Author: Cathy

…Mr. Bush, is not the press, but you. Your rhetoric, your policies, your religious fanaticism are the stone in the shoe of United States and the World. As long as you hold office, there will be no coming together. You have acted unilaterally, believing you are divinely ordained, and in the process have alienated half the population. A lucid example is your desire for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. You support writing discrimination into the Constitution; a document depended upon by this country’s citizens to guarantee personal freedom and privacy. By doing so, you segment gay persons as not deserving equal protection of the law. How can you hope for anything but animosity from this rejected and condemned group, their friends and family and any other person that believes in the basic value of every human being? At the same time your stance inflames and entrenches and condones the hatred, prejudice and ignorance of your supporters. Mr. Bush, until you remove the log from your own eye, you will never see why this country is so bitterly divided.

In the midst of this depressing morning, facing the likelihood of another 4 more years of Bush and the personal hatred most gays and lesbians are feeling from over half the electorate, there is a bit of good news, my mother, strongly republican, voted against banning spousal rights for gays in her state and convinced several of her friends to do the same.

A news commentator mentioned this morning that in previous elections people voted against their economic interests because of racial issues, that basically, southern whites’ hatred of blacks led them to vote for candidates that negatively affected their daily lives. Today it looks to homosexuals that many U.S. voters made similar choices because of their hatred for gays.

I wonder how many million non-voters will look at the results today and reassure themselves, “I knew my vote wouldn’t make a difference.” They are right. Individually nobody’s vote makes a difference. However, voter turnout was about 5 million short of the hoped for 120 million. Five million additional voters could certainly have made a difference.

While we ponder the apathetic, we can say goodbye to the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, goodbye to women’s personal rights, goodbye to more of our privacy rights and due process, and goodbye to healthcare for the teachers in my district whose entire salary does not cover the group medical coverage they are offered. We can say hello to greater instability in the mideast, increasing threats from terrorists and most sadly, deeper and wider division between those in power and the disenfranchised. Who can guess what will happen as this large percentage of the U.S. population becomes increasingly alienated, angry and hopeless.

Will Jeb Bush use any means to try and deliver Florida to his brother again? You bet!! CNN just interviewed a woman in Florida who voted for Kerry, but saw that the review screen of the voting machine she was using indicated her vote was for George W. Bush! Other of her choices were also incorrect on the review screen. She and her husband called over poll workers who suggested she had voted in error. She then asked for an attorney. When they went back she had, in fact, voted correctly, but the machine was munging her vote. The corrupted voting machine was removed and she placed her vote for Kerry on another machine. But how many incorrect votes were entered on the machine she first used? Have individual machines been programmed to vote for Jeb’s brother or have many or all of the machines been programmed to randomly change Kerry votes to Bush?