Wednesday, May 09, 2012

Well Done, Mr. President

I had been planning a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger ramble about the vote in North Carolina. I was going to question whether the US Declaration of Independence was going to be amended to read We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, but some are more equal than others, And to wonder if the unmarried-but-recognised-in-law straight couples who voted for that new law realised that they'd just removed any legal protections, rights, or advantages that they had previously enjoyed.

I was going to ponder on the fact that the last time North Carolina voted to ban any kind of marriage it would have made the President's parents' marriage illegal, and that this was not a good precedent to follow.

I was going to speculate as to whether the law-makers had read the US Constitution (I have, and I'm not a US citizen) - specifically amendment 14.

And then President Obama stood up and changed everything.

Well, OK, not quite everything - because none of the discriminatory, and quite possibly unconstitutional, laws have gone. The President hasn't wielded a magic pen and struck them off. But undoubtedly things have changed. The possibilities are there now.

Perhaps the USA isn't going to turn into a totalitarian, misogynistic, oppressive theocracy based on The Handmaid's Tale after all. Perhaps it really will be the Land of the Free. And that all of its people will be equal in law. For the sake of all my US American friends I do hope so.

See you next week. Goodnight and may your God/s go with you

Ze

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