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.

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By David Drucker | Filed in Canada, Politics | December 8, 2006 1:46 am

2 Comments to “The Vancouver Sun and Reaffirming Gay Marriage”

  1. AvatarJonathon Narvey
    Posted: Dec 14th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
    1

    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.
  2. Avatarddrucker
    Posted: Dec 15th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
    2
    Author Comment

    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.
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