Go Obama!

Tuomo writes: OK so the US elections came and went, and four weeks later, I still haven't commented... I guess everything worthwhile saying has been said and analysed to the nth degree so that li'l ole linguistics me probably has not much to comment on the outcome.

On election night, we went over to our friends' Tim and Keith's place to watch the results roll in on NBC and CNN. On most occasions being three hours behind the east coast is a nuisance, i.e. by the time we want to call our friends and family in Maryland and Rhode Island, it's close to midnight their time! However, this time the results were in well before 9pm, and we were good to go home around 10.

IMHO McCain gave a very eloquent speech; too bad that his booing supporters continued to reveal the true colours of the Republican Party...

There was a collective gasp in the room when President Elect Obama mentioned gays [and lesbians] in his speech. There was nary a dry eye in the room as we witnessed the end to the eight years of nightmare under Dubya. It was such a wodnerful and uplifting speech... And the family is adorable too; let's hope the puppy issue gets resolved soon :-) So here's to a new dawning full of hope at a time of turmoil of various kinds, economic, social, you name it!

Ironically, on the same night that the future president of the United States explicitly made reference to gays and lesbians, more ominous news came from possibly the most progressive state in the country, California. Proposition 8, the evil-spirited move to bring down the recently passed law allowing gay marriage in California had passed. And the irony of ironies is that the people who helped boost Obama were primarily the same ones who helped this proposition pass. Not that Prop 8 would have changed Dave's and my lives in any way (at least, at this stage, thanks to Clinton's DOMA in the 90s), but it made us mad for like days.

As someone on one of the columns that I read regularly put it, this wasn't just telling us to get back to the back of the bus - we had been run over by the bus.

Thank goodness then that this has activated the LGBTQ community to stage protests across the country - or as CNN put worldwide, with a demonstration in London! Hopefully this fury encourages the community to be more forceful... I mean, if my memory doesn't fail me, just last week gay partnerships were made legal in Bhutan :-)