It's Not A Competition, Please No Wagering

My good friend and confidant from New York was out visiting a few weeks back, and he mentioned the relative gay-ness of his home to mine, and I suggested that San Francisco alone would certainly tip the scales in California's favor, since it was internationally recognized as the headquarters of such things. Way back in 2005, Bill O'Reilly announced to his viewers, "[I]f Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. ... You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead." All just a part of his continued support of our city by the Bay. As a hotbed of secular progressives, Bill is not alone in singling out the left coast for his conservative bile.
That may be why the door has swung open for New York to become the sixth state in the union to legalize gay marriage. If you are keeping score, California was second in that race, but there was some unpleasantness a few years back, and now we are all waiting for judges, gay or not, to decide the eventual outcome of this whole mess. Meanwhile, four other states: Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and even the District of Columbia have joined Connecticut in this alternately ground-breaking or common-sense legislation. And now, New York's governor Andrew Cuomo has signed his state's bill into law. The legal wrangling has only begun in the Empire State, but for now it would seem that the part about "the pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence extends to all of us, at least to those living in one of those six states. The rest of us will have to wait while the exhibition continues.