The Indigestible

No national comment just yet, though I have to say I’m happy about the house decision. “Mandate”, indeed.

However, I’m even more satisfied about the loss suffered by the right-wing fanatical filth.

As of 7:30 this morning, Proposition 107 is defeated. It only lost out by 30K votes or so, but in Arizona — astoundingly — there isn’t yet a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage … or on marriagelike benefits for any unmarried couples.

Now I’m not going to fool myself here. What worked was simple. The text of the amendment sought to abrogate civil union and marrriage-style benefits for any unmarried couple regardless of the genders involved.

This affected heterosexuals as well (which was pointed out in all the advertising against the amendment), and it showed the ugly side of the Christian filth that supported it: They were trying to legislate a marriage-or-nothing deal for everyone, trying to slam their bigoted “morality” down everyone’s throats.

Let this be a lesson to both the filth and those of us who oppose the filth: Fucking with marriage fucks with everyone. That message can and should travel in both directions.

Overall, though, there weren’t that many surprises for me; for the most part things broke as I expected, and some better than I hoped.

Lamentably, the pro-Bush, pro-torture, anti-Habeas Corpus traitor Jon Kyl made it in; but we’ve retained our more-or-less Democrat governor Janet Napolitano, and Proposition 201, the real ban on smoking, has passed. 206, the rival initiative funded by RJR, is in the crapper where it belongs.

Ironically we’ve also voted in a boost in cigarette taxes to fund preschool programs — so light ’em up early, kids, your education depends on it — and in an interesting parallel development we have both raised the minimum wage and banned tethering of veal animals. (Now who says Arizonans don’t care about the little guy?)

I guess this means your tender cutlets are going to end up costing more because of wage hikes to the farm workers … and be a bit tougher because the animal was allowed to walk around a little before it was killed so you could eat it.

On the down side, pretty much every initiative aimed at hurting illegal immigrants — and, collaterally, legal immigrants who are still fresh from their mother lands — has passed.

Some of them actually made sense, such as the official language measure (consider the expense and massive pain in the ass involved in translating all official documents) or the ban on bail for illegals (make bail = jump bail, let’s face it) — but other measures, such as limiting lawsuit payouts or preventing illegals from having access to social services are things I can’t say I like.

Frivolous lawsuits are a problem, to be sure, but more of those are pressed by US citizens than any other group; and what’s wrong with giving illegals social support as long as they’re (more or less) behaving?

On the extremely parochial front, the local school bond passed by a fair margin. I guess there just weren’t enough old, greedy bastards going to the polls this time around. Maybe they’re all dead or something.

I know which one you’re really waiting for. Alas, there will be no million-dollar lottery for voters.