Our brand new world, Part Deux
“As long as they still both commit suicide at the end, I’m cool with it.”
-FreeRepublic crapweasel commenter, on a British high school’s gender-bending production of “Romeo and Julian.”
Archived entries for Gay stuff
Wisdom from FreeRepublic
“How did they take over VT? They moved there. They voted. They outnumbered the natives. I bet a lot of them are teachers. One thing—Most of them do not have kids, so they ruin yours. Who is having a lot of children? Latinos and Muslims. Take your pick America. That is the result of Choice. There should be no choice and we all know it.”
-Freeper commenter huldah1776 on a story about New England being at the forefront of gay rights
Just that chance
Say what you want about Keith Olbermann. But he says things no one else is willing to say.
That’s sad. But thank goodness we have Keith Olbermann.
Common sense on Prop. 8
In all the brouhaha over the passage of Proposition 8 in California, which enshrines discrimination in the state’s Constitution by denying gay people the ability to marry, it’s easy to forget that the liberal hero Barack Obama has been able to quietly assert that he’s against gay marriage because of his Christian faith.
Hmmm. As the Church Lady would say, “conveeeeenient.” And ironic to boot.
But the fact remains that even liberal stalwarts can’t seem to find the words to defend something that for their “base” seems so easy to defend. So I’m going to repeat something I wrote for Hillary Clinton in 2003, when she was having some problems explaining exactly why she didn’t support gay people getting married. If anything it’s more relevant today, now that Californians haven’t let the futures of thousands of happily-married gay people stop them from voting discrimination into their state’s founding document.
Why can’t Democratic politicians just say:
I think what’s important here is to understand the difference between civil and religious marriage. Religious marriage is a sacrament, and I don’t believe the government has any business telling any religion who they can and cannot marry. If the government ever made any kind of move to force any church to marry anyone they did not want to, I would be on the front lines protesting that.
But civil marriage is not a sacrament. It is simply a legal contract that’s enforced by the state that confers rights on the citizens who enter into that contract. I believe Americans are a fundamentally fair people. And this is about fairness – allowing people who want to enter into committed relationships, relationships that strengthen the society, to get the rights conferred by civil marriage.
There’s a lot of talk about civil unions these days – trying to create a system alongside civil marriage that would involve the same rights. But why create a new system, a new bureaucracy, to try to simulate something already in place? Is that fair? I don’t think it is. “Separate but equal” didn’t work in the civil rights era, and it doesn’t work here. I know there are a lot of Americans who are uncomfortable with homosexuality. But that unease shouldn’t be enough reason to deny basic rights to citizens of the United States of America.
See? That wasn’t so hard.
Turn, turn, turn
A friend of mine was with her young daughter in the grocery store this week, when they passed the People magazine at the checkout with photos of Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi’s wedding.
“What if I decided that I wanted to marry another girl?” my friend’s daughter said with that amazing directness children have.
“Well, if you were in love, and wanted to get married and spend the rest of your life with someone, that would be wonderful, whether it was a girl or a boy,” said my friend.
It’s with those sorts of off-the-cuff, informal, seemingly insignificant conversations that everything changes. Those tiny moments move the world.
Obama is teh GAY!
I hardly know where to begin with this comment from FreeRepublic:
“Hillary never came out of the closet, and I don’t expect Obama to, either. But I can readily believe that he is gay or bisexual.
There were those charges, which were NOT really disproved by the lie detector test. Also, there is his family background—an absent father, brought up mostly by females. That doesn’t make anyone homsexual, but it increases the odds. It’s one reason why AIDS is fairly common among blacks, as Rev. Wright complained. Lots of absent fathers among the welfare population, lots of gays as a result, and lots of gay sex and drug use, with shared needles.”
God, they’re dumb
On the internet, it’s easy to tell that you’re an anti-gay crapweasel.
Waiting it out
Just finished watching an episode of Morgan Spurlock’s F/X series “30 Days,” where a woman staunchly against gay adoption went to live with a gay couple who had adopted four boys from foster care.
Predictably, the woman, while grudgingly admitting that the men were good parents, didn’t budge an inch from her conviction that children should have a “mom and dad home” and nothing else. If anything she left feeling more strongly against gay adoption, because her beliefs were challenged by the gay couple and their friends, and that just made her defensive and angry.
I’m sure there are still some people in America who, faced with the reality of gay people and their lives, could change their anti-gay stances. But not that many, at this point. Those ships have sailed. For people who believe unconditionally in a holy book and how they were taught to interpret it, the issue begins and ends there. And how can anything compete with that? Spurlock’s show also emphasizes that in most cases, when people’s deeply-held beliefs are challenged, they just become more rigid and dogmatic. Because if you are willing to give up your deeply-held beliefs, what do you have left? It’s a human reaction, if still a sad one.
The truth is that people like the woman in Spurlock’s show won’t ever change – in fact, as they see the world change around them and leave them behind, they’ll probably get more strident. It’s harsh, but all we can do is wait for those people to die out. History is on our side; too bad history takes so damn long.
Just sick of it
What do you want to bet that if Janet Folger was writing columns in the 60s, she would be saying that interracial marriage would bring on The End Times?
I know religion can bring out the best in people. But why does it also have to be so damn destructive? Is that the way God wants it?
This is just one of the many ways I feel like an outcast in my own society – and I don’t mean about being gay.
Vote Kodos!
We will have an openly gay President of the United States long, long before we ever have an openly atheist President of the United States.
Here’s my reckoning of the probable order:
- Black
- Female
- Gay
- Muslim
- Transgender
- Space alien
- Atheist