Your Bowers Of Flowers Bloom In The Spring

The late Bush administration was able to definitively push the Supreme Court to the Right when Alito replaced O'Conner. It may be sometime before the Court tilts Left, Mostly depending on who dies next and who is President when it happens.

Conservative courts are minimalist rather than active. In this kind of environment, States rights shine. In the South, if the Right can retain it's populist, fear based, White racist hegemony, progressive politics may suffer a setback. It's not clear. Voter demographics are changing in the South and the most stalwart social conservatives are aging and dying off rapidly. Most voters today in the old Confederacy and it's Midwestern satellites, don't remember the strictly segregated Jim Crow era. They don't secretly yearn for the return of Lynch Law and the five o'clock whistle.

Where I live, in California, it is a different matter. No place in the World today, has the kind of culturally diverse and tolerant population that we do. Even people from traditional and repressive societies tend to support progressive social policies. One reason they do, is because they realize how much better an open society is to live in, than wherever it is they came from. It's why they're here. Another is that extreme tolerance, is vital for them to maintain aspects of their own foreign cultures, that are often personally offensive to the majority of their neighbors.

California is socially liberal and rapidly becoming more so. People are moving toward the goal of maximizing personal choice on lifestyle issues. Support for women's reproductive rights is now overwhelming here, despite heavy immigration from Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, where that is not the norm. The mainstreaming of homosexuality is another issue, where this is true. The passage of Proposition 8 last year, was not significant as an expression of support for traditional values. It was significant that traditionalists even felt such an amendment was necessary and because of how small the margin it passed by was. In a year or two, Prop 8 will be overturned and gay rights will cease to be an issue. This will end up being a benefit to the Right, as homosexuals tend to be otherwise socially and fiscally conservative, many will return to the fold of the Republican Party.

Read the very interesting new polling results from California here, from the Associated Press.