When it rains, it pours: NAACP now is on board with same-sex marriage

I still believe that President Barack Obama, for his ubiquitous campaign promises of “hope” and “change,” publicly came out for same-sex marriage too late in his presidency — the time to do the right thing is (almost) always right now — and I still believe that Obama publicly came out for same-sex marriage only after he’d calculated that it was politically safe to do so (and maybe even only after he’d calculated that it was politically harmful to continue not to do so).

And I certainly don’t want to be told that I should be thankful that Obama politically went out on a limb for my fellow non-heterosexuals and otherwise non-gender-conforming individuals when, in fact, we helped put him in the Oval Office, and when, in fact, our equal human and civil rights always have been and always will be far more important than is one politician.

All of that said, Obama’s belated pro-same-sex-marriage proclamation seems to be having benefits that perhaps even he didn’t foresee.

Not only have leaders within the black community such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton proclaimed that they support same-sex marriage — Jackson not long ago enough was adamant that same-sex marriage is not about civil rights – but the NAACP yesterday announced its support of same-sex marriage, calling same-sex marriage a civil right.

The Associated Press quotes NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous as having proclaimed: “Civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law. The NAACP’s support for marriage equality is deeply rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and equal protection of all people.”

Wow.

True, Jealous is a young black leader — he’s 39, the youngest president that the NAACP has ever had — and it’s true that younger people are much more accepting of same-sex marriage and other equal human and civil rights for non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals than are older people. And it’s true that there are many, many older people (and yes, plenty of younger people), of all races, who are going to take their homophobia with them to their graves, regardless of what Barack Obama or Benjamin Todd Jealous or Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or you or I have to say about same-sex marriage and equal human and civil rights for all.

But the good news is that old bigots do die, that they have fewer days ahead of them than they have behind them. And as today’s younger bigots grow older and their bigotry becomes less and less acceptable, at least they increasingly will keep their stupid fucking mouths shut and keep their ignorance and hatred to their miserable selves.

Given that blacks have been the one racial group in the United States most opposed to equality for non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals, having the likes of Obama and Jealous and Jackson and Sharpton now proclaiming that the black community should share the civil rights pie already with non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals should, within a few years, I surmise, put a fairly solid majority of Americans (say, at least 55 percent of them) in favor of equality for all.

There is a pretty good article on the topic of black homophobia that Slate writer William Saletan posted in November 2008, shortly after the nation elected its first black president — and after black voters were the largest racial group of voters in California who voted down same-sex marriage by voting yes on Proposition 8. Saletan begins:

[November 4, 2008] was a good day to be black. It was not a good day to be gay.

Arkansas voters approved a ballot measure to prohibit gay couples from adopting kids. Florida and Arizona voters approved measures to ban gay marriage. But the heaviest blow came in California, where a gay-marriage ban, Proposition 8, overrode a state Supreme Court ruling that had legalized same-sex marriage.

A surge of black turnout, inspired by Barack Obama, didn’t help liberals in the Proposition 8 fight. In fact, it was a big reason why they lost. The gay marriage problem is becoming a black problem.

The National Election Pool exit poll tells the story. Whites and Asian Americans, comprising 69 percent of California’s electorate, opposed Proposition 8 by a margin of 51 percent to 49 percent. Latinos favored it, 53-47. But blacks turned out in historically high numbers — 10 percent of the electorate — and 70 percent of them voted for Proposition 8. …

I remember that Election Day well. I had cast my vote for Barack Obama, only to learn within the following days that while I had supported the black community, the black community had coldly turned its back on me.

Saletan’s article even indicates that perhaps black homophobia helped get George W. Bush a second term in 2004:

A report from the pro-gay National Black Justice Coalition attributes President Bush’s 2004 re-election in part to the near-doubling of his percentage of the black vote in Ohio, which he achieved “by appealing to black churchgoers on the issue of marriage equality.” This year, blacks in California were targeted the same way.

The NBJC report paints a stark picture of the resistance. It cites surveys showing that “65 percent of African Americans are opposed to marriage equality compared to 53 percent of whites” and that blacks are “less than half as likely to support marriage equality and legal recognition of same-sex civil unions as whites.”

It concludes: “African Americans are virtually the only constituency in the country that has not become more supportive over the last dozen years, falling from a high of 65 percent support for gay rights in 1996 to only 40 percent in 2004.” Nor is the problem dying out: “Among African-American youth, 55 percent believed that homosexuality is always wrong, compared to 36 percent of Latino youth and 35 percent of white youth.”

Saletan then goes, at some length, into the black homophobes’ “mutability”/“immutability” “argument,” which I just don’t fucking buy. (Who chooses to be a member of an historically reviled and oppressed minority group? Fucking duh.) I still surmise, as I wrote recently, that most homophobic blacks remain homophobic primarily because (1) they want to remain, in the national story, the only victims of prejudice and discrimination and oppression, because their identity is wrapped up in race-based victimhood, real or imagined/fabricated, and (2) because they want there to be one minority group that even they still can shit and piss upon, because it’s better to be near the bottom of the sociological dog-pile that is the United States of America than it is to be at the very bottom, isn’t it?

This is cruelty and hypocrisy, of course, to demand equality for one’s own minority group but to continue to shit and piss upon the members of another historically oppressed minority group. When the historically hated and oppressed become the haters and oppressors of others, it’s pretty fucking ugly. (Are you listening, Palestinian-oppressing Israelis?)

And, of course, homophobia within the black community doesn’t just hurt gay whites like me. It hurts blacks in many ways. Being rejected by your own family for not being heterosexual and/or gender-conforming contributes to such problems as drug and alcohol addiction, emotional and psychological disorders, suicide attempts, and the contraction of sexually transmitted diseases, because individuals who have come to believe that they are shit for not being heterosexual and/or gender-conforming often don’t worry too much about protecting themselves because they probably want to die anyway, their self-esteem is that low.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in fact, reports:

African Americans face the most severe burden of HIV of all racial/ethnic groups in the United States. Despite representing only 14 percent of the US population in 2009, African Americans accounted for 44 percent of all new HIV infections in that year. Compared with members of other races and ethnicities, African Americans account for a higher proportion of HIV infections at all stages of disease — from new infections to deaths.

Black homophobia — and its attendant ignorance and fear and stunning lack of education and enlightenment – probably is the No. 1 reason for those grim statistics, and, of course, heterosexual black women are less likely to contract HIV and other STDs if their black male sexual partners who actually are homosexual or bisexual don’t feel pressured to lead double lives in order to give the appearance of heterosexuality in order to please the homophobic bigots in their lives. (The CDC reports than for 2009, “Most [85 percent of] black women with HIV acquired HIV through heterosexual sex. The estimated rate of new HIV infections for black women was more than 15 times as high as the rate for white women, and more than three times as high as that of Latina women.”)

And, of course, it’s much easier for me and other non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals to be supportive of the members of the black community if we have the same love and respect from them that they want from us.

With equal human and civil rights for everyone, everyone wins.

Except, perhaps, for the members of the right wing, who have opposed equal human and civil rights, who have opposed liberty and justice for all, forever.

That so many blacks have shared that trait with the white wingnuts is nothing short of tragic.

P.S. Here is the text of the NAACP’s decision to support same-sex marriage, from the organization’s website:

The NAACP Constitution affirmatively states our objective to ensure the “political, educational, social and economic equality” of all people. Therefore, the NAACP has opposed and will continue to oppose any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the constitutional rights of LGBT citizens. We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Further, we strongly affirm the religious freedoms of all people as protected by the First Amendment.

Of course, that last sentence, an apparent afterthought, apparently had to be thrown in there in order to appease the churchgoing set. Of course, one’s religious freedoms do not include the “right” to impose his or her own religious beliefs upon everyone else, which the churchgoing set has a problem understanding, thus their incredibly insane claim that they are victimized if they are not allowed to victimize others, because their religious beliefs include the supposedly Bible-based victimization of others.

Not being a member of the black community, I don’t know how much sway the NAACP has within the black community. The organization’s website proclaims:

The NAACP has addressed civil rights with regard to marriage since Loving vs. Virginia declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in 1967. In recent years the NAACP has taken public positions against state and federal efforts to ban the rights and privileges for LGBT citizens, including strong opposition to Proposition 8 in California, the Defense of Marriage Act, and most recently, North Carolina’s Amendment 1, which changed the state constitution’s to prohibit same-sex marriage.

While I am happy to see the NAACP’s comparison of same-sex marriage rights to mixed-race (heterosexual) marriage rights, if it is true that the NAACP showed “strong opposition to Proposition 8 in California,” the fact that 70 percent of the state’s black voters voted down same-sex marriage nontheless indicates, unfortunately, that the NAACP doesn’t have an awful lot of sway within the black community, at least not here in California or in North Carolina or in the other states where black voters have shot down same-sex marriage in much higher percentages than have their white, Latino and Asian counterparts.

Barack Obama’s cold calculation on same-sex marriage

President Barack Obama made headlines today by having proclaimed in an interview with ABC News, “…[A]t a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go  ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

I can tell you what that “certain point” was: the point at which Obama finally calculated (correctly) that his stubborn refusal to publicly endorse same-sex marriage was causing him more political harm than political gain.

On Saturday, I presciently raked Obama over the coals for having yet to fulfill what I had considered to be at least a strongly implied 2008 campaign promise: his endorsement of same-sex marriage — of full marriage equality, regardless of gender or sexual orientation – in all 50 states.

Among other things, I wrote:

Instead of delivering upon his relentless, ubiquitous [2008] campaign promises of “hope” and “change,” [Obama] for the most part has maintained the status quo and has told us dreamers of full equality for all that our dream must be deferred.

No, it doesn’t have to be deferred. It’s that Barack Obama lacks the character, the courage and the moral conviction to deliver upon what he promised (explicitly and implicitly…) …

On Sunday I felt fairly psychic, for the big news of that day was that Vice President Joe Biden had come out in support of same-sex marriage. But, as I wrote on Sunday, Biden’s endorsement of same-sex marriage was not nearly enough.

To a commenter on Saturday’s piece, I responded:

Nationwide polls taken over the last year or so show that about 52 percent of Americans, when asked to give a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down to legalized same-sex marriage, give it their thumbs-up. (The spread is about 51 percent to 53 percent. See
http://pollingreport.com/civil.htm
.)

As Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote in 2008, there probably is great overlap — at least 90-something percent, I venture — among those who voted for Obama in 2008 and those who support same-sex marriage.

So I don’t see what Obama gains politically, especially in terms of votes for re-election, by claiming that he’s still “evolving” on same-sex marriage. For any support from the homophobes that he might get (and most of them hate him because he’s black), Obama is losing the support of those like me who used to support him but who no longer do, in large part because he is still “evolving” on the issue of same-sex marriage.

Sacrificing your base in order to cater to the “swing voters” is, I think, a huge fucking mistake.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Mittens becomes the next president. And after Election Day we can say that it was completely avoidable, that Barack Obama fucked it up royally.

Again, while it’s hard to calculate and thus hard to prove, I do believe that any political gain that Obama might have garnered from refusing to “evolve” already and publicly endorse same-sex marriage was canceled out by the loss of support from his base. And it’s your base, not the fucking “swing voters,” who give you money, who enthusiastically give you their votes, who talk up your candidacy to their associates, and who even volunteer for your campaign.

And we gay men and lesbians (and other non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals) long have been sick and fucking tired of the Democratic Party asking us for our money and our votes — the term “gAyTM” was coined for this phenomenon — while refusing to fight for our equal human and civil rights, instead perpetually telling us that it’s not the right time yet.

A recent nationwide Gallup poll (which was taken between May 3 and May 6 and was released after I wrote the paragraphs above) put support for same-sex marriage at 50 percent and opposition at 48 percent, with 2 percent “unsure.”

Now, it seems to me that if you’re vehemently against same-sex marriage you are vehemently against same-sex marriage, so I surmise that more than half of those who are “unsure” would support same-sex marriage if they had to give it a thumbs up or thumbs down, so, I surmise, we’re looking at at least 51-percent support.

A Pew Research Center nationwide poll taken last month showed that 47 percent favor same-sex marriage, 43 percent oppose it, and 11 percent are unsure (yes, that’s 101 percent — which Pew says is due to rounding). Let’s give the freedom-hating homophobes more than half of the unsures — 6 percent — and the lovers of liberty and justice for all only 5 percent of the unsures. That still is 52 percent for same-sex marriage. I stand by my earlier assertion that we’re at about 52 percent of Americans favoring same-sex marriage.

Indeed, an ABC News/Washington Post nationwide poll in March found that 52 percent of Americans favor same-sex marriage, while only 43 percent oppose it, with 5 percent unsure. Give the pro side only 2 percent of the unsures, and that’s 54 percent support.

Again, Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote in 2008 — which very apparently is within a percentage point of the percentage of Americans who support same-sex marriage.

Obama had nothing to gain, but, I surmise, had a lot to lose by continuing to hold out on same-sex marriage.

If we cannot agree on that, well, then, at least we had better agree that we cannot call Obama’s new-found stance on same-sex marriage an epiphany or even a change of heart — not when he put himself on record as being a supporter of same-sex marriage way back in 1996, when he answered a question of a campaign questionnaire as follows: “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”

Politico.com reported back in January 2009, the month that Obama took over the Oval Office, that this response was typed out and that the document was signed by Obama, and Politico included this graphic with the January 2009 story:

Image from Politico.com

So: Of course it has been cold, political calculation on Obama’s part.

But at least this is one clear contrast between Obama and the multi-millionaire Mormon Mittens Romney, who today in response to Obama’s surprise pro-same-sex-marriage pronouncement affirmed his homophobic, “Christo”fascist, anti-liberty-and-justice-for-all stance on same-sex marriage.

(The patriarchal, misogynist, homophobic, racist Mormon cult, which is led by a cabal of stupid old evil white men in Salt Lake City, did, after all, give millions of dollars in support of Proposition H8 here in California, as did Mitten’s fellow “Christo”fascist nutjob Prick Santorum’s Catholick cult, which is led by a cabal of stupid old evil white men in the Vatican.)

Mittens — who, if elected, might as well move the Oval Office to the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City — proclaimed today: “Well, when these issues were raised in my state of Massachusetts, I indicated my view, which is I do not favor marriage between people of the same gender, and I do not favor civil unions if they are identical to marriage other than by name. My view is [that]domestic partnership benefits, hospital visitation rights, and the like are appropriate but that the others are not.”

Whether or not it’s too late for Obama to recapture enough of the love that he has lost over the past few years in order to ensure his re-election remains to be seen. He has disappointed millions within his base, and he has only six months to try to woo them back.

He might find that mere words aren’t enough; after all, it was the words “hope” and “change” that took him all the way to the White House (on the wave that Howard Dean had created in his ill-fated 2004 quest for the White House), and it has been the fact that those words have remained, for the most part, just words that accounts for the gap of enthusiasm for Obama of today from a few years ago.

P.S. I note that Obama apparently hasn’t abandoned his “states’ rights” “argument.” In a fundraising e-mail that he sent out today titled “Marriage,” he wrote: “I respect the beliefs of others, and the right of religious institutions to act in accordance with their own doctrines. But I believe that in the eyes of the law, all Americans should be treated equally. And where states enact same-sex marriage, no federal act should invalidate them.”

That is not the same as saying that no state should be allowed to outlaw same-sex marriage, of course, even though he had just finished asserting, “But I believe that in the eyes of the law, all Americans should be treated equally.”

“All Americans” means all 50 states.

This very much reminds me of the days of slavery, when some states retained slavery and others rejected slavery.

Speaking of which, North Carolina was a slave state, of course, so it’s no fucking shock that the backasswards state’s voters decided to write discrimination into their state’s constitution yesterday by banning same-sex marriage.

None of the former slave states is exactly enlightened.

(To wit, the haters of North Carolina voted not only to ban same-sex marriage, but voted to ban even separate-and-unequal civil unions and domestic partnerships as well, to be extra hateful.)

Biden’s endorsement of same-sex marriage is not nearly enough

So Vice President Joe Biden today on “Meet the Press” said that he supports same-sex marriage.

When host David Gregory asked Biden, “You’re comfortable with same-sex marriage now?”, Biden replied: “Look, I am vice president of the United States of America. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual [men and women marrying] are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. …”

That to me sure sounds like an endorsement of legalized same-sex marriage — full marriage equality for same-sex couples – in all 50 states, but the White House was quick to back-pedal and say that no, Biden actually still is “evolving” on the issue of same-sex marriage just as President Barack Obama is.

Whether Biden’s nationally televised endorsement of same-sex marriage is just a calculated political game of good cop-bad cop, or whether Biden was, at least in the Obama White House’s opinion, just shooting his mouth off again, I’m not sure, but in either case, I am not moved, perhaps especially in light of this fact:

MSNBC quotes a White House “aide” as having stated: “The vice president was saying what the president has said previously — that committed and loving same-sex couples deserve the same rights and protections enjoyed by all Americans, and that we oppose any effort to roll back those rights. That’s why we stopped defending the constitutionality of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in legal challenges and support legislation to repeal it.  Beyond that, the vice president was expressing that he too is evolving on the issue, after meeting so many committed couples and families in this country.”

Um, no, Biden did not say that “he too is evolving on the issue” of same-sex marriage. He said, “I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual [men and women marrying] are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.” He said “men marrying men” and “women marrying women.” He did not say, “Committed and loving same-sex couples deserve the same rights and protections enjoyed by all Americans.” He did not use such mealy-mouthed language that public-relations hacks love to employ, believing that they are word-magicians who are bamboozling all of us with their ingenius hocus-pocus. He was not talking about the separate-and-unequal, second-class, unconstitutional substitutions for marriage, such as civil unions and domestic partnerships. He was talking about same-sex marriage.

Obama’s pussy, trying-to-have-it-both-ways public political stance is that each state reserves the right to determine whether or not to institute legalized same-sex marriage, and he very apparently sees no problem with forcing non-heterosexual Americans to drink from different drinking fountains by offering them only cheap imitiations of marriage, such as domestic partnerships or civil unions, which he supports. Publicly, at least, he very apparently thinks that these unconstitutionally separate-and-unequal substitutions for marriage are A-OK. (He used to teach constitutional law, too. He truly must have sucked ass at that as much as he sucks ass at being president of the United States of America.)

This “states’ rights” “argument” is the fucking coward’s way out, and if President Abraham Lincoln had adhered to such cowardice as the “states’ rights” “argument,” slavery probably would have lasted a lot longer than it did. (Funny that Obama’s official kick-off of his 2008 presidential campaign in February 2007 had him mimicking Abraham Lincoln at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois:

Associated Press photo

Barack Obama is no fucking Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had balls. Big balls.)

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not nearly enough that Joe Biden supports same-sex marriage. He’s just the vice president. I and millions of other non-heterosexual Americans are to hope for Barack Obama to die or to otherwise become incapacitated, so that President Biden can fight for our equal human and civil rights, since President Obama refuses to do so? Is that it? Is that the kind of change that we are to hope for?

No, fuck Barack Obama.

Nothing short of his full endorsement of same-sex marriage in all 50 states could induce me to give him my vote in November or to give him a fucking penny toward his re-election.

Obama also has been a dismal disappointment as far as labor rights are concerned. Early next month, Wisconsinites will decide in a recall election whether or not to allow Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott Walker to keep his job for his decision to try to destroy the state’s labor unions, a project that he apparently started immediately after his election in November 2009 (if not even beforehand).

(Walker claimed that the labor unions were making the state go broke, but he had had no problem giving the state’s plutocrats tax cuts. In bad economic times, you see, it’s the working class and the middle class who are to suffer even more — not the plutocratic elite, who, like on the Titanic, are the ones who get the lifeboats while the rest of us are to drown in the icy sea.)

In November 2007 at a campaign rally in South Carolina, Barack Obama said this: “And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself; I will walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America, because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.” (Here is video of that promise.)

Yet when Wisconsin became a battleground for the life of its labor unions in early 2010, when national media attention was focused on the state’s capital, where the fuck was President Barack Obama? He couldn’t find a comfortable pair of shoes? Despite his clear promise to stand up for — in person — “American workers [who] are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain,” Obama showed his face not once in Wisconsin. Not once.

How about the British Petroleum debacle? Obama sat on his hands as BP’s oil well in the Gulf of Mexico filled the gulf with crude oil for months in the summer of 2010, making it the largest marine oil spill ever. Clearly the corporate-ass-kissing Obama White House took a back seat to BP and to Big Oil in the environmental catastrophe.

Yet despite his colossal failures of leadership — and these are just three of them – the sweet-talking Barack Obama, who is as slick as the millions of barrels of crude oil that have filled the Gulf of Mexico, wants, even apparently expects, the money and the votes of gay men and lesbians (and other non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming Americans who want equal human and civil rights right now – none of this “evolving” bullshit), the money and the votes of the members of labor unions, and the money and the votes of environmentalists.

Barack Obama does not deserve this money or these votes. He makes promises and he breaks them. He asks you to put him or to keep him in power, yet once you do, he does not deliver for you, but tells you that in the future, in the future, in the future, he will use his public office for the public good.

You have absofuckinglutely no reason to believe that Barack Obama the sweet-talking and self-interested two-faced coward will be any more effective in a second term than he has been thus far. None.

(On a related note, when “Meet the Press’” Gregory asked Biden if the Obama administration would come out for same-sex marriage in a second term, Biden replied, “I don’t know the answer to that,” adding, “This is evolving.”)

You know, at least with Mittens Romney we would know what we were getting. The enemy clearly would be the enemy.

Which is worse:

Someone like Mittens, who at least is fairly up front about the fact that as president he wouldn’t lift a fucking finger to help non-heterosexuals achieve equal human and civil rights, that as president he would help further destroy what’s left of our labor unions and our middle class in order to further enrich the filthy fucking rich, and that as president of course he would side with Big Oil and other corporations over the environment – or — someone like Barack Obama, who explicitly or implicitly promises us progressives that he’s on our side, but then, once we’ve put him in office, fucks us over anyway?

And memo to Joe Biden: You also stated on “Meet the Press” today, “I think ‘Will & Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody has ever done so far.”

“Will & Grace,” Joe?

Really?

It’s a fucking sitcom, Joe. A fucking sitcom. One that ended six years ago this month.

That’s the best example that you can come up with to show how gay-friendly and how politically correctly accepting of non-heterosexuals that you are?

That’s like saying to a gay man, “I have a gay cousin in New York City. Maybe you know him!”

As well-intended as it might be, it’s better to say nothing at all than to reveal that you actually have no fucking clue about the historically oppressed minority group that you’re talking about.

I am Barack Obama’s ex, too!

Fire and ice!

You come on like a flame,

Then you turn a cold shoulder!

Fire and ice!

I want to give you my love,

But you’ll just take a little piece of my heart…

– from Pat Benatar’s “Fire and Ice”

A younger Barack Obama and his former girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, the daughter of an Australian diplomat, are shown in a photo from the 1980s, when they were a couple.

It was interesting to read the remarks of one of Barack Obama’s pre-Michelle girlfriends about her experience of him in the 1980s. While I didn’t see that anyone else made the overt comparison, it certainly struck me that Barack’s modus operandi in love is the same fucking one that we’ve seen in his politics.

“His warmth can be deceptive,” Obama’s ex-girlfriend, Australian Genevieve Cook, wrote of Barack in her diary years ago, adding, “[Though] he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness. …” AFP reports that Cook’s diary chronicles “how [Cook and Obama's] romance grew and then cooled when the couple moved in together.”

Fuck. I’ve had the same damned experience with Barack Obama. He courted me madly but then became a cold fucking fish. Does that make me one of his exes, too?

I remember one of my first exposures, if not my very first exposure, to Barack Obama’s first campaign for the White House. When I was visiting San Francisco for the Castro Street Fair (no, that’s not a sex fair [not that there's anything wrong with that...]) in October 2007, an Obama campaign operative gave me an Obama campaign sticker that had the rainbow morphed into the ubiquitous “O” logo:

I was happy to see a Democratic presidential candidate courting the gay, lesbian, bisexual and non-gender-conforming vote.

But I also remember that the campaign sticker fucking ruined my faux-sueded shirt. (Seriously — the adhesive never came off completely.)

Maybe that was a sign of what was to come.

Barack Obama, you see, despite his rather unequivical embrace of same-sex marriage in 1996, today claims that on the topic of same-sex marriage he still is “evolving.” Today, he refuses to advocate for legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states, even though that is the right thing to do. Apparently he believes that to do so will cost him too many “swing votes.”

This issue has an awful lot of relevance to me. Let me give you a fresh example of how I have been relegated to a different drinking fountain because I am gay.

My same-sex partner and I are in our fifth year together. We consider ourselves to be, for all intents and purposes, married. We do maintain separate apartments (largely because both of us hate moving, and also largely because he doesn’t want to move to my city and because I don’t want to move to his suburb), but we are together on weekends and on holidays and on other days that we have off in common, and we speak on the phone every day that we are not together in person. And certainly, there are heterosexually married couples who, for whatever reasons (such as having jobs in different cities, states or even in different nations), see each other in person much less often than my partner and I do, but the validity of their marriages is never called into question – because they enjoy heterosexist favoritism.

Whether or not my partner and I have legal or social recognition of the fact that we consider ourselves, for all intents and purposes, to be married, this fact is our reality, is our truth, and as such, while recognition of our relationship from others is nice — and while such recognition, at least from our local, state and federal governments, is our pathetically and sickeningly unfulfilled constitutionally guaranteed equal human and civil right – it’s not essential for us to have others’ approval or recognition for us to know what we have together. We know that we are, for all intents and purposes, married; anyone who disagrees is a mean-spirited, fucking heterosexist, homophobic bigot who can go fuck him- or herself.

Recently, I claimed some “family” sick leave (time off for caring for an ill family member; in this case, for my partner) in my California state job. Whether I claim sick time for myself or for a family member, it doesn’t really matter, as it comes out of the same sick leave bank. There is not a separate sick leave bank for myself and for my family members.

My employer — the state of California, which should know much, much better — this past week mind-blowingly questioned whether or not my partner really is a family member. After all, my employer essentially stated to me, my partner and I do not have a domestic partnership. (The only legal protection that same-sex couples in California have, outside of such legally protective documents as wills and living wills, is the domestic partnership. [The marriages of those same-sex couples who married when same-sex marriage briefly was legal in California* remain legal, but today, all that same-sex couples in California have in terms of seeking state recognition of their partnership is the domestic partnership.])

My employer also, unethically if not also illegally, asked whether my partner and I live together full-time, and suggested (or at least implied) that because we don’t, my partner is not actually my family. Of course, California’s domestic partnerships, one of which my employer at least semi-faulted me for not having, don’t require that the two individuals share the same residence all of the time, and allows them to have two residences yet still be registered as domestic partners, so the invasively personal question was way out of bounds. And again, whether or not two heterosexually married individuals share the same residence all of the time never is used to determined whether or not their marriage is valid.

Sure, I told my heterosexist employer, my same-sex partner and I could get a domestic partnership, but to do so, of course, is to give tacit support to something akin to having to drink from a different drinking fountain or having to swim in a different swimming pool.

Real marriage, you see, is reserved for heterosexual couples. Non-heterosexual couples in the United States are lucky to get even second-class, separate-but-unequal marriage, such as a civil union or domestic partnership.

This bullshit is blatantly unjust and unfair in a nation that promises “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and “liberty and justice for all.”

If I were heterosexually married and stated that my wife were ill, or even if I just claimed to be heterosexually married and claimed that my “wife” were ill, would my employer have asked to see the marriage certificate? Would my employer have questioned the validity of my heterosexual relationship/marriage?

Fuck no, because of widespread heterosexism, even within the supposedly ”progressive” and “liberal” California state government.

(My employer advised me, by the way, in the future to claim sick time for myself only, whether or not the reason for my use of sick leave was for me or for my partner. In other words, my partner, according to my employer, the state of California, is not my family because we have not bought into the separate-but-unequal institution of the domestic partnership. I have a real fucking problem with my employer dictating to me who is and who is not my family. Especially when California state government explicitly prohibits discrimination based upon sexual orientation.)

I still am torn on the subject of getting a domestic partnership. The legal protections that come with it are good, and all couples deserve such legal protections, but it still rankles me that in the supposedly “liberal” and “progressive” state of California, my partner and I, if we want those legal protections, are forced to drink from a different drinking fountain than the fountain from which heterosexual couples drink. It’s unfair, it’s un-American and it’s fucking wrong.

To bring all of this back home: Does Barack Obama give a flying fuck about any of this?

Hell fucking no.

He is, indeed, as Genevieve Cook described him to be: a cold calculator. He says what he figures he should say in order to get what he wants from you.

He lures you in with pretty promises, such as of “hope” and of “change.” He gives you a pretty rainbow sticker. Then, once he has your money and your vote, he leaves you high and dry.

Instead of delivering upon his relentless, ubiquitous campaign promises of “hope” and “change,” Barry for the most part has maintained the status quo and has told us dreamers of full equality for all that our dream must be deferred.

No, it doesn’t have to be deferred. It’s that Barack Obama lacks the character, the courage and the moral conviction to deliver upon what he promised (explicitly and implicitly, and it goes beyond much more than just same-sex marriage; it goes into such other areas as combatting poverty and the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots, and combatting the corporate thievery that is responsible for this growing gap, and ceasing the bogus warfare for the military-industrial complex, which is looting the U.S. Treasury while Americans go without adequate health care, higher education, environmental protections, etc.).

Barack Obama has found going along to get along to be the easier, more politically expedient route. He is a moral sluggard. He can trumpet what the right thing to do is — like a trumpeter on crack. He just can’t bring himself to actually do the right thing.

Which is why, like Genevieve Cook, I broke up with Barack Obama a long time ago.

I gave him hundreds of dollars in Round One. His sweet talk swayed me that he’d be a significantly more progressive president than would Billary Clinton, but he turned out to be just another Clintonista, a Repugnican-ass-kissing Democrat in name only. I’m giving him not a single fucking penny in Round Two.

I also gave Barry my vote in Round One. He made me regret that vote, so in Round Two I most likely will cast my vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.

I don’t care that she can’t win the White House. I would much rather vote for the person I actually would like to see in the Oval Office than be punk’d by Barack Obama, the sweet-talking cold calculator, once again.

–

*The California Supreme Court ruled 4-3 on May 15, 2008, that the state’s Constitution as it was written at that time guaranteed legalized same-sex marriage to residents of the state, so Proposition 8, in response to the state’s highest court’s ruling, wrote the prohibition of same-sex marriage into the state’s Constitution after the proposition passed narrowly on November 5, 2008, and became effective the very next day.

The window period during which same-sex couples could legally marry in California in 2008 — after the California Supreme Court’s ruling until the passage of Prop H8 — was less than six months.

My partner and I had been together for just over a year when the window for same-sex marriage in California slammed shut on November 6, 2008. While we consider ourselves essentially married today, it was too early for us to get legally married then. We wanted to know each other for longer than just a year before making such a serious commitment, a commitment that we take much more seriously than do many heterosexual couples who marry and divorce willy-nilly — and whose marriages’ validity is never questioned simply because they are heterosexual.

I ♥ NY!

Associated Press photos

New York City’s Empire State Building is lit up in rainbow colors today in honor of gay pride week. Because of the state legislation that was passed last night, same-sex marriages are expected to begin in New York state in a month, and same-sex couples who marry in the state do not have to be residents of the state.

There is so much to bitch about that it’s nice to see some good news for once.

Despite the fact that the “LGBT” “community” in general doesn’t have its shit together, that most of its “leaders” are self-interested sellouts who pathetically passively accept the national Democratic Party establishment’s pathetic mantra that we non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals  have to keep waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting* before our constitutional rights are upheld in all 50 states, the 19-million-plus-strong state of New York last night became the most populous state in the nation to have legalized same-sex marriage.

Six states — New York, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont — and the District of Columbia now have legalized same-sex marriage.

The addition of New York to that still-too-short list is a great gift this gay pride month.

It sucks to be a Californian and to not to be able to marry my same-sex partner of almost four years — talk of individual freedom and equality supposedly being so God-damned inherently American when so many so-called Americans want only some of us to have freedom and equality is utter bullshit to me — but same-sex marriage in either New York or in California is the death knell for the heterosexist fascists’ agenda of freedom and equality for only some.

And as the legal challenges to California’s anti-same-sex-marriage Proposition Hate are making their way up the federal courts — and thus far, Prop Hate is losing — it’s possible that what began as a loss for equality and freedom in California in November 2008 with Prop Hate could end up as a victory for equality and freedom not only in California but in the rest of the states as well.

Further, recent nationwide polls consistently show that around 53 percent of Americans believe that same-sex marriage should be legal in all 50 states.

Prop Hate, I surmise, ironically only harmed the haters’ “cause” because it exposed their ignorance, their fear, their bigotry, their hatred — in a word, their evil.

This, I believe, as well as other factors – such as that bitter old fucks take their ignorance and hatred with them to their graves and they are replaced by much more enlightened youths — account for the fact that finally, the equality-hating queer-haters are a minority in the United States of America.

That 53 percent majority was hard-won, and it took an awfully long time, to be sure, but it will hold. And it will only increase in the coming years. It’s already clear that the haters are on the wrong side of history, as evidenced by such facts as that same-sex marriage passed in New York last night with the “yea” votes of enough Repugnican state senators in the Repugican-dominated New York state Senate.

These are the Repugnicans who are wise enough to know that to continue to oppose equality and freedom for everyone is a battle that they cannot win, and they don’t want their names to go down in history as having been on the wrong, shameful side — as having been fucking assholes.

(“While I understand that my vote will disappoint many, I also know my vote is a vote of conscience,” one of the Repugnican New York state senators said in a statement before he voted “yes” on same-sex marriage last night. “I am doing the right thing in voting to support marriage equality.”

Said another Repugnican New York state senator, a lawyer, of his “yes” vote: “I cannot legally come up with an argument against same-sex marriage. I cannot deny a person, a human being … the same rights [that] I have with my wife.”)

A few more notes on the historic achievement of same-sex marriage in New York:

The Associated Press quotes Ross Levi, executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, as having said of the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York that there “certainly [will be] a ripple effect across the nation” from the “historic night.” I am with him thus far, but then he added that “democracy won.”

OK, fine, let’s celebrate the historical achievement, but let’s not tacitly or overtly agree that anyone’s equal human and civil rights, guaranteed to him or her by the U.S. Constitution, should be put up for a vote. Inalienable rights are just that — inalienable and not subject to the whims of the democratic process.

And I must note that history shall record that the Catholick Church – which, along with the Mormon Cult, backed Proposition Hate – fought the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York.**

Further, history shall record that same-sex marriage in the state of New York was won only after the theofascists were sufficiently satisfied that religious groups’ “right” to discriminate against non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals would be preserved.

Yes, today, “religious freedom” means things like the preservation of bigotry and discrimination and infant male genital mutilation (a.k.a. “circumcision”).

And the “argument” today is that if you don’t allow the theofascists to violate others’ rights (even the right of infants not to be mutilated), then you are violating the theofascists’ “religious freedom.”

(I suppose the fact that we don’t allow murderers and rapists the freedom to freely rape and murder is a violation of their “freedoms,” too. Interesting thing, freedom/“freedom” is.)

The Catholick Church, the Mormon Cult and other groups of “Christo”fascists and theofascists and ignorant haters deserve to see themselves driven to extinction for their refusal to leave the Dark Ages behind in this rapidly changing world.

I’m fine with these fascists believing whatever bullshit they want to believe, but when they believe that they have the “right” to impose their brand of theocracy on me, when they can’t keep their evil insanity to themselves, then it becomes my fucking problem.

It is because of them that I cannot legally marry my partner of almost four years. I take their assault on my freedoms and liberties — which I believe are worth dying for – quite seriously. They have declared war, and they deserve whatever blowback they sustain because of their declaration of war.

–

*It has occurred to me that the Democratic Party doesn’t want the advancement of rights and equality for non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals, because the promise of these rights and this equality in the future — always in the future – is great for fundraising.

Indeed, any actual progress in the United States at all can be made only by doing an end-run around the national Democratic Party establishment, such as how the people of Wisconsin took things into their own hands after Barack Obama and the other national Dems totally ignored the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ attack on labor unions/collective bargaining in that state, and how the states are achieving same-sex marriage state by state when it shouldn’t have to be achieved so fucking incrementally and without the support of the national Democratic Party establishment, which is less than worthless.

**The Associated Press notes:

The Catholic Bishops of New York said the [same-sex marriage] law alters “radically and forever humanity’s historic understanding of marriage.”

“We always treat our homosexual brothers and sisters with respect, dignity and love,” the bishops said Friday. “We worry that both marriage and the family will be undermined by this tragic presumption of government in passing this legislation that attempts to redefine these cornerstones of civilization.”

The AP also notes that the infamously homophobic “Democratic” New York state Sen. Ruben Diaz, “a Bronx minister,” said of his “no” vote: “God, not Albany, settled the issue of marriage a long time ago.”

Wow.

OK, the Catholick assholes (redundant…) don’t get their cake and eat it, too. They don’t get to oppose same-sex marriage but at the same time claim, “We always treat our homosexual brothers and sisters with respect, dignity and love.” That’s like your rapist proclaiming his “love” for you while he’s fucking raping you. No. You can’t work to keep others down and claim that you are treating them with “respect, dignity and love.”

And the Catholick theofascists and theofascist Diaz — who is not a Democrat — sorely need to be educated about the separation of church and state.

They have the right to believe, stupidly, that there is a “God” (it’s their right to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, too) and that this “God” has an inviolable definition of marriage as being a union between a biological male and a biological female, one of the main purposes of which is to produce more offspring on an already overpopulated planet (after all, global warming is bullshit, right? And in any event, Judgment Day is just around the corner, so it doesn’t matter how much we trash the planet, does it?). They have the right to act out of this belief in their own lives.

They do not have the right to impose this stupid belief on those of us who disagree with them.

And same-sex marriage was legalized in the state of New York not by some abstract entity called “Albany,” to use Diaz’s propaganda, or “government,” to use the Catholick bishops’ propaganda.

No, the people of the state of New York elected their state representatives and their state senators in a system of representative democracy.

In this system of representative democracy, theocracy and theofascism lost and the people won.

The Catholick asshats, Diaz and the other “Christo”fascists and theofascists should get used to losing to democracy, because even though none of us non-heterosexuals and non-gender conformists should have to use the democratic process to win our inalienable rights, we are doing so. And we are winning.

Enough with the sex scandals already

Reuters photo

Christopher Lee shirtless! No, not that one. This one:

Associated Press image (from the U.S. House of Representatives)

Don’t get me wrong; I’m happy to see any Repugnican politician bite the dust, but something feels at least somewhat wrong about the latest casualty of a sex scandal, Repugnican U.S. Rep. Christopher Lee of New York.

Lee resigned his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives today after the website Gawker revealed that he had responded to a 34-year-old woman’s personals ad on Craigslist, telling her that he is a divorced, 39-year-old lobbyist, when, in fact, he’s a 46-year-old married-with-child U.S. representative.

And, Gawker reports, he sent her these images:

Oops.

The woman contacted Gawker about her e-correspondence with Lee, and the rest is history.

I don’t really see, though, that Lee was guilty of much more than attempted infidelity and apparently being in the throes of a midlife crisis. I mean, lying about his age, repeatedly using “Lol” in his e-mails to his would-be mistress, posing shirtless in a mirror and flexing his biceps like a teenager – that reeks of a midlife crisis to me.

As reprehensible as he seems to be — Gawker notes that Lee’s “support for ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and vote to reject federal abortion funding suggests a certain comfort with publicly scrutinizing others’ sex lives” while his own apparently is quite interesting* — it seems to me that the matter really is between Lee and his wife. And, dare I say, that he shouldn’t have had to resign over it.

As fun as it is to dog-pile upon an apparent Repugnican hypocrite (wait, that’s redundant…), my concern is that these sex scandals, aside from giving us perverse entertainment at the expense of others’ privacy, serve to preserve our national hangups over sexuality.

Lee’s crime here isn’t that he’s a sexual being. We all are sexual beings, and sex, when used for communion, is a wonderful thing. Lee’s crime here is that he’s a liar. He apparently lies to his wife (unless they have an open relationship, which I rather doubt) and he very apparently lied to his would-be mistress. (No, it’s not OK to lie about your stats and status, even for just a Craigslist hookup.) This makes you wonder how much Lee lies in other areas of his life.

But the embarrassment of having his private e-mails and his shirtless pic released to the entire world should be punishment enough for Lee.

Again, this was an attempted extramarital dalliance, not sexual harassment while on the job or sexual assault, which of course would justify resignation from elected office.

By focusing on the salaciously scandalous aspects of Rep. Christopher Lee’s downfall, we are missing the opportunity to have national discussions about the more important human issues, such as how we can age gracefully (and not pathetically), what we can do to change our youth-obsessed culture, and whether or not monogamy really works in the first place.

Until we do have those discussions, the sex scandals will continue.

–

*Gawker does not get itself off of the hook for being sensationalistic by pointing to Lee’s apparent hypocrisy. I’m perfectly OK with outing — exposing a closeted (usually Repugnican) politician whose voting record has been anti-homosexual — but this is not the same thing.

‘HoBos’ in HELL

In his syndicated column for which he presumedly actually is paid, wingnut Jonah Goldberg — perhaps best known for having penned this lovely little tome:

(Ha ha ha! Comparing liberals to Adolf Hitler is funny! And original!) – makes the “argument” that because liberals* finally repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell,” it must mean that militarism is a great thing.

Wow. This “ironic progressive victory,” as Goldberg calls it, sounds like the kind of bullshit “logic” that Goldberg was roundly criticized for employing in his book with the Hitlerized smiley face on the cover.

Goldberg does in his column make some statements of fact, such as that the gay community very largely has been co-opted by the dominant, corporate-dominated American culture. (That he makes some statements of fact among all of his distortions and lies apparently is his tactic; many people, I surmise, believe that if they read one sentence that they recognize as truth, then all of the sentences that they read must be truthful.)

But Jonah Goldberg is no historian. In his column he bizarrely actually asserts:

Two decades ago, the gay left wanted to smash the bourgeois prisons of monogamy, capitalistic enterprise and patriotic values and bask in the warm sun of bohemian “free love.” And avant-garde values. In this, they were simply picking up the torch from the straight left of the 1960s and 1970s, who had sought to throw off the sexual hang-ups of their parents’ generation along with their gray flannel suits.

Really?

There are leftists who are gay, but I’ve never known, in my 42 years on the planet, of a strong “gay left.”

“Two decades ago,” by my math, was the early 1990s, and I recall the 1990s being more of the same from the 1980s: unbridled materialism and consumerism among all Americans, gay or straight, male or female, white, black, brown, red or yellow. I don’t recall the 1990s as having been some sort of a repeat of the 1960s, as much as many of us might have wished that that had been the case.

The baby boomers, including gay baby boomers, of course, had some rebelliousness to them, but from the late 1960s to at least the early 1980s they largely were about partying. And – consequently… – from the early 1980s until the mid-1990s, it was combating AIDS, not combating capitalism, that the gay community was most concerned about, if my memory serves.

I just don’t remember that Big Gay Anti-Capitalism Era that Goldberg posits existed in our history (“two decades ago,” to be exact), and as far as is concerned that “bohemian ‘free love’” thing that the gay community wanted two decades ago, according to Goldberg, well, I can tell you that ever since about 1983 or 1984, when the AIDS epidemic started to decimate the gay male population, I, for one, have been quite careful not to become infected with HIV, which pretty much fucking precludes “free love.”** Two decades ago, in the early 1990s, when gay men were still kicking off from AIDS (until the protease inhibitors came along in the mid-1990s), “free love” was the last thing on this faggot’s mind.

But the wingnuts are still fighting the culture wars of the late 1960s and the 1970s, so Goldberg just reaches into his rectum and scrawls that my generation of gay men (Generation X) were copycats of the party-hardy gay baby boomers when no, we were not and we are not.

And Goldberg also stupidly asserts that the “gay left” “simply [picked] up the torch from the straight left of the 1960s and 1970s” as though no gay people were a part of the sociocultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s when, in fact, the gay rights movement was a large part of those two decades, and of course many individuals in the other movements of the 1960s and the 1970s, such as the women’s rights movement, the civil rights movement and anti-war movement, happened to be non-heterosexual. Fucking duh.

And presumedly Goldberg’s sloppy assertion that the “gay left” “wanted to smash the bourgeois [prison] of … patriotic values” means that perpetual fucking warfare, a value of the right, is a “patriotic value,” so that if you don’t support perpetual warfare, then you are unpatriotic. (Nice try, Jonah. While you were at it, why didn’t you just write that members of the “gay left” wanted to “smash” puppies and kittens, too?)

Goldberg writes that “the sweeping embrace of bourgeois lifestyles by the gay community has been stunning” (he calls the “homosexual bourgeoisie” “HoBos,” borrowing from the book Bobos in Paradise), and this has been stunning, but this does not mean, as he asserts, “that such bourgeois values — monogamy, hard work, etc. — are the best guarantors of success and happiness.”

“Hard work” is what the filthy rich who don’t work claim to value, and those who are poor, the filthy rich lie, are poor because they “hate hard work.” It’s not exploitation of the poor by the rich, you see; it’s that if you’re poor, you’re lazy, and if you’re filthy rich, you’re industrious — even though you are filthy rich only because of the hard work of others. (The right wing loves “hard work,” all right — hard work performed by others from whom they obscenely profit.)

And we all know how well monogamy is doing among the heterosexuals in the U.S. these days.

Goldberg essentially asserts (as far as I can tell from his inartful prose) that gay men and lesbians (and other non-heterosexuals) want same-sex marriage because marriage inherently is (and monogamy, by extension, inherently is) wonderful — and that they wanted “don’t ask, don’t tell” repealed because militarism is so fucking great.

I, however, long have found it beyond unfortunate that instead of creating something new, so many non-heterosexuals have only wanted to mimic their heterosexual counterparts (yawn). Yes, as Goldberg points out, gay men and lesbians and other non-heterosexuals have been co-opted, but this is not testament to the greatness of capitalism or militarism or monogamy or any other of Goldberg’s wingnutty fetishes. This is testament to, among other things, the degree to which the plutocrats and corporatocrats have been able to zombify the American masses over several decades, regardless of their sexual orientation or race.

And, with virtually nothing else widely modeled for them, what else can we really expect of so many same-sex couples other than that they (desire to) mimic their heterosexual counterparts, and in a nation that doesn’t want to educate its college-age citizens and doesn’t want to provide them with decent careers or even living-wage jobs, can we blame financially and occupationally desperate non-heterosexual young people for wanting to join the U.S. military when so many heterosexual young people are in the same boat?

It also is a failure of imagination, as well as it is intellectual laziness, political apathy, materialism, self-centeredness and zombification by the corporate media (which want Americans to be obedient to the corporatocrats, not to be informed and to be free) – and it is not a testament to the inherent greatness of the wingnutty values that Goldberg and his ilk espouse (such as capitalism and militarism) — that accounts for why so many non-heterosexuals want to mimic their heterosexual counterparts.    

Further, there is much more about the ongoing push for same-sex marriage and the successful push for the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” than great love for the institution of marriage or love for the institution of the military.

I, for one, have great reservations about monogamy and marriage. Scientists are coming to the conclusion that just as monogamy is not normal or natural for our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, monogamy is not normal or natural for most human beings, either — thus the high rates of infidelity and breakups and divorce. (Google it.) I’ll take science over religious/hocus-pocus moralizing any time.

However, for me the issue of same-sex marriage is not that the institution of marriage or that monogamy is so fucking great – the issue is fucking fairness. You allow all consenting adults to marry each other, regardless of race or biological sex, or you allow no one to marry.

While I have reservations about marriage myself, I can’t see myself telling any other consenting adults who wish to marry each other that they can’t. The wingnuts, however, have no problem whatsoever depriving others of the freedoms that the wingnuts claim to be all about.

“So now openly gay soldiers get to fight and die in neocon-imperialist wars too?” Goldberg snarkily begins his column.

Um, yes, they do, but no, that they do doesn’t mean that those wars for the war profiteers and corporatocrats and other assorted traitors are now just wars. That so many non-heterosexuals want to be able to serve in the U.S. military is just testament to the shitty national economy, with its lack of decent-paying jobs, and to the zombification of Americans, heterosexual and non-heterosexual, who believe, stupidly, that the U.S. military actually exists primarily to defend and protect the nation when, in fact, the U.S. military exists primarily for the obscene profits of the war profiteers and the corporate expansionists.

So I did not want to see “don’t ask, don’t tell” repealed because I think that the U.S. military is so fucking great. I generally believe that no one with two brain cells to rub together would join the U.S. military when the U.S. military hasn’t fought a just war since World War II. (Again, I do, of course, cut at least some slack to those who join the U.S. military because, unfortunately, they see no other career option than to make themselves cannon fodder for evil rich men who cavalierly send them off to bogus wars for their war profiteering and for their corporateering.***)

But, if you’re going to allow heterosexual dumbfucks and the heterosexual financially and occupationally desperate to join the U.S. military, then out of fairness, you have to allow non-heterosexual dumbfucks and the non-heterosexual financially and occupationally desperate to join the U.S. military, too.

It’s about fairness and equality, something that Jonah Goldberg and his wingnutty ilk wouldn’t know about, and while I understand that Goldberg is desperate because his dinosaurian values are in their death throes, I am one faggot who’s not going to allow him to actually Orwellianly attempt to twist the cause of equal human and civil rights for non-heterosexuals into being some sort of “proof” that his sick and twisted beliefs and values are OK.

Goldberg concludes his sick and twisted column: “And given that open homosexuality is simply a fact of life, the rise of the HoBos — the homosexual bourgeoisie — strikes me as good news.”

Yes, homosexuality is simply a fact of life (referring to it as “open homosexuality,” however, curiously sounds like Goldberg would prefer that all non-heterosexuals pose and pass as heterosexuals), but “the rise of the HoBos” is not “good news.”

The co-option of heterosexuals or non-heterosexuals (or whites or non-whites or…) by the toxic, militaristic, materialistic, consumeristic, capitalistic, jingoistic, ultimately soul-crushing system that Goldberg so slavishly supports is fucking tragic.

We’re not talking about “HoBos” in paradise — we’re talking about “HoBos” in hell.

P.S. Goldberg also writes in his column:

Personally, I have always felt that gay marriage was an inevitability, for good or ill (most likely both). I do not think that the arguments against gay marriage are all grounded in bigotry, and I find some of the arguments persuasive. But I also find it cruel and absurd to tell gays that living the free-love lifestyle is abominable while at the same time telling them that their committed relationships are illegitimate too.

Goldberg sounds like he’s trying to please all sides.

I don’t find him to be an ally simply because he states, correctly, that same-sex marriage in all 50 states is inevitable. (I’m sure that many supporters of slavery saw its eventual demise, too. That doesn’t mean that they were anti-slavery — just that they were realistic about the current of events.)

If he’s going to assert that same-sex marriage is an inevitability for “ill,” then Goldberg should tell us how it would be for “ill,” and in his column he curiously doesn’t fucking bother to share any of the arguments against same-sex marriage that he says aren’t “grounded in bigotry” and/or that are “persuasive.”

And the only two possibilities that Goldberg apparently offers to us non-heterosexuals are the “free-love lifestyle” (you know, with its diseases and death and sinfulness and such) or the strictly monogamous married lifestyle that so many heterosexuals find to be stifling and soul-eroding.

But he’s happy to grudgingly allow us non-hets to take part in the misery that is monogamous marriage.

Gee, thanks, Jonah.

While Goldberg asserts in his column that “there isn’t” “some grand alternative” to these two miserable choices, I wholeheartedly disagree with him. Maybe heterosexuals’ biggest concern about allowing same-sex marriage has been that once non-heterosexuals got marriage, they would be able to transform it in a way that heterosexuals never have been able to do. 

–

*I prefer “progressives,” not because I’m ashamed of being a leftist, but because so many so-called “liberals” actually are milquetoast Clintonistas with whom I don’t want to be associated. (After all, it was the “liberal” Bill Clinton who is responsible for “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the first fucking place!)

**The AIDS epidemic first hit when I was still a freshman or sophomore in high school, and I saw the images of dying AIDS-stricken gay men (looking like concentration camp victims) before I seriously thought of having sex with another male, and to this day HIV transmission is a significant concern of mine, so this “free love” thing that Goldberg claims my generation perpetuated did not, in my experience, ever fucking exist.

***Goldberg snarkily remarks that “the folks who used ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ as an excuse to keep the military from recruiting on campuses just saw their argument go up in flames.” Ha ha ha!

Well, the primary argument against allowing military recruiters to recruit fresh cannon fodder on our high school or college campuses is that so many young people have no fucking idea what the U.S. military is really all about and so they are easily duped. And so many young people notoriously believe that they are immortal, a mistaken belief that the deliberately mispresentative, “Top Gun”-like military recruitment ads, which never show maimed or killed soldiers, perpetuate.

Our young should not be fed to the meat grinder that is the military-industrial complex, regardless of their sexual orientation. I invite Jonah and his ilk to go fight the wars that they claim are all about patriotism and actual national defense and leave our children the fuck alone.

‘8: The Mormon Proposition’

DVD review

Tyler Barrick and Spencer Jones, both raised in Mormon families, were married in San Francisco’s city hall during the window period in 2008 in which same-sex marriage was legal in California. Their marriage remains legally valid, but Proposition 8 put an end to further same-sex marriages. Barrick and Jones are featured in the documentary “8: The Mormon Proposition.”

I’m glad that they made a documentary — a pretty good one, too — about the Mormon cult’s behind-the-scenes push for Proposition 8, the ballot initiative in California that in November 2008 wrote discrimination into the state’s constitution, invalidating the state’s Supreme Court’s May 2008 ruling that to prohibit same-sex marriage violates the rights guaranteed to Californians by their state’s constitutution.

Let me state right off that I fucking hate the fucking Mormon cult.

I could, but I won’t, go into detail about the Mormons’ fucktarded, backasswards beliefs, such as that non-whites aren’t white because they were punished by God (yes, the Mormons are huge old fucking white supremacists); that their “prophet” (a stupid old evil white guy named Thomas Monson, who even has his own website) literally receives communiques from God (Monson “is the only person alive who can receive revelation for the entire [Mormon cult],” his website proclaims); that their polygamous founder, Joseph Smith Sr., in the late 1820s transcribed golden plates given to him by an angel fucktardedly but appropriately named Moroni (these golden plates, which contained the Book of Mormon, reportedly were taken back by the angel, conveniently); and that when good Mormons die they get to be gods of their own planets (which is even better, I’m guessing, than the bevy of virgins that good Muslim men are promised in the afterlife).

Frankly, the Mormon cult is lucky to be able to get away with what it gets away with, most notably and probably most destructively, its routine brainwashing of its youth, who have no fucking choice. Those born into Mormon families, if they reject the toxic, bullshit belief system that is crammed down their throats from birth, risk being ejected from their own families.

When belief is tied to life’s necessities, such as food and shelter, that’s not spirituality; that’s the pyschological enslavement of other human beings (a.k.a., too often, as “religion”). And that is evil, and that is nothing that Jesus Christ taught, and there is nothing to fucking debate about it.

And this evil perpetrated by the Mormon cult on a daily business is perfectly legal. In fact, even non-Mormons support the Mormons’ right to brainwash and thoroughly pyschospiritually destroy their offspring for life. This is called “religious freedom.”

Speaking of which, I remember when a co-worker of mine and I happened to be walking around the state Capitol here in Sacramento on our lunch break in late October 2008 and we quite unexpectedly happened upon a large group of wingnuts demonstrating in support of Prop H8 in front of the Capitol.

On their blue-and-yellow “Yes on 8″ signs were the Orwellian slogans “Restore Marriage,” “Protect Marriage,” “Prop 8 = Free Speech,” ”Prop 8 = Religious Freedom” and “Prop 8 = Less Government.”

As I noted of these slogans/“arguments” just after Prop H8 narrowly passed in November 2008:

“Restore[/protect] marriage”: How do same-sex couples harm heterosexual couples’ marriages? If heterosexual marriages are in trouble, don’t the heterosexual couples need to do something about it? The divorce rate was sky high long before gay men and lesbians ever got the legal right to marry in any state.

“Less government”: Wait a fucking minute. “Less government”? The government telling two consenting adults that they may not get married is less government? How?

“Free speech”: Yes, you have free speech. You may hold the most hateful beliefs that you want and you are pretty free to say whatever hateful things you want. But what right do you have to infringe on someone else’s rights?

[“Religious freedom”:] These motherfucking haters, if it is their religious belief that same-sex marriage is wrong, are perfectly free not to marry someone of the same sex. Their religious freedom is in no way infringed upon by two other consenting adults marrying each other.

If we actually are to buy this argument that to offend someone’s religious beliefs is to infringe upon his or her religious freedom, then we must make interracial marriage illegal too if it should — gasp! — offend someone’s religious beliefs. (What about the eating of certain foods? Should pork be banned by constitutional amendment because its consumption offends some people’s religious beliefs? Where would it end?)

The bottom line is that the homo-haters have no actual legal, moral or ethical arguments against same-sex marriage. They have only blind hatred, and they fabricate “arguments” to try to legitimize and sanitize their hatred.

The overarching “argument” by the homo-haters that their civil rights — religious freedom, freedom of speech, parental rights, etc. – are actually being violated by gay men and lesbians being granted equal civil rights is beyond insane.

“8: The Mormon Proposition” — narrated by Dustin Lance Black, the gay (ex-?)Mormon who, ironically, won an Oscar for his screenplay for the film “Milk” — makes it clear that the stupid evil white men who run the Mormon cult are not satisfied with having control only over the hearts, minds and genitalia of their Mormon mindslaves. They want control over the entire nation, if not also the entire planet.

And it is at that point, when the Mormon cult no longer is content to mind its own fucking business, but wants to convert all of us to Mormonism, that the Mormon cult deserves to be brought down. (And no, I don’t rule out violence if necessary. An unprovoked, direct strike at our equal human and civil rights deserves a strong response, and if violence ever is called for, then so be it.)

“8: The Mormon Proposition” masterfully exposes how the Mormon cult has tried to hide behind its anti-non-heterosexual crusade by creating front organizations (most notably, the National Organization for Marriage* [which, ironically, actually is for fewer marriages]) made to look as though it’s a grassroots effort rather than what it actually is: a crusade of the Mormon cult. “The Mormon Proposition” also details the history of the Mormon cult’s involvement in denying equal human and civil rights to non-heterosexuals, starting with the battle over same-sex marriage in Hawaii in the 1990s.

“The Mormon Proposition” showcases two young gay (ex-?)Mormon men who wed when same-sex marriage was legal in California and follows their story, which includes ostracization from their family members (although the mother of one of the two young men is very supportive of him and the cause of equal human and civil rights for all Americans; she rocks).

I’m not decided whether the two young men are given too much attention in the documentary or whether it’s a strength of the documentary that their case is a thread that runs throughout it. In either case, though, they are an adorable couple, and if you are sane you can’t help but feel happy for them and you can’t imagine that anyone could be so miserable and hateful as to try to take their happiness away from them.

Also featured in “The Mormon Proposition” is Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate (now known as a national group called Rights Equal Rights), whose advocacy for equal human and civil rights and whose counter-crusade against and exposition of the “Christo”fascist Mormon cult I admire greatly (but I’m not big on his bid to run for president in 2012 on the Repunignican ticket; there’s no way in hell I’d vote for a Repugnican, but especially not for a gay Repugnican).

Karger’s Californians Against Hate website sums up the Mormon cult’s support of Prop H8 rather succinctly in a post on July 8:

During the summer of 2008, we discovered the active involvement of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church) in Prop 8. The Mormon Church had taken over virtually every aspect of the Yes on 8 campaign.

Mormon families contributed approximately $30 million of the $40 million raised, the Church produced 27 slick commercials, put up an expensive website, bused in thousands of volunteers from Utah [and] had massive phone banks, yet only reported a mere $2,078 in non-monetary contributions three days before the election.

Two weeks later I filed a sworn complaint with the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) against the Mormon Church for not reporting its vast financial involvement in the campaign.

The commission prosecuted the case, and conducted an unprecedented 19-month investigation of the Salt Lake City-based church’s finances. Three weeks ago the FPPC found the Mormon Church guilty of 13 counts of late reporting and they were fined $5,539. That was the first time a religion was found guilty of election irregularities in the 36-year history of the FPPC.

How the Mormon cult retains its tax-exempt status regardless of its well-documented illegal involvement in politics eludes me. The Mormon cult should have been fined millions of dollars and lost its tax-exempt status. That it did not shows how scared the powers that be are of the “Christo”fascists of the Mormon cult.

One thing in “The Mormon Proposition” that I’m not thrilled about is to watch people cry over the passage of Prop H8 when the Mormon cult had to lie and cheat in order to “win.” When you have to lie and cheat to “win,” your “cause” is fucking weak. It’s actually good news that the Mormon “Christo”fascists had to resort to their anti-Christian deception and lies to “win.” It proves that unless they wear sheep’s clothing, the majority of the voters will recognize them as the wolves that they are. The Mormon “Christo”facists don’t have the power of the truth behind them.

And despite the tens of millions of dollars and the manpower that the Mormon cult pumped into Prop H8, it didn’t win by a huge margin. It won by only 4 fucking percent. That’s not what I’d call a fucking landslide.

The latest Field Poll on the issue, taken in late June and early July, indicates that if same-sex marriage were put on the Californian ballot today, Prop 8 would be reversed, with 51 percent supporting same-sex marriage, 42 percent opposed and 7 percent undecided. (It seems to me that most of the undecideds would end up in the pro-same-sex marriage camp, since the hardcore homo-haters already know who they are.)

My fellow non-heterosexuals need to stop crying and start fighting, which includes educating themselves and others on how and why Prop H8 passed in the first place. While I’m happy to see that the 52 percent support for Prop H8 in November 2008 appears to have dropped 10 points to 42 percent today, 51 percent of Californians in favor of same-sex marriage is still too close for comfort.

“8: The Mormon Proposition” is a great teaching tool, and I recommend it for everyone who gives a shit about equal human and civil rights for all Americans.

While I can’t support him for president, I wholeheartedly agree with Fred Karger’s proclamation that:

Younger people who begin to realize that they might be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer will soon be afforded all the same rights as their brothers, sisters, friends and neighbors.

That is what our founding fathers had in mind when they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

We will settle for nothing less.

Amen.

–

*Speaking of NOM, headed by the grotesque wingnut Maggie Gallagher, who really needs a dildo, a wingnut recently showed up at a NOM event holding this sign:

Yes, many if not most of the “Christo”fascists believe that non-heterosexuals should be executed — just like it is the case in theofascist nation of Iran. (Thus, I think of the “Christo”fascists as the “American Taliban.”) 

This is why I never rule out violence against the “Christo”fascists.

Memo to the breeders: 6 billion-plus already is more than enough

I usually hate the term “breeder,” used as a pejorative for heterosexuals who have offspring, but I was inspired by a moment at Wal-Mart yesterday (yes, I was at a Wal-Mart; I’m a very bad moonbat) and by a news story from today regarding the anti-gay Proposition 8 to use it just now.

When I was at Wal-Mart yesterday, I witnessed this young Negro black guy ask another young man (who, I believe, was Latin0), “Are you still walking with Jesus?” Apparently the two young men knew each other but hadn’t seen each other for a while.

I could go off on what the fuck “walking with Jesus” means, but I won’t — but I will say that if anyone ever asks me if I walk with Jesus, I will say something like, “Yeah, man, and let me tell you, he is tore up!”

The whole “walking with Jesus” thing is indicative of “Christo”fascist brainwashing that makes me want to vomit, and I include mention of the races of the young men only because I think it’s tragic that non-whites have adopted whitey’s toxic bullshit backasswards ignorant religious beliefs, which resemble nothing of what Jesus Christ actually taught, but what came next in the moment at Wal-Mart was even worse.

The young black man asked the other young man (who had replied that yes, he still walks with Jesus) if he was married. No, the other young man said. Engaged? asked the young black man. Nope, said the other young man. Why not? asked the young black man, to which the other young man replied that he’s been too busy with work.

“Adam and Eve,” the young black man intoned at least moderately ominously. I surmise that the full “thought” was: “If you don’t follow the example of Adam and Eve, and procreate, then you’ll go to hell.”

That seems to be the “argument” that the pro-Proposition 8 fascists made in federal court today during arguments as to whether or not the federal court should overturn November 2008′s Proposition 8 — which overtuned, by a popular vote of 52 percent to 48 percent, the California Supreme Court’s ruling that it is unconstitutional, and thus illegal, to ban same-sex marriage in the state.

Reports The Sacramento Bee today:

Chief Judge Vaughn Walker peppered attorneys with questions as a historic federal trial on Proposition 8 began today, with the defense of California’s same-sex marriage ban arguing that the fundamental purpose of marriage is procreation, to raise children in an “intact” family and that same-sex marriage could erode that purpose.

“Same-sex marriage is simply too novel an experiment at this stage,” argued [pro-]Proposition 8 attorney Charles Cooper in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Francisco.

Representing two gay couples challenging Proposition 8, attorney Ted Olson gave the first opening remarks.

Gay people have been classified as “degenerates” in the United States, Olson said, targeted by police, fired from employers. “Proposition 8 perpetuates that for no good reason,” he said. He said it has the effect of inflicting “upon them badges of inferiority” and is a violation of constitutional rights.

Walker asked pointed questions about whether each side had evidence to prove their cases. Two plaintiffs, a gay couple from Los Angeles, took the stand, and the challengers began showing pro-Proposition 8 campaign videos and asking gay plaintiffs to describe how the campaign videos made them feel, especially the references to protecting children….

Walker was quick to start questioning Olson once the famed attorney began his presentation. Olson, a conservative who views gay marriage as a constitutional right [emphasis mine], is famed for representing George W. Bush before the U.S. Supreme Court after the [disputed] 2000 presidential election.

Olson said, “This case is about marriage and equality.” He quoted from U.S. Supreme Court decisions referring to marriage as “one of the most vital personal rights” in the pursuit of happiness and “a basic right.”

Walker interrupted him and asked him if that meant that a marriage license was necessary. He also asked if evidence will show that gay people “suffer” by being limited to domestic partnership.

Olson said the language that the Proposition 8 campaign used, describing marriage as “unique,” bolsters his argument that by barring gays from marrying, the government has “isolated” gays and lesbians and said, “You are different.”

Walker said that “moral disapproval” leading to a law is not a reason to declare it unconstitutional.

Olson replied that moral arguments were used to defend discrimination based on race and gender, and that marriage has “evolved” to discard biases and prejudices.

The parents of President Obama, he said, wouldn’t have been allowed to marry in some states at the time they did….

Cooper said, as he began his presentation, that voters in California cast their ballots on an issue of “overriding cultural and social significance” and favored a definition of marriage that has “prevailed” through history.

He said the people of California have “been generous” on extending rights to gays, and that the gay movement — with the exception of marriage — has been “very successful” at enacting rights and laws against discrimination.

He said the gay organization Equality California “hailed” civil unions, when they were permitted by law, as a victory for civil rights.

“The evidence will show that gays and lesbians in California have substantial political power,” Cooper said.

He said Proposition 8 speaks not out of “ill will” toward gays but rather a “special regard” for a “venerable institution.”

“Among those who have drawn that line are President Obama,” he said, noting that Obama said he favors civil unions but believes marriage is between a man and a woman.

Walker interrupted and noted that Olson said Obama’s parents couldn’t have married under some laws barring interracial marriage.

Cooper said such laws were “loathsome” but were of a different nature.

He said people of different races can procreate. He said the evidence presented during the trial will show that the government has a purpose to “channel” the procreation and rearing of children into families with a mother and a father.

Walker asked if companionship was not a reason for marriage, along with other reasons other than children.

Procreation, Cooper said, “is the essential” and the “defining definition of marriage.” [Emphasis mine.]

The question, Cooper said, is whether marriage will remain “a pro-child institution” or a “private relationship” between adults based on the search for “personal fulfillment.”

He said same-sex marriage would “deinstitutionalize” marriage, and “hasten” its demise in society….

Where to begin?

Cooper’s “argument” is that almost equal equals equal. It does not. Further, the U.S. Supreme Court long ago struck down the concept of “separate but equal” as unconstitutional.

And those heterosexual couples who wish to marry but who do not wish to procreate — or who cannot procreate, because of age or medical condition or some other reason – will be shocked to discover that the right wing apparently believes that marriage hinges upon procreation, and therefore their marriages aren’t real marriages.

Under Cooper’s “argument,” those who don’t procreate shouldn’t be married. Maybe we’ll give heterosexual newlyweds one year in which to procreate, and if they don’t, the state will dissolve their marriage — because the state needs people to breed, Goddamnit!

Actually, Cooper answered the question of same-sex marriage better than did anyone at the courthouse today, it seems. The answer to his question as to whether marriage should be regarded as ”a pro-child institution” (suggesting, of course, that anyone who disagrees with the right wing on same-sex marriage is anti-child) or as a “private relationship” between adults based upon their search for “personal fulfillment” is that of course it is the latter, not the former.

The preamble of the U.S. Declaration of Independence declares:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Not only would Cooper and his ilk strike a line through that pesky equality language, but they would shit and piss upon the pursuit of happiness as well.

The pursuit of happiness — an unfuckingalienable right, let me remind you – may or may not involve procreation. It is not for the fucking wingnuts to define happiness for other people.

If the “procreation” “argument” is the best that the wingnuts can come up with to defend the denial of equal human and civil rights to non-heterosexuals, then the wingnuts already have lost the battle.

The planet, which is approaching 7 billion people, already is overpopulated, which not only has resulted in diminished quality of life for everyone who is here, but which threatens the future of the entire fucking human race, and indeed, the future of all life on Earth. To argue that any government anywhere has an interest in furthering procreation anywhere on the planet is bullshit.

To get back to my friend at Wal-Mart from yesterday, the Old Testament’s instruction to “be fruitful and multiply,” to which he apparently was referring, came at a time when world population was just a tiny fraction of what it is now, and when people thought such things as that disease was caused by unclean spirits rather than by microbes and other medical problems, and that certain astronomical events, such as solar eclipses, were ominous signs from God. (In other words, they were fucking ignorant.)

That someone could walk around in the year 2010 and instruct others to mimic Adam and Eve — shit, that someone even believes in the myth of Adam and Eve in the year 2010 — is frightening.

I might as well go and live among the Taliban, who are as enlightened as are too many of the dumbfucks whom I have to share this nation with.

You know who’s going to save the human race from overpopulation?

We Adams and Steves – not the Adams and Eves.