Poultry And People
San Francisco Chronicle
November 5, 2008

Prop 2, which ensures chickens the right to engage in basic life activities such as stretching their wings, passed yesterday by an impressive margin.

Prop 8, which detracts from human beings' rights to engage in the basic life activity of falling in love, also passed.

Californians are willing to pay—and tolerate some risk to the state's agricultural industry—to ensure farm animals their rights. They're also willing to pay to take them away from gays and lesbians when those rights have no real-world effects on heterosexuals.

According to the Williams Institute, maintaining legal same-sex marriage would have put an additional $64 million [pdf] in the coffers of state and local governments.

I'm proud of Prop 2's success and I'm happy for the chickens. But why is my right to fall in love so odious to my fellow Californians? Octogenarian men can legally marry twenty-something arm candy. Cousins can marry. Surely these unions do not uphold the noble ideals of marriage backers of Prop 8 claim justify the exclusion of same-sex couples (noble ideals which are wholly fabricated—the real origins of marriage date to tribal societies where women were property and virginity was fetishized not because it was virtuous but because paternity was just a theory. For a compelling analysis of evangelicals' facts and fantasies about sex and marriage, read this New Yorker article).

If any commitment of a noble rite makes a mockery of that rite, it is the act of voting to insert discrimination against a minority into the constitution. What greater abuse of democracy is there?

Sadly, votes based on hate do not respond to facts or economic analyses. And so, most progressive ballot measures fail if analysis suggests they will be ineffectual or expensive, but discriminatory measures sail through the realm of facts and logic unscathed. It's a major problem with California's ballot system, and, yesterday's presidential election notwithstanding, I don't think we will have a truly healthy national democracy until everyone agrees that facts—not religious fervor—are the currency of social discourse.

Still, voters were willing to act with something not unlike religious fervor in order to protect another helpless minority: the chickens. Why the difference?