California -- The Rube State

You know you’re old when you remember when California was trendy and progressive.

That’s where all the latest things once started – some good, like Casual Friday and surfer music, some bad like the drug culture, and some intensely annoying like “Have A Nice Day!”

California was the liberal opposite of the hidebound, narrow-minded, culturally repressed American Gothic folk who inhabited places like Iowa, or Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire or Connecticut. You know, the Rubes.

California was Haight-Asbury and Flower Power and 77 Sunset Strip and Disneyland and Hollywood and, in a word, possibility. The dream-dreamers and dream-makers lived there.

Those other places were the spirituals heirs of the Puritans and the farmers. Their thought ran in straight rows like the furrows of their fields, and woe betide the weed or wild idea that tried to sprout in that ground. California thought was far too vigorous for straight rows, and ran in bold twists and splashes like tie-died clothes.

Sure, California sometimes gave the rest of the country a lesson in opposites. Sometimes the leader was Governor Jerry (Moonbeam) Brown. Sometimes it was Governor Ronald Reagan. But those opposites both pointed to a future better than the Hidebound Back East. No more.

Scientists tell us that the Earth’s magnetic poles reverse every cosmic now and then, and California and the Hidebound Back East have switched ends on the political scale. And what did it was gay marriage.

Boiled down and stripped of both Bible-thumping and the Feather Flaunting, gay marriage comes down to a simple question of equal protection under law.

If two persons of one moral persuasion can have the state bless the union of their affections, bodies and property, then the state must so bless any two persons of any persuasion. If the law does not protect all equally, it is not law – at least not the law of those who declared to a tyrant and to the ages “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

As a nation, we haven’t been universal in living up to that truth. It took us some time before we all agreed it included women, longer still before we really included people of color, but we’re still working. That’s been the case since we all agreed to “to form a more perfect Union,” recognizing in the Constitution’s preamble that it would remain a work in progress.

Progress was certainly made in New Hampshire this week when the governor signed a bill legalizing gay marriage, joining the Granite State to five others that had reaffirmed equal protection under the law.

California, of course, has been different. First, its Supreme Court said the state constitution meant that marriage licenses could be issued to same-sex couples. Then the voters floated and passed Proposition 8, which said nuts to that, it’s the boy-girl way or the highway. And the California Supreme Court said, yeah, well, the voters have spoken, but those 18,000 or so of you caught in the crossfire are still married.

And now, California voters, who get more propositions than a tourist at Hollywood and Vine, will probably have to address the issue again.

Much to the amusement of the hip and trendy – and liberty-loving and patriotic – folk in Iowa, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Connecticut.

What’s the matter with those rubes in California? Don’t they get it?

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