Though much-vaunted for being the bastion of liberalism in America, California is actually a very divided state, with the hippy-dippy liberals living amid the swirling, crenelated parapets in the north and the closed-minded, stone-age thinkers manning the bastions of the massive, hulking fastness that is the Orange County Wall. It is a state that elects a remarkably high number of Republican governors and the one that bestowed the benighted rule of Ronald Reagan on an unwitting America. They have, once again, managed to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory by repealing a state law that granted the legal right of marriage to same-sex couples. Amidst the delirious self-congratulation that was (is) the week after having elected Obama, the disgusting bigoted extrusion of Proposition 8 blights the landscape otherwise illuminated by the bright, new dawn of hope and change. Or something like that. Other states banned gay marriage as well, but it is in California that it will affect the most people, with voters having used their mighty power to annul tens of thousands of marriages overnight. An incredible feat, to be sure and one over which many drunken high-fives were doubtless shared. Doubtless, too, in the grand tradition of bigotry, some of the high-fives were traded by outwardly macho, but inwardly very uncertain and slightly sweaty men, who do everything in their power to resist the strange tingling sensation they feel when their fingers linger just a little too long or they frame a gaze just a little too openly and they scream away their arousal with lewd comments about someone's "rack" or call for a round of shots for their buddies. The self-denial and self-hatred of the bigot notwithstanding, Keith Olbermann put on the velvet glove for his latest screed, which, at six minutes, is short---for him---and very even-toned---for him---and very touching in many ways. It is a plaintive appeal to reason, with the question: "seriously, what does it matter to you if gay people want to be married?" <media src="http://www.youtube.com/v/cVUecPhQPqY" caption="MSNBC Keith Olbermann on Prop 8, Marriage" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVUecPhQPqY" author="Keith Olbermann" source="YouTube" align="center" class="frame"> Olbermann's plea is unlikely to get the attention of those most in need of hearing it. He finishes up by citing Iranian poet Omar Khayyam---always a sure-fire winner among America's most-bigoted idiots.