California, Hang Your Head In Shame

Fear, hatred, ignorance. I wonder if there was exit polling to show which of these three was issue number one to the supporters of Proposition 8?

Fear - the fear that somehow, allowing homosexuals the same rights and privileges and benefits of marriage will destroy your own holy unions. Fear of the unknown, since no one - NO ONE - has been able to explain how this would occur. This in a land where television game shows entertain us with contests to select a bride from a pool of competing bimbos. This in a state where celebrities marry and divorce and remarry and cheat and join in consenting multiple relationships for amusement or enjoyment or advancement or just because they are bored. Yet somehow, if the two people involved happen to have the same type of genitalia, civilization as we know it is at the brink of collapse. Better to prohibit these freaks from the rights of every other resident than to risk that.

What are you afraid of? Is your own sexuality that fragile that allowing Adam and Steve to have a marriage license tempts you to fellate the first man who will let you unzip his pants? Are your own bonds so weak that the lure of the lesbians will steal your wife away? Are your children so poorly raised and so confused that the mere idea of illicit bathroom sex will rob them of the Ozzie and Harriet life you have planned for them? Here's a clue for you: there IS no homosexual agenda. Gays want to connect and marry (or not) with others of their own gender because that is to whom they are attracted. Period. It is no more complicated or sinister than that. Your straight son is more likely to be seduced into a life of depravity by a female scoundrel than a male. Your straight daughter is no less likely to find her soul mate in another woman than a gay woman is to find hers in a man. Get over it. There is nothing to be worried about. Except, perhaps, your secretly gay child suffering in a life of self-loathing and misery at being the unknown target of your hate.

Hatred - yes, admit it. When you see the footage of two men at the alter, gazing into each others' teary eyes, kissing, exchanging vows of love and fidelity, your stomach turns. They are different. They are doing something that you would never, ever do - or if you did, you would hate yourself for it. The same feeling that members of the KKK feel when seeing a black man looking at - or God forbid, touching - a white woman. The same feeling that the Nazis felt when they saw a young man in a yarmulke walking free on the streets. Their mere existence makes you angry, uncomfortable, enraged. It isn't what they do, which has no actual effect on you at all. It is simply that they are. You may deny it, but you know it to be true. Go look at a gay couple somewhere. Notice the pit of your stomach when they hold hands. That feeling is hatred. Enjoy it.

Ignorance - gullible people filled with fear and hate who want to be fooled into justification. Lazy, uncaring people too wrapped up in themselves to question the pap being fed to them. Do you honestly believe it possible to be "separate but equal?" Did you believe the lie that California's civil unions and protected rights are "just as good?" Or perhaps you believed that they are "good enough" for those people.

It simply isn't true. Arkansas has just passed a ban on unmarried couples adopting, the purpose of which bill they gleefully bragged was to keep homos from getting their hands on children. It says nothing about couples with civil unions. And people move. We are a mobile society. And while state benefits may be protected, federal benefits are denied. Separate is not equal.

Listen: even if the exact same water comes from both fountains, having both and replacing the "Whites Only" and "Coloreds Only" signs with "Straights Only" and "Queers Only" is offensive and discriminatory.

Once you have categorized a group by law to be somehow different, you have instantly made them less. Less than Americans, less than Humans. This may be exactly what the fundamentalist theocratic whack-jobs want, but I shudder to think that it is truly a majority view. And even if it is, one of the central tenants of American Democracy is the protection of the rights of the minority from the tyranny of the majority. In the end, each one of us is a minority of one. Abandon that ideal, and we are all at risk.

Like every other heterosexual person in America, my own marriage and my own children are completely unaffected by the marital status of homosexual couples. And yet, the prohibition against gay marriage diminishes us all. In addition to creating a subclass of Americans with a lower legal standing than "real" Americans, this ban represents the death of Freedom of Religion in America.

Face it: the only reason - the ONLY justification - for creating this class of disenfranchised individuals is that God has labeled them unnatural, abominable sinners. Or rather, some believers in a particular manifestation of God have thus labeled them. Others may believe in a God who celebrates all loving relationships. Others don't believe in God at all, and wish that we weren't forced to obey the doctrines of those who do. But now, in California, all are compelled by law to follow a single dogma.

While believers in the gay-hating God may think they have gained a victory, they have lost as much as anyone. Because the separation of Church and State was never meant to inhibit religion - it was and is meant to protect it. For all of us.

So hang your heads, Californians. You have enshrined bigotry and intolerance into law, the first amendment ever to deny rights to a group of Americans and dictate religious persecution. You've accomplished with the ballot what terrorists with bombs and box-cutters could not. Your underlying weapons, though, were the same - fear, hatred, and ignorance. No doubt the Taliban is cheering your alignment with their fundamental fanaticism. On the day that America made a historic step forward, California has taken a shameful step back.

Grain Of Truth

The probability of anything happening increases dramatically once it has.

I Gotta Gotta Lazy-Boy I'm Afraid

Birthday Greetings from Joe Cocker - watch more funny videos

Make sure you watch straight through.

Let's Be Honest

Last night, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin had the opportunity to answer questions and advance the policies and principle by which they would govern the country. All well and good. But whichever side of an issue you take, the point of the debate is lost if we aren't honest about what the answers were.

Here's what Reuters said:

Palin, Biden agree on gay rights at debate

ST. LOUIS (Reuters) - Equal rights for gay couples, a divisive issue in the 2004 U.S. presidential election, produced a rare moment of agreement in Thursday's vice presidential debate between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Sarah Palin.

Except, of course, that they did not.

Here's what they actually said:

IFILL: Let's try to avoid nuance, Senator. Do you support gay marriage?

BIDEN: No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically the decision to be able to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths the determination what you call it.

The bottom line though is, and I'm glad to hear the governor, I take her at her word, obviously, that she think there should be no civil rights distinction, none whatsoever, between a committed gay couple and a committed heterosexual couple. If that's the case, we really don't have a difference.

IFILL: Is that what your said?

PALIN: Your question to him was whether he supported gay marriage and my answer is the same as his and it is that I do not.

Governor Palin very carefully, deliberately divided Senator Biden's answer into two parts, and agreed only with the first part. In doing so, she made it very clear that she does not agree with the second. There can be no doubt of her meaning. So let's be honest about it. The governor has very strong beliefs on the subject - she believes that homosexuality is a choice, that she herself is tolerant and non-judgemental of that choice, but that the choice is intrinsically wrong. This belief drives her public policy on the issue - she would not, perhaps, actively persecute gay citizens, but at the same time she sees no reason to extend civil rights to people who "choose" to put themselves at odds with those rights. 

Palin says that a McCain/Palin administration would not "do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed, negotiated between parties." Except that those prohibitions already exist, when compared to the automatic allowance to heterosexual couples.

This statement is a far cry from Biden's statement that "in an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple."

Now, I'm not going to tell you which position is closer to the correct one - at least, not in this post. And I spent a little extra time dissecting Palin's remarks because she was, in my opinion, deliberately misleading in order to avoid frightening away voters who might disagree with her. The important point here is that there is a clear difference between the candidates and between the platforms, and we need to be honest about it. 

If you agree with McCain/Palin that homosexuality is the result of a wrong choice that is ultimately harmful to society, and that gay Americans are therefore unworthy of the rights granted to heterosexual Americans - that if a gay man wants the protections of marriage all he has to do is marry a woman - then you can feel happy supporting the ticket on this issue. If you agree with Obama/Biden that the constitution guarantees the same rights and privileges to all couples regardless of their inherent sexual orientations - and that those rights in no way diminish those of others - then they are your choice; at least with regards to this particular issue.

It's really important to get honest answers, and to understand those answers. Not just on this issue - on every issue. The differences between the two tickets are stark and clear, and you want to be sure that you vote for the team with whom you agree. So let's insist that the candidates promote their positions honestly, and may the best team win.

Sing, Sing A Song

Once I built a fortune
To the sun
On mortgage and equity lines.
Once I built a fortune,
Now it's gone.
Brother, could you spare
Seven trillion dimes?

Grain Of Truth

All economic policy is redistribution of wealth.

What Senator Obama Doesn't Understand

During the first Presidential Debate in Oxford Mississippi, Senator John McCain's catch-phrase was "What Obama doesn't understand." By the third time he repeated it, I was shouting replies to the television, much to the annoyance of my wife who was trying to hear it. Obama never challenged the phrase. Today, he gave it a try in an interview with Bob Schieffer. He swung and missed with "What I don't understand is why Senator McCain wants to continue the Bush policies." Senator, you should not admit that you don't understand anything.

Allow me to provide the proper response. Senator, if you read this, you are welcome to use it at no charge.

Senator McCain says that I don't understand. But I understand perfectly well. I have watched these policies fail for the past seven years, and I understand that they do not work. What Senator McCain doesn't seem to understand is that there are alternatives. Senator McCain doesn't seem to understand that we don't have to continue following the failed foreign policies of the Bush administration - they have not worked, and it is time for a change.

That is a statement everyone can understand. And Senator McCain would never be able to claim that you don't understand again.

You're welcome.