Diana's Writing Blog

So, yesterday was E-Day, as I like to call it. It was my first time voting, and I was super excited. I got up an hour early to go to my polling place, which was a block from where I work, handily enough. When I got there, however, I wasn’t on the list of eligible voters. I wasn’t on any of the lists. So they sent me down to City Hall to figure out what the deal was. The very nice county clerk looked up my voting edibility and apparently Michigan had canceled it because they had decided I had moved out of state. Even though I still lived in the exact same place listed on my voter registration card and driver’s license and had paid Michigan taxes this year. Yay, friggin’ democracy.

But I wasn’t going to let that stop me. The county clerk reinstated my voter eligibility and said I could go straight back and vote if I took the photocopy of my reinstated voter form with me. So back I went across town to vote again. The county clerk called ahead to let them know how to deal with me and my paperwork. So, when I got back everyone was really nice and they were all glad that I had gotten it sorted out and came back, not just called it a day. I was proud of me, too. No way was I missing the chance to be a part of something historic.

And it was! So historic! I voted for Obama and he won. By an embarrassing majority. Like I actually feel bad for McCain. It wasn’t even close. But I’m so glad Obama won. If he can get even half of what he promised done in his term, I’ll be happy.

Of course, my happiness is somewhat overshadowed by the fact that every bigoted anti-gay proposition and amendment on the ballots passed–though some only squeaked by. Arkansas banned gay adoption and Arizona, Florida, and California banned gay marriage. That’s right, even California, the most liberal state I know and whose No on Prop 8 campaign I personally donated to has banned gay marriage. I cannot even fathom that a country that just elected is first black president also took so many backwards steps when it comes to equal rights. How can people in this day and age still believe that a person’s sexuality makes them any less deserving of the right to get married and raise a family?

The sheer amount of lying it took to get these propositions passed sickens me. You know what was the deciding factor in California: that gay marriage would somehow lead to homosexuality being taught in the schools. What? That doesn’t even make any sense! Yes, your fundie spawn might encounter a teacher or other employee who is both gay and married. Or they might have a friend whose gay parent gets married. Guess what, if you choose to put your kid in public school, they’re going to encounter people whose lifestyles differ from yours. If you don’t like it, pay for private school or home school them. If you really want to make sure that they never figure out your conservative hate-mongering is based on lies, keep them locked in their rooms for the rest of their lives. I don’t care. They’re your kids and your choice. What shouldn’t be your choice is depriving gays of their right to marry just so you can pretend their lives and their love is somehow less legitimate than yours.

As for moaning about how churches will get in trouble for for refusing to marry gays, it would never happen. Even if someone wanted to get married by a church and a pastor who thought their entire existence was sinful, any lawsuit they brought would never be successful. It’s called freedom of religion. You have it. Case in point: you haven’t been successfully sued for holding up the "God Hates Fags" signs in public, have you? Besides, why would any lawsuit even be necessary? There are plenty of churches out there who are both inclusive and supportive of gays and plenty of priests and pastors willing to marry them.

And what bothers me the most is that you live in mortal fear of the government intervening in your religious affairs, yet you support legally defining marriage. You need to be very careful how much legal intervention and definition you invite when it comes to marriage. There’s always someone out there whose definition differs from yours, and the crazier they are, the more eager they are to impose their definition on you. Right now marriage is between a man and a woman. In a few decades it could be defined as only legal if between a fertile, child-producing man and woman. After all, marriage is for procreation, right? Not that sappy love stuff.

But the real problem is that the word marriage describes two very different constructs. There’s legal marriage, which makes you one person in the eyes of the law, and there’s religious marriage, which makes you one in the eyes of God. Calling them the same thing is obviously confusing people. So here’s a proposition for you, let’s rename change the legal concept of marriage to "civil union." To join yourself to another person in a legal sense, becoming one entity in financial matters, taxes, legal decision-making, etc., you apply for a civil union. It’s done at a court house by an appropriate official.

If you want to be "married" you go to whatever religious official you consider to be authoritative in these matters–priest, rabbi, your mom, whoever you feel has the power to unite you in the eyes of whatever higher power you worship. Being married has no legal effect at all. If you want that, you have to go get a civil union. You can be "united" in the eyes of the law, "married" in the eyes of your god, or both.

The sad thing is, we already have pretty much this exact division. Just not the division of terms. You have to go get a marriage license, whether or not your ceremony is at the courthouse or at the church. The license is the civil part, and it’s all that gay people are asking for. They already have plenty of religious leaders to marry them in the eyes of the lord. All they’re asking for are equal legal rights. But of course this will erode the sanctity of all hetero marriages. Because something isn’t truly holy in the eyes of God unless it’s depriving the scapegoat minority of the day from equal rights. Congratulations, Religious Right, even in this historic election, you’ve managed to remind us that a good portion of America is still ruled by prejudice and hate.

Decades from now, when everyone does have equal rights–and they will, segregation was struck down even in the South, eventually–when your grandchildren ask you how anyone could be that ignorant, what will you tell them?

In other news, I won a flip camera from the Pepsi sweepstakes. I’ll probably sell it for X-Mas cash. The fun thing is that Pepsi doesn’t notify you when you win. A package just showed up today, wedged between my “mail box” and the next one up. By mail box, I mean one of those boxes that are supposed to hang on the outside of houses, but in the case of my apartment, hangs in an unlocked vestibule area. Most of the time, the door is propped open. This is why I usually have boxes shipped to my work.

And finally, here’s my writing box for today. Hoping to do another 1,000 words tonight, but we’ll see. I actually did an extra 1,000 last night, so if I get lazy, no biggie.

So, a little more than a week ago I was moaning about how I’d never manage to finish this novel before NaNo WriMo started (yesterday). Well, I didn’t. It took me till about 5 minutes ago.

That’s right, people! It’s finished. Well it’s a rough draft, anyway. And that leaves me the rest of November to work on the next novel, which I managed to do some rough outlining on. I’m only 4,000 words behind so far. So yay! I’ll grab myself something celebratory for a job well done and get right to work on that next book. Yeah…that’s how it’ll go.

Anyway, here is the last writing progress box for this novel:

For those of you playing along at home, that’s 21,842 words in the last 9 days. Or an average of 2,427 words a day. It didn’t quite work out that way. More like 1,500 for the first 7 days and then 10,000 this weekend.

So here’s hoping I can keep up the progress this month and crank out another novel-like object.