Proposition to end the madness in California

I didn’t get fired up about voting no on proposition 8 in California, and I regret it.  I took for granted how well organized the religious right is and how well smear tactics have worked, and I assumed that Prop 8 would not pass.  It did pass, and now our court systems will be bogged down in the aftermath of lawsuits and paperwork that will rival the Bush-Gore debacle of 2000 in Florida.

 

One of the things that I like least about living in California is the proposition system.  Every election year, well before I am thinking about the nuts and bolts issues that people who push propositions obsess over, petitioners outside of grocery stores begin asking for signatures and donations for their causes.  What would really be nice is a proposition to end all subsequent propositions.  The propositions waste tremendous amounts of resources – paper to print all of the confusing and often deliberately misleading pieces of propaganda; mail carriers’ time to sort through all of the junk mail created by the proposition system; the ordinary citizens’ time outside of grocery stores and malls, evading or getting caught up in paid proselytizers’ pitches; and the time we spend screening and getting aggravated about non-stop robocalls that begin months before the election.

 

Stop the insanity.  Most people I know, even the most educated or civic-minded, lack the time or the interest to formulate opinions on complex public policy issues for fellow Californians.  And almost every one of us lacks the expertise or the permission to sit in judgement of another person’s legal right to spend the rest of their life with someone they love.