numbers

 :

Ok, the 13.5 is of the full NC population, if you break it down to registered voters, the percentage only goes to 20.7% - so one fifth of NC hates the gays...... I am missing your point about the aggressive campaign.... We may have been aggressive, but we were not functional.... I really dont htink you and I are on opposite sides of anything here... I just dont think that all the anger at our loss here can be turned outward

All ways with the silver lining:

We are losing by less

So there is all this tempest in a tea pot,that we all thought was big news, 

until.

WEDNESDAY

That was then, this is now.

Looks like we sort of tried burying that lead with the North Carolina story. The tweets and winks were all over the cable news shows that morning, and the web was right there with them. But, it took me by surprise.

If you are straight reading this, and not a very old black person, then you really can not understand what this means. You can empathize, but I do not think you can sympathize . It is still really sinking in for me. I sort of went  - for lack of a better word - floaty, after hearing him say this.
The President of the United States of America, thinks I am a full fledged citizen. That my and Neil's marriage is every bit as valid as his own, that I am not so evil that  a constitutional amendment is needed to keep this country safe from me .

As massive a life changing event as this was, the GOP response only added too it. Mitts came out,not with fire and brimstone ( yet ) but with " yeah, gays are bad,but not like black death bad or anything"  - really, positive to the point of saying , IN his response to the President that " gay adoption was ok ". We will have to see about all of this, because he is on record as being FOR a constitutional amendment, and could not even , last week, appoint an openly gay man to be a senior staff member.

Yeah, I drank this Kool-Aid four years ago, and anyone with in ear shot of me knows how much I support the President, but there was always that little chain of  remorse. As the fireworks went off on election night 2008, we were dealing with the crushing outcome of prop 8 in California. Still on the back of the bus - until yesterday. The POTUS supports gay marriage.
 Nothing legally changed yesterday. North Carolina still bans ANY form of same sex commitment, New York thankfully does not, but EVERYTHING changed. There is a clear clear choice now. The GOP is anti gay and in their world view I am a second class citizen. My Democratic party thinks me an American, finally.

We hold these truths to be self evident that ALL men.........

It is late,I am sleepy.. I did not do what the President did justice.
I will come back to this....