That’s why they call it the Heartland: Shortly after the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of same sex marriage, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom triumphantly proclaimed, “As goes California, so goes the nation.” Considering more recent events, let’s hope not. The Iowa Supreme Court’s unanimous overturning of the state’s ban on same-sex marriage has everyone singing a new tune, “If it can happen here…” Katherine Franke at Gender and Sexuality Law Blog commented on the distinctly midwest character of Iowa court’s ruling, eschewing language of dignity and civil rights for plain old U.S. midwestern populism. Also, for all us cynics out there, UPI just ran a story on how Iowa is gonna make bank.
Grad school, check: Stephen Chrisomalis at Glossographia responds on Thomas Benson’s Chronicle polemic, “Just Don’t Go” [to grad school]. Chrisomalis takes a look at the rising PhDs and the academic market and how to reconcile the two.
Hope you’ve been following Tad McIlwraith’s series of posts on the British Columbia provincial government’s legislation on First Nations Recognition. He’s followed the story pretty closely here, here, here, and here.
Fooled by April: LL Wynn at Culture Matters wrote on an April Fools joke on at AAA that was never meant to be.
Unfortunately, it seems like it wasn’t a deliberate joke. The AAA website said clearly in several places that the call for papers would end April 1st, 5pm EST. But when I went to put in my abstract at about 2am on April 1st, it got rejected saying that the call for papers had closed at midnight! Even though the very same page that was telling me that the call for papers had closed also said that the deadline was 5pm. I called the number listed at the bottom of the page and a very annoyed-sounding call service guy (who basically just takes messages all night long for the AAA — I was rather surprised that they had something like this!) said, “No ma’am, this is not a joke. I do not have time for jokes.”
Luckily, AAA extended the deadline for abstracts.
Would a sentence of any greater length be Twittish? Ryan Bigge at the Smart Set considers the prevelant social attitude that technoculture (like twitter) is dumbing us down, encouraging shorter communications, and turns the opinion on its head. Brevity is the soul of wit, after all.
i’m all for Iowa legalizing same sex marriage, but what happened in Iowa happened here in California just a few months ago; the Supreme Court struck down the law banning gay marriage as against the state’s constitution. So California voters went and changed the constitution. Who’s to say Iowa voters won’t do the same? The only difference is, here in California it seems to be much much easier to change the state constitution (i believe it’s a simple majority vote but don’t quote me on that; i honestly don’t remember) than in other states; i’ve heard it quoted that in Iowa it could take years.
Frankly, i’m not going to start getting excited for a while. One, i’d like to see the voters finally start voting down such referendums in greater numbers, and two i’d like to see someone finally take up the cause as civil rights and have it pass. This probably means taking it up to the Supreme Court, and who knows when that’ll happen.
I completely agree with you, Kethryvis. I hope my kernel of sarcasm snuck through what I wrote. It seems, though, that people are (probably prematurely) celebrating the court decision in Iowa as a sign that same sex marriage has shed its elite coastal aura in the public imagination. And I think the most interesting consequence will be the boost in the tourist and hospitality economies. This summer, Massachussettes dropped its law barring outsiders to marry in the state in part out of pressure from businesses that wanted to compete for CA for gay wedding dollars. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/us/16gay.html?_r=1)
And I think this article from the Des Moines Register (link below) takes seriously what Tina Fey once said best in 2004, that conservatives are torn between their hatred of gay marriage and their love of the economy.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20090405/NEWS03/904050335/1001/NEWS