Following up on a few things I’ve written about in the past week.
The perplexing Alaska elections story, the Alaska state elections page has (finally) been updated. As of 5:28 PM pacific time, the count stands at 125,019 votes for Begich and 125,016 votes for Stevens. That is just preposterous. It does demonstrate, at least, that the voters of Alaska may have just been moderately insane, rather than absolutely nuts. We’ll have to see how the final vote actually turns out to be sure.
Dan Savage participates in the animal cruelty trivialization in his podcast, saying: “most insultingly of all” the voters approved Prop 2, while voting to “actual human beings” of rights. I’ll say again that I strongly believe that animals should be treated with less cruelty AND that gay people should be treated with less cruelty. And I understand the attempt to connect these two issues and wonder how people who vote for one wouldn’t vote for the other, given the similarities. Still, there’s a way to say that which doesn’t imply that Prop 2 was some silly little thing to protect mere animals. It didn’t create “new rights” for chickens – it established an (incredibly low) baseline where we would stop torturing them.
I’m not trying to get all preachy vegan here. I’m just trying to point out that the anger over Prop 8 shouldn’t be just another brick in the huge wall that we as a society build to minimize our recognition of responsibility for how animals get treated. That’s all.
Prop 2 was one (very small) victory for the struggle against an amoral individualism that treats everyone who is different as irrelevant. And it will be another when we (in two years or four years) pass a new proposition to legalize gay marriage.