Monday, November 5, 2012

Are You Voting Tomorrow?

I've made an effort to try to keep politics out of this blog (with the occasional lapse), but tomorrow's election is too important not to say something.

There are plenty of other places to get information about virtually all of the issues at stake, from economics to social issues. But I want to take a very brief moment to talk about one issue that should be important to readers of this blog.

Which candidate do you think would be more supportive of the types of people likely to read this blog? Not everyone who reads this blog is gay, though I know that some are. Which candidate will respect gay Americans and help them achieve their aspirations to be treated as equals, both in terms of who they love and in terms of things like work equality? Which candidate would be more likely to treat a member of the transgender community with respect instead of respect or ridicule? Which candidate would be more likely to try to understand who we are as a community, instead of just thinking of us as a bunch of freaks?

For me the choice is simple.

And which candidate would be more likely to sign laws cracking down on pornography or the very types of images that we like to look at? Which candidate would be more likely to limit fair use and similar copyright exceptions to give yet more power to the big corporations? Which candidate would be more likely to oppose Net Neutrality and allow ISPs to determine what we can look at or which sites we would have to pay more to access? Again, for the me the choice is simple.

Tomorrow, I'll be casting a vote for Barack Obama for President and for candidates from the Democratic Party on the down ticket races. I hope you will, too.

3 comments:

  1. Here here!! I know I'm looking forward to voting tomorrow, and I plan on voting straight Democratic too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Not even going to bother learning what each candidate stands for, hmm?
    I'll be casting a vote for Gary Johnson seeing as how I'm in a state in which my vote for president doesn't matter. The important votes are the propositions.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I know about Gary Johnson. And I might even consider him. If he had a chance. But I live in the reality of the system that we have. A vote for a third party candidate may send a lot of messages, but it doesn't -- at least not now -- lead to the election of a candidate, other than, perhaps, the candidate from whom that "protest vote" was drawn. So I have to be realistic. I have to vote for the candidate that will best represent my interests from those who have any sort of possibility of winning.

    And I don't like the "my vote doesn't matter" formulation either. Because as I see it, if a lot of people think like that -- and a lot do -- then we wind up with situations where many may choose to sit out the process, thus opening opportunities for those who are able to get out the vote. Remember, if just 538 of Ralph Nader's folks voted for Al Gore in Florida in 2000 ... well, the world would be a very different place now. If you add together all of those who cast a protest vote and all of those who don't vote at all because they feel that their votes don't matter, and those votes are cast and counted, the real changes can be made.

    ReplyDelete

Add This