How to change the order of my Favorites in the Special Characters palette?
Yes - they are drag and drop in the palette itself on Lion (so that's the easiest for me to get them in order).

If that doesn't work for you, you can also edit the plist when the Special Characters picker isn't running.

The favorites are (hopefully for your OS level) stored in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.CharacterPaletteIM.plist


If your editor lets you drag "Item 2" up to "CVFavorites" it will be the new first item. You can open the triangles to see what the favorites are and reorder them fairly painlessly and then save your work.