Georgia On My Mind...and out of it's...

A couple of touch points from today's mid-workday reading of the blogsoshphere...

Georgia is pretty well falling into the dark ages now.

First, there's the State School Superintendent, Kathy Cox who's deleting the word "evolution" from all state biology textbooks and replacing it with "Biological changes over time". Something tells me that this is the first step to something more draconian, like Kansas' "Thou Shalt Not Techeth Evolution" law.

Hauling poor teachers into court for some new form of the Scopes Monkey Trial...these are the good old days.

Then there's the Georgia Senate that is preparing to vote on a constitutional amendment to prevent the state from creating same-sex unions of any type, and from recognizing the same if another state implements them. (You can read the proposed amendment here.)

Still, there's some hope. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had a good editorial on Friday that makes a very good point...

Read the AJC editorial, here.

There was a rally to protest the amendment Friday, but the organizers (Georgia Equality and others) realized that they didn't take time to invite more than the gay groups to the protest. Michael Demmon wrote about it in his blog, Discount Blogger. yes, he's gay, he's conservative, he's not for Bush. He's mirroring a lot of the same thoughts I'm having right now. He made a post about the rally, here.

I felt the need to respond to him, so I wrote something that's been on my mind today, here's how it reads:

This is where I thank the people that wrote the Texas Constitution that states our legislature only meets every other year. There would be no doubt this same legislation would be coming up.

The problem is, we can't dothis ourselves. there's not enough gay people to do something through legislation. There's not enough representation when it's just us.

We must find ways to engage the average, straight American and work with them to stop this kind of discrimanatory legislation. We have to find ways to build coalitions, and create a majority, but we have to motivate people. The average American won't take action, because it doesn't directly affect their lives. We have to show them that it does affect the society that they live in, and it will affect someone they know and love.

I anticipate that we in Texas will also have to hold rallies, next year when the legislature meets. Hopefully we can be more organized and realize that it needs to be more than "just us".

Good luck in the fight.

You know...I'm getting more and more political these days. I might just learn to be an activist if this keeps up.