I was late to work today because of wrecks and a stall on I-20, which consequently made me late enough to get caught in protestor traffic as I take the Capitol Avenue exit. There are several different types of protestors out today: those for the gay marriage ban, those against the gay marriage ban and various factions for and against several different designs for Georgia’s state flag. I don’t know who actually coined the term “flaggots” for all those up in arms over the design of Georgia’s state flag, but I first heard it from Neal Boortz and I think it’s funny, so I’m giving him credit.

Now really. Gay marriage and flag design. Don’t we have more important things to worry about? Of course, I have opinions on both those issues, the least inflammatory of which is that I see no reason why our flag should look like an IHOP placemat, like it did under Governor Barnes. But shouldn’t we get our priorities in order? I can’t believe the time, effort and probably money that the Georgia General Assembly is expending on these two issues, nor can I believe the numbers of people who are expending their time, effort and probably money getting all bunged up about them when there are far more compelling and important problems going on in this state. Not important in my opinion, but empirically more important - child abuse, for example. I mean, does it matter (or should it matter) on any level what color the damn flag is when there are kids being abused and molested? Off the top of my head, with no internet research involved, I can think of three metro Atlanta children who recently died at the hands of abusive parents who had been reported to DFACS multiple times. Not that getting rescued by DFACS is necessarily a good thing, either - I know I’ve read about kids dying in foster care before and, more specifically, Gwinnett County DFACS forgot about a twelve-year-old girl and left her alone, locked in their offices at the end of the business day. She was discovered when her movements set off the security alarm and cops arrived. Now, I’m no fan of children, not fond of them at all actually; I’m fond of things like order, cleanliness and quiet, and children are pretty much anathema to all those things, but even I will categorically state that children are a lot more important than flag design and banning gay marriage. It’s no wonder the rest of the nation (well, not Alabama and Arkansas, but everybody else) thinks we’re a bunch of ignorant rednecks down here. We act like it.