Everybody Hates Manchester
So it's wonderful that NH now has gay marriage.

But I'm sorta bugged by the snide comments about NH that keep slipping in from fellow liberals who don't happen to live in NH. Most often, from people in MA, who have, in the past, used phrases that seem to imply they think we're stupid, toothless, ragingly conservative hicks who date our farm animals and shoot anything that moves. Which reminds me of the origin of the term "Masshole" and also has me biting my tongue to keep from mentioning what New Yorkers think of the entirety of New England. Like "ignorant hicks", concepts like "panicky and provincial" are really rather relative, aren't they?

The fact that most of my neighbors do, in fact, own shotguns is beside the point since people in NH don't see gun ownership as a liberal vs conservative issue. Anyway, Maine has more guns and more country music fans, and Vermont has more cows and Massachusetts has more loudmouth jerks who can't drive.

Oops. Did I say that?

Anyway, people keep talking as if this new law comes as some type of surprise. "Of all the states this would happen in, I'm gobsmacked that it was New Hampshire". A Certain Person said some things I was pretty hurt by, but she disabled comments so it's not like I could defend the place I've lived in for twenty five years to someone who talks as if she knows it because she worked there a short while. Her frequent snide comments about NH are apparently based on having once worked for The Union Leader, and that'd give anyone a skewed experience of the state.

I'd like to think I know this place pretty well by now (and that's without pulling The Family Card except that I just kinda did), and I'm quite protective of it. But then, my mother and I both used to work for Seacoast Newspapers (it owns The Portsmouth Herald, Hampton Union, Exeter Newsletter, Rockingham News, etc, making it the third leading news source for NH) which is basically the exact opposite of The Union Leader in every way. They're terrible business people but so liberal that My Mother the Republican occasionally complained that she felt the odd man out at the office.

I mean, the Seacoast is full of yoga doing, organic cotton wearing, free trade coffee drinking,gluten free muffin eating, hybrid car driving, environmental petition signing, war protesting, alternative religion practicing folk music fans who regard Manchester (and The Union Leader) the way you'd regard something you tracked in on your shoe. And that's almost the whole southeastern part of the state, and it's been that way my entire life so... (in high school, classy, sophisticated people hung out in Portsmouth, trashy losers went to Manchester). The Peterborough area is also very crunchy and liberal, the very far north tends to keep to itself and Concord is fairly neutral except for not liking Manchester much either.

In other words, Everybody Hates Manchester. The Union Misleader is loathed by more than half the state.

I'm not saying NH was never a staunchly Red state. I remember those times. Sort of. In the misty haze of vague childhood memories. But really, people. New Hampshire has been Blue for awhile now and it happened mostly without any sort of a struggle put up.

Anyone who seriously didn't see this coming really has not been paying much attention to NH politics for the last fifteen years. We haven't been the same since Shaheen. Which means NH has been increasingly, largely blue, for half my life so far. This actually means that there's now a whole new generation of voters who have never known a Red NH, period.

I mean, for starters, we already went through this whole gay marriage thing a year ago when NH broached the idea of allowing Civil Unions and it actually...sort of passed so you can't say this came out of the blue. There was that whole thing about us having the first (and only) openly gay Anglican bishop in North America who is even in a long term relationship with a man. And that wouldn't have been possible if NH wasn't already a popular place with well to do gay couples who value our "it's none of anyone else's business" attitude (there's a reason "going antiquing in New Hampshire" is used to jokingly imply that a man is a homosexual).

NH is not a fun place to be young, poor, gay and wanting to party, but then it's not a fun place to be young, poor and wanting to party, period. Gay people who settle in NH are usually over 30, making a comfortable living and interested in long term relationships. Which is, ultimately, why I think it happened here and not in some other state. Middle class, middle aged people who vote, pay taxes and spend a great deal of money locally have more power, and more inclination to direct that power toward political goals than twenty somethings who spend all their money on E and glowsticks do.

What NH values more than religious values is Money and Who Will Spend It Here. So yeah, that used to be conservatives but their stingyness and inability to change led to them slowly dying out like the dinosaurs. Gay liberals spend money, "NH style" conservatives don't.

What the people of NH are is cold, standoffish, raging snobs and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Democrats or Republicans- the uber liberal Seacoast is the snootiest section of NH I've ever been in. They also want badly to be left alone. This state is quite the haven for wealthy people who don't want to pay income taxes, don't want to pay sales taxes, want low crime, clean air, and most importantly, to be left alone but still surrounded by the conveience of civilisation that they wouldn't have if they spent all their money on a giant tract of ranch land out west, an hour from the nearest tiny town. Here, you can be five minutes from a McDonald's but with neighbors who assume you prefer to be left alone.

Neighbors who are "conservative" in the sense that they refuse to contribute a dime to improving the quality of anyone's life but their own, but who also could care less who you're sleeping with or what state your Immortal Soul is in.

You can do any number of bizarre things in public and people will pretend not to notice.

I grew up in a church that was considered "very conservative" but later I realized how amazingly lucky I was that said church was in the far Northeast. The horror stories I heard about growing up conservative evangelical in *other* places...the climate our church was in was one of restraint, and checks/balances. There was only so much they were going to be allowed to get away with-well aware that they were vastly outnumbered by Mainlines, Catholics***, Unitarians and people who simply didn't bother with church at all. We briefly had this pastor who was originally from Georgia. He was distressed that a few miles down the road from the church there was this little park where Gay Men Were Known to Congregate. He wanted us to all start using the park as often as possible to discourage these men from returning. Everyone said "sure ,sure, we'll go". But almost no one actually did.

Because we didn't see it as worth bothering with (they were still against the idea of gayness in principle but not enough to spend time sitting around some stupid park in the chance a gay couple might drive in). NHerites are not easily moved or stirred into frenzies and have that wonderfully WASPy quality of Ignoring Things One Would Prefer Not to Know About.

And we've got all those universities too, and the close proximity to MA's prestigious and very liberal schools and all the spillover from the other NE states and it's not surprising as such that we've gone liberal but surprising that we held out for as long as we did.

***if anything, it's Manchester's giant working class Catholic population that creates that area's conservative atmosphere. It is a factory town, intended from the start to be modeled on the English city of the same name and was built on the backs of desperate immigrants
who tend to see things like homosexuality, caring about the environment, protesting wars or standing up to corruption to be the sort of thing only the idle, weak, soft, middle class is silly enough to find important. Which suits the factory bosses and the GOP just fine.