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.
Be thankful that the debates over. We’ll see, though, if the other political parties will stop slamming the Conservative’s “hidden agenda” regarding same-sex marriage. Somehow, I don’t think the rhetoric will be any less shrill come election time.
Unfortunately, campaigns use what ammunition they have. If they want to use the other side’s views as a cudgel, then all’s fair and all that. You’d think that candidates would eventually get the message that poisoning the political ecosystem with negative campaigning is bad in the long run, but the temptation to grab votes with attack ads is just too great, and telling the public to ‘just say no’ to negative campaigning won’t stop them any more than preaching abstinence will prevent unwanted babies.
The best we can do is have an active Press corps that can wade through the muck and better educated voters that can see past it. Neither of those were true in my former home. I’m hoping Canada can do a better job of it — I suspect they can.