Daily Roundup: The Maine event

Wow, has it been an entire year since marriage equality was voted down in California, leading to massive protests across the US?

Well, let’s do the Time Warp again, as voters in Maine last night “vetoed” same-sex marriage legislation that their elected officials had already passed. One step forward, two steps back. And to think this happened just a day after the TV soap opera “One Life to Live” had their big gay wedding episode:

Don’t people obey television anymore? The problem, of course, was the massive turnout by older, conservative voters — there’s less of them overall but they get out to vote more than us liberal youngsters. Apathy kills!

As Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura repeated on CNN last night:

“You can’t put a civil rights issue on the ballot and let the people
decide. You have to have elected officials to who have courage to make
the right decision. If you left it up to the people, we’d have slavery,
depending on how you worded it.”

We’ll be seeing more protests in the days to come but the first, silliest and most delightful tactic against this awful setback comes from Bridgette P. LaVictoire at Lez Get Real, who insists the world should now boycott Maine lobster. It is, after all, an abomination — isn’t that right, Bible fans?

Oh, there I go, making it religious again but hey, they started it (“God has given us this victory”) and if you can stomach reading exactly why they did, this screed from the odious antigay activist Matt Barber will make fascinating reading to future historians who will wonder why the idea of two men or two women getting married was ever an issue in the first place.

Until then, as always, I take solace in the little things, like brilliant SCTVer and Canadian national treasure Andrea Martin shocking a roomful of Broadway people or this video from the BBC’s “Friday Night with Jonathan Ross” — easily the funniest thing you’ll see today:

A former editor of the late, lamented fab magazine, Scott has been writing for Xtra since 2007 on a variety of topics in news pieces, interviews, blogs, reviews and humour pieces. He lives on the Danforth with his boyfriend of 12 years, a manic Jack Russell Terrier, a well-stocked mini-bar and a shelf of toy Daleks.

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