{"id":507,"date":"2008-11-05T09:04:57","date_gmt":"2008-11-05T14:04:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rawtop.com\/blog\/?p=507"},"modified":"2008-11-05T09:04:57","modified_gmt":"2008-11-05T14:04:57","slug":"one-giant-leap-forward-several-steps-backwards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/2008-11\/one-giant-leap-forward-several-steps-backwards","title":{"rendered":"One Giant Leap Forward, Several Steps Backwards"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While the election of Barak Obama is a huge leap forward, I just want to remind people that many other things didn&#8217;t exactly go our way last night&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It looks like we lost on Prop 8 in California (final numbers aren&#8217;t in yet). $73 million was spent on that fight. $37.6 million by gay friendly forces and $35.8 million by bigots. That&#8217;s a huge loss. Personally, I&#8217;m ambivalent about it. While I&#8217;m married I&#8217;ve never thought forcing someone to recognize your relationship changes anything. They either genuinely recognize it or they don&#8217;t. Give it a few years and it will fix itself.<\/li>\n<li>Gay marriage lost in Arizona (no surprise).<\/li>\n<li>We&#8217;re now banned from adopting children in Arkansas.<\/li>\n<li>Gay marriage lost in Florida.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So in a way it was a very bad night for gay rights last night (abortion rights didn&#8217;t have a very good night either). BUT the silver lining is the Supreme Court judges that Obama will appoint and the fact that anti-gay legislation will have a hard time getting passed on the federal level with the Democrats in charge. In the end we will win, but yesterday was very much a mixed message from a gay point of view.<\/p>\n<p>The funny part is that California used to always be seen as the most gay-friendly part of the US. I think we can say that that&#8217;s now changed. New York and New England are doing much better for the gay community. As of yesterday there are now no Republican senators from NY\/New England. Massachusetts has gay marriage. Connecticut will have it in a few days, and New York recognizes gay marriages from other states (to a limited extent). That means four of the New York&#8217;s immediate neighbors have gay marriage &#8211; Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ontario and Quebec.<\/p>\n<p>That said, I was just a little bit surprised with the election results in Manhattan. Last election 86% voted for Kerry. This time 85% voted for Obama. I&#8217;m really surprised the percentage went down (even a point) &#8211; I was expecting it to go up. Still, 85% makes me proud to call NYC home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While the election of Barak Obama is a huge leap forward, I just want to remind people that many other things didn&#8217;t exactly go our way last night&#8230; It looks like we lost on Prop 8 in California (final numbers aren&#8217;t in yet). $73 million was spent on that fight. $37.6 million by gay friendly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=507"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":508,"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507\/revisions\/508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rawtop.com\/sex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}