Ballot Measures

Two major developments in New York and California have thrust the issue of same-sex marriage back into the political spotlight. First, California's Supreme Court struck down the state's ban on gay marriage, saying it violated the California Constitution. Second, yesterday, New York's governor directed all of his state's agencies to begin recognizing same-sex marriages performed in places, like California, where the practice is legal.

While California's court decision will be tested in November with a ballot initiative to amend the state's constitution so as to outlaw gay marriage, new polls indicate that the public may have turned the page on the issue and be ready to afford gays and lesbians the legal rights of state sanctioned matrimony. Indeed, California's R.I.N.O. Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger supports the court ruling and opposes any initiative to alter the constitution to exclude gays from getting married.

So does this action from two of our nation's three most populous states signal and end to the culture war, or have these blue states played right into the hands of their red state counterparts?

In the wake of the Supreme Court's approval of an Indiana law requiring voters to present a state-issued photo identification card at the polls, voting security activists are seeking to take the argument over voter ID one step further, just in time for the presidential election. Missouri lawmakers plan to vote on an amendment to the state constitution that would require voters to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote. The amendment would tighten the proofs required for registration in the state. The Missouri Constitution already requires that voters be citizens, but currently, Missourians can show a utility bill as proof of residency and are not required to provide a birth certificate to register to vote.

Nineteen other states are also considering similar measures, but only Missouri's stands to have an impact on the November elections. The amendment, if passed by the legislature, could go before the voters for ratification on the August primary election ballot in the state. If passed into law, it would be in effect for the presidential and congressional elections in the fall. Supporters of the bill say that it is necessary to prevent illegal aliens from voting while detractors say that the bill would do more harm than good by disenfranchising poor and elderly voters. Those arguments were made against the Indiana law at the Supreme Court and were soundly rejected.

Is America ready to watch a President Barack Hussein Obama sworn in? What about a President Mike Huckabee?

What's in a name? Apparently a lot when it comes to electing an American president. Just ask "Mitt" Romney...

AOL News is fronting a USA Today article which questions the prominence of "family values" as a campaign issue. Moral or family value issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, have been a rallying call for conservative voters and a staple of the Republican platform and electoral strategy for the past 30 years.

However, while Mitt Romney (see here) and Mike Huckabee (see here) have focused their campaigns upon such moral issues, other GOP candidates have, as of yet, spent their energies elsewhere (the war on terror and the economy, for example).

The authors of the USA Today article speculate that the reason for the conspicuous silence might be that many of the GOP hopefuls do not exemplify traditional family values in their personal lives.

I was talking to my Mom the other day about The Political Machine, and she asked if I could look into something she'd heard about in an e-mail from a friend. The friend had sent her this link, to a comment on a forum. She was convinced that teachers in California were now forever forbidden to utter the words "mother" or "father, or any permutation thereof. I immediately said, "Mom, don't believe stuff you read in e-mails. I'm sure it's just a twisting of some new law, to scare people." I promised to check it out.

Turns out it's all true, according to this breathless account by World Net Daily. Check out the text of the law in question, SB 777. It's all right there...written in secret gay code, I guess...let's see if "Fox News" can clear this up for us.

Voucher Proponents must face reality. School vouchers are not selling to the American public. The latest example is Utah, the reddest of red states, where a comprehensive, although limited voucher program went down by 2-1. I'm in general support of the concept. In the university system, which has a mix of public and private institutions, has broad public support and government underwrites much of the tuition at both. I see no reason why the same could not be true at lower educational levels.