“If Alaskans were genuinely libertarian”
…Woah there, kiddo. Seriously, are “Alaskans” supposed to be a single block minority, all rigidly marching lock-step to your stereotype?
Speaking as an Alaskan, who happens to be bisexual, what I do in my bedroom is my own business. Is it the be-all and end-all of my existence? Not at all – my life and politics are not completely controlled by my glands and desires.
Here’s why the whole Palin-voting-against-banning-benefits happened.
Frankly, Alaska is not California. It doesn’t want to be. The people of the state made that pretty clear when they voted to ban homosexual marriage, gay or lesbian. You’re not in bad company; the state doesn’t recognize common-law marriages, either. It’s pretty clear on what marriage is, and shacking up doesn’t fit the bill, whether or not I agree. (If we go for civil unions up here, we’d be pretty likely to succeed, but given that marriage is seen as a very Christian act, and the majority of Christians are pretty clear on the man-and-woman part, trying to steal all the pomp and circumstance and privileges without endorsing the substance is oh so… Obama? I knew this campaign sounded familiar.)
But when we banned gay marriage, we left this legal and moral problem where state workers who now could not be married were not eligible for any of the rights that their straight counterparts had. So our courts ruled that we had to extend benefits to the people whom we had otherwise legally shut out from having them – that we must treat all workers equally. It created quite a stink – not because the gays were getting access to benefits! No, it was because now all the straights that were shacking up but unmarried – remember we don’t recognize common law – weren’t eligible to the benefits that the “unmarried” gays were, and they wanted to have their cake and eat it too (as long as it wasn’t wedding cake.)
Loren Leman, otherwise known as That Slimeball, promptly started lobbying and pushing a bill to specifically ban the state workers from having their court-granted rights. He pushed it publicly as keeping the state from having to indiscriminately give out benefits to all partners, and keeping costs down, but really tried to pander to every anti-gay bone in the public’s body. Which didn’t work, because the court decision was pretty widely seen as having to take our medicine for banning marriage, and accepted.
Palin promptly shot it down – for exactly the reasons she states. She’s not “pro-gay”, she’s not “anti-gay”, she’s pretty darn constitutional. Which is why we love her. Well, that, and the way she’s taken apart the good old boy network, starting with putting her foot down and emphatically stopping contractors from getting away with building incredibly sub-code new housing in the Valley and sticking the new homeowners with the heating and repair bills.
Relax. She’s not going to make us wear pink triangles, she’s not going to shut down all abortion clinics, and she’s got two years of governing over 50% of the United States (we’re bigger than you think), dealing with two foreign countries, and has made Big Oil back down to protect the interests of her constituents.
She may continue to pull her trick of pissing off folks by wielding line-item veto and cutting pet projects that can’t justify their existence, though, regardless of whether they’re your special interest group’s or not. Maybe we can put Obama to work raising money for them privately with that silver tongue of his – there’s always a market for honeyed words with no more solid foundation that “hope” of unspecified “change”.
