Author: hankkalet

I was no fan of Christie Whitman when she was governor, but she did manage to get this one right. Chief Justice Deborah Poritz, the first woman chief justice in the state’s history, left a legacy of expanding rights — especially for minorities and women — ending it with her blistering dissent in the same-sex marriage case decided Wednesday (she didn’t disagree with the court’s ruling that gay couples deserved equal rights; she disagreed with the court’s unwillingness to use the word “marriage”).

I had the opportunity, shortly after she was appointed by Gov. Whitman, as the state’s first female attorney general to sit with her for a story. I was a reporter in Princeton for the Packet at the time and she was gracious and gave willingly of her time.

She deserves the best in retirement.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

The News Blog offers a textbook way to respond to GOP attempts to nationalize Wednesday’s gay marriage decision. As they say on “Family Fued,” “Good answer, good answer.”

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

The Boston Globe has some advice for the New Jersey Legislature — advice it should take as it now takes up the issue of marriage equality. In an editorial today, it recommends that the state look to Massachusetts’ experience, which has been uneventful, to understand how little impact the Massachusetts’ court had on heterosexuals.

The state’s four candidates for governor have different positions on the issue, but none “has brought the issue to the forefront in a campaign that has seen spirited differences of opinion” on other issues, the paper said.

One reason is that any opposition to gay marriage would likely be based simply on a candidate’s belief that it breaks with the traditional model and not on any evidence that it has had a harmful effect on gay spouses, the children that many of them are raising, or anyone else. There is no such evidence.

There also appears to have been little, if any, political fallout from the deicision, the paper said.

Although Massachusetts legislators have had occasion to vote on the issue, not one has been turned out of office for favoring gay marriage. So at least in this state you can add elected politicians to the long roster of those who have suffered no harm because the SJC decided gays had the same right to marriage as heterosexuals.

Not sure where the Legislature is likely to come down on this, but at least the court has ruled rather definitively that gays and lesbians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of us.

I suspect that the Legislature will try to punt on the issue — though there are a few Republicans calling for a constitutional change to overrule the court (and one, quoted by The Star-Ledger, calling for impeachment of the judges).

That said, I think there are two ways the Legislature should go — as opposed to the path they actually will choose:

1. They can expand the legal definition of marriage to include same-sex couples. This would grant full equality under the law, removing the stigma that would ensue from creating an entirely new category for gay couples.

Or

2. Eliminate the word marriage from the law, enact civil union legislation that would cover a variety of family arrangements and leave it up to the individual couples (and their families, religious institutions, etc.) to determine what each relationship should be called. This makes the most sense to me — it honors the separation of church and state and gets the government out of the personal relationship business.

But I’d endorse either approach, so long as the current discriminatory set-up is ended along with the double standard the court seemed ready to endorse.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Here’s a posting from the National Journal that proves that stupidity is not a partisan affair. Both Virginia Senate candidates made comments in the wake of yesterday’s half decision on gay marriage here in the Garden State that place both in the troglodyte category and unfortunately reinforce the stereotype of southerners as unintelligent bigots.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

One of my more recent poems.

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NEVER ASKED

because you weren’t home when I called

because the front page news is depressing

because nine-year-olds are not supposed to carry guns

because you called and left a message

because I’m not getting enough sleep lately and my head hurts and I think we’re out of coffee

because my guitar has a broken string, the high E, and I’m not very good at playing it anyway

because it’s the first day of school and I’m waiting for a PIX message from my brother of his son walking into kindergarten

because the grass is wet and my knee is sore and the iPod died in the middle of Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues”

because I’m running everyday and still getting fat

because gas prices have hit three bucks a gallon and I can’t afford to fill up

because

because they want to build a warehouse on a farm near the Turnpike and the neighbors are fighting it

because I like neighbors who fight and I don’t like developers

because there’s a cardinal in the backyard

because summer is ending and I didn’t get to the beach enough

because you’re worried about your job

because I’m worried too

because rumors are like chemical waste, leeching into the water supply, spreading in a grand plume of foreboding

because the company is sending jobs to India

because India has the bomb and Pakistan has the bomb and Iran and North Korea want one

because we have the bomb and we say we’re ready to use it

because I said so

because they’ve got the counter in and the appliances and this damn renovation is nearly done

because the dog’s eyes are red from allergies and I forgot to give her eye drops

because she doesn’t care and just wants a rawhide or tennis ball or something

because the gutters are clogged and weeds are growing from them

because the gutters look like window boxes and that is utterly ridiculous

because Y is a crooked letter

because the president lied

because he keeps repeating it again and again though we know and he knows it’s a lie

because there is a line from a song running over and over again in my head

because I hate the song and its artificial drum beat

because I hate that they keep playing it, that it’s there every time I turn on the radio

because rock and roll is not poetry and poems are just words anyway and words are meaningless when you have to face a woman whose son was killed by a roadside bomb

because soldiers die in war and civilians do too and if you don’t believe me read the reports from Baghdad and Beirut and the bomb shelters outside Haifa

because the dog just ate half a tennis ball and threw it up on the carpet

because that seems so trivial with the news on in the background

because it is trivial, but it’ll leave a stain in the carpet if I don’t clean it up

because there are worse things than stains to worry about

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick