Prop 8 – Will All the Bigots Please Leave the Room
I don't usually blog about political issues but I felt I had to say something in this case.
Being a regular reader of Daring Fireball I am well aware that John Gruber's politics are quite a bit different than my own. I really don't see that as a problem. I am fine with different views since they often help me clarify my own. But last week he posted a note about Google coming out against Prop 8 in California with this commentary:
Good for Google. I hope they put some money behind it too; anti-gay bigots are putting a ton of money into a campaign to pass this initiative.
I have no issue with Google stating their position or with John Gruber stating his. But it seems to imply that anyone who supports Prop 8 must be an "anti-gay bigot". It is possible that Gruber didn't mean to lump everyone together on this but it sure seems this way. I support Prop 8 in California and do not consider myself an anti-gay bigot so I thought it might be useful to make a few points about what is going on in California from my perspective.
What is Prop 8? Prop 8 is a proposed amendment to the California State Constitution that would establish that marriage is only valid between a man and a woman. Basically it means that same-sex couples cannot get married.
Erroneous Fact - Gary Marriage in California is to Establish Equal Rights
Many are saying that gay marriage in California is necessary so that same-sex couples have equal rights. The California Supreme Court has specifically stated that this is not the case:
We note that although much of the academic literature discussing the legal recognition of same-sex relationships frequently uses the term “domestic partnership” to describe a legal status that accords only comparatively few legal rights or obligations to same-sex couples, the current California statutes grant same-sex couples who choose to become domestic partners virtually all of the legal rights and responsibilities accorded married couples under California law . . .
In light of the comprehensive nature of the rights afforded by California’s domestic partnership legislation, the status of such partnership in California is comparable to the status designated as a “civil union” in statutes enacted in recent years in Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Vermont.
This is not about equal legal rights. The court that supported gay marriage stated so clearly.
A Question of Religious Freedom
So what is it about? I will not pretend to know all the factors at play here. But I can tell you that a key component of this debate is religious freedom.
Many people say that allowing two people that love each other to get married doesn't harm anyone else. Therefore, if you are opposed to gay marriage you must be a bigot. What is a bigot? Here is a definition from WordNet.
a prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from his own
The idea goes that since same-sex marriage doesn't infringe upon the rights of anyone else, if you are opposed to gay marriage it must be because you are intolerant of same-sex marriages because they differ from the type of marriage you believe in. Basically, you don't like same-sex marriages simply because they are different.
This is far too simplistic a notion.
Legally recognizing same-sex marriages has far reaching effects that go beyond the two people getting married. Many religions believe that homosexual relations are morally wrong. This is true of most Christian religions. You may agree or disagree with that belief, but one of principles this country was founded upon was that of religious freedom. Thus the question arises - should a priest be forced to perform a wedding ceremony for a same-sex couple? I think that most people would say no. In that case the same-sex couple's right to marry would be taking away the priest's right to practice his religion.
But, you say, that wouldn't happen. The government would not force its standards on a religion. The same-sex couple could just find a priest who wasn't opposed to same-sex marriage to perform the ceremony. But that isn't what has been happening.
In Boston, where same-sex marriages are legally recognized, Catholic Charities have ceased to offer adoption services. Why? Because if they denied adoption to a married same-sex couple then they would be practicing discrimination and would therefore be punished.
This is not the only case. Doctors in California have been forced to provide fertility treatment despite the fact that they claimed it was against their religious beliefs.
So, you have to ask yourself a very important question - how important is religious freedom? When does the state have the right to force you to do something that is against your religion?
This is the real question revolving around Prop 8. I have not spoken to anyone in California that is against homosexuals having all the rights that would accompany a civil union. As I stated previously, those already exist. The gay marriage initiative is much more a push to tell religions that they do not have a right to believe that homosexuality is morally wrong. Whether or not you support gay marriage you must ask yourself if government should be making this declaration.
Why a Constitutional Amendment?
A constitutional amendment seems pretty heavy handed. So why is this approach being taken in California? Because there are no other options left on the table for those who oppose gay marriage. In 2002, Prop 22 was passed which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. This was passed via ballot initiative where the people of California actually voted on the measure.
So, what happened?
By a 1 vote majority a split California court decided that the definition of marriage being between a man and woman was unconstitutional. By one vote a court decided that gay marriage was constitutionally protected. This despite a popular vote that clearly said the opposite.
Opponents to gay marriage were left with no other option than a constitutional amendment.
Think about this. Five judges were able to declare that they knew better than the majority of voters in California and totally disregard the voice of the voters. Ask yourself how American that sounds.
Is Everyone a Bigot?
So, the question still remains, if you support Prop 8 are you an "ant-gay bigot"? Maybe. If you support Prop 8 are you an anti-religious bigot. Maybe. I am sure that there are supporters on both side of the issue that could easily fall into the bigot category. But there are many who are not. There are many supporting Prop 8 who just want the right to believe and practice their religion. There are many who believe that if the redefinition of the word "marriage" is going to come about after thousands of years, it should happen because the people of California or the United States, or their legislatures have voted to make it so. It should not happen because 5 judges decided that was what they believed. I am also confident that there are many who oppose Prop 8 who sincerely believe that gay marriage should be a right and who may not have even thought about the religious freedom component of this.
Believe what you want to on this issue but don't throw around the bigot charge. All it does is prevent people from dealing with the real issues.
TonchiDot Sekai Camera
Check out this video of the Sekai Camera shown at TechCrunch 50. The possibilities for this type of thing are incredible. We have always wanted to do some sort of virtual history tours. This would be a very cool way of doing it.
Setting Up @ Contexts in Things
I have just started using Things, a new GTD application for the Mac and am really liking it. I saw this one tip in the forums and wanted to document it a little more clearly. Basically this shows you how to setup contexts in Things using tags without overwhelming your menu bar with a gazillion tags.
Open Tags Window
Create an @ tag
Add Nested Tags
Add nested tags for all of the contexts you want to setup.
Here I have setup four contexts, Grocery Store, Phone, Online and Email. Now assign these tags to some tasks.
Select a Focus
If there are tasks in the focus with your tags you will see the @... in the tag bar.
Click on @ tag
When you click on the @ tag you will see all of the sub items.
Filter List
You can then filter the list based on the context.
The Business of Software Conference (Part 2)
I decided that trying to go through every presentation was going to be more than I was capable of. So, to finish off my review of the conference, I am just going to talk about the presenters that were most pertinent to me an my business at our current stage of development. That is not to say that the presenters I don't mention were bad, it is just that their topics weren't directly applicable to my situation.
Day 1 (Continued)
The overall highlight of the conference for me was Dharmesh Shah from OnStartups.com and the founder of HubSpot. The guy is brilliant. It was clear he didn't have a set presentation but instead just some guidelines that he meandered through. It was all fascinating.
A lot of the presentation had to do with metrics. How much does it cost to acquire a customer? How much is that customer worth once you have acquired them? What is the typical lifespan of a customer? To all of these questions my answer was a solid, "I have no idea" so obviously I have some work to do.
He also talked about the Customer Happiness Index (CHI). The basic idea is to measure actions that tell you how much a customer is using your product and figure out what actions are likely to prompt them to upgrade or cancel your service. By doing this you can develop some very good financial projections and hopefully see what is/isn't working before it is too late turn that information into useful actions. Once again, we aren't doing much in this area so it is something that we want to start looking at right away.
Another great tip was to test the advertising of the product using Adwords before you develop/launch it. A little too late for our current product, but something to keep in mind for future ventures.
Another one I really liked was Jessica Livingston, author of "Founders At Work". In the book she interviews a bunch of founders. I read it last year and it was one of the best books on entrepreneurism I have ever read. The stories were all fascinating and contained the types of anecdotes that every founder craves. She mentioned that she might start looking at founders who weren't successful, maybe a book titled "Founders Who Failed" (my term, not hers)? I hope she does something along those lines. Information about failed startups would probably be more valuable than the stories of the successes. It is great hear about those who won the battle, but sometimes you want to talk to the guys who found the mines before your cross the field.
Finishing of the first day was Paul Kenny from Ocean Learning. He is a sales consultant from the UK. A lot of what he talked about was similar to stuff I had read in Jeff Thull's book "Exceptional Selling". He had some great tips but it all boiled down to, "Care about your customer and do what is best for them." If your solution isn't the right thing for them, tell them so. It will build credibility for the future. Don't talk to them about what your product does. See if you can sell them solutions to their problems. Great stuff that I really already know but don't always practice. He mentioned that there is a salesman in the UK that is quite a bit older than him but still comes to his conference twice a year. The guy says it is to keep his skills fresh because it is so easy to slip into bad habits. So true.
Day 2
Day 2 had more presentations that weren't directly applicable to our business right than day 1, but there was still some excellent stuff in there.
Tom Jennings from Summit Partners gave a great rundown of how venture capitalists work with founders and how they make money. He seemed like a very straight shooter and probably a great guy to do business with. I learned a ton. Don't know if I will ever be in the position to take venture funding but, if I am, I will definitely refer back to a lot of what he said.
Key takeaways for me were:
The Business of Software Conference (Part 1)
On my way back from the Business of Software Conference in Boston. I debated hard about coming to this one, not because I didn't think it would be good, it was just an inconvenient date. I am so glad that I went though. I left with so many ideas.
There really was a large cross section of attendees, from small startups (like me) to large, established companies. Because of that there was really a wide range of topics. Not all of them were applicable to my situation but enough were to make it well worth it.
Seth Godin started off the conference with a great presentation on marketing. I have seen/read quite a bit of his stuff before but he always gets you thinking about new ways to reach out to people. We have been struggling with some marketing decisions lately and his presentation really helped me realize where we need to focus our efforts.
Next was Jason Fried from 37Signals. I had pretty much seen this presentation before online but it was still valuable. Jason obviously has some strong opinions. My only suggestion for the presentation would be that he start out by stating that a lot of the principles he espouses are only possible if you have a certain type of business model. He talks about avoiding feature creep and maintaining a 4-day workweek. But, if you are selling single license software you have to implement new features in order to sell upgrades. And, if you are a consulting company who bills hourly you may or may not be able to take Fridays off. I guess that the real message is that you need to move your business model to a SaaS structure, then you can do a lot of the things that he talks about.
All that being said, he has a lot of good points and listening to him always makes me think about how we can simplify things. Our product, ScreenSteps was developed right after reading their book, Getting Real.
Eric Sink was next with a comparison of a product manager to a parent. In some ways it was geared towards a company that is larger than we are but there was still quite a bit of good information there. The basic idea was to imagine your product as a child. At different stages of its development it will need different things.
After lunch (which was quite good) came the Pecha Kucha presentations. In case you don't know Pecha Kucha means (at least at this conference) that each presenter gets to go through 20 slides in 20 seconds. The slides advance automatically so it can be a bit tricky. Some did better than others but there was actually quite a bit of good information here. My favorites were:
- Jason Cohen who had some great marketing ideas.
- Lou Franco who had some great insights into how to use funneling techniques outside of your website, and
- Alexis Ohanian was flat out hilarious with with Web 2.0 parody.
That is all I have for now. I will post more about the conference later.
Two Interesting Perspectives on the Current Financial Crisis
A lot of things are being thrown out there right now about the current financial meltdown. I have heard a lot of talk on the various news programs that if the U.S. taxpayer doesn't bailout Wall Street then we are headed for another Great Depression.
Jeffrey A. Miron had an interesting piece at CNN.com. He is definitely a contrarian when compared to what seems to be the current conventional wisdom. But a lot of it sounds right to me.
Another great resource is this video from Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. It is about an hour long but very informative. A couple points that I thought were interesting:
Though I am currently opposed to the bailout proposals I must admit that I have my doubts as to whether my position is correct or not. A new great depression is a pretty scary thing. But it seems that everyone who is pushing the bailout has a strong vested interest in this thing not blowing up. The business correspondents are most likely heavily invested in the stock market which will take a big hit if this happens. Lawmakers are going to get a lot of the blame if this doesn't get fixed. So, who do you trust? This people that are proposing the "fix" are the very ones who created the problem.
I guess now it is just a game of chicken. Will the lawmakers opposed to this bailout be willing to chance a new great depression? And, if we avoid it now are we just delaying the inevitable?