Attorney General Jerry Brown vows that existing gay marriages will remain valid. But I don't count on it. The California that I know is a mean, fucked-up place that will gladly be the FIRST jurisdiction in the nation to invalidate existing, legal marriages.
Honestly, the idea of a "liberal California" - something that the right-wingers in Alaska, Indiana, and elsewhere love to bring up - is a complete joke. It might apply to parts of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, but it certainly doesn't apply to the interior of the state, nor to the place where most people are - Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego.
California led the way in starting the Reagan revolution of neoliberal economics and conservative social stances for the past 30 years. Even before then, Richard Nixon hailed from California. You can certainly blame California for all the evils that the US has had to put up with for the past three to four decades. California dragged the rest of the US down into the past three decades of disaster. It's Illinois, Delaware, Washington State, the Northeast, and other real "blue states" that will save the country - and the undeserving state of California.
California is the leader in extremist Christianity, both in the Los Angeles Pentecostals of the years past and in the Third World ethnic communities of today.
California has always been a bastion of conservatism, and that's especially true of Orange County and Inland Empire. The Democrats are only the #3 party in Orange County, well behind the reactionary theocrats of the Constitution Party. The Republicans would starve to death without all the wealth and contributions (and ideas) from Orange County.
California has attracted vast numbers of right-wing immigrants, the very ones with NO understanding of such concepts as "individual rights" or "majority rule, minority rights," who have destroyed what little undeserved reputation the state once had for so-called tolerance. The worst offenders are from Central America, Korea, and Vietnam, but the Chinese are quite guilty too. And while at it, they strain the state's resources and crash wages in many sectors.
California led the way in instilling the idea that to not drive is to be moronic and deficient. That's how Los Angeles ripped up its Red Cars, and the Bay Area also ripped up its Key System (though the latter had some cooler heads prevail, and put in BART). I am very glad to have voted AGAINST Prop 1A, the proposal to study the feasibility of a bullet train line. My experiences in Europe and in South Korea have convinced me that a bullet train line is a very nice thing - something that a fucked-up state like California, especially SOUTHERN California, doesn't deserve at all; California simply deserves to choke itself to death in its endless traffic jams and exhaust fumes. You certainly won't pay for your bullet train line with MY money.
The California Democratic Party is a whole bunch of clueless San Francisco white liberals who understand nothing about life among their so-called nonwhite friends in the Southland. And they don't even want to try.
Given all these facts, I don't even get how California remains Democratic, and stayed firmly in the Obama camp this time. There are only two possible answers, both of which probably hold some truth.
- Just like the Republicans rig the polls in Florida (and formerly in Ohio), the Democrats use their undeserved influence in California politics to rig the California polls.
- The Republicans got so stupid on the immigration issue that they lost their potential lifetime supporters - those damn Third World immigrants - to the Democrats. But the Democrats are not gonna even bother teaching their core liberal values to these Third Worlders. Sooner or later, they'll all become Republicans again - I guarantee that.
