You Americans apparently voted; and since everyone else seems to comment on it, I’ll tell my opinions of the results as well, though I am a Finn and far away from your troubles. And since I drone, my thoughts are below the fold.
Thank you, thank you, thank you — for not choosing the slippery dotard and the creationist juju woman. I personally don’t have an opinion of the Democrats’ Obama, but I know enough of the Republicans to know I shan’t ever agree with them on anything.
My view is that I don’t exactly like any American candidate, but some I like more and some a whole lot less. Basically: Democrats are “meh”, dickless populists, but Republicans are actively, scarily, insanely nutjob loony evil, a group of capering xenophobic deluded-ignorant-selfish gun-totin’ stone-age devils. Then again, to me voting has always been a problem of trying to find the candidate who is, in the candidate pool, a minimizer of insincerity, wrongheaded ignorance and stark raving madness. I guess that comes with having very liberal and very personal opinions.
However — and as a Finn gloom is naturally more, er, natural to me than morning light — you still had an excess of idiots in California, and those idiots being a majority, they decided that love knows boundaries, and Proposition 8 passed, banning gay marriage there.
Great: your chosen bond of love, caring and affection for another may now be wrong in the eyes of the state unless the other has the “correct” sort of genitalia!
And since most of the support for that excrement of a proposition was based, directly or indirectly, on religious bigotry, I reiterate that that’s what I hate about religious people: not their dumb personal beliefs as such — people should be free to believe whatever they want to, be it dumb or true, wise or foolish — but the religious insistence that others must do as they say because of their personal convictions.
Next, I suppose, they’ll be for a proposition that bans happy atheists because they devalue Christian happiness. (“We ain’t no bigots; we’re fer traditional values! Like pogroms and bookburning!”)
Overall opinion: At times it seems like US is the retard child of the developed world. Witness Michelle Bachmann and Elizabeth Dole, for the empty heavens’ sake! And the fucking Proposition 8! And the creationist Palin —
Ah, I can’t express my opinions better than one bland and calm Finnish night radio host last night, whose words went a bit like this, and who made me very happy about being a Finn:
…the voting will end in Alaska, the home state of the… (laughs) interesting Sarah Palin, at around…
That’s what Sarah Palin (out), Michelle Bachmann (in), Elizabeth Dole (out), supporters of Prop 8 (in, dammit!) and similar Bible-thumpin’ folks are to us liberal Europeans: interesting. Basically a variety of five-legged goats; an interesting though disgusting atavistic throwback.
And, basically, when one of your major parties can have a total medieval idiot as its vice presidential candidate, when you can pass propositions that hurt people’s lives rather than have the intolerant feelings of others hurt — you’re broken.
But thank you for having enough people, in some places, in some ways, that want to fix at least some of that. Try to get whole, America. Now you maybe can. (Yes, you can.)
We here in Europe have done our best to show you you can get rid of racism, religion, xenophobia, isolationism, militarism, tyranny, populism, patriotism and other infantile diseases of young civilizations if you just try hard enough; we’ve had our successes and failures too. Come walk with us to a brighter morning.
