<3 Parents.

This post is part of a blog project on student teaching, hosted at So you Want to Teach

Forgive typos, I haven't slept since Saturday morning and I'll edit this later.

Parents.

If there's one thing I'm going to drag away from my experiences working with the bands at Davis High, it's that parent involvement and support are probably some of the most important things in teaching any child. Whatever the subject, only a small amount of learning ever happens in the classroom and anything taught there is reinforced by learning at home. When it comes to a performing arts program, however, parental support is paramount due to all the effort required by a student outside of a classroom. Any performance program requires a regular practice regimen -akin to homework- but all the concerts, festivals, workshops, trips, everything done to make the students better musicians (and make the elective more appealing than art or yearbook), requires a substantial amount of time, effort and money on the part of the parents. Most of my students have their own instruments, many are in extra curricular performance groups and about 80% receive private lessons, and have since fourth grade. This is all a substantial financial investment on the part of the parents and reflects the affluence of the community, something I know I can't replicate when I step into my first job as a teacher.

Operational budgets for performance programs are generally barely enough to pay for routine maintenance on their instruments; let alone venues, festival fees, travel, and the ubiquitous annual "band trip." Fundraising is an integral part of every performance program I know. Those stupid candy bar scams are the first thing to come to mind but thankfully the students I work with have parents who are deeply involved in both the school and community, and the kids are able to do most of their fundraising with their instruments. The bands rent themselves out in small combos at winter time to play for christmas parties, the jazz band and choirs put on an annual Cabaret, the Madrigals hold a Madrigal dinner between thanksgiving and christmas, but the one big thing our band program does is something called a "Playathon." 

I don't know whose idea this was, but it's akin to the "jog-a-thons" I did in elementary school. Kids beg for money, er collect pledges from close family and friends, either by hour or for the entire night - promising to attempt the amazing feet of playing for 12 hours, straight through the night without sleep.

This money doesn't go towards the band's operational budget, but towards the kids cost of the trips we take, some upwards of $600. Each student has their own account and the money is deposited and kept there for them, and any left over is carried over to next year's account. None of this would be possible without the Band Booster's program, and I am routinely surprised at the amount of organization and continuity in the program. They have an extensive charter and binders for each event throughout the year holding the lessons learned from the years previous and instructions on how things are done. The amount of parental involvement in this program is phenomenal and building a booster's program, or taking active involvement in an existing one will be a large priority of mine as a first year teacher.

Although too much parental involvement can lead to twitching, murderous glares from teachers, in building an amazing performing arts program, no matter how big of a pain they may be, parents are a teacher's greatest asset. 

Playathon.

So.... anyways, our director is past 60, and three years ago he declared the last Playathon. The kids got so upset because they loved the program so much that alumni came in, and parents stepped up to make it happen the next year without the director, bringing in student teachers to help conduct instead. Both this year and last I was put in charge of the music, while parents put up the organizational front and provided chaperones for the entire night. This playathon went so well, I want to keep the schedule and music somewhere for next year, and this is as good a place as any.

19:00 - Kids show up, warm up, tune.

19:30 - Kids give a "Concert in progress," performing works that they've only seen since they returned from winter break. This year, the Concert Band played Longford Legend, Appalachian Morning, and ... (I'm honestly too tired to remember the other one). The Symphonic Band performed Masada, Three Dance Episodes from On the Town, The Whispering Tree, and a roaringly busy piece they got on Wednesday called "Applause," one they pulled off marvelously. With set changes, these two concerts take about an hour and a half.

21:00 - The Jazz Band steps in. They gave an hour long concert, after playing all day at the Folsom Jazz Festival today. They scored all Superiors, scores in the 90s, but our director was less than satisfied with their performance - the best part is, so were they. They're looking to place at Monterey in a couple of months and need to tighten up quite a bit to do so. 

22:00 - Between ten and eleven, the pizza arrived, donated in small amounts from most of the pizza joints in Davis, a small college town with lots of pizza places. Before the kids got to chow down, we allowed guest conductors to jump in and direct the band. Mostly parents, some who have no idea what they're doing but a few are "regulars" and ham it up to the point where some of the kids are laughing so hard they can't even play right. This is another chance for fundraising, getting donations, or prizing this out at raffles. 

N.B. Don't loan your baton out to someone who doesn't know how to use it. Mine was broken before I had the chance to direct.

23:00 - The fun begins. At this point we have 45 minutes of rehearsal every hour running through pieces the kids have never seen before, or at least haven't seen in a year. During the other fifteen minutes, the kids run off to a dark room with a strobe light, thumping techno music and enough sugar and caffeine to put several large animals into hyperglycemic shock. I, myself stuck to a diet of carrot sticks, wheat thins and chai tea, learning from last year that a steady diet of Mountain Dew inhibits my ability to direct and causes my hands to shake. I also brought in help, a few extra directors, the student director, manager and drum major of the Aggie Band, all current music majors at UCD. There's no way I could direct a band for 7 hours on my own. Working with a combined band of about 150 kids, I lost my voice as it is, and that was working with them only 15 minutes every hour. 

Between 11 and 12 we started them off easy with "With Quiet Courage" "Three Ayers from Gloucster" and Holst's First Suite in Eb

00:00 - 01:00: WE decided to get the harder stuff out of the way while everyone was awake: Culloden III, El Camino Real (a beast to conduct on the fly), Holst's Second Suite in F (running the march as fast as we could).

01:00 - 02:00: Mars, Baroque Hoedown, and American Elegy

02:00 - 3:00: Here if the kids were dragging we made them sing instead, playing arrangements of Les Mis, Aladdin and the Lion King

03:00 - 04:00:  Continuing in the same vein we did Phantom of the Opera, Beauty and the Beast and Hunchback of Notre Dame. 

04:00 - 05:00: Rock Bottom.  This was a bad time to pull out Vaughn William's Folk Song Suite. I think the flutes were about to cry when I called it up. Between that, Mary's boy child and an arrangement of Avenue Q, it was a disaster. We should have pulled up much easier music for this late in the game.

05:00 - 06:30: To rally the troops we played a bunch of their pep band music, (Black Saddles, Cortez) which with a full band, rivaled the Aggie Band in power and quality. We then set out to rehearse three pieces from the night to get them sounding decent for a concert at 7:00. - when their parents and people who threw money at them come to see them perform without any lips.

We chose Baroque Hoedown (The theme to the electric light parade in Disneyland), Beauty and the Beast and American Elegy as those pieces with the balance of "easy," "engaging," and "impressive."

06:30 - 0:700: Breakfast, keep everyone off their instruments to allow a bit of recovery.

07:00 - 07:30: Concert, a little flat here and there, with lips as droopy as their eyelids. But promising the kids that this is the last thing between them and sleep seems to rouse the spirits. And students always play better when their parents are watching. 

I pushed the pace on American Elegy, but as I said, it was the only thing between me and sleep. If you look closely you can see the sun rising behind the curtains of the multipurpose room.

Why I love what I do.

This post is part of a blog project on student teaching, hosted at So You Want To Teach

I know that I don't reflect back nearly enough on the amazing amount of opportunity upon which I've stumbled over the last two years. I know my situation is fairly unique and am continually grateful for it, except when I grumble about commuting from Sacramento to Davis 5 days a week. My job barely pays for the gas it takes to get there every day, but it's worth enough to me in experience that if they didn't pay me, I'd probably still come in every day. Having graduated in June, and deferred my enrollment in a master's program, I'm stuck between undergraduate and graduate studies and am currently taking music education courses that weren't offered in the UCD music department over at CSUS. There I'm lumped under "post baccalaureate studies" and am not currently in a credential program, or student teaching, but my work at Davis Senior High School in the position of "Paraeducator III - Music Specialist" hits very close to the mark. At the very least it's paid classroom observation and mentorship, and at its best it's hands on experience leading a class of kids in making awesome music. 

Most of my job consists of doing whatever the director doesn't want to do, which is a lot. On paper, I'm little more than an aide, something his student T.A.'s could do: be more mobile than the director (he's post-polio) and facilitate an efficient rehearsal. I make copies, grab scores, part music or file it away, take attendance and enter everything into his grade sheets. Sometimes I get to re-arrange music or write out new parts with Sibelius, other times I work as a section coach with any particular section while the director works with the rest of the band. But the reason I show up every day, and would do so without being paid is the chance to conduct the DHS bands.

When I played with the UC Davis wind ensemble, we'd go to a gig every year called the  "Festivity of Bands" it was the "Causeway Classic" for band nerds. CSUS and UCD give a joint concert, pitting the wind programs of each music department against the other. Well, for a few years now they've been inviting the audition ensemble from Davis High to come play with them, and I was always a bit bitter leaving knowing we were schooled by a bunch of high school kids. They played harder music than we did and sounded better doing it. 

This of course is the result of an amazing amount of support from the school district and community in Davis and is completely not representative of any public school program I've ever seen. Last year, when the Governator decided to cut the budget 10% across the board, we were going to lose funding for all elementary band and orchestra programs, and the community promptly raised over $400,000 for the "Save our Music" Campaign, and then voted to implement a parcel tax to cover the expenses for the next 3 years, saving the programs and teachers who had been pink-slipped.

I get to work with kids who are musically literate and have a musical maturity greater than some college ensembles. They can sight read anything and sound decent doing it. They regularly play grade 5 and sometimes grade 6 music. The non-audition ensemble, with which I get to work, regularly starts the year at grade 4 and works their way up, auditioning on grade 5 stuff by the end of the year. Last year as an undergraduate and now working towards my credential, this is experience I can't get anywhere else. I'm allowed to peruse a huge catalogue of music and choose pieces that I get to rehearse with the band and conduct in concert, going through the whole process as a director from start to finish and perfecting my skills and confidence at the podium. Right now I'm walking around with about 30 scores in my backpack preparing for a fundraiser for the kids: an all night band-geek-a-thon where I'm responsible for keeping them playing music -all sight reading- from midnight until 7:00am at which point they are to pull together, rehearse three pieces and perform a concert for those parents picking them up - with whatever lips they have left.

Basically, I'm spoiled for the rest of my career and have a template from which to work and build my own band programs. One that starts with strong elementary and junior high programs. 

Anyways, the Symphonic Band got their hands on a piece called Masada and have been working on it since January 5th - they're two and a half weeks in and still a little shaky. The piece is a programmatic work depicting a great siege of the Judean fortress, casting the Romans in sober, relentless 4/4 time and their Hebrew adversaries in complex dance rhythms (generally asymmetric meters that flop around i.e.  5/8 [7/8] changes from 3-2 [-2] to [2-] 2-3, mixed in with 2/4, 3/4 or 6/8 for good measure). I convinced the director to let me take the score home with me over the MLK weekend and obsessed over it for three days, trying to work out the rhythm patterns. The goal was to come in during their final period to put together some audition tapes for my meeting with faculty at UOP next Monday; hopefully to prove I'm a technically competent conductor when it comes to negotiating a teaching assistantship to support my graduate studies. I realize now that the video is not as impressive to look at when compared to the score (the composer or maybe publisher created his own meters to save on ink because the meter changes almost every bar). I had my head buried in the score, and couldn't think past the rhythms enough to do anything but mirror with my left hand, but it was a nice change from the slow, lyric pieces I normally get to work with (the ones the actual director would rather not conduct). In short, this is why I love what I do:

I get to work with exceptional musicians who bring energy and exuberance that only students can to a rehearsal. I get to engage both my creative muscle and theirs; they may know how to play their instruments, and well, but it's my job to teach and encourage them how to make music to the best of their abilities.

How Obama Can Fix Schools

Yesterday I came a cross a newspost titled "How Obama can fix schools" it was a digest of a Wall Street Journal article by New York City School Chancellor Joel Klein and Reverend Al Sharpton titled "Charter Schools can Close the Education Gap" The article presents a sob story of America's youth, particularly minorities who are suffering under the current school system and in some cases are being left four grade levels behind. The article goes on to champion the Education Equality Project which, while tossing accusations at the current system of schools, tows the line of No Child Left Behind. The EEP offers advice to the President Elect on how to close the achievement gap between white and minority students and beyond expanding federal support for charter schools, their first idea is "more stringent standards."

First, the federal government, working with the governors, should develop national standards and assessments for student achievement. Our current state-by-state approach has spawned a race to the bottom, with many states dumbing down standards to make it easier for students to pass achievement tests. Even when students manage to graduate from today's inner-city high schools, they all too frequently are still wholly unprepared for college or gainful employment.

I read this and almost had an aneurism, the mental equivalent of screaming "Are you ephing kidding me Ref?" at the top of your lungs at someone who cant hear you. Stricter standards mean more "assessment" more "accountability" and more "Enforcement" Which means more tests for students (less time spent learning), less freedom for teachers to decide how best to educate their students, and stricter punishments for teachers who don't have the resources to bring some of their students scores up to grade level save by teaching to the test, which is a strategy that not only rarely works, but denies the students any useful education.

I immediately ran to my bookshelf and dug out a few old textbooks, and rifled through the boxes in my closet to find some old essays from my education courses. Here's the thing, I never had to experience NCLB first hand, I graduated high school in 2002, a private high school so we didn't even have exit exams or star testing or whatever. My first contact with this program was studying it in education courses, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Now I work with, and am friends with many educators, all of whom have nothing but venomous words to spit about NCLB and how it's hindering the education of their students. It's not just the assessments and accountability that pressure teachers into teaching to the test and forgoing their duties to actually educate their students, it's the idea that these standards are doing more to hinder the education of their students than to help.

To make my point I'm going to lean heavily on a collection of essays both for and against standards, digest thirty pages into a few paragraphs and share them with you. The first of which is written by Deborah Meier titled "Educating a Democracy." This one essay had a lot to do with forming my own ideas of education. Meier states that the educational crisis facing our country is not the crisis presented in "A Nation at Risk," it is not based in economics and can not be solved with higher test scores, and our actions to improve education by implementing and enforcing standards in education have only caused a rift to widen within society.

"An understanding of this other crisis begins by noting that we have the lowest voter turnout by far of any modern industrial country; we are exceptional for the absence of responsible care for our most vulnerable citizens (we spend less on child welfare–baby care, medical care, family leave–than almost every competitor); we don’t come close to our competitors in income equity; and our high rate of (and investment in) incarceration places us in a class by ourselves."

"One important change has been in the nature of schooling. Our schools have grown too distant, too big, too standardized, too uniform, too divorced from their communities, too alienating of young from old and old from young."

"In such settings it’s hard to teach young people how to be responsible to others, or to concern themselves with their community."

"By shifting the locus of authority to outside bodies, it undermines the capacity of schools to instruct by example in the qualities of mind that schools in a democracy should be fostering in kids–responsibility for one’s own ideas, tolerance for the ideas of others, and a capacity to negotiate differences. "

"Because of the disconnection between the public and its schools, the power to protect or support them now lies increasingly in the hands of public or private bodies that have no immediate stake in the daily life of the students."

"We need to surround kids with adults who know and care for our children, who have opinions and are accustomed to expressing them publicly, and who know how to reach reasonable collective decisions in the face of disagreement. That means increasing local decision-making, and simultaneously decreasing the size and bureaucratic complexity of schools. Correspondingly, the worst thing we can do is to turn teachers and schools into the vehicles for implementing externally- imposed standards."

"A democracy in which less than half its members see themselves as "making enough difference" to bother to vote in any election is surely endangered–far more endangered, at risk, than our economy. It’s for the loss of belief in the capacity to influence the world, not our economic ups and downs, that we educators should accept some responsibility. What I have learned from thirty years in small powerful schools is that it is here above all that schools can make a difference, that they can alter the odds."

After six years of college there was one thing I learned that will be of more value to me in the real world than anything else; from calculus, stress (both personally and in structural geology) to composition of essays or symphonies, the one thing I learned that I value most was how to think critically and the ability to interact with and critique the society in which I live. It is this mindset, more than any skill that Meier is pushing, preparing and motivating students to go out into the real world and make a difference. Holding students and teachers accountable to scores on singular high stakes tests which don't go into any depth of studying a child's education beyond their ability to fill in bubbles has neither brought about a better America nor closed the achievement gap.

"Americans invented the modern, standardized, norm-referenced test. Our students have been taking more tests, more often, than any nation on the face of the earth, and schools and districts have been going public with test scores starting almost from the moment children enter school."

"We have test data for almost every grade thereafter in reading and math, and to some degree in all other subjects. This has been the case for nearly half a century."

"In short, we have been awash in accountability and standardization for a very long time. What we are missing is precisely the qualities that the last big wave of reform was intended to respond to: teachers, kids, and families who don’t know each other or each other’s work and don’t take responsibility for it. We are missing communities built around their own articulated and public standards and ready to show them off to others."

Meier finishes by bringing to light the problem of trying to tackle the achievement gap between students of differing socioeconomic standing with standardized testing.

"We can’t beat the statistical advantage on the next round of tests that being advantaged has over being disadvantaged; we can, however, substantially affect the gap between rich and poor where it will count, in the long haul of life."

In short, we can't begin to address the achievement gap that Sharpton and Klein are so worried about by enforcing more stringent standards and implementing more restrictions on the teachers of these kids. To tackle this problem, Educators need to be able to do their job and, prepare them for life outside of their classroom, to provide them with an education. I'm going to borrow the words of one of the President Elect's close personal domestic terrorist friends, William Ayers:

"The purpose of education in a democracy is to break down barriers, to overcome obstacles, to open doors, minds, and possibilities. Education is empowering and enabling; it points to strength, to critical capacity, to thoughtfulness and expanding capabilities. It aims at something deeper and richer than simply imbibing and accepting existing codes and conventions, acceding to whatever is before us. The larger goal of education is to assist people in seeing the world through their own eyes, interpreting and analyzing through their own experiences and thinking, feeling themselves capable of representing, manifesting, or even, if they choose, transforming all that is before them. Education, then, is linked to freedom, to the ability to see and also to alter, to understand and also to reinvent, to know and also to change to world as we find it."

Father of Nations

8 days ago I hopped in my car to go climbing and turned on the radio. Not commuting every day for over a week had created a void in my schedule for news absorbance. NPR was running a story that Israel had opened the border with Gaza and was allowing aid to reach the country after over a month of it being closed to all traffic and embargoed by sea. It was an olive branch offered in "good faith" to the leaders of Hamas to renegotiate the ceasefire that had ended recently. I thought to myself: "Oh wow, that's cool they didn't just start killing each other." Apparently there had been rocket fire launched from the strip over the past few days, no Israeli casualties, just terror and property damage, in fact the only casualties at that point had been two palestinian girls caught when a rocket fell short of it's intended target.

The next day I opened my browser to read: "200 dead in Israeli air strikes." We were told that Most of these were Hamas militants. Most. A Majority. 

101.

By Wednesday the death toll had doubled, 400 dead, not to mention the thousands wounded. And today, that border that was opened for the first time in months is now being crossed by the Israeli military.

To put this into context, Israel is about 150% the size of New Jersey, invading a state that is maybe twice the size of Washington D.C. This is similar to an eight year old blooding his 4 year old brother's nose for poking him repeatedly after he had told him to stop.

I'll be the first to say that I know nothing about living in a hostile environment, surrounded on all sides by people who are resentful of my existence, and refuse to recognize my very right to exist. But to me, the idea of "Israeli Deterrence" is thuggish and is no better than tactics used in gang warfare. "If you fuck with us, we'll fuck you up harder."

Many ask: "Well, what would you have them do? These are terrorists who will not negotiate with Israel" I can't answer that, as they are following the example we have set, one that almost the entire world disagrees with in hindsight. (One of the dissenters to this opinion, of course being Israel where Bush approval ratings are still sky high).

Israel has turned out to be the aggressor here, and it's easy to wag fingers at them. However, when confronted about the excessive violence on his part, the older sibling's response is almost always "But, but... he started it!" No one has the moral high ground here. Everyone is culpable, everyone is responsible for the ongoing violence, including the U.S. and U.N. This goes back 60 years and generations. There are many who would even trace this back to Ishmael and Isaac. 

Zionism, Terrorism, religious zealotry at it's best. I'm going to borrow from a debate I had a little while ago and lean on one of the brightest and most respected minds of the modern era, Albert Einstein.

"As long as there are Men, there will be War." 

Human nature is rooted in tribalism, whether that's ethnic or religiously motivated, there will always be "the other," "the outsider." Religious fanaticism and Nationalism only serve to extend this further.

It's not social darwinism, it's not divinely inspired, it's not the prevailing of the righteous or strong, it is simply human nature.

What's simply hilarious (in the laugh-so-you-don't-cry sense) is that this conflict between Israel and Palestine, our "War on Terror" and in truth, some of the largest or cruelest of wars and atrocities of the past 1000 years have been committed by followers Abrahamic religions against each other.

Holocaust. Inquisition. Jihad. Crusade. Committed all by greedy or malicious men hiding behind religion or more often, and with far more tragic results, hiding behind piety.

What's worse? The "big three" all trace their lineages back to the same tribe.

I don't know how to play the cymbals correctly.

I've just gone through and edited clips of video recorded from my last few rehearsals. I'm recording my conducting, it's necessary because I can't see how I look when I'm being me. Mirrors also don't work because the experience is so much different in front of a band. I'm pretty sure this isn't some illegal thing, I don't need waivers or anything since I capture any of my students, only their music. This is what I did all last year at DHS, and am continuing to do this year. I just figured I'd put a (short) segment up here as another installment of A Day in the Life. This life is free of busses and much more fun.

We were working on getting the third trumpets to acknowledge a triplet rhythm in the first few measures, which they got. I give the evil eye to the percussionists for a while... but really, who doesn't?

Warning: I set up my laptop next to the Oboe stand. My bad. 

Olbermann was wrong.

"Wha? John, say it ain't so." 

Ok, calm down and (re)watch his special comment from Monday and think about it.

Well, I'm not saying I disagree with him on any point he made, but for all his eloquence and vehemence, he missed the issue in favor of warm fuzzies.

Sure, he made me feel all those warm fuzzies, and he made the religious right look hypocritical and anything but Christlike, but this issue, marriage, is not about love.

There is no need for love to be legitimized by any institution -church or state- only by those involved.

Marriage, the marriage the homosexual community is fighting for, is marriage as a legal right. The "Gay agenda" is not about getting their unions recognized by any religious institution, this is not about love or God, or dissolving the sanctity of a sacrament. This issue is about property, it's about kinship, it's about custody, insurance, taxes.  Marriage in this instance is something created (appropriated) and recognized by the state, and is excluding a group people from sharing these rights based on a specific yet arbitrary characteristic. 

This issue is about our government's failure in enforcing separation of church and state, and now it's gone further - a proposition passed with a simple majority with the intent to modify the state constitution to exclude a certain class of people from equal recognition under the law on very real issues (property, kinship, custody... etc.).

When James Madison introduced the amendments to the constitution that would become the bill of rights, he made specific mention of this problem.

"But I confess that I do conceive, that in a government modified like this of the United States, the great danger lies rather in the abuse of the community than in the legislative body. The prescriptions in favor of liberty, ought to be levelled against that quarter where the greatest danger lies, namely, that which possesses the highest prerogative of power: But this [is] not found in either the executive or legislative departments of government, but in the body of the people, operating by the majority against the minority."

I hear all the time about how the State Supreme Court overturned the "Will of the People" but the court's job is to use the constitution to serve as a watchdog against abuses of any and all in power, be they by the executive or legislative branches of government, or by the majority of the people. This is one such instance where we have witnessed the "tyranny of the majority" and when their initiative was overturned by the courts, they moved to change the state constitution to make their discrimination legal. It takes a supermajority of the legislature to make any changes to the constitution, but only a simple majority to use the constitution to deny the legal rights that only come with marriage to a class of citizens. That's 50% plus 1 vote.

The ACLU in northern California has since filed suit with the State Supreme Court, basing their claims that Proposition 8: 

"...makes far reaching changes to the nature of our governmental plan by compromising the core constitutional principle of equal protection laws, depriving a vulnerable minority of fundamental rights, inscribing discrimination based on a suspect classification into the Constitution and destroying the courts' quintessential power and role of protection minorities and enforcing the guarantee of equal protection under the law."

Olbermann was wrong. This is not about permanence, or happiness, or legitimacy of love, it's about the legitimacy of a certain group of people as citizens of our government, legitimizing the homosexual community as a minority worthy of the same protections under our constitution as any other. 

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...."

A friend of mine, after six years of school and obtaining degrees in music and engineering, is now pursuing a graduate degree in theology at Berkeley. He raised a discussion on Proposition 8 citing all sorts of things regarding the family as a sociological construct and raising questions about the various arguments for and against gay marriage. I wanted to share my response to his ideas, because it seems I've had this conversation all too often in the past month or so:

The issue here on proposition 8 is not a sociological or theological one. It's not about unions and procreation or family integrity with only one type of parent. Proposition 8 brings to light a serious issue of civil liberties guaranteed in the U.S. constitution.

What's happened to spawn this issue is our government has failed us at both the state an federal level. The establishment clause in the first amendment guarantees freedom of religion by all citizens by enforcing freedom from a state religion. Because our culture is one of monogamy, the state has appropriated the term "marriage" from religion for the civil and legally binding contracts into which people enter, and this is a big problem.

When Christians thump their bibles and decry "gay rights" citing the "sanctity of marriage" they are confusing the sacrament and the secular contract. These are two very different things.

The state supreme court found that a ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional, based on our state constitution. The very idea of denying a significant minority basic civil rights based on a single quality that separates them from other was found to be what is is: legislating bigotry.

Propositions allow initiatives to bypass the legislature and go straight to voters, and basically what's going on is a special interest doesn't like the rules and is trying to change the game.

The proposition that should be on the ballot is one that would remove the term "marriage" from our state laws and tax system, replacing it with "civil union," as that is what it is, a contract. We should be leaving the sacrament of marriage to the churches, and if they would rather discriminate based on sexual orientation, (a very Christlike behavior, I might add) that's their prerogative.

The state does not enjoy such a luxury.

Besides, on the issue of procreation: homosexual unions are pro life. Think about it. The pope should reach deep into that hat of his and pull out some good old fashioned pragmatism.