A tall order for California.

March 2, 2010 by Dan Hooper.

Another pebble slipped off the slippery slope of official and public homophobia yesterday, when John A. Pérez was sworn in as the California State Assembly’s first openly-gay Speaker. (If you haven’t paid attention to LGBT officer-holders in Sacramento, click here.

Equality California wasted no time in congratulating Pérez. Geoffrey Kors issued a statement that said in part:

“Speaker Pérez is a role model and an inspiration to the LGBT community, especially to LGBT youth struggling to find acceptance at home and in school. We wish him the very best of luck as he embarks on this momentous journey and look forward to continuing our partnership with him in our mission to achieve full equality for LGBT Californians.”Pérez faces a time, however, when almost no sentient being puts any trust in California government, and that includes the Governor (27% approval ratings in December) and both houses of the Legislature. Districts are so gerrymandered to favor the incumbent party that no current office-holder and no candidate can really hope to sway anyone’s minds.

Recently I had opportunity to meet one of the candidates for the vacant seat in the Assembly’s 43^rd District, at a house party to introduce him to potential supporters. Mike Gatto further explained the brokenness of the Legislature by referring to the “third house” — not the Assembly or the Senate but the lobbyists who attach themselves to everything they can in Sacramento (and Washington, etc.), especially to every dollar that adheres to campaigns for public office.

Gatto knows that Sacramento is broken.  I question whether, even if he wins, he can have any impact on fixing it under current term limits law. (The predecessor in his district, Paul Krekorian, bailed out of the Assembly a few months early, because of term limits, and landed himself a seat on the Los Angeles City Council.)

What Pérez and young bucks like Gatto would need to fix is worse than gerrymandered districts. It includes our pathetically amended state constitution and its really screwed-up ballot-box legislating with one “initiative” after another.

(My personal view, which Gatto verbally endorsed, is that it is time to make it unlawful to pay for or be paid for gathering signatures for ballot measures. If an “initiative” actually started because citizens took the initiative, that would be one thing. But when big out-of-state money can literally buy a spot on the ballot to peddle reactionary social views, as has been done over and over with ballot Propositions, well, “… there ought to be a law!”)

And if they have time, the Legislature needs to re-think sentencing laws for juveniles (SB 399) ; adopt SB 906 the Civil Marriage and Religious Freedom Act which would have taken the wind out of the religious liars’ sails when they purposely misled California voters in the Proposition 8 campaign; and seriously consider AB 1878, which require California to include gender identity and sexual orientation in state government forms.

Fixing some of the things that are broken might be a good way to restore confidence in younger voters that they should bother to pay attention to state politics and state laws.

–D.H.

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