A few years ago, I heard writer Gerald Haslam explain his struggle to describe the difference between the Kern County burg of Bakersfield and the Bay Area city of Mill Valley, both of which are settings for his novel, "Straight White Male."
"Then it suddenly occurred to me," he said. "There was nobody in Bakersfield who cared whether Tibet was free."
Haslam's remarks came rushing back to me last week with the news that the Kern County clerk will stop performing all civil marriages before June 17, the first day same-sex couples in California can legally apply for licenses.
The clerk, Ann Barnett, cited financial concerns and space limitations. But e-mails and other records obtained by the Bakersfield Californian suggest that the decision stems from her personal discomfort with gay and lesbian unions.
Barnett's action -- and the debate it has triggered over whether she is flouting her responsibilities as an elected public official or rightly "following the dictates of her conscience," as one supporter put it -- serves as a stark reminder that California is not just a liberal, blue-state bastion, as so many see it. It's a right-wing redoubt as well.
In 2005, the Bay Area Center for Voting Research studied ballot-box patterns in 236 cities, and it counted Berkeley, Oakland, Inglewood and San Francisco among the 10 most liberal metropolises in America. But just as notably, Bakersfield was ranked No. 8 among the most conservative cities in the country, and seven other California locales also made the Top 25. No other state exhibited this kind of political schizophrenia.
Some of this, of course, simply speaks to California's vastness. But Texas, 100,000 square miles bigger, displays far greater ideological coherence. Three of the five most conservative U.S. cities were in Texas; not one city there made the liberal top 25.
That California has long been a place of extremes, culturally and politically, is not terribly surprising. All sorts of people have felt the Golden State's utopian tug. Dreamers don't come in a single flavor.
California has found itself the home of both the Free Speech Movement and Fred Schwarz's school of anti-communism, of the Grateful Dead and Merle Haggard, of the porn industry and (for many years) Focus on the Family's James C. Dobson. In its selection of political leaders -- think Rep. "B-1 Bob" Dornan on the right, Rep. Phil Burton on the left -- the state has shown "a dichotomous diversity verging on the eccentric," as historian Kevin Starr has written.
