What would Wyoming do?

I watched the Cheney family asininity unfurl with just about as much pleasure as anyone who enjoys a good public life versus private life train wreck.  For those who don't follow these obscure tidbits (& I grant you, it is obscure or at least deserves to be) one of Dick Cheney's daughters is gay & the other one is running for public office on a party ticket that explicitly does not support marriage equality.

This is not the first time a Cheney has been gay & another has run for public office on a party ticket that is described as anti-gay by everyone except the party themselves.  I know, they claim they are inclusive & maybe they really believe it, but as a straight person affiliated with neither party I promise you aren't.  "God wouldn't like it" is not a good reason for doing anything & certainly doesn't undo any harm you do in insert-deity-of-choice's name.  I'll stop ranting now.  Because I like to offend as many people as I possibly can, I am going to call them Gay Sister & Party Sister.

So, Gay Sister has been trotted out for previous elections to wave to the crowd & maybe you think she could have taken the opportunity to denounce her family's values, but she didn't.  She is not the first person to be exploited by her family for their own gain & she won't be the last.  However, what a person will take from her parents is a helluva lot more than she will take from her sister & way-way more than her spouse will take from same. 

In short, Party Sister went on the public record saying she did not believe Gay Sister had the right to marry a woman, should have the right to marry a woman or was even already married to a woman & then Gay Sister's wife told her to shut her yap.  She was much more eloquent than me (who isn't) & wrote a lyrical list about joining in celebration & enjoying hospitality etc. but I will paraphrase: Wow, what a hypocrite you are.  Either you know you are wrong & you're pandering for votes or you really are a douche.  Scratch that, either way you are a douche. 

Party Sister entered the race with a lot more support than she has now.  That fishing license gaffe didn't help (Party Sister applied for a fishing license as a state resident but did not meet the one year residence criteria that defines state resident for the purposes of applying for a fishing license.  She apologized, paid the fine & then blamed the CLERK WHO SOLD HER THE LICENSE for not defining the terms properly).  Her know-it-all swagger probably is not helping much either.  & maybe, just maybe people who pride themselves on "Equal Rights" are not all that keen to be told who is more or less equal than anyone else.  It is the state motto, after all.

Anyway.  Today in 1867 Wyoming granted women the right to vote.  Yes, you read that right, more than 50 years before the same was a twinkle in Washington's eye (the 19th amendment was PROPOSED in 1919, a handy little mnemonic if you want to dazzle with dates), before Wyoming was even a state, the women of Territory of Wyoming had been casting ballots.  Wyoming might be big on beef/moose/deer/let's just say meat eating, gun toting & letting sleeping dogs lie but that doesn't mean they are completely backwards.  At least once, they were decades ahead of their time. 

For the record, Party Sister's opponent (her political opponent, not the one that is married to her sister...& her sister) is also against marriage equality.  So maybe that state motto is just for the license plates.  Nope, not even there.