On the Beat
Thursday, November 13, 2008
TRIPPY TIMES: What will things be like now that Barack Obama has been elected president? Here are a few off-the-wall predictions, although who’s to say what’s too trippy in times like these:
• Outgoing President Bush accepts Sarah Palin’s petition to allow Alaska to secede from the U.S. and become independent. Alaska then affiliates with the OPEC oil cartel.
• Former Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice becomes a lecturer at UCSB, moves to Isla Vista, and starts giving kegger parties. Is romantically linked with a 23-year-old assistant professor of music.
On the Beat
• Rep. Lois Capps is named secretary of state, goes to Cuba, and lifts the Cuban embargo under a President Obama executive order. Santa Barbara Mayor Marty Blum takes her place in Congress. Ty Warner buys 10 hotels in Havana.
• President Obama appoints ex-opponent John McCain ambassador to Vietnam, where his wife Cindy gets the national beer concession.
• Four U.S. Supreme Court justices retire, replaced by President Obama with the only four honest judges in Chicago.
• Obama approves bailouts for 12 major financial institutions that reaped unconscionable profits — if they donate those same profits for college scholarships.
• Former vice president Dick Cheney is named ambassador to Alaska — if he pledges not to go hunting with Alaska’s President Palin.
• When a fifth Supreme Court justice dies, President Obama appoints Hillary Clinton as a replacement, thus assuring that she will not challenge him for the presidency in 2012. Former president Bill Clinton becomes her law clerk.
• Obama appoints former president George W. Bush ambassador to Iran. His mission: End the nuclear threat or don’t come home.
• President Obama decides to pull out all U.S. troops from Iraq by Christmas, if the airlines agree to waive baggage checking fees.
• When gas hits $10 a gallon, Governor Schwarzenegger digs a hole and uses his Hummer as a planter for his Yule tree.
• President Palin of Alaska asks the U.S. to allow the state to return to the nation. Says she intends to run for president in 2012. Congress refuses on a unanimous vote.
• Palin petitions Canada for annexation, says she wants to run for prime minister. Canada refuses. Cheney wounds Palin’s husband in a hunting accident.
• President Obama installs 4,000 wind generators outside Congress, the blasts of hot air supplying the entire District of Columbia with energy.
• China and Japan agree to forgive the multibillion-dollar U.S. debt if the nation agrees not to declare bankruptcy.
• Hawai‘i declares independence, balancing its budget by luring Chinese and Japanese tourists with cheap golf fees. The two nations offer to buy Hawai‘i. Ty Warner also offers to buy Hawai‘i. He wins.
• Obama cuts middle-class taxes, and banks, seeking to avoid prosecution, slash mortgages for millions of homeowners. This sparks a major economic boom. Construction workers swarm to Hawai‘i to find work building golf courses.
• The Dow skyrockets, reviving everyone’s 401(k)s and IRAs. Savings boom. Mortgage rates drop to 2.5 percent, leading to a boom in home ownership.
• The U.S. Supreme Court okays same-sex marriage. Fifteen members of Congress immediately tie the knot.
WRONG LOVING: (This is for real.) In 1958, a married couple, ironically named the Lovings, were slumbering peacefully in their bed in Virginia when police broke in and arrested them. Their “crime”: living together. Police also hoped to catch them in the act of sex, another crime.
Why? Were they gay, breaking a Virginia law? No, Richard Loving was a heterosexual white man, who had just married Mildred Jeter, of African and Rappahannock Native-American descent. They had wed in the District of Columbia to evade Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law (“Racial Integrity Act”) banning marriage between whites and non-whites. But they were charged with breaking Virginia’s law against whites cohabiting with non-whites and faced one to five years in prison.
Only a decade earlier, California became the first state in the union, since Ohio just after the Civil War, to declare its anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional (Perez v. Sharp) under the 14th Amendment. It had been illegal for whites to marry blacks, Asians, or Filipinos starting in 1850, when California was admitted to the union.
A Virginia judge suspended the Lovings’ sentence on condition that they leave the state and not return for 25 years. The couple moved to D.C. but in 1963 decided to appeal. The same judge not only refused to reconsider, but wrote a strongly worded defense of racial segregation. The Virginia Supreme Court invalidated the sentence but upheld the Racial Integrity Act.
Then, in 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, struck down a Florida ban on racial cohabitation, but not its law against interracial marriage.
In 1967, 17 southern states were still enforcing laws against interracial marriage. But that year, the Lovings’ case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. It ruled unanimously against all miscegenation laws, finding that marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man.” (And woman?)
Words to remember when, and if, California’s just-passed Proposition 8, adding a ban on same-sex marriage to the state’s Constitution, reaches the High Court.
Barney Brantingham can be reached at barney@independent.com or 805-965-5205. He writes online columns throughout the week and a print column on Thursdays.