I'm a California native and I admit to being proud of it, no matter where I end up living at the time. But there are times when I am forced to question that. The passing of the hated Proposition 8 is one of those times.

Now living here in New England, my parents and I - who actually watch the news, and aren't homophobes (my grandfather, on the other hand, is practically celebrating the passing - but I digress) - began discussing some rather...peculiar differences that I thought bore mentioning.

The New England states - Massachusetts in particular - were founded by the Puritans ("people so uptight, the English kicked them out", as Robin Williams put it). The Puritans sought (quoting Wikipedia now) "both moral purity down to the smallest detail as well as ecclesiastical purity to the highest level", and felt that the reforms in England weren't doing enough for them. So they came to North America and founded colonies here. And yet, for being established by a group that would probably qualify as religious extremists, New England is remarkably flexible: Two states (Massachusetts and now Connecticut) allow same-sex marriage with full benefits. New Hampshire and Vermont recognize civil unions and allow them to receive the benefits that married couples do. Maine recognizes civil unions, but I don't think their benefits extend as far as New Hampshire's.

Then we come to California. It's founded because we stole it - let's not mince words, that's what we did - from Mexico in 1849, after the U.S. Army kicked the shit out of them in the war the previous year. And nowadays, what does one think when they hear "California"? Hollywood, Disneyland, San Francisco, Yosemite - free spirits (in more ways than one in some places!). And yet, they're the ones being puritanical....does anyone other than me find this both ironic and stupidly amusing at the same time? It's like running to be elected to the highest office when your husband is a member of a secessionist group. And we know how well that worked, don't we, Governor Palin?

Yes, the California Supreme Court shot down an attempt to ban same-sex marriage because they thought it unconstitutional, and Governor Schwarzenegger - despite being a supporter of George W. Bush - was willing to let the court's ruling stand, to the extent that he opposed Proposition 8. I was glad to be able to see the effects of the ruling for myself, when I attended the wedding of my good friends JT Tepnapa and Adam Browne in Los Angeles, about a month before I left for Massachusetts.

But now, since the court said it was unconstitutional, what did these idiots do? They made it constitutional to ban the marriage of people like Adam and JT. Which brings me to this question: How do you make something that's unconstitutional into something that's constitutional? Doesn't that violate some law of physics?