The Vancouver Sun and Reaffirming Gay Marriage

The Vancouver Sun picked up the Op Ed yesterday. I guess it made sense, since it was a local who wrote the piece. One fun thing about that is that someone at my office sent me a link to it (you can only read it online if someone does that), and along with a more-or-less exact visual rendering of the page, they also include a sound file with a synthetic speech reading of it. I captured the file to disk and could post it here, if anyone’s interested (just let me know). The computer voice was not that of Stephen Hawking or one of the Mac OS voices one often hears. Instead, it was a fairly realistic female voice, and it even pronounced my last name, as well as ‘Mara Liasson’ correctly! The paper must have it mainly for their blind readership, but it is impressive, all the same. It’s a pity that the Sun requires that you pay a subscription to read (or have read to you) the whole paper online.

Another Reason to Stay
Remember how I came to the conclusion that the entire political spectrum here was generally to the left of the country to the south of us? It was proven once again today, when the Parliament voted down a motion by some Conservatives to reopen the debate on Gay Marriage in Canada. Even several conservatives who were on the losing side said ‘It’s over, let’s move on.’ Stephen Harper, with a stone face, told the cameras: “We made a promise to do this, and we fulfilled that promise.” He stopped short of saying: ‘See, I told you this wasn’t doing either you Religious Conservatives or me any good.’, but he may have been thinking that. It wasn’t his best day.

It was a stark contrast to the 7 states in the mid-term election that actually made it unlawful: Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Only Arizona voted down their ballot initiative.

While we were proud to live in the only state that made gay marriage legal in the US (Massachusetts), it’s even better to be living in a country that clearly agrees with us, with no apologies or pockets here where it’s illegal.