Bicoastal Bigotry

I live in the heart of a famously liberal county just north of San Francisco, but because I have an ailing mother in Florida and a husband who consults in Memphis, I've spent most of the past month in the South. It's been an interesting spot to ride out the electoral upheavals that have re-shaped the nation’s socio political landscape. The cultural divide between the Left Coast and the New South, once very wide, now seems much slimmer in ways that are good, bad, and flat-out ugly.
The good: Florida—comedian Rush Limbaugh's home state, bristling with McCain/Palin signs and bustling with pickup trucks bearing state-sponsored anti-reproductive-rights license plates—was carried by Barack Hussein Obama. The bad: back home in California—you know, that bastion of secular humanism and laissez-faire tolerance—The Church of Latter-Day Saints successfully re-cast a key state proposition to align with the Mormon agenda, and convinced the electorate to deny constitutional rights to a minority population.
 Now the ugly: in suburban Memphis, I was party to a casual display of racism so naked and extreme that even after hearing the phrase twice I had to Google it to believe it.
Answerjack was buying a used computer, dirt cheap, from a real-estate broker/substitute teacher who had bright burgundy hair and a shiny Christian cross around her neck. She met us at the door of her house, a tschotke-and-fake-foliage preserve steeped in the reek of cigarette smoke and plug-in air fresheners, and started yammering the instant we stepped over the threshold.
One of the hazards of Answer’s line of work is the sort of perfect stranger who feels compelled to Tell All about her or his experience in The Hospital. This good old gal was definitely that sort of stranger. She regaled us with the tiresome details of her inpatient detox from a 300-pill-a-month Xanax habit (“Doctors got me addicted”) as Jack disconnected the computer and I wrote her a check. As we inched toward the door, this sharp little pebble bounced out of the avalanche of verbiage: "weekends at the detox center were the absolute worst, because of all the jungle bunnies."
 “That’s odd,” I thought. “Didn’t 'jungle bunny 'used to be a racial pejorative?” In the context of her rant, I figured it was some unfortunately named drug reference. Then, incredibly, she said it again. There could be no mistaking that she was referring to humans, not pharmaceuticals.
Answerjack and I traded stupid white people looks. “Hey, you’re the one who’s been working in the New South,” my puzzled frown said to him. “In 2008, does anyone here really say words like ‘jungle bunny’ and mean it?”
“What the fuck?” answered Jack's stricken stare, quite clearly. We left in a hurry without smiting the stupid bitch, which I deeply regret. In the car I pulled out my iPhone and Googled the words, just to make sure their meaning hadn’t changed in the 50 years since I’d last heard them, on a grade-school playground. Yep, only one meaning.
My thought then was that the woman’s crude bigotry had to be some regional by-product of the notoriously unstable mix of religion and ignorance that we Left Coast types like to think is confined to the historically benighted South. Then I came home—to freakin’ California, people—and stepped into a state-scaled illustration of exactly the same sort of intolerance that I had found so horrifying in one dumb cracker a couple days before. In 2008, does anyone here really listen to words like “faggot” and "dyke" and vote in support of discrimination? Apparently, in 42 of California’s 58 counties, they do.
 
Here Phyllis Lyon, 84, and Del Martin, 87, gay rights pioneers and partners for nearly 60 years, threaten of the sanctity of marriage at their wedding in June 2008. Del died a couple of months later. If proponents of Proposition 8 have their way, this marriage, along with an additional 18,000+ marriages performed in California, would be rendered null and void. You can sign this petition if you think that's wrong.