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Rubber Met The Road… Crash. Last Thoughts on Prop 8.

A few posts back, I wrote about one of the deceptive and false arguments being used to scare the California populace into voting yes on Prop 8 – “by law, teachers have to teach about gay marriage, and this is what yuo dirty sodomites wanted all along, to brainwash your children, you fucking faggots!”.

These are my last words on the subject.

The spirit of the law in question, the teachable moment, as it were, is to promote the healthier lifestyle choice of marriage and committed relationships over a life of going out every night, finding a “hook up”, and f’ing your little brains out, thus not only exposing yourself to STD’s and HIV, but also denying the emotional health a more stable relationship brings.

Will there be some teachers who will take the law out of context and use it to “Promote” gay marriage. Of course they will. Will a few districts actively promote it? Yep. I’m sure they already do in San Francisco and a few other districts.

The law in question was written long before gay marriage was ever considered a possibility. Using it as a tool to actively promote gay marriage is wrong and against the letter and the spirit of the law. For the “Yes on Prop 8” crowd to twist the meaning of the law and suggest, no, exclaim, that teachers are required to design lesson plans devoted to giving the finger to religious parents and teaching gay marriage is not only false, but is against the intent of the code, and yes, a lie.

Anyway, congratulations. You won. I have also lost a lot of respect for the religious institution that funded the yes campaign, but what the hell do you care anyway.  We’re all sinners, will burn in hell and are excommunicated from your church anyway.

PS. Over at Althouse, expressing my thoughts on the subject earned me this distinction:

sonicfrog,

The thought of you as a teacher is literally frightening. Your last post shows that your lack an understanding of what you are reading is matched only by your complete acceptance of the propaganda you’re fed.

You ‘ve got the wrong country. Your kind of blind teaching belongs in Cuba or China. <i>They will even welcome you in Iran if you like.</i>

WOW! Who knew blogging could be so brutal. And somehow, I don’t think they would like me too much in Iran.

Piece Out – “Commie”frog.

Why We Lost

I am soooo out of touch with the majority in my state. I voted against the chickens and for the homo’s. Now chickens have more rights than homosexuals.

In all seriousness, the passage of Prop 8 can be laid directly at the feet of Obama. He sent a very mixed signal to his flock. He said he does not approve of gay marriage, and then went into verbal deliberations on why he didn’t think that amending the constitution via proposition was the correct way to go about defending marriage.

“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that’s not what America’s about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don’t contract them.”

He did not make a firm stand against prop 8, and when masses hear him say he’s “not in favor of gay marriage”, every thing else after that is gobldy-gook. It’s like talking to your dog – “Spot, Bad Dog, blah, blah, blah…

Booooo!!!!!

Prop 8 won. The tryanny of the majority has prevailed. I’m still a second class citizen. Los Angeles, you really let me down!

Now the countdown to the inevitable legal challenges has begun. I’m keeping an eye out for a post by Dale Carpenter over at Volokh, as he is bound to explore the legal options or process to challenge the proposition.

And congratulations to Barrack Obama. No, I didn’t vote for him (my candidate, Paris Hilton, only got one vote), but I give him the respect I would if he was my candidate of choice. Now, could you please start to reduce the $23 trillion dollars in national debt? Thanks

The Rubber Meets The Road. Part 2

I’m not going to be able to stay up and see if Prop 8 wins or loses. Right now, with 24% of the precincts counted, it is close, at 53% for banning gay marriage, and 47% opposed to the ban. At first glance, that looks pretty bad. But here is the thing you have to remember. In California, the smaller, less populated counties, which consists of a majority of conservative leaning voters, are the first to get counted.

This is a map from 2004. The red areas voted dominantly for Bush, the Blue, for Kerry. There is a lot more surface area that is conservative. But here is the sticky wicket. The blue areas, though it takes up much less space, those voters are very, very liberal, i.e. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and are the urban meccas of the state. Note that Kerry won with a ten percent margin. That gives you some idea of the dominance of the blue areas in state elections.

The blue areas, as a rule, take longer to get into the final tally. Because they are so much more densely populated, it takes a lot more time to count the votes in those counties. It matters. When Bill Simon was running for Governor in 2002, we went to bed with him in the lead by seven’ish points against the later-to-be-recalled Grey Davis. We woke up to find he had lost by 47 to 42 percent. That is the difference the blue areas make. Plus, in this election cycle, some of those red areas have been leaning blue. So though the measure is behind right now, we will see what the morning brings.

In the mean time, this is how the Religious Right sees the outcome of this vote:.

“If we lose California, if they defeat the marriage amendment, I’m afraid that the culture war is over and Christians have lost,” said Donald Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association. “California is a big dam, holding back the flood — and if you take down the dam in California, it’s going to flood 49 other states.”

Before the night is over, there will be a deluge of “No” votes from SacroFranAngeles. Here’s hoping for a flood of Biblical proportions.

Remembering The Past… Bloggy Style. When Political Partys Collapse.

Many years ago, in a different time and on a different blog, I wrote a post or two about the impending doom of the Democratic Party. It was 2004, and the Dems were tripping over themselves to try to be both anti-war, and pro military at the same time. It’s possible to do, but it ain’t easy. They had a Presidential candidate in John Kerry who was about as charismatic as a dead bug, and, in case you didn’t know, he was in Vietnam… Uhm scratch that. I was looking through my archives, for the post I was referring to, and as it turns out, I wasn’t even blogging when Kerry was running for President. I didn’t start until January 2005. But If I would have been blogging then, I would have been gleefully anticipating the collapse of the Democratic party. They had picked yet another lame candidate for the Presidency. They were doing their bet to ensure defeat in Iraq, which, especially the latter, caused rgeat strife within the party. It looked as if the ghosts of Vietnam (which Kerry served in BTW) were coming back to tear the party in two.

Now here we are on election day 2008, and the Dems are poised to gain even more of a majority in the House, take over and maybe even get a veto proof majority in the Senate, and to top things off, get the biggest prize of them all, the Presidency.  And it is the Republican party that appears to be in tatters. Am I gleeful? Not really. Though I am a registered libertarian, I identify more with conservatives more than liberals.

The reason why I am not gleeful is that the Republican party is shedding the Reagan inspired concept of “the Big Tent”. The Rush Republicans have declared that the moderates and RINO’s leave the party – they want it to shape in their own image. Fine. When the night is over, and Obama has won by a landslide, we’ll see how well you do without us in the next elections.

Grub Editing – Upgrading From Ubuntu 8.04 To 8.10 – Nvidia Issue – Solved (for me anyway).

Geek Alert!!!

I upgraded from Hardy Heron to Intrepid Ibex and had problems with my video configuration. Previously, I was using the Nvidia driver without any problems at all, but after the upgrade, when I booted into Ibex, I would get the nvidia driver error and would be forced to operate in low res graphic mode. I installed and reinstalled nvidia drivers, first 177, then, since my card is a bit dated, downgrading to 173. Still no luck. I found the solution, and it wasn’t a driver problem after all. I have several Distros running on my computer, and my grub on MBR was point to the boot folder on an older distro, Mint 5 Xfce, and of course, that /boot/menu.lst did not get updated to the new configuration. So I went into grub and rooted the /grub/boot/menu.lst to the correct path on the updated Ubuntu partition (“/boot/grub/stage1” should also work).

When you boot into your grub menu, type “c” to get to the command line.

OK, lets say, like me, you have a bazillion partitions on your hard drives and you don’t remember which one has the correct /boot/grub/menu.lst, type this command to search for the one you want.

• grub> find /boot/grub/menu.lst

Press enter. You’ll get something like this.

• grub> find /boot/grub/menu.lst
  (hd0,1)
  (hd0,5)
  (hd0,6)
  (hd0,7)

Well crap! Which one is the right one? At this point, you need to look inside the /boot/grub/menu.lst file to find the most up to date kernel configuration, in this case, Ibex is using the 2.6.27-7 kernel. Lets open each file, starting with the first eligible partition.

• grub> cat (hd0,1)/boot/grub/menu.lst

Make sure there is no space between (hd0,1) and /boot/…
You now can see the boot configuration in this file. The info we are looking for is found where you see this:

## ## End Default Options ##

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=630d5f38-97f8-4b30-a650-1bd014770981 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic
quiet

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=630d5f38-97f8-4b30-a650-1bd014770981 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic……

This is the correct /boot/grub/menu.lst file. Mine was on (hd0,4), so I had to look in a few files before I found the right one. Now that we know where the correct menu.lst file is, we need to set grub to point to this file.

• grub> root (hd0,4)

Then, write the information to grub, which in most cases will be installed on your MBR, at (hd0)

• grub> setup (hd0)

Now, to reboot:

• grub> reboot (or exit)

Now you should be booting into the right version of Ubuntu.

Note#1: I had really scrambled my xorg.conf file, and as soon as I reinstalled the Nvidia 173 driver, I have had no problems.

Note # 2: If you have grub installed via Suse or Ubuntu with the fancy splash screen, you’ll lose those graphics. I think that you can restore that by reinstalling grub after you’ve booted into the correct distro, in my case, Ubuntu kernel 2.6.27.

More info here and here. Hope this helps. Happy grubbing!!!

The Rubber Meets The Road. Part 1

Election day.

Here is the final poll concerning the fate of Prop 8.

Here’s hoping this poll is accurate.

Hat Tip: Sully.

Next, on the Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin shows'…

I’m not voting for either McCain or Obama. That said, when Obama wins tomorrow night, I’m looking forward to the sudden onslaught of…

***drumroll please***

ADS  –  Acorn Derangement Syndrome!!!

Prop 8, Marriage, and Lies

A friend blogged about his reasons for voting no on Prop 8, the initiative that would constitutionally bar gay from the institution of marriage in California. In the comments someone raised the issue that if it doesn’t pass, California schools will be mandated to teach about gay marriage. Here is his comment:

Sire,
Sorry. Section 58190 clearly states that the legal aspects of marriage must be taught as part of school curricula. Read it for yourself.
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=edc&group=51001-52000&file=51890-51891

there is no special opt-out clause.

It would be like opting out of evolution.

OK. First, in the CA code this gentleman cites, classified as the “comprehensive health education programs” section, there is not one word about marriage anywhere in the text.

Second, as Zack correctly points out, there is an opt out clause for health instruction:

51240. (a) If any part of a school’s instruction in health
conflicts with the religious training and beliefs of a parent or guardian of a pupil, the pupil, upon written request of the parent or guardian, shall be excused from the part of the instruction that conflicts with the religious training and beliefs.

The decision about whether to offer comprehensive sex education is left up to individual school districts.

What state law does require is that districts that offer sex education “teach respect for marriage and committed relationships.”

How horrible!!!!!

Districts have taken different approaches.

The Los Angeles Unified School District offers ninth-graders a “Life Skills” class that deals with a variety of issues, including personal identity and relationships. A district spokeswoman said marriage is not a specific part of that curriculum but could come up as part of classroom discussion.

And in Fresno, where I live, and will teach if the state has any money left to pay me;

…district policy is that teachers do not address the subject of gay marriage in the classroom; students who ask about it are told to raise the issue with their families, according to district officials.

Third: Students can, in some districts, opt out of evolution instruction, based on religious conflicts.

I think we’ll call that myth… busted!

PS. One thing I find hillarious about the opposition to the idea of teaching gay marriage, is that, with all the religious rage against gay marriage, there is more advertisement about the issue than there is of either Presidential candidate. They are exposing our delicate children to the issue of gay marriage more than the schools are. How’s that for irony.

No On Prop 8 – Why Domestic Partnerships Are Not Good Enough.

By letter of the law, a “Civil Union” provides the same rights and benefits as marriage does. This is one of the arguments used to sway voters in California to vote yes on Proposition 8, the measure that will Constitutionally bar gays and lesbians from using the term “Married” to describe their legal union. It sounds like a good argument, but it is flawed. This exposes the flaws in the two tiered concept of the Civil Union or Domestic Partnership versus actual marriage. Here is an example of the inequalities inherent in California’s Domestic Partnership law hurting a heterosexual:

Consider the ruling two weeks ago ordering an Orange County man to continue paying alimony to his ex-wife, even though she is now in a registered domestic partnership with another woman. This session, the Legislature is considering three bills to resolve other gaps, ambiguities and inequities — and that’s not unusual. We have needed multiple pieces of legal patchwork every year since 2001, when domestic partnerships went into effect.

There are many examples of how this “separate but equal” policy simply fails to ensure equality. But the law isn’t the only think that matters here – it’s the heart.

I was going to write in Paris Hilton for President, but now I have someone who is actually worthy.

On Tuesday, I am going to write in San Diego Mayor Gerald Sanders for President.