Posts tagged ‘afghanistan’

California Supreme Court backs gay marriage! and other news, too

Whoa! It seems I was totally wrong when I expected the California Supreme Court to uphold the ban on gay marriage. Instead, they struck down the ban as unconstitutional, allowing same sex marriage in the state. Conservatives are already rallying to try to get a constitutional amendment banning it on the ballots in November, but it seems pretty unlikely that they’d be able to get the two thirds majority needed to pass it. Edit: it only takes a simple majority, which seems much easier. I don’t know if it is likely to pass. Hooray, progress!

Also, there is currently some finegaling in Congress these days over funding the Iraq invasion. It would be awesome if the legislators finally grew a spine and started passing bills that would, you know, stop wars of aggression and ban torture and provide education and medical benefits to veterans (admittedly, that last one is not related to Congress, but it’s despicable enough to mention along with the rest of this crap). but unfortunately I doubt this will actually go anywhere, and even if it did, Bush would almost certainly veto any such measure.

In natural disaster news, the cyclone that hit Burma and the earthquake in China have each left tens of thousands dead. Burma is in trouble because it is a poor country that doesn’t have the infrastructure to help the refugees or to rescue the people still trapped. China is in trouble because the areas worst hit are in hard-to-reach mountainous areas, and the earthquake coupled with heavy rains the next day wiped out most of the roads and airports, so it’s hard to send aid to the victims.

Hooray, getting my blog back onto the “Civil Liberties and World News” bit, rather than the “and computer science and stuff” part. I had begun to wonder if I needed to change the title of this blog.

Good news at last…

The US is considering beginning pulling out of Afghanistan (how many participles can I string together?) as early as this Spring! This would be great. I think the country is finally starting to pick itself up, despite all the problems with a constitution. Here’s hoping!

In other news, I’m not yet sure how I feel about John Roberts. From what I’ve heard, he seems like he’d be a pretty great Supreme Court Justice. However, I’m a little worried that most of his writings will not be released, so no one will be able to see most of what he has done in the past, and I’m equally worried that he hasn’t really expressed any of his views on anything except court cases that have already been decided (and his views on those are that the cases are already decided, so we should just uphold the previous rulings). If he actually approaches new cases with such an open mind and lack of opinion, that would be absolutely fantastic. I think it’s equally likely, however, that he could have views that would surely keep him from getting confirmed, but the Republicans have locked away all evidence of these views and Roberts himself is smart enough not to bring them up. This could go either way, but if he can be trusted, he’d be pretty great. Here’s hoping!