A Proud Nation and a Shamed State

Nearly eight years ago I snuck into a bar in Davis to watch the election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. I stumbled into my bed late that night secure in the knowledge that after a close race Mr. Gore had won his bid for president. The next morning I awoke to a completely different reality and all I could ask was “What the hell did I drink last night?!”
Eight years of repression later and I awoke on November 4th, 2008 half expecting the results of the most historic election in the nation’s history to have been nothing more than an alcohol induced dream. It wasn’t, and for the first time in eight years I am proud of my nation, however, for the first time in my existence I am ashamed of my state.
I will not mince words here, until the night of November 3rd I believed that California was the greatest state in the union. I knew that we had the best geography, the most advanced technology, and the most enlightened citizens, I was painfully mistaken. The blame, I suppose, rests not fully on the shoulders of California’s citizenry, outside money from the religious right was flooded into our state in an effort to confuse the weaker minded of our people. It apparently worked.
Those who stand upon their pulpit and preach love and tolerance have won a decisive victory for hate and bigotry. These loathsome organizations who quote Leviticus and ignore the words of their own messiah have taken yet another step towards spawning a theocracy from the ashes of democracy. Congregations that once declared it abomination to allow black and white to marry now do so to a other people. I am once again left in awe of a hypocrisy I thought myself inured to. Slowly they are eroding the will of the individual by creating laws to protect us from ourselves and match their own two thousand year old dead mythos, to allow us to give over our own responsibility to a government that, when it has garnered the last vestiges of our civil rights, will stand proudly under the banner of heaven with raging flames at its back and blood upon its tattered flag.
I am ashamed and frightened that my state would allow itself to take part in that slow march towards doom but I am heartened that our country stepped back from the brink. We as a nation have said to one disenfranchised people “join us,” and as a state we declared to another “you are less than us.” There is hope, but that hope rests in the hands of the individual, not the god-blinded mob.