Same-sex marriage
Undoubtedly, the same-sex marriage issue ruled the 2006 election. Rallying students to a record turnout, the Gay Marriage Amendment allowed the re-election of Gov. Jim Doyle and Democrats to capture the state Senate. But the eventual passage of the amendment burst our Madison bubble.
Fair Wisconsin used the liberal nature of UW-Madison and increased awareness of the issue. ""Vote No"" signs and chalking could be found from Bascom Hill to Engineering Hall. Pins adorned students' backpacks and even graced the pages of Facebook. But when that day came, disappointment reverberated.
Now, more than a month later, the issue is still one of contention. State Sen. Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton, proposed a plan that could hopefully bypass the amendment and give equal rights to same-sex couples. The UW-Madison Faculty Senate endorsed domestic partner benefits and the Board of Regents has the issue on the docket.
State Rep. Mark Gundrum, R-New Berlin, who authored the amendment, claims such benefits can still be available. We have called out Gundrum in the past to make good in this claim and help the regents bring domestic partner benefits to UW-Madison. Only time will tell what the future of same-sex marriage will be in Wisconsin.
UW marching band
The University of Wisconsin Marching Band marched into national news publications in mid-October after The Daily Cardinal revealed UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley had put the band on probation.
Because the accusations were vague at first, the national media swarmed UW-Madison as the topic was covered by The Associated Press and appeared on ESPN.com and ""The Late Show With Conan O'Brien,"" among others.
After sexual harassment allegations—including girls being forced to kiss each other in order to go to the bathroom on traveling busses—emerged, Wiley ordered the band to take a sexual harassment seminar. The seminar occurred last week.
Since October, the band controversy has significantly lessened and no sections of the band were permanently removed even though, in the Cardinal's Oct. 10 article, Casey Nagy, special assistant to the chancellor, cited Wiley as saying, ""I'm not sure what a band would sound like without any tubas or trumpets or any other particular group of instruments, but we can certainly find out.""
The band will travel to Orlando, Fla., to play during the Jan. 1 Capital One Bowl.
Freakfest success
Congratulations to the Madison Police Department for finally getting it right. The new plan for Halloween this year proved young adults respond negatively to authority, and positively to horses, camaraderie and tolerance.
For the first time in five years, the MPD was able to curtail revelers by accepting bead necklaces and letting partiers pet and hug their horses.
Reports said police even handed out ID cards with information about their horses—putting the crowd into a jovial mood. We commend the mounted police for thinking quickly, and saving Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and Police Chief Noble Wray another year of headaches.
We praise the city for its successful plan to block off more streets and sell tickets for the Saturday night festivities. Although UW-Madison students did not favor this policy—its implementation contributed to the overall success of the event.
We feel the compliance showed by Halloween attendees will continue in future years if the MPD continues the friendly authoritarian behavior it imposed this year. Hopefully, the images of pepper spray and bonfires will remain only in memory.
Kevin Barrett
UW-Madison lecturer Dr. Kevin Barrett single-handedly brought the university more coverage in The New York Times in 2006 than any other single newsmaker, for which we thank him. Sort of.
Barrett put UW-Madison on the national map as the home of the ""loony liberals"" who let him teach a course on Islam in which Barrett introduced the theory—which he espouses—that the U.S. government carried out 9/11 as a pretext for starting a Middle East war.
Barrett and his course might have gone unnoticed, of course, if 60 state legislators—including 59 Republicans—had not supported a resolution by state Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, to cancel Barrett's one-semester contract to teach ""Islam: Religion and Culture.""
In the end, UW-Madison Provost Pat Farrell supported Barrett's right to teach the class and discuss his 9/11 theory, citing academic freedom.
Barrett, who earned a Ph.D. from UW-Madison and is a specialist on Sufism, has taught several courses at the university. He said he would like to teach the Islam course when it is offered again in the fall.
Gov. Doyle re-election
The past year has been one of trials and tribulations for Gov. Jim Doyle, but in November he managed to overcome allegations of pay-to-play politics to handily defeat challenger Mark Green and become the first Democratic governor in Wisconsin to be re-elected in a quarter century.
This summer, one of Doyle's employees, State Purchasing Supervisor Georgia Thompson, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for unfairly steering a $750,000 contract to Adelman Travel, a company that had donated $20,000 to Doyle's re-election campaign.
But this scandal and other smear campaigns launched by Republicans failed to unseat a governor who has been a champion of public education and a fighter for UW-Madison.
As an especially strong advocate of the university, Doyle adamantly supports embryonic stem cell research programs that could provide cures for countless diseases, and an economic windfall for the state.
In the end, voters, felt that Mark Green, who opposed state funding for embryonic stem cell research, was simply too extreme for Wisconsin, and Doyle was given more time to make Wisconsin great.
