I think those who understand previous social rights movements can't understand that clearly.

-David Ahlport

Unfortunately, not everyone gets it.  The Supreme Court of Maryland recently handed down an anti-same-sex-marriage decision, falling back on prejudices that simply do not make sense, to the effect that allowing couples of the same sex to marry will somehow impede straight people from marrying and from having children.

It would be interesting to know more about the evolution of Jerry Sanders on this issue.  The way he refers to his daughter and his staff workers suggests that he was always aware of their interests, on the one hand, but on the other he never actually spoke with them about any of this.

So, how is this going down in California?  My understanding is that San Diego is a conservative, reliably Republican part of the state.  But from what I can tell, "conservative" and "liberal" mean rather different things in California (and perhaps the whole West Coast) than they do here in the Northeast.

More personally, I find it interesting, but also scary, that two of the great societal issues that matter most to me, animal rights and equal rights for the LGBT community, will require huge shifts in the ancient, time-honored ways of thinking of many people, before we see real progress.

The leading Democrats, it is clear, do not want to be in the lead in this issue.  The best they can do is to support equal civil protections for same-sex couples (which some states are finding are not all the easy to guarantee, e.g. New Jersey), and meanwhile to say something to the effect that they have not quite found their way to accepting same-sex marriage.  Reading between the lines, I understand that to mean that they know supporting same-sex marriage is the right thing to do, but they are more concerned about not alienating independent voters, and even some more socially conservative groups within the traditional Democratic constituencies, i.e. African-Americans and Latinos.

But if, thanks to a large extent to Jerry Sanders's bold principled statement and message to Sacramento, California's pro-same-sex-marriage people actually can get it legalized, we can hope that that will have a very good effect elsewhere in the US, much more so than the actions of little Vermont and eccentric Massachusetts.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.