Image to stimulate your economy by Richard Kadrey / Kaos Beauty Klinik.
Two things: one, here’s HR Reality Check’s voter guide: RH Reality 2008 Election and Reproductive Health (via Viviane).
Next, You really have to read my dear friend Carol Queen’s blog post about visiting Salt Lake City, Utah before the election “I Can’t Help Myself: Must…Write…About…Elections…” Here’s a teaser:
(…) This was a very interesting time for me to go to a bright-red state, but the funny thing was how many Obama lawn signs we saw (OK, not *that* many, but at least plural, and in the neighborhoods we visited, none for McCain) and how many folks, and not just the kinky people we were there to visit, saw my political button and brightened up, whispered, “I hope he wins — I’m praying over it,” or variations on the theme. It’s not safe, at least this time, to predict or assume, and this of course reminds me more of sex than the presidential race does overall: you really can’t tell by looking, you know, what people’s private feelings are, either about eroticism or political choices (though this year there is a weird overlap of the two issues in the person of Sarah Palin, whom I’ll always adore for saying “Caribou Barbie” on Saturday Night Live and who seemed to *really* inspire the people at the Center for Sex & Culture’s Political Smut Night last week — almost half the readers read stories about her, not that erotic inspiration always wins votes).
(…) And how about that Prop 8? Its sly supporters sent out a ton of glossy flyers to Californian households saying that Barack Obama and Joe Biden were against gay marriage — another dirty trick, since the Obama camp is allied with the No on 8 message, and I don’t see most of the conservative Christian backers of Prop 8 working hard to elect those guys. The anti-8, anti-discrimination, pro-freedom to marry crowd responded with an ad that didn’t just name-check Obama, it included that wild-eyed radical Dianne Feinstein telling people how wrong discrimination is. And apparently the pro-8 demonstration in San Francisco today had a high level of hate speech that could be heard over the platitudes about marriage. People, can anyone explain to me how any heterosexual marriage is altered by the existence of homosexual ones? Is it that the expectation of blowjobs rises, or exactly what? Because look, I’m no big fan of marriage to begin with — I’ve written that a vote for gay marriage is a vote for gay divorce, and I’m proud that Robert and I are listed on the Alternatives to Marriage website as a notable unmarried couple, right there with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. But if *anybody* is going to get married, *everybody* should have the right to do it — or decide against it — too.
Besides — and I have to thank Jon Stewart for, as usual, serving as the sharp cutting edge of political analysis in this country — how ’bout them Mormon Prop 8 donors? Remember, I was just there, right in the state of the union featuring multiple small towns full of polygamous marriages. You can get a dang t-shirt in the airport for a lovely beer company called Polygamy Porter (”Bring some home to the wives”)! The very state of Utah *exists* because Mormons were run out of so many other towns and states because their marriage customs were too new-fangled and controversial! Touchy, touchy, touchy, LDS! (And you know, another irony is that gay marriage *isn’t* fundamentally about sex, but about relationship choice: which is connected but also different. And you know what else it’s about? Homophobia, up one side and down the other.) (…read more, carolqueen.wordpress.com)
Wow, this election was a disaster for me. Even Prop. 8 won. Only win I could see was Prop 4 losing.