Election tea leaves show liberal isn't such a bad word

A look at how sundry ballot issues fared in the election seems to show a country that is becoming, at least for the moment, a little more liberal. Except, of course, when and where it isn't. Tea leaves are poor oracles. Still, there are adventures to be had trolling the dregs.

Gay marriage was the big loser, with state bans enacted in Florida, Arizona and even California. That makes 30 states in which hetero majorities have denied marital recognition and rights to gay and lesbian couples, thereby accomplishing – what? Only a bit of anonymous nastiness.

Floridians even directed that "no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized." And voters in Arkansas, in an act of outright and especially gratuitous cruelty, went for an issue designed to forbid adoptions by gays and lesbians.

Yet polls continue to chart steadily broadening movement toward the understanding and acceptance of homosexuals in the population generally. Marriage is coming.

And lawful abortion is settling in. Propositions to severely restrict it failed in South Dakota and Colorado, as did a pitch for requiring parental notification in California. The issue is still a passion to many, but it has been 35 years since the Supreme Court ruled that access is a constitutional right. The numbers who want the police and prisons involved once again are dwindling.

The environment had a good election, on balance. Florida voters OK'd a tax exemption for land placed under permanent conservation protection. Minnesota's voters nudged up the sales tax to fund natural resource protection.

Other results were mixed. Californians voted down a proposal to require utilities to generate 20 percent of their energy from renewable resources by 2010, half by 2025 – both unrealistic goals. But where more reasonable propositions with similar aims were put to voters, they did well. Missouri's voters, for instance, approved a plan gradually to increase renewable-source energy to 15 percent by 2021.

Mass transit, a matter closely tied to the environment, won important votes. Californians fronted $10 billion to begin creating a system of high-speed rail transportation between major cities.

Where given a chance to, voters continued to show, as they often have, that they are far less hysterical about marijuana than nearly the whole politician-police-prison circuit is.

Massachusetts became the 13th state to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana and Michigan the 13th to approve its medical use. Voters in a Hawaiian county instructed authorities to treat marijuana as a low-priority enforcement matter. (The local police naturally announced right away that they'd do no such thing.)

A quick assay suggests a nation in a cautiously progressive mood for the most part, even as it struggles against an economic sump. And there's this development, which hasn't attracted the notice it deserves:

Come next year, New Hampshire will have a female-majority senate, the first such in the country. Hillary Clinton didn't crack the Big Daddy of all glass ceilings, but she left it spiderwebbed with cracks and ready to go, and the reverb in the meantime will be heard in statehouse and congressional roll calls.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers.