Hope Junkie in Flight

I'm hanging out at blogger now, for no really good reason. Come see me there. Or one of you guys with a paid or permanent membership could create a syndication feed for lj, and then friend that. (If you don't know how, ask me.)

The new url is http://audacityofhop.blogspot.com. I'll try to cross post for a while, but let's be honest, we all know I'll get lazy on that one...

This latest development will amuse anyone who knew me as a bunny mad child - my best friend and I wrote a newspaper based on the exploits of our stuffed animals called "The Bunny Press", for crying out loud. (Yes, I was a nerd, thank you very much.)

Dave and I have adopted two bunnies from the Manhattan Shelter of NYC's Animal Care & Control. We went intending to adopt only one rabbit, if that, but we both fell in love with separate bunnies, so we decided to take both of them. On the left here is Jupiter, Dave's selection (and now my favorite, if I can be said to have a favorite - they're both pretty great) and below on the right is my selection, Juno. (The Roman goddess, not the movie, just so's you know.) Juno is now Dave's favorite, being the more mild mannered of the two. I was actually starting to worry that Juno was too forceful a name for such a sweet and friendly rabbit, until the two of them met on their first bunny "date". Turns out that our sweet girl is quite the dominatrix!

I say "date", but the process of bonding two rabbit strangers promises to be quite the challenge. You can read more about bonding rabbits, or house rabbits in general, at the House Rabbit Society. The first time they met, Juno tried to exert her dominance, which, despite her size advantage, I didn't expect, and Jupiter resented it. Yesterday was their second date and they seemed to get along better, he mostly ignoring her and her attempting occasionally to groom him. Tonight we decided to skip the date, as there was a storm and both bunnies were a bit edgy.

So there they are, our new rabbit friends, Juno & Jupiter. Expect to see a good deal more of them as they learn to be friends with each other as well as with us.

Today is the anniversary of the landmark supreme court decision in Loving v. Virginia(1967) which ended race based bars to marriage by declaring Virginia's anti-miscegenation statutes to be unconstitutional. In this case, a interracial couple, Mildred & Richard Loving, were married in D.C. and then returned to the commonwealth to live. At the time, there were laws on the books in Virginia stating:

"If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years."(Virginia Code § 20-59)

And:

"If any white person and colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it, and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife, they shall be punished as provided in 20-59, and the marriage shall be governed by the same law as if it had been solemnized in this State. The fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage." (Virginia Code § 20-58)

When they returned to Virginia, they were charged with violating these statutes and pleaded guilty, being sentenced to one year in prison, which was suspended conditionally as long as they left the commonwealth.

So they left. They moved to D.C. and made friends with the ACLU, who drove the legal train to the Supreme Court.

The court reversed the convictions, with Chief Justice Warren stating in the majority decision that:

"The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.
Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541 (1942). See also Maynard v. Hill, 125 U.S. 190 (1888)."

I'm sorry to have to say that it was a suit brought against my own beloved Commonwealth that occasioned this change, but I do find it encouraging that now, forty years on, this particular form of discrimination seems so antiquated. It gives me hope that soon we will find our current marriage related bigotry quaint and old-fashioned. Perhaps the next iteration of Loving v. Virginia will be a gay couple suing the Commonwealth for not recognizing their Californian marriage.

This is another reason why we need to elect Barack Obama. Can you imagine the current court, or even worse, the court after four more years of Bush (as played by John McCain), making a decision based on "the broader, organic purpose of a constitutional amendment" rather than the "passage of specific statutes"? I can't.

And yes, in the interest of full disclosure, I am a card-carrying member of the