Friday, November 18, 2011
[1786 - Carl Maria von Weber, composer, born in Eutin, Holstein]
;
[1787 - Louis (Jacques-Mande) Daguerre, artist, chemist, inventor, born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d'Oise, France]
[1836 - Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, operetta librettist, poet, born in London]
[1882 - Amelita Galli-Curci, opera singer (coloratura soprano), born in Milan, Italy]
[1899 - Eugene Ormandy (Jeno Blau), conductor, born in Budapest, Hungary]
[1901 - George (Horace) Gallup, pollster, born in Jefferson, Iowa]
[1908 - Imogene Coca, Emmy Award-winning comedienne, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]
[1909 - Johnny (John Herndon) Mercer, Academy Award-winning composer, lyricist, born in Savannah, Georgia]
[1923 - Alan Shepard, Jr., astronaut, born in Derry, New Hampshire]
As a transplanted Californian (My folks came west in the early days of WW II) I regularly came to the defense of my adopted state. Recent events, however, made me ashamed to call myself a Californian. It was not just that we elected an action movie hero to run one of the ten largest economies on the planet. It wasn't even the annual spectacle of a dysfunctional legislature that cannot seem to timely pass a state budget that had me so upset. It was this Proposition 8 thing that caused me to look for a break in the housing market so I could try to sell my home and move to a place that still believed in individual freedoms and equal justice under law.
The California Constitution once was a source of pride for your humble servant, since it included even greater protection for some individual freedoms than did the federal Constitution. Then my fellow citizens of California amended the document to embed a definition of marriage favored by the Religious Right in the supreme law of the State. As a result, a disfavored minority was denied equality of opportunity under law in California. What could we have been thinking of?
William's Whimsical Words:
The founders understood the danger posed by a tyranny of the majority, and designed a democratic government that would keep church and state in their separate legitimate parishes. The passage of Proposition 8 in California, and similar laws in other states, spits in the face of lady liberty.
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