A timely redesign of the California State Flag. Click on the flag for a larger version. Fair use encouraged. (Graphic: mine)
There is a lot about California that out-of-state conservatives and the radical religious right despise. They hate us Californians for our creativity and imagination; they hate us for our independent vision and pioneering spirit; they hate us for our outside-the-box thinking; and they hate us for our technology, music, films, literature, art, food, wine and everything else we bring to the nation’s table.
But above all else, to paraphrase The Great Decider, they hate us Californians for our freedoms.
California offered the displaced and impoverished a haven during the dust bowl days of the Great Depression. People flocked here for the opportunity to work in the fields and in industry. Then they stayed for the freedom to prosper. Californian John Steinbeck wrote about it.
During World War II, thousands of soldiers and sailors, on their way to the South Pacific, passed through California. When that war was finally won, they came back and they stayed for the freedom to live their lives as they chose — in a place where people didn’t much care about the color of their skin or with whom they slept. And so San Francisco and Los Angeles flourished.
During the Fifties and Sixties, California played a significant role in the Civil Rights movement as a haven for people of all colors, countries, cultures and sexual orientations. Where else could a movement supporting the rights of immigrant farm workers have originated and succeeded? Kansas? Alabama? Utah? Not a chance.
In the Eighties, America’s, and the entire world’s, technology boom kicked off in a garage in what’s now called Silicon Valley. Those long-haired California natives would have been laughed out of the corporate boardrooms of IBM for suggesting the personal computer would one day benefit, as they put it, the rest of us.
And thank California for Hollywood movies, Alice B Toklas, multi-culturalism, Joe DiMaggio, Berkeley free speech, Isadora Duncan, Levis, Chicano culture, the Bakersfield sound, flower power, Robert Frost, sexual liberation, surf and skate culture, the good Star Wars, Jodie Foster, the Grateful Dead, Beach Blanket Babylon, California wines, West Coast Jazz, John Steinbeck, low-rider cool, Billie Jean King, the Beatniks, Bruce Lee, the Hippies, the United Farm Workers, Ghirardelli Chocolates, Greg Louganis, Disney movies, the Beach Boys, Cheech and Chong, roller-skating guys dressed up as nuns, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, the Golden Gate Bridge, South Central rap and hip hop, American Graffiti, casual Fridays, Tales of the City, Merle Haggard, Ansel Adams, Snoop Dogg, Ronald Reagan, Tom Bradley, Charles Schultz, Carlos Santana, The Sierra Club, Alice Waters, preserving the towering redwoods, Governor Schwarzenegger, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jack London, Tom Hanks, Shirley Temple, etc., etc., etc.
No other state in the union has offered such a wide spectrum of people, of diverse talents, backgrounds and ideologies, the freedom required to create, innovate and excel — while, at the same time, offering them the freedom to live their lives the way they choose.
When the rest of the world envisions the positive contributions the United States of America has made to international culture, for the most part, they’re thinking of California. And yeah, xenophobes, the rest of the world matters.
So, to the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to the New Haven, Connecticut-based Knights of Columbus, to the Tupelo, Mississippi-based American Family Association, to the Washington DC-based Concerned Women for America, to the Colorado Springs, Colorado-based Focus on the Family, and to all the rest of those warped little minds that incessantly whine that what plays in California would never play on Main Street, USA, I say who cares? Get the Hell out of California! Pack up your hate-money, your lies and your Bibles, and head back to your own dried-up little wastelands, where you can inflict your Bronze Age pettiness on people who share your so-called values.
Californians value justice, fair play and equal access to opportunity. Values like discrimination and inequality have no place in the California Constitution.
Vote NO on 8 to keep out-of-state hate out of our Constitution.
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No one says it quite like you, Mike. Powerful, poignant, and most of all, right on.
Unfortunately, California also gave the world Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bob Dornan, Dick Pombo, Duncan Hunter, Howard Jarvis, etc. For all that we progressive denizens of various little coastal enclaves would like to think otherwise, there’s a deep conservative streak running through this state, and the “red” parts of California are politically indistinguishable from the deep South. Besides, many of the Christianists people who now inhabit Colorado, Utah, Idaho, etc., are refugees from California in the first place.
Peter nailed it – which is why Prop 8 will loose. The idiots running the Prop 8 should have scared these east-of-the-5 rednecks with some heavy lethal Rovian commercials because I believe even these dumb-fucks could have been swayed “enough”….
Yes but no but yes but … for every one of them, we’ve got 10 influential leaders like Steven Spielberg, César Chávez, Maxine Waters and Harry Hay. Yeah, Bakersfield, Oceanside and Modesto and their ilk are like chunks of Alabama that broke off and floated through the Panama Canal and somehow attached themselves to California.
Despite that, thus far, almost every single major newspaper in the state, including the conservative San Diego Union-Tribune has published an editorial urging a NO vote on Prop 8.
A recent LA TImes Article pointed out that, even if we lose Prop 8, California will still lead every other state in the scope of rights for gay people. We just won’t have civil marriage by that name.
Dobson packed up his dog and pony and headed to Colorado because he thought we had too much freedom here in California, and he knew he couldn’t make the inroads necessary to establish his $150 million dollar Xtian empire here. Good riddance.
Hey Tom!
They’re listening. They’re retooling their message right now and look for some new heavy-hitters to get involved and start making commercials.
That’s about all I can say right now.
The radical religious right is freaking because our side has raked in a fortune in the last two weeks.
So don’t count us out yet.
I am reserving judgment on the campaign and won’t be a naysayer so soon, although I am feeling uneasy about this. I’m afraid that once the kids got involved, the Yes f*cks defined the message and no matter what we do we screwed up. I used to work for a guy named Arthur Finkelstein who was D’Amato’s pollster and major consult at the RSCC among others, and he who happens to be gay and married yet worked for jessie helms is the type of consultant this campaign needed from the start. The reality is the CEO’s of each major cities Gay Lesbian Center don’t have a fucking clue how to run against these bastards and had too much input a campaign we should have always been on the offensive.
Right, how do you lose a campaign that both the Orange County Register and the San Francisco papers agree to agree on? But my hope lies in the fact that I am putting too much concern on the folks east of the 5.
Have you seen the latest No on Prop 8 ad, featuring the California State Superintendent of Schools?
The tone is still defensive, but at least we’re hitting back with the truth.
I for one want to see us on the offensive!
The swing vote who eventually jumped from the No into the Yes column (which is about 10% of the electorate) is still very soft and volatile.
Here is why I still remain slightly hopeful (of course in addition to the Obama turnout which we cannot underestimate) so there is a hope.
But instead of saying money brought from “Out of State interests”… NAME IT…. that is,
I would have said “DON’T LET THE ELDERS OF THE MORMON CHURCH IN SALT LAKE CITY DICTATE HOW PEOPLE SHOULD LIVE IN CALIFORNIA”
that would have been truthful and hard hitting and would have easily in my mind brought home the independent soft voter for good into the No camp.
Well said!
I sincerely hope PROP 8 fails miserably.
BUT – if it DOES passes, is everyone prepared to spend another ba-zillion dollars on PR and possibly wait 20-30 years to “win” equality in CA?
AND – if it does NOT pass, which state will we focus on next so we can spend another ba-zillion dollars to purchase civil rights?
I know I am virtually alone here (except for Charles Merrill and his partner), but I think all of you are insane.
Truly crazy….one step away from writing-on-the-wall-with-your-feces crazy.
Because if ALL of us truly believed we WERE equal, we would not be so patient as tax-payers and U.S. citizens. We’d simply KNOW we ARE equal, and refuse to pay into a system that not only denies our familes civil marriage but doesn’t even acknowledge our existence (wait for the 2010 census).
I’m 43, and I will NOT wait until I’m 73 for fair and equal treatment. It’s OK for the country at large to be ignorant, bigoted, mid-guided, and mid-informed. But that’s not my fault. So until people GROW UP and show my family the same “civil” respect heterosexually-identified families are given, I owe this country and the IRS nothing.
How many times do I need to say this?
TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION AIN’T GWANNA HAPPEN!