Users/queerbychoice - Yuba-Sutter Wiki

QueerByChoice's Statistics

Edits	Pages Created	Files Contributed	First Edit Date	Last Edit	Last Page Edited
7846	857	361	2009-04-02 13:39:17	2009-11-20 17:21:54	Sutter Buttes

About Me

Me in a field of lupine in Jackson Demonstration State Forest, near Fort Bragg, July 2009.Hi. I'm the owner of the QueerByChoice.com website. I grew up in the Sacramento area, but in 2007 I fell in love with a Marysville resident. In January 2009, I moved to Marysville to be with her. We have two dogs, one cat, one mouse, and three tanks of fish. I like to grow locally native plants in the back yard garden—my favorites are lupines, but I'm also growing buckthorns, coyote mints, godetias, monkeyflowers, tulips, and willowherbs. I work from home as a freelance consulting editor, although I'm currently underemployed due to the recent economic collapse.

In the summer, my fiancée and I often go camping, especially in Plumas and Nevada Counties, so I've posted pictures here of some of those campsites. We've also taken day trips to Spenceville State Wildlife Area (where she proposed to me!) and various spots along the shores of the Yuba River and Feather River.

I created the Yuba-Sutter Wiki in April 2009 and the Marriage Equality Wiki in June 2009. But although I'm currently the most active contributor to both of them, I'm not the owner of either of them. They are wikispot wikis, and as such, every page on each of them is owned by its entire respective community. If you have a problem with the way a particular wiki page is being edited, please make a comment on the "Talk" page where the problem occurs. Then everyone in the wiki community can discuss your problem and reach consensus. Note that deleting content without a good reason is usually not appropriate.

About My Username

My username should not be interpreted as implying that all queer people chose to be queer. Different queer people have different experiences and are free to form different opinions accordingly. I am asserting that I chose to be queer, and I feel the choice I made was a good, brave, and wise choice to live up to the moral mandates of my own conscience and not to let the pressures of a fearful society deter me. Whether other people feel they chose to love the people and/or gender(s) they do is for them to decide.

Why Same-Sex Marriage Matters to Me

Me in Cayucos, near San Luis Obispo, January 2008.In 2008, my fiancée and I got engaged. Then the California Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. However, my fiancée had a registered domestic partnership from 1999, the first year they were available in California, and hadn't yet saved up enough money to hire a lawyer to have it legally dissolved—it hadn't seemed that urgent when the government wouldn't recognize our marriage anyway. After same-sex marriage was legalized, she took a temporary second job and earned enough that she hired a lawyer and filed for legal dissolution of her domestic partnership. Unfortunately, by then there wasn't time for the court to finalize her dissolution before Proposition 8 passed. For that reason, we have still not been able to get legally married.

My fiancée is the only person I've ever moved in with, the only woman I've ever even kissed. The government won't recognize our marriage, even though it recognizes the marriages of every cheating, abusive, drug-addict who's been divorced 17 times already and is marrying someone younger than his or her grandchildren—as long as the spouses happen to have been born as opposite sexes, or one has undergone a sex-change operation resulting in the spouses being opposite sexes.

The fact that many churches campaigned to call off our wedding gives me a very low opinion of the "morals" preached by those churches. If your church believes it would be more "moral" for me to heartlessly dump my adoring fiancée for no other reason than that she happened to be born into the same gender that I was, then I consider your church to be immoral, degenerate, disgusting, an abomination, and a perversion of all that is good in the world. Such a church is opposed to my loving a good and generous person who deserves and has more than earned my love. To oppose love is to oppose all that is good in the world; to oppose love is the very definition of evil.

But wait—perhaps your church doesn't oppose my loving her, per se! Perhaps your church just wants me to heartlessly dump her and go marry a man and devote myself to loving that man first and foremost. Perhaps your church would grudgingly allow me to still give her some sort of secondary, purely platonic love, provided that I would agree to use a definition of "love" that doesn't involve regretting breaking her heart. Athough if I did continue to give her any sort of love at all, your church would probably still suspect that there was something gay about it and treat everything I do with severe supicion. Gosh, thanks.

I have more to say about this in my profile on the Marriage Equality Wiki.

Comments:

2009-04-03 Hey, I looked up the CSS file, and you need to alter the top of layout.css. It has a 15px nudge (twice, once for Internet Explorer, once for everybody else). Replace both times it says "15px" with "0", and it looks fine.

#banner {
  margin: 0px;
  padding-top: 0px;
  padding-bottom: 0px;
  background-position: 0 -17px;
  _background-position: 0 -85px; /*IE Hack, draws from bottom rather than top */
}

See ebg13 for an example. And welcome to Wiki Spot! —Evan 'JabberWokky' Edwards

Thank you! —queerbychoice

2009-04-04 15:07:24 Glad you got it working! By the way, you might want to reconsider having that many tabs and just provide links from the Front Page. That way it won't wrap around on smaller screens and make the site more "busy". (Just a suggestion, feel free to ignore it) ;) —JabberWokky

2009-04-17 07:33:10 Sometime in the next week I'm going to start a Help with CSS entry, and one of the things is an example of how to change the local icon for Wikipedia. If you're interested in doing that here, I'd like a wiki to cite as an example of what it looks like (since you use it so much right now). —JabberWokky

Yes, actually, I'm very interested in doing that. —queerbychoice

2009-06-07 12:07:40 Thanks: great edit and good catch. —JasonAller

2009-07-24 18:34:18 Fantastic list of Wally Herger links at the Chico Wiki. Thanks for your help on all those pages there! —RyanMikulovsky

2009-08-05 15:48:33 Nice shrub photos! —JabberWokky

2009-09-01 01:17:55 Thanks for creating the Yuba-Sutter Wiki. You have put a lot of time and effort into it obviously. It is off to a great start with your many photos as well. Good work! —24.10.86.156

Thank you! And thank you also for your contributions to it today. —queerbychoice

2009-09-08 15:45:01 Hey there, somewhere in my todo list I planned to put together a Marysville/Yuba City wiki, but it looks like you've got an awesome start on it already. I have the domains marysvillewiki and yubacitywiki (.com/.net/.org) that I'd be happy to donate to the project. Just let me know if you'd like to use either for the yubasutter wiki here. Great job you've done so far and great photos! —Rodney

Wow, what a generous offer! Unfortunately, using either one of them seems like it would be a little misleading, since it's a wiki for both (both entire counties, even) rather than just one city or the other. I sometimes think I should have created it as separate wikis for Yuba City and Marysville, so that pages like 5th Street, Marysville could be just "5th Street." But it seemed like just one or the other would draw on too small a population base to really get going, and they would need to duplicate too much of each other's content. Anyway, it's too late to separate them now, so I think I'll have to decline the domains. Thank you, though!

I noticed that you've contributed quite a bit to the Elk Grove Wiki. Do you live in Elk Grove or here? If you live in Elk Grove, what's your connection to the Yuba-Sutter area? I really liked your page about the State Theatre in Marysville. —queerbychoice

Yes, I'm in Elk Grove now, but I grew up in the Marysville area and worked at the State Theatre for years. Have some very fond memories of that place :) Makes sense about the domain names. Neither one really fit the nice combo you've created here —Rodney

2009-09-24 14:22:26 My natural inclination for balance keeps prompting me to want to put a pro-homophobia point on the homophobia entry, but I can't think of a single point in that favor. Darn it, I think I'll let this one particular topic sit without an opposing viewpoint. ;) Nice work on both wikis! —JabberWokky

Sooner or later, I'm sure someone will do that. This area isn't the People's Republic of Davis! —queerbychoice