The Marble Map of Rome

Last week, a fascinating new archaeological park opened in Rome, displaying the surviving fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae, a giant map (60 by 43 feet) of the city created around A.D. 200 by order of Emperor Septimius Severus.  No, the Dark Arts had nothing to do with it; it was a bureaucratic production of the city property records office, or so it seems.  Read more about it here or just watch the video below.

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War in Ukraine - Day 23

Map of recent Russian advances in Ukraine -
from the BBC, 17 March 2022, 2100 GMT.
Click to enlarge.

The cruel juggernaut lumbers on, the slow strangulation of a nation continues - George Floyd's death repeated over and over and over, with blood and bombs.

Sky News reports - "The life is being drained from Mariupol":

 

Sky News reports: Kiev residents say "Putin's trying to kill us":

 

Sky News reports: Rescuers dig frantically through steel and rubble to save one life:

 

CBS News reports: An American was shot to death in Ukraine while standing in a bread line to get food for his partner and other hospital patients:

 

President Zelensky warns that if Russia is not stopped now, it will embolden other aggressors to attack their neighbors:

 

Full text of Zelensky's speech here. 

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The Two Americas, Mapped

The New York Times has generated a couple of fairly large geographic maps showing the difference between the America that voted for Clinton and the one that voted for Trump.  The small snip below is just to whet your appetite, so go look at the real thing..

And in case you are wondering -- I have been surprised to discover that there is no single nationwide authority for the popular vote, which is still being counted in some states by election officials. However, it seems that two private websites that keep running totals of the vote are regarded by the general media as being more or less dependable; here they are:

The Cook Political Report

Dave Leip's Atlas of U. S. Presidential Elections

Not that the vote count really matters at this point; but the stats are there if you want to see them.

Mourning in America

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

--Emily Dickinson

It's like a death in the family, isn't it?  First the brutal shock of the news, the unbearable, inescapable fact - then the cold, gray, leaden feeling that takes away all your strength, leaving you stunned, and groping for words.  But words won't come.

Hillary's gracious concession speech:

The sickening nationwide results, as of noon today.  Click to enlarge.

Garrison Keilor:

Alas for the Trump voters, the disasters he will bring on this country will fall more heavily on them than anyone else. The uneducated white males who elected him are the vulnerable ones, and they will not like what happens next. . . .

We liberal elitists are now completely in the clear. The government is in Republican hands. Let them deal with him. Democrats can spend four years raising heirloom tomatoes, meditating, reading Jane Austen, traveling around the country, tasting artisan beers, and let the Republicans build the wall and carry on the trade war with China and deport the undocumented and deal with opioids, and we Democrats can go for a long, brisk walk and smell the roses. . . .

Don’t be cruel. Elvis said it, and it’s true. We all experienced cruelty back in our playground days — boys who beat up on the timid, girls who made fun of the homely and naive — and most of us, to our shame, went along with it, afraid to defend the victims lest we become one of them. But by your 20s, you should be done with cruelty. Mr. Trump was the cruelest candidate since George Wallace. How he won on fear and bile is for political pathologists to study. The country is already tired of his noise, even his own voters. He is likely to become the most intensely disliked president since Hoover. His children will carry the burden of his name. He will never be happy in his own skin. But the damage he will do to our country — who knows? His supporters voted for change, and boy, are they going to get it.

In an optimistic mood, President Obama addressed the nation from the Rose Garden shortly after noon today:




This New York Times map plots the election results by counties:

Frank Bruni:

The party had a night so miserable that its leaders cannot chalk it up to the Russians or to James Comey, though there will be plenty of talk about that, much of it warranted. They had a gorgeous chance to retake their Senate majority, and not only did they fail to do so, but Democratic candidates who were thought to be in tight races lost by significant margins.

Clinton struggled more than had been predicted in the so-called Rust Belt — states like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — in yet another illustration of how disaffected working-class white men had become and how estranged from a new economy and a new age they felt.

Their anger was the story of the primaries, the fuel not just for Trump’s campaign but for Bernie Sanders’s as well. And it manifested itself in the general election. Both parties are going to have to reckon with it.

And they should. If this were all that Trump had shown us, we’d owe him our thanks.

But there are darker implications here, too. After all the lies he told, all the fantasy he indulged in, all the hate he spewed and all the divisions he sharpened, he was rewarded with the highest office in the land. What does that portend for the politics of the next few years, for the kinds of congressional candidates we’ll see in 2018, for the presidential race of 2020?

I can’t bear to think about the conflagrations to come.

The NYT summary of exit polls shows that the president-elect got 14 percent of the LGBT vote:

Thomas L. Friedman:

Before I lay out all my fears, is there any silver lining to be found in this vote? I’ve been searching for hours, and the only one I can find is this: I don’t think Trump was truly committed to a single word or policy he offered during the campaign, except one phrase: “I want to win.”

But Donald Trump cannot be a winner unless he undergoes a radical change in personality and politics and becomes everything he was not in this campaign. He has to become a healer instead of a divider; a compulsive truth-teller rather than a compulsive liar; someone ready to study problems and make decisions based on evidence, not someone who just shoots from the hip; someone who tells people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear; and someone who appreciates that an interdependent world can thrive only on win-win relationships, not zero-sum ones.

I can only hope that he does. Because if he doesn’t, all of you who voted for him — overlooking all of his obvious flaws — because you wanted radical, disruptive change, well, you’re going to get it. . . .

Unlike the Republican Party for the last eight years, I am not going to try to make my president fail. If he fails, we all fail. So yes, I will hope that a better man emerges than we saw in this campaign.

But at the moment I am in anguish, frightened for my country and for our unity. And for the first time, I feel homeless in America.

Embed from Getty Images

David Remnick:

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.

There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other. The most hopeful way to look at this grievous event—and it’s a stretch—is that this election and the years to follow will be a test of the strength, or the fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our seriousness and resolve. . . .

All along, Trump seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right. That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering. . . .

The commentators, in their attempt to normalize this tragedy, will also find ways to discount the bumbling and destructive behavior of the F.B.I., the malign interference of Russian intelligence, the free pass—the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies—provided to Trump by cable television, particularly in the early months of his campaign. We will be asked to count on the stability of American institutions, the tendency of even the most radical politicians to rein themselves in when admitted to office. Liberals will be admonished as smug, disconnected from suffering, as if so many Democratic voters were unacquainted with poverty, struggle, and misfortune. There is no reason to believe this palaver. There is no reason to believe that Trump and his band of associates—Chris Christie, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Pence, and, yes, Paul Ryan—are in any mood to govern as Republicans within the traditional boundaries of decency. Trump was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law; he was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so—but this is surely the way fascism can begin.

As of 5 p.m. today, it appeared from this NYT map that Clinton had edged out a bare majority in the popular vote. Click to enlarge.  

Readers in other lands, before you curse and castigate "Americans" for whatever may befall your countries in time to come, please do remember that more than half of us did NOT will this catastrophe upon the world, and in fact did all we could to prevent it.

And anonymous commenter rgfrw from Sarasota, Florida, sums it all up nicely:

The Republicans now own the country lock, stock and barrel. The own the white House, the Senate and the House. They will soon own the Supreme Court again. They own a majority of Statehouses & Governer's Mansions. If thing go wrong I don't want to hear any "it's all the fault of the liberals."

25 Maps

An unverified, but mildly interesting little vid:

Marriage News Watch, 6/9/14

Matt Baume of the American Foundation for Equal Rights reports:




Updated marriage map from Wikipedia:

The Game of the States

I always wanted to have that board game as a kid, but never got it.  Anyway, here's the latest marriage map of the country, courtesy of Freedom to Marry:

Note that same-sex marriage is not effective in Minnesota and Rhode Island until August 1st.

BTW, the latest USA Today poll shows a record high of 55%-40% nationwide in favor of same-sex marriage. The only groups with majorities not in favor are, as you might expect, Republicans, Southerners, and the over-65's.

Having said that, it's rather amazing how closely their views align with those of Russian President Putin, who has just signed a law banning all gay pride rallies and any other public form of support - "to protect the children," of course. American conservatives have in fact already been sidling up to the formerly dreaded Ruskies, and the notorious Scott Lively, who got Ugandan politicians all fired up to pass the "Kill the Gays" bill a few years back, has just finished a 50-city speaking tour in Russia. He boasts that the new law substantially follows recommendations he made.

May he rot in hell, is what your Head Trucker says. Meanwhile, a small contingent of pride demonstrators was beaten and arrested in Moscow this weekend. This is exactly what them good ol' boy, Bible-believing, God-fearing American patriots want to see happen here - and worse, and would do in a heartbeat to you and me, if only they could.



And in St. Petersburg, antigay thugs broke through police protection to beat up the gays:




Bottom line: While we're all deservedly a bit giddy over the Supreme Court rulings here, give a thought to our persecuted brothers and sisters in other lands.  And don't bitch so much about life in America, Miss Thing. You could living be in a much worse place.

Marriage News Watch, 5/13/13

Matt Baume of the American Foundation for Equal Rights reports:



About 4:15 this afternoon, the Minnesota Senate passed a marriage-equality bill by a vote of 37-30. Governor Mark Dayton is expected to sign the bill into law tomorrow, and marriages will commence on August 1st, making the North Star State the twelfth in the nation, plus the District of Columbia, to authorize same-sex marriages.

Update, 5/15: Yesterday, Governor Dayton signed the bill on the steps of the state capitol in front of a cheering crowd:



The City of Minneapolis announced that City Hall will open at 12:01 a.m. on August 1st in order to marry all the gay couples who want to be the first to get hitched in that town. And the city also released this gorgeous photo of the I-35 bridge all lit up like a rainbow last night:

Way cool, and a breathtaking moment in history to your Head Trucker, who remembers when gay meant nothing but merry, and homosexual was not a word nice people used in public, and only whispered in private.

It's worth noting that in Minneapolis on May 18, 1970, Jack Baker and Michael McConnell were the first gay men ever (so far as I know) to apply for a marriage license in the United States. They were turned down by the county clerk, which led them to take a lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court - which, unfortunately, dismissed the case "for want of a substantial federal question." In other words - "Equal rights under the Constitution? You have no rights, faggots." What a difference 42 years makes, huh? Just amazing.

Your Head Trucker remembers reading the shocking story in Life magazine way back then. BTW, Jack and Mike are still together after all these years, retired now and living in Minneapolis.

Updated marriage map from HRC.  Click to enlarge.
Yellow = same-sex marriage; blue = broad civil unions;
green = limited domestic partnerships.

The Vote, by Counties

Go to the Washington Post website for the interactive version of this map; when you run your cursor over each county, the stats display in a pop-up box.

Note to my overseas truckbuddies: there's a lot of Republican red on this map, true; but many, many of those scarlet counties are rural ones with low population, outweighed by the populous blue cities.

Also, while I can't tell you what the deal is in the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West states, I can say that across the South, from Virginia to Texas, many blue rural counties are those with a large population of blacks or Hispanics or both, who tend to vote Democratic; and some others are counties with large universities, hence a more liberal population of white voters.

If anybody wants to know, Texas went 57 to 41 for Romney. In the county where I live, the split was much greater: more than 6 out of 7 voters lusted for Mr. Etch-a-Sketch.


Related: Queer voters made up 5% of the electorate this time around, and 77% of them voted for Obama. Nationwide, 60,653,724 ballots have been counted for Obama so far, a popular vote margin of 2.4% over Romney. Ballot counting is still going on in Florida and Washington state.

Does that mean WE made his re-election happen? You do the math.

My God, what a fabulous election this turned out to be.  Here's a chart of the gay vote in other recent national elections, click to enlarge:

Well said: Your Head Trucker heartily seconds Mike Signorille's comments on the meaning of "pro-gay" from this point forward:

The re-election of Barack Obama, as well as the wins in states wherever gay marriage was on ballot -- in Maine, Minnesota, Maryland and Washington -- is a massive watershed for LGBT rights. No longer will politicians -- or anyone -- be able to credibly claim to be supportive of gays, and to love and honor their supposed gay friends and family, while still being opposed to basic and fundamental rights like marriage.

The very ads pushed by the enemies of gay rights, like the mastermind behind the antigay ballot measures, Frank Schubert, which claim you can support gay equality but be against gay marriage, no longer hold water. From now on, you're no friend to gays if you don't support full equality, and you're a bigot if you try to defend that position, as Mitt Romney did.

Many people previously hid behind the idea that since the president, prior to May of this year, didn't support marriage equality, but could still be considered "pro-gay," they could be considered pro-gay too. But President Obama not only evolved, he set a new standard: being pro-gay means supporting full equality.

Upside-down World

Click to enlarge.

Gives a whole new perspective on things, don't it?


From BuzzFeed via Joe.My.God.

The World According to Facebook

Click to enlarge

I'm not sure what this means, but it does make a pretty picture.  Interesting to note the countries that don't show up.

A while back I read on some blog somewhere a comment by an obviously very young man:  "Forty million people in the U.S. don't have a Facebook account.  What's wrong with these people?  Are they sick, or just crazy?"

Um, maybe they just don't want to be bothered with the damn thing, ya know?  Like your Head Trucker, who is still in awe of the miracle of email - no stamp, no envelope, no waiting.  Works for me.

.          .          .

Speaking of maps, it's also interesting to take a look at the hit counter globe in the sidebar here on the Blue Truck:  the red dots seem to me to indicate the intersection of gaiety, technology, wealth, and civil liberty. 

Or maybe just horniness, when you consider a fair number of visitors arrive from porn blogs and are probably looking for more of the same.  Oh well, always glad to have visitors.

It's Unanimous: Iceland OK's Equal Marriage

Reuters:

The Althingi parliament voted 49 to zero to change the wording of marriage legislation to include matrimony between "man and man, woman and woman," in addition to unions between men and women.

Iceland, a socially tolerant island nation of about 320,000 people, became the first country to elect an openly gay head of state in 2009 when Social Democrat Johanna Sigurdardottir became prime minister after being nominated by her party.

"The attitude in Iceland is fairly pragmatic," said Gunnar Helgi Kristinsson, a political scientist at the University of Iceland. "It (gay marriage) has not been a big issue in national politics -- it's not been controversial."

The prime minister's sexual orientation garnered far more interest among foreign media than in Iceland, where the attitude toward homosexuality has grown increasingly relaxed in the past two or three decades, Kristinsson added.

On Top:

Forty-nine of the country's 63 members of the Althingi parliament voted in favor of the law. The remainder abstained.  The legislation is groundbreaking in that it does not alter marriage to a gender-neutral institution, but instead includes “man and man” and “woman and woman” among the definitions of marriage.

The bill was introduced on March 23 and couples are expected to marry as early as this month. Marriage will replace Iceland's system of registered partnerships for gay and lesbian couples first enacted in 1996.

The legislation goes to President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson for his signature. Reports indicate the president will sign the bill into law.

And in Portugal, whose equal-marriage law came into effect last month, Agence France-Presse reports:

The first gay marriage in Portugal was celebrated Monday as a lesbian couple exchanged vows in a civil ceremony, one week after a law allowing same-sex unions went into force.

The divorced women, Helena Paixao, 40, and Teresa Pires, 33, were married in Lisbon before about 30 people.

The lesbians, who have two daughters from previous marriages and have been together for eight years, were also the first gay couple to submit a request to be married back in 2006, which launched the debate on legalising homosexual unions in Portugal, a predominantly Catholic country.

Same-sex marriage map of Europe (click here for the Wikipedia article): dark blue = equal marriage; medium blue = registered partnerships; yellow = under discussion; gray = not recognized; red = constitutional prohibition.

Canada and South Africa also recognize equal marriage nationwide.  New Zealand has civil unions, and Australian states extend limited rights to same-sex couples either through registered partnerships or unwed cohabition.

Mapping It

So I came across this wonderful quote from a piece by Mary McCarthy written for the New Yorker back in the 1950's.  McCarthy was one of those great intellectual writers back in the day, fiercely political, who got involved in feuds with other intellectuals that led to no end of sniping and quarrelling amongst other New York types that I really have very little interest in.  However, I can recommend her book, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, which sounds like it ought to be a sweet, sentimental little memoir - and is anything but.  If you like fine writing and vivid storytelling, give it a try; she wields a pen the way a surgeon wields a scalpel.

Well, having been reminded of McCarthy, I went to refresh my memory of her life and times, and one website led to another - you know how that goes.  But somewhere along the way, I made a pretty cool discovery:  how to create and embed a personalized Google map in your blog, so I thought I'd share that with my truckbuddies. 


View Some Long Automobile Trips in a larger map

This map is pretty lame, I only spent five minutes on it, but it was the first thing I could think of to try.  I can see a lot more possibilities of things to do with this though.  So if you guys want to give it a try sometime, here's two sets of easy directions to get you started:

Embeddable map samples

How-to video.

House Passes Healthcare Reform

By 219 votes to 212, and not a single Republican vote among them.  NYT:

Never in modern memory has a major piece of legislation passed without a single Republican vote. Even President Lyndon B. Johnson got just shy of half of Republicans in the House to vote for Medicare in 1965, a piece of legislation that was denounced with many of the same words used to oppose this one. That may be the true measure of how much has changed in Washington in the ensuing 45 years, and how Mr. Obama’s own strategy is changing with the discovery that the approach to governing he had in mind simply will not work. . . .  In 1966, celebrating the creation of the first Medicare rolls that covered 20 million Americans, President Johnson recalled the complaints three decades earlier that Social Security “would destroy this country,” and noted “there is not one out of 100 who would think of repealing it.” . . .

Mr. Obama’s gamble is that what worked for Johnson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt will ultimately work for him. Once Americans discover that they can no longer be rejected for insurance for pre-existing conditions, he is betting, or that they can keep their children on their own insurance plans longer, the more they will come to appreciate the effect of the changes on their day-to-day lives.

L.A. Times:

The House vote Sunday to send a comprehensive healthcare reform bill to President Obama's desk put the United States on a path toward universal health insurance, a goal that had eluded reformers since then-presidential candidate Teddy Roosevelt called for all workers to have coverage in 1912. It may prove to be the signal accomplishment of Obama's administration, even though the controversy surrounding it threatens to end his party's majority in Congress. Rarely has such a good thing for Americans been perceived by so many as a threat to their livelihood and liberty.

There's wide agreement in the healthcare industry and across the political spectrum that the system is in dire need of repair. But while liberals called for government to eliminate the insurance middleman and act as the single source of coverage, conservatives sought to reduce the government's presence in the market and give consumers more responsibility.

The measure that emerged from the Senate, HR 3590, pursues a course between those two extremes. It augments the existing system with a new marketplace for individuals and small groups to shop for insurance, a mandate that everyone buy coverage, insurance subsidies for the working class and rules limiting insurers' freedom to design, price and market their policies. It won't bring coverage to everyone -- the Congressional Budget Office estimated that HR 3590 would leave about 6% of Americans uninsured in 10 years. But that's a significant improvement over the situation today, when an estimated 17% have no insurance and thousands lose their coverage daily.

Well, finally a victory after a hundred years of struggle on this issue:  Obama has done what FDR, Truman, Nixon, and Clinton could not.  For an enlightening history of the long, drawn-out fight for healthcare reform, see this excellent summary (PDF) by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

What this bill ended up being is a mishmash and doesn't go nearly far enough in my opinion; I would like to see a single-payer nationwide system, which this is not.  But at least, thank God, it's a start on something that could eventually be a decent program.

If the fascist fundamentalist know-nothing crowd doesn't overthrow the government, that is.  Note this very interesting map I swiped from Sullivan's blog, and the overwhelming Baptist population of my tragic, benighted Southern homeland:  notice that the green area is practically identical with the boundaries of the Confederacy, even 150 years later.  Nothing wrong with being a Baptist per se, but so very often that kind of believing is allied with ignorance, arrogance, and a hatred of everything and everyone who isn't a straight white Bible-believing Anglo-Saxon Republican.  And then there are plenty of people in this region who never show up in church and don't much miss it, but still retain the prejudices of the culture they grew up in.

Compare that with the NYT's interactive map of the geography of tonight's House vote here.

Brrrrr!

Holy shit!  Eighteen degrees outside right now, and a wind chill of 8!  That's pretty damn cold for this part of the country.  At least it's dry, though - no snow or ice.  Thank God I don't have to go in to work today; I'm staying home and staying warm as possible, hope you are too.

How cold is it in your neck of the woods?

I Just Made Love

Okay, so maybe that's just wishful thinking on your Head Trucker's part.

But now you can record all them notches on your bedpost and share the love with the whole wide world.  Find out where people are getting it on today from Greenland to Tahiti here. 

Pretty cool, I think.  Geez, can't wait to put my little blue thumbtack on that map.

Too bad you can't order it like pizza.  Not out here on the prairie, anyway.

Marriage Victory in New Hampshire

Updated marriage equality map from Wikipedia;

purple = same-sex marriage.

Reuters has just reported:

State lawmakers approved a bill on Wednesday to make New Hampshire the sixth U.S. state to authorize gay marriage, but the legislation still requires the governor's signature.

New Hampshire's Democratically controlled House of Representatives endorsed gay marriage in a 198-176 vote, hours after the state Senate approved the legislation by 14-10 along party lines, making the state the fourth this year to back gay marriage in the United States.

Late last month, the House rejected a similar bill. But Senate and House members met last week to reach a compromise, approving new language giving clergy and religious institutions opposed to gay marriage greater protections, including the legal right to decline to marry same-sex couples.

Governor John Lynch, a Democrat, has said he would veto a gay-marriage bill if such protections were excluded and is expected to sign the latest bill into law.

Update: Governor John Lynch signed the bill into law at 5:20 p.m. It comes into effect on January 1, 2010, exactly two years after the state began performing civil unions. The Boston Globe reports:

Gay marriage is now legal in Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts -- all of the new England states, except for Rhode Island. Gay marriage is also legal in Iowa. . . .

When Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2004, New Hampshire seemed unlikely to follow. Republicans had enjoyed virtually uninterrupted control of both houses of the Legislature since the late 19th century.

But in 2006, Granite State voters unseated a pair of GOP congressmen amid rising upopularity for the Iraq war and the presidency of George W. Bush. The voters also swept Democratic majorities into the State House. A few months later, the new Legislature approved civil unions.

In early May, Lynch reiterated his position that civil unions were best for the state. But two weeks later, he said his thinking had changed. He said society's views on civil rights have "constantly evolved and expanded" throughout our history. "That is what I believe we must do today."

The Associated Press reports:

The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, elected in New Hampshire in 2003 as the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, was among those celebrating the new law.

"It's about being recognized as whole people and whole citizens," Robinson said.

"There are a lot of people standing here who when we grew up could not have imagined this," he said. "You can't imagine something that is simply impossible. It's happened, in our lifetimes."

I know just what the bishop means. Full text of Governor Lynch's comments at the bill signing is here. Key excerpts, emphasis mine:

New Hampshire's great tradition has always been to come down on the side of individual liberties and protections. That tradition continues today.

Two years ago in this room, I signed civil unions into law. That law gave same-sex couples in New Hampshire the rights and protections of marriage. And while civil unions was [sic] recognized as a step forward, many same-sex couples made compelling arguments that a separate system is not an equal system. . . .

Today, we are standing up for the liberties of same-sex couples by making clear that they will receive the same rights, responsibilities - and respect - under New Hampshire law.

Today, we are also standing up for religious liberties. This legislation makes clear that we understand that certain faiths do not recognize same-sex marriage, and it protects them from having to participate in marriage-related activities that violate their fundamental religious principles.

With the signing of this legislation today, New Hampshire will have taken every action possible to ensure that all families have equal rights to the extent that is possible under state law.

Unfortunately, the federal government does not extend the same rights and protections that New Hampshire provides same-sex families, and that should change. . . .

Most families in New Hampshire will awaken tomorrow, go to work and to school, and feel no impact from what we have accomplished today.

But for some, they will awaken tomorrow knowing we have said to them that they are equal, that they have the same rights to live and to love as everyone else.

Today is a day to celebrate in New Hampshire. Today should not be considered a victory for some and a loss for others. Today is a victory for all the people of New Hampshire, who I believe, in our own independent way, want tolerance for all.

That is truly the New Hampshire way.

Nevada Gets Domestic Partnership Law

Map of same-sex unions in the United States from Wikipedia

That makes one-third of the states who now provide some form of recognition, weak or strong, to same-sex couples. The New York Times reports:

The Nevada Legislature voted into law a domestic partnership registry for same-sex and unmarried straight couples on Sunday evening, with the Assembly mustering the two-thirds vote required to override a veto by Gov. Jim Gibbons, a Republican.

The move makes Nevada the 17th state to recognize the relationships of gay men and lesbians, creating the registry with the secretary of state by which couples receive legal protections associated with marriage.

The State Senate voted to override the veto on Saturday.

The Nevada law does not require businesses to provide health benefits to the domestic partners of their employees.

“The significance here is it literally equates domestic partner with spouse under Nevada state law,” said Michael Ginsburg of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada.

“You have the full force of the law behind you now,” Mr. Ginsburg said. “When you’re in the hospital, forced to make decisions for your partner, all you have to say is, ‘This is my spouse,’ and that carries tremendous weight.”

Proponents were able to persuade two members of both the Senate and the Assembly to switch sides since earlier votes. Many were pressured by executives for the casino industry, who feared a boycott by gay travelers.

Opponents, including the governor, argued that the law was unnecessary because gay couples could create legal contracts to provide most of the rights they would receive through the registry. They also pointed out that Nevada voters approved a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage earlier this decade.

Yet State Senator David R. Parks, a Las Vegas Democrat and the only openly gay elected official in Nevada, obtained legal opinions from legislative lawyers stating that the domestic partnership registry was not the equivalent of marriage.

Correction: The NYT reporter must have miscounted; I'm only seeing 15 states, plus the District of Columbia. We need two more states to get to a third of the Union; and 45 more states to get nationwide marriage equality, plus the repeal of DOMA at the federal level.

Who's the Great Pumpkin Now?

Iowa. At least, it sure looks that way, doesn't it, guys?

Visit the Human Rights Campaign's website for more maps like this one about laws affecting gay people in the United States.

Equal Marriage Arrives in Sweden

Map of same-sex marriage status in Europe as of today, from Wikipedia.

Swedish gays and lesbians can begin marrying today, following legislation passed by the Swedish parliament last month. Registered partnerships for same-sex couples have been available in that country since 1995, but today Sweden becomes the seventh country to offer full marriage rights for gay people.

The Lutheran Church of Sweden supported the legislation and does provide same-sex blessings for couples, but will not offer actual marriage services until the question is decided by a church assembly later this year.

The other countries that offer nationwide same-sex marriage are as follows:

1. The Netherlands - 2001
2. Belgium - 2003
3. Spain - 2005
4. Canada - 2005
5. South Africa - 2006
6. Norway - 2009
7. Sweden - 2009

And of course, the U. S. states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, and Vermont (beginning Sept. 2009); but same-sex couples in those states are not recognized by the federal government.