One of the most egregious acts Governor Gray Davis committed in California was to veto a bill that would have allowed men wrongly identified as fathers escape the obligation to support other people’s children and girlfriends. He did this for the children. The Harvard Crimson Online :: Opinion ran a good op-ed piece on this problem back in May:
According to U.S. Citizens Against Paternity Fraud, as many as 30 percent of “fathers” paying child support nationwide may not be the actual fathers. Often, child-support agencies bamboozle them into signing paternity declarations, or the mother fraudulently names a father to qualify for welfare assistance. In some cases, judges are prohibited from overturning default rulings despite clear DNA evidence. The problem is so out of hand that in 1998 the California Court of Appeals had to rebuke overzealous L.A. officials for having “lost sight of the paramount duty to seek justice” in child-support cases.
This is why Sheila Kuehl was so upset about the recall — she urged Davis to veto the bill. Apparently “ignorance” is OK when, as in her case, it’s willful.
BTW, it’s interesting that the loudest opposition to Gov. Arnie in the legislature, from Kuehl, Mark Leno, and John Vasconcellos, comes from gay legislators. I don’t know why that should be. Leno is the guy who wrote the Anti-Cross-Dresser Discrimination Act, for which he argued for a genetic requirement for certain men to wear women’s clothing. Vasco is still in the closet after 30 years in Sacramento, but everybody under the dome knows he’s gay so my outing him here is no big shock. Since he’s the big self-esteem guy, certainly he should realize that his hateful remarks about Arnie have to hurt the governor-elect’s self-esteem and therefore hurt the whole state.
It’s probably just hypocrisy, not really a big gay thing. What’s more remarkable is the increasing use of the argument that “the voters are too stupid to decide elections” from the left. I’ve thought for a long time that Democrats are generally anti-democratic, and it’s getting pretty hard to hide from that fact any more.