"Election Round-Up"

by Sally Sheklow

(622 words)

Hello South Africa!

Greetings from the land of the idiots. Yes, our sorry-assed fundamentalist Christian-dominated electorate has put the faux-cowboy president in for another four years. What do you expect from a country where nearly 20% of the population believes the earth was created 6,000 years ago. Not to mention the wild popularity of butt-groping, Hitler-admiring muscle-head Arnold Schwarzenegger starring as California's "Governator." And we have to live with these people!

George W. Bush will be our president again. Everyone I talk to is still in shock. We tried our best to stop it. Nearly 49% of U.S. voters cast our ballots against the smirking chimp (no offense to chimps). But it wasn't enough.

Exit polls report "moral values" drove the voting. Translation: anti-gay bias. Bush supports, and Kerry opposes, defining marriage to exclude same-sex couples. So much for the liberty and justice for all we Americans have been pledging since we were little kids.

Seems we're stuck with the November election results, despite growing suspicions that all our votes weren't counted. Right-wing republican-owned Diebold company's new electronic voting machines and thousands of uncounted ballots are still in question. One woman in Florida reports pressing the screen for Kerry but the confirmation kept coming up Bush. Maybe voting fraud will be exposed in time to spare us. The news media haven't run with that story, they're too busy reporting Bush's plans for his upcoming inaugural festivities, a spectacular royal pageant (sans drag queens, unfortunately) all at taxpayer expense. It's hard to believe he won.

I am truly sorry to see my country inflict this dimwit on the world. Please accept our apologies. (See www.sorryeverybody.com). Fifty-six million of us voted against him. Many Americans' maybe most, depending on how reliable the vote count was'nt deeply regret the fact that our C-student God-told-me-to-bomb-Iraq president is free to unleash his reign of terror on the world. We vow to try harder in 2008.

My own home state of Oregon, the famously progressive, Left Coast, pro-choice, death with dignity, medical marijuana, recycling, Kerry-supporting state, passed a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. And so did ten other even more queer-hating states.

We were so hopeful. With the draconian anti-sodomy laws overturned just last year, the state of Vermont granting Civil Unions (marriage without federal recognition or protections) and Massachusetts issuing full-fledged marriage licenses to same-sex couples, we thought our time had come. Equality was on the way.

Then the right-wing churches got into it (forget anything you've heard about the U.S. Constitution protecting separation of church and state). The fundamentalists emerged en masse to assert "One Man, One Woman" and left Adam and Steve, not to mention Lilith and Eve, in the dust.

The bright side? A full 44% of us Oregonians voted for keeping the marriage ban out of our Constitution. That's amazing, considering only a few years ago 46% voted to declare homosexuality "unnatural, abnormal, and perverse." Thank God, or Goddess, or the Great Whatever that we defeated that one. Equally astonishing, both presidential candidates acknowledged during the televised debates that Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter Mary (apparently the only known lesbian in North America) is entitled to form whatever kind of relationship she wants. Nothing about burning in hell or recruiting the children whatsoever. And this on national television. We couldn't have imagined such a positive acknowledgment even four years ago.

So please don't give up on us. We're trying. Queer groups, political activists, and civil rights organizations are springing into action across America to fight for equality and for democracy. More and more LGBTQ people are coming out, coming together, and, one can assume, simply coming.

Everywhere in America progressive allies are taking up our banner and recognizing the common enemy: Rampant idiocy.

Writer Sally Sheklow lives in the Pacific Northwest state of Oregon with her wife, their teenaged queer grrrl niece, and an overindulged tabby cat. Her humor column "Living Out" appears in alternative and LGBTQ publications in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa and online at sallysheklow.com