Bitter Sweet Election of 2008

As much as I am happy about the Presidential election results, I'm disappointed by California's failure to reject Proposition 8 which eliminates gay marriage in our state. Thankfully, the lives of farm animals in our state will improve. Hopefully this will set off a chain reaction in the rest of the country as they see this progression in California.

Where did we go wrong on Prop 8? I've tossed around a few ideas in my head that I think might have some substance:
1) The proposition was confusing. We were voting "Yes" to say "No" and "No" to say "Yes". That's not intuitive. Were there an equal number of confused voters on both sides of the issue? I don't know.
2) Personally I was not informed about the rights which are granted with marriage. I'm still not sure about marriage rights versus domestic partnership rights and where the two diverge. If most voters were as uneducated as myself about this, then I believe voters were answering a different question. "Do you think homosexuals should be allowed to get married?" instead of "Should a homosexual couple have the same rights as a heterosexual couple?" I think the ladder may have had more success because it separates the issues from religion more.

I'm thinking we need another word for "marriage" to appease the religious folks. Maybe government should ONLY recognize some kind of newly defined partnership that requires a nice big ceremony complete with giant ridiculous cakes and thousands of dollars to make it nice and official feeling.

If most people consider marriage a religious term, maybe we need to remove the term from government completely in order to better separate our church and state.