Two major topics: the NJ governor, and the recent california ruling.<\/p>\n
Many of the lj’s I subscribe to have said something about James McGreevey, and his combination self-outing and resignation as governor of New Jersey. Basically, he hired an old trick of his, who turned out to be incompetent and, when he fired said ex-trick, was sued for sexual harrassment. He resigns, presumably due to associated bad press. <\/p>\n
His resignation speech was filled with shame. That’s kind of appropriate. But it was shame over his digging guys.<\/strike> Shame over your sexuality is pretty dumb. Shame over hiring a guy who turns out to be a total incompetent is totally appropriate, especially if he also turns out to be an asshole. Shame over making hiring decisions based on how good a lay the candidate is, also appropriate. I’m not sure it’s worth resignation, but so it goes.<\/p>\n
[edit: Special thanks to Btw, here’s a quick check for partisan bias. In MA, the state congress wants to rewrite the law so that the republican governor won’t appoint Kerry’s replacement, but the voters will. In NJ, the democratic governor timed his retirement so that a democrat would fill in his position, and keep it for two years without the post coming up for voter decision. If you think both of these are fine and dandy things, you may be suffering under democratic partisan bias, I certainly am. If in both cases, you think these are terrible things, you may be suffering under republican bias. If you actually care about the voters having their say more than you care about which party takes the position, that’s certainly a note in your favor. And if you think governors should have free reign in such things, you’re pretty damn scary, but this also shows signs of no partisan bias. <\/p>\n So, they ruled that Gavin Newsom overstepped his bounds by ignoring the law. I’m not surprised, even if I am a little disappointed. There’s the obvious disappointment of the court not immediately granting full equality to homos in the eyes of the law, but we knew that wasnt going to happen in this case. I’m also disappointed that the court said, more or less, “We are the ones entitled to interpret the constitution, not you.” <\/p>\n Why do I care? The constitutional limitations on the types of laws that can be passed can’t be challenged until the court agrees to hear the case. State congresses and voter referenda are quite capable of churning out laws that violate their own constitutions. That those laws would stand until the courts get around to striking it down bothers me. That officials are expected to act according to those laws, likewise. <\/p>\n In my ideal little world, the constitutional question would have been resolved before the “Was this inappropriate behavior on the part of the mayor” question was resolved. The courts might have said the family code was completely constitutional. Newsom might have gotten smacked around more as a result. The courthouse might have been stormed by a brigade of torch-wielding homos. That outcome is not preferable. But I find that approach more elegant than “we’re annulling thousands of limbo marriages, because they are legally awkward, I mean, because you need closure.”<\/p>\n Not like I think the state ought to have a damn thing to say about marriage in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two major topics: the NJ governor, and the recent california ruling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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