Election '06 - Voting My Ticket

DISPATCH 2:
Yes, Yes, Yes on Prop. 86!

Last year I saw a movie called “Blowing Smoke,” about a bunch of men sitting around smoking cigars and making misogynistic comments, some of which were even kind of funny: (“No matter how beautiful a woman is, I guarantee you there’s some guy tired of f***ing her.” “I promised my wife I wouldn’t cheat on her for the first three years we’re married, and then only with hookers.” Etc.)

It’s pretty staged, and all the characters are hostile, repressed and unsympathetic, but it’s also fairly entertaining — sort of like “The Boys in the Band,” except with cigars and heterosexuals. Naturally there’s a lot of Freudian suggestiveness about sex and cigars.

I hope you won’t mind me giving away the twist at the end — all the guys get various forms of mouth cancer, just like Freud: Sid gets tongue cancer, Phil gets jaw cancer, Ray gets palate cancer, etc.

Kidding! Well, except about Freud — he did get a particularly miserable form of palate cancer. What do you expect after all those cigars?

All this is my way of saying that, yes, I voted for Calif. Prop.86, which outrages my downstairs friend and tenant Danny becauset it raises taxes on cigars and pipes as well as cigarettes, and he likes to smoke cigars sometimes.

To which I say: So what? The secondhand smoke from cigars and pipes is even worse than that from cigarettes.

Now I did vote against Rob Reiner’s ridiculous initiative several years ago (which passed) that taxed smokers even more than they’re already taxed and passed the extra money along to early childhood education projects, because what do smokers have to do with early childhood education? Reiner just picked a group everybody hates as an easy target for transferring resources to a group everybody likes — demagoguery at its most basic.

Maybe the California rich should pay more taxes, and maybe these taxes should be specifically earmarked for education in general. But whether the money should go to hiring and retaining better teachers, or building more schools, or afterschool programs, or expanded preschool, or whatever, should not depend on which category happens to be some Hollywood bloviator’s pet project.

But even though smokers do pay more for insurance and other things, nonsmokers still subsidize them, because the real cost of smoking would be just too high if it were passed along only to smokers. But money raised through Prop. 86 does go to health coverage and tobacco-related programs, which has a connection to the tobacco tax, so that’s fine with me.

Danny’s angry because he likes smoking a cigar once in a while and doesn’t believe that cigar smoke causes any health problems. I tend to have more faith in claims made my medical associations than those by tobacco companies. Besides, it’s just common sense that the extremely concentrated smoke from cigars and pipes would mean a higher incidence of mouth and palate cancer.

“You know what — Darren on “Bewitched” smoked cigars!” yelled Danny, who was peeved because he noticed I’d marked “Cathy sez yes” next to the “No” he’d marked next to Prop. 86 on his sample ballot. He’s a drummer with tattoos, and looks like he should be a running dog Democrat, but I guess he’s actually even more Republican than I.

You never can tell here in wacky Silver Lake.

DISPATCH 1:
Despite being an evil Republican, I suppose I voted mostly like a Democrat on the California state propositions and Los Angeles city measures today. (As far as people go — Arnold Schwarzenegger for governer, Calif. state sen. Tom McClintock for Lt. Governor, etc. — I voted basically the straight Republican ticket.)

But I’m a Republican mostly because I’m a neocon (there, I said it!) foreign policy hawk, not a traditional values conservative. And unlike the left, the right doesn’t peevishly evict you if you fail to toe even one section of the party line.

For instance, I’ve said before that I have little sympathy with clamping down harder on pregnant teens with parental notification laws. So I voted no on Calif. Prop. 85 today, which except in a medical emergency requires the doctor of a girl under age 18 to notify the girl’s parents before she can have an abortion, just like I voted against a similar measure in the special California election last year. These parental notificaiton laws always strike me as disingenious and wrong-headed, and I feel quite snappish when I hear people say, “Why shouldn’t parents get to approve any medical procedure for their children?”

Leaving aside the obvious problem that some of these girls are pregnant because they were raped by their fathers or stepfathers or brothers, who would perhaps not react kindly upon hearing such news about their young relatives — or their families are dysfunctional in other ways, and the girls worry about being kicked out of their homes — an abortion is not like other medical procedures.

If a girl wants, say, a nose job, and can’t get it because her parents say no, the alternative to getting the nose job is simply not getting the nose job — she remains free of a medical procedure, with its attendant risks, that her parents don’t want her to have. And I agree that in such a case this should be the parents’ decision.

But if a girl wants an abortion as soon as she finds out she’s pregnant and her parents say no — or she can’t work up the nerve to tell them, at least not right away (not an uncommon situation) — the alternative is not that she remains free of a situation requiring a medical procedure, but that she is forced instead to endure others (staying pregnant, or having a later term abortion) which, whatever you think of embryos’ rights, are certainly riskier to the girl, especially a young one.

Perhaps if the men and boys who get underage girls into these medical situations in the first place were legally required to notify the girls’ parents, Prop. 85 would make a certain amount of sense. As it stands now, however, it’s just pandering to those whose real agenda is making even early term abortions more difficult, not helping parents know everything that goes on in their daughters’ lives.

I’m not even convinced that Prop. 85 would cause noticably less abortions, which of course is its real purpose. I suspect the real effects would be more late term abortions instead of early ones, and more newborns dumped in trashcans by girls who find it hard to admit even to themselves they’re pregnant, let alone their parents.

What really sticks in my craw is the dishonest smarm of the pro-parental notification people. “We believe strongly that this law has removed a barrier between parents and their small children,” Joe Pojman, executive director of Texas Alliance for Life, which successfully backed a similar law in that state, told the Los Angeles Times last fall.

A barrier? Does Pojman actually mean that until such laws are passed, there’s something keeping parents and children from having discussions about whatever they like?

And small children? Is he really implying that four-year-olds get pregnant?