The scariest thing to come out of Tuesday’s election was not the Republican landslide, or the defeat of so many good Democrats.
It was, for me, the defeat, or “recall” of three judges in Iowa, who lost their jobs because of a single verdict they handed down last year.
Chief Justice Marsha Ternus, David Baker and Michael Streit will be removed after about 54 percent of voters backed their ouster Tuesday. Why? Because they were three of the seven who had the audacity to rule last year that an Iowa law saying marriage is only between a man and a woman was unconstitutional.
An Iowa businessman solicited donors from around the country, and $1 million was raised from the bigoted anti-gay marriage folks to try to get the three judges voted out of office.
Disgusting. Just disgusting that our nation’s arbiter of laws can be tossed aside by rabble-rousing citizens who simply didn’t like, or agree with, one of their rulings.
It’s a damn scary, scary day when judges will be too frightened to make a ruling that may be unpopular politically, for fear of losing their jobs.
That day is here. And it makes me sick.
**Was listening to a podcast of Jon Stewart (that’s him in college up there, by the way) being interviewed by the excellent Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air” Thursday. The interview was from a few weeks ago, so maybe you heard it. Anyway, in the midst of Stewart’s funny stuff (and there was a lot of it; you can listen to the interview here), he said something that got me thinking. He was talking about the completely different world his kids are growing up in, as opposed to how he grew up in the mid-1970s:
“And you know, my kids will never know what it’s like to have nothing to watch because there’s like – they will – I mean, I’m surprised that when we have human interactions, they don’t like go, let me freeze that and just run that back. Like they’re… they’re accustomed to things being presented to them when they want it, in exactly the form that they want it.”
Stewart’s right, and it made me think about how today’s kids might be growing up without creativity. So many of the best childhood memories I have started with boredom. And then Marc or Andrew or David and I would make up some stupid game and it would lead to hours of fun.
Without boredom, creativity suffers. And today’s kids have WAY too many options for entertainment, so they never have to have a quiet or dull moment.
Of course they think they can rewind life, or get it to happen exactly when they want it to. Everything else in their world is set up for them that way.
Just my two cents.
