wshaffer

Judge Vaughn Walker has given me the best (slightly belated) wedding anniversary present ever, and ruled that Proposition 8, the California law banning same-sex marriage, is unconstitutional. As someone who has been married for well over a decade, I feel like I can say this with some authority: Same-sex marriage doesn't devalue marriage. Pretending that heterosexual marriage is such a delicate institution that it will be destroyed if we give same-sex couples the basic human rights we take for granted? That devalues marriage.

Anyway, I know that this is merely a small sanity check on the long road to the Supreme Court. But it still makes me happy.

Interestingly, the LGBT Mentoring Project just released a report looking at why Prop. 8 passed in the first place. I haven't had a chance to do more than skim it, but it features a quite interesting analysis of which ads on both the Yes and No sides were effective. I was particularly struck by the suggestions that parents, even ones who had somewhat liberal attitudes towards homosexuality, were strongly swayed by ads suggesting that failure to pass Prop. 8 would lead to children being exposed to homosexuality in schools.

There's also some suggestion that a lot of voters were confused about whether a Yes vote on Prop 8 meant they were voting for or against gay marriage. Remind me why we think direct democracy is a good idea?

Just got back from a department meeting where the head of our department announced that, thanks to recent changes in California law, all the writers and editors are going to be reclassified as non-exempt employees effective July 1st. (For those not up on employment jargon, this means that instead of being an employee who gets a fixed salary regardless of how many hours I work, I will be paid hourly and be eligible for overtime if I work more than 8 hours a day. With the caveat that overtime has to be approved by a manager.)

( Mutterings about California employment law )