Recently a dear southern friend instructed me passionately in the theory of "equal but separate."   "It just happens," he said, "that in my town there are three new Negro schools not equal, but superior to the white schools.  Now wouldn’t you think they would be satisfied with that?  And in the bus station, the washrooms are exactly the same.  What’s your answer to that?"

I said, "Maybe it’s a matter of ignorance.  You could solve it and really put them in their places if you switched schools and toilets.  The moment they realized your schools weren’t as good as theirs, they would realize their error."

And do you know what he said?  He said, "You trouble-making son of a bitch."  But he said it smiling.
        -John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley (1962)

Shallow understanding from people of good will, is  more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
        -Martin Luther King Jr.

I have a proposition along the lines of Steinbeck’s.  If heterosexuals think civil unions really are equal to marriage, let them convert their marriages to civil unions.  Once we gay folk see how well civil unions work for heterosexual couples after all, it’ll really put us in our place won’t it?

I jest of course.  But I want you think about this.  If separate but equal really is equal, then why does it have to be separate?  The answer is, typically, that same-sex marriage is too controversial to be a realistic goal now.  I can appreciate a tactical decision to pursue equality in stages, but only so long as we’re all clear what the ultimate goal is, and why we have to do it that way.  But that’s not what I’m hearing in the wake of the California Supreme Court decision on marriage equality.  What I’m hearing from various quarters, not all of them heterosexual, is that we blew it in California by going for marriage, when we already had a perfectly acceptable compromise in separate but equal civil unions. 

It’s very frustrating to listen to the debate surrounding the California Supreme Court’s marriage decision to devolve into babbling talk radio crap about how foolish it is for gay people to fight this as though it’s all or nothing, and particularly in California where we already had perfectly good separate but equal civil unions.  If I hear one more time about how we’re only fighting over a word I am going to fucking explode.  Can anybody who says that just stop and think about what they’re saying for a moment? 

A word.  A word.  A motherfucking word.  Why does a motherfucking word matter?   Say, I have an idea, why not ask the heterosexuals who are fighting bitterly to keep a mere word all to themselves if that’s what they’re fighting for.   A word.  A word.  Ask them if it’s only a word.  Go ahead.  And when you ask them you need to listen to what they tell you.  You need to pay attention.  Especially when they explain to you why letting us have That Word devalues it for them. 

This is not over a word.  It’s not even over marriage as an institution.  It’s not about what marriage is to heterosexuals, but about what we are to heterosexuals.  When you understand why heterosexuals want to reserve the word ‘marriage’ for themselves, you understand why civil unions will never be equal to marriage.

After the California decision, USA Today posted an editorial that is eminently typical of the response from what King might have called the People Of Good Will.  As USA Today likes to posture as a civilized foe of bigotry, you would think they’d have warmly congratulated Californian gays on this milestone, and on their courage and fortitude the for the sake of their love.  You would think this…if you weren’t paying attention….

Last week, when California became the second state after Massachusetts to allow gay marriage, same-sex couples celebrated and began planning June weddings. Good for them. But the unfortunate and unnecessary impact of the California Supreme Court ruling might well have been to set back the cause of gay rights more broadly.

The judges ruled 4-3 that gays’ inability to get married amounts to discrimination under California’s constitution, even though the state’s domestic partnership laws give them the benefits and responsibilities of marriage.

In other words, pragmatic political compromise on the intensely controversial issue is not allowed in California. It’s all or nothing, and recent political history leaves little doubt about what will follow.

Never mind for a moment that it’s always easy to be pragmatic about someone else’s lives.  Pay attention to this.  The instinct in the "mainstream" "moderate" pews the moment, the instant, same-sex couples get a chance to marry isn’t to be happy for them, it isn’t even to raise a red flag of warning, though if you skim that editorial you might think that’s what they’re doing.  They’re not.  The point of the editorial isn’t to warn of a backlash, it assumes one.  The point is to blame the gay community for causing it.  We are always to blame for the hate leveled at us.  It is always our fault.  The distance between bigots who say the "gay lifestyle" is self destructive, and the People Of Good Will who say that we are needlessly provoking our enemies and whatever comes of that is Our Fault, is thinner then the paint on one of Fred Phelp’s God Hates Fags posters.  As far as they’re both concerned, we bring it on ourselves.

How?  The bigots say we bring it upon ourselves just by being homosexuals.  The People Of Good Will say we do it by provoking our enemies.  In other words, by defending ourselves from the bigots.  The bigots say we are unclean.  The People Of Good Will say that we should at least act like we are unclean for the sake of keeping the peace.  Besides they say, we already have all the legal protections we need.  To ask for more is just selfishly causing trouble.   We are always the trouble makers in this story.  And this story goes back a long, long way.

Once upon a time, before there was civil unions, let alone same sex marriage anywhere in the United States, the argument was that same-sex couples already had all the legal rights they need, because we could always avail ourselves of things like medical directives and powers of attorney.   The case of William Robert Flanigan Jr. and Robert Lee Daniel back in March of 2002 is instructive here.  For four hours, officials at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center barred Flanigan from his dying partner’s bedside, saying he was not "family", and that ‘partners’ did not qualify. Though Flanigan had legal power of attorney for his partner, Robert Lee Daniel, officials at the Shock Trauma Center kept him away from his partner’s bedside. Only when Daniel’s mother arrived from New Mexico, was Flanigan allowed into Daniel’s room. By that time, Daniel had lost consciousness. He would die two days later.

Because Flanigan was not present during Daniel’s final four hours of consciousness, Flanigan was unable to tell Shock Trauma that Daniel did not want breathing tubes or a respirator. When Daniel tried to rip the tubes out of his throat, staff members put his arms in restraints.

At first glance all this seems irrelevant to a discussion of civil unions.  Because Maryland at that time did not have a medical directives registry, and did not then and does not now recognize civil unions, they didn’t enter at all into the legal considerations of this case.  But look at it.  In the context of making health care decisions for his beloved,  Flanigan’s durable power of attorney gave him, in theory, for all practical purposes exactly the same rights as a spouse.  But in practice, in the moment of crisis, that durable power of attorney couldn’t have been more worthless.  United in a mere legal arrangement, as opposed to being Married, Daniel and Flanigan simply weren’t regarded as a family.  That was the immediate reflex of the hospital staff.  Their relationship wasn’t a marriage.  It was something else.  Something other then marriage.  And so Daniel died apart from his lover, with the tubes he was terrified of shoved down his throat, and his arms strapped to the bed.  There was no family there to say otherwise, as far as the hospital was concerned.  Something other then marriage, is inevitably something less then marriage. 

Flanigan later sued the hospital.  After trying different excuses, first saying they never got the paperwork on Flanigan;’s power of attorney, Maryland Shock Trauma decided to tell the jury that their emergency room was simply too busy to let him into where Daniel was being treated.  That he was allowed in when Daniel’s mother, the legitimate family, arrived, had to have been just sheer coincidence.  Ask yourself what jury would buy that if it were a heterosexual couple.  Yes…the jury bought it.  Maryland Shock Trauma was let off the hook.  Flanigan was left only with his memories of not being able to keep his beloved from the thing he feared most in his last hours on earth, and to be there with him.  The usual words of condolences, worth their weight in gold, were spoken all around.

Make no mistake, had Flanigan and Daniel been anything other then a gay couple that power of attorney would have allowed the one to make medical decisions for the other.  But what the hospital staff saw in that document wasn’t a power of attorney, but two homosexuals asking to be treated as if they were married, and that was an attack on their own marriages.  That is where the reflex came from.  When the staff told Flanigan he could not be with Daniel or have any say in how he was treated, because he was Not Family, they were not simply enforcing hospital rules, they were defending the sanctity of their own marriages.

Sanctity.  You hear the word a lot in this struggle.  Of all the careless brain dead claims being made here by People Of Good Will, the claim that gay activists have turned the fight over same-sex marriage into an all or nothing battle is the most nefarious.  In state after state, and even in California, the enemies of gay equality have either tried to, or enacted amendments that sweep away both same-sex marriage And civil unions, And anything and everything else that gives same sex couples even the passing rights that married couples enjoy, in the name of preserving the sanctity of marriage.   In the vast majority of states, this was long before same-sex marriage could even have been a possibility.  How close to same sex marriage was Virginia, when it passed its constitutional amendment barring it, as well as anything even remotely like it?  In fact, he entire history of the fight against gay equality has been waged as an all or nothing struggle by our enemies, and was long before the gay community began seeking marriage in earnest. 

Our enemies understand the logic of this fight a lot better then some of us seem to.  What’s confusing, or more likely what a lot of us are in denial about, is that the fight over same-sex marriage isn’t a fight over same-sex marriage specifically.  It’s a furious, bitter, scorched earth battle over the status of gay people.  That is the root of it, that is the thing we are all fighting over.  Are we your neighbors, or are we an abomination in the eyes of god?  Are we as human as anyone else, or are we the victims of a kind of sexual sickness?  Is the fact that we mate to our own sex just a simple and unremarkable variation like being left-handed or green-eyed, or is it a damaging distortion of natural sexuality?  If it’s the latter, it should be suppressed like any other illness afflicting humankind.  The kinder, gentler view is that we are merely some sort of unfortunate sexual cripples.  But in the eyes of the homophobes, we are a curse on humanity and you don’t grant rights to a curse on humanity. 

They have been waging this war against granting us human status for decades now.  It is not about marriage specifically, but marriage is both their trump card and the end of pretense.  Like raising the fear of homosexual child molesters, waving same-sex marriage in people’s faces frightens people into thinking gay rights is an attack on their families, on their most intimate sense of self, on that which is sacred to them.  If people who engage in unnatural, distorted sexual behavior can have their brokenness treated the same as the wholesome love of two normal heterosexuals, then that reduces the love and devotion of heterosexual couples to the level of pornography.  But the other edge to that sword is that letting same sex couples marry acknowledges their shared humanity with the heterosexual majority.  Same sex marriage is both the homophobe’s weapon, and their greatest fear, because then the battle is simply over.

I have watched this fight for decades.  Not the marriage fight.  The gay civil rights fight.  And I tell you, Every Step Of The Way, whether it was over the right to hold down a job, to the right to simply have sex with the one you love without being thrown in jail for sodomy, our enemies have turned every single solitary step we have taken, every meager right we have ever fought for, into a fight over same-sex marriage.  Oh, we can’t give them hospital visitation rights, it would lead to homosexual marriage!!!  Oh we can’t give them protection from discrimination in the workplace, that will lead to homosexual marriage!!!  What was the first thing they started screaming about after the U.S. Supreme Court voided the sodomy laws?  It wasn’t that the queers would start having sex now.  They know we’re having sex.  They immediately started babbling about same-sex marriage.  They don’t give a rat’s ass about our having sex.  Animals have sex too.  But only human beings marry.

So much, so obvious.  What should have been more illuminating then it seems to have been, was how after Lawrence v. Texas the mainstream news media and all the so-called liberal and moderate middle of the spectrum pundits started worrying about the possibility of same-sex marriage too.  Mostly to re-assure each other that Justice Kennedy had said their decision shouldn’t wouldn’t lead to that.  This was the reaction on the part of the self described sensible middle of the roaders, the People Of Good Will, to the fact that we were no longer presumptive criminals simply by virtue of being homosexual: Gosh…I hope this doesn’t lead to them getting married or anything.  But why shouldn’t it?  Why shouldn’t people who say they’re against ignorant bigotry towards their gay neighbors, want us to have the same status they do?

Because, they don’t really mean it.  For the People Of Good Will, we may not be a curse on all mankind, but we are still sexual cripples at best, if not disgusting perverts at worst.  They might agree that civil society should tolerate our existence the sake of the freedoms of all.  They may not go on crusades against homosexuality.  But you need to not mistake that for enlightenment or even tolerance.  It is disgust.  They just don’t want to deal with it.  They aren’t going on crusades because they find the entire subject distasteful.  And that distaste has consequences. 

When they say civil unions is a rational compromise between two extremes, look at that, really look at it.  It is the middle ground between your being wholly and completely human, and being cursed by God that they are saying is a rational compromise we should gratefully accept if we weren’t so stubborn.  In exchange for just shutting up so they don’t have to deal with our existence, we are being offered the compromise status of damaged goods.  But you don’t treat damaged goods as though they are anything but damaged. 

Here is how USA Today viewed the decision of the California Supreme Court:

…the domestic partnership laws in California are hardly equivalent to the egregious racial discrimination of the Jim Crow era. Far from denying rights, they guarantee gays equal treatment in such important areas as raising children, assigning responsibility for medical choices and settling financial matters.

By pushing the envelope, the California ruling will help those who want to deny gays such rights — blatant discrimination that reaches far beyond understandable differences rooted in the religious meaning of marriage. Even in California, an initiative is already underway to put a same-sex marriage ban into the state constitution. Similar bans are likely to be considered in Arizona and Florida. Failed attempts to amend the U.S. Constitution will revive.

The special status and sanctity of marriage is the ultimate blessing for couples who want to spend their lives together. Eventually, the nation might be ready to extend the institution to same-sex couples. But, as  New Jersey’s top judges wrote in a 2006 gay marriage decision, courts "cannot guarantee social acceptance, which must come through the evolving ethos of a maturing society."

It will be regrettable if the impact of the California decision is to slow or reverse that evolution.

Look at that first paragraph I quoted, where they offer the separate but (at least somewhat) equal defense of civil unions.  But just how egregeous could Jim Crow have been, if black people merely had to drink out of separate fountains.  After all…it was the same water…right…?

There is separate but equal.  But if all you see in that photograph is the black guy has equal access to water you are missing the egregious nature of Jim Crow, just as the editors of USA Today are missing the egregious nature of civil unions.  In point of fact, all it takes to see nothing wrong with what is happening in that photo, is to not see the humanity of the black man.  He has water…what’s the problem?

The special status and sanctity of marriage is the ultimate blessing for couples who want to spend their lives together. Eventually, the nation might be ready to extend the institution to same-sex couples.  Here the editors of USA Today admit out of the other side of their mouths, that this special status, that sanctity, that Ultimate Blessing, is precisely what civil unions are meant to exclude us from.  It does not, and you have to understand this, signify a legal status, so much as a social understanding.  And that social understanding is that our unions, that our love, does not rise to the sacred level of heterosexual love, and does not merit the same special status, the same blessing, that heterosexual love does.  This is the premise, spoken and unspoken, behind every appeal to the "special status of marriage".  It is not that marriage is so special after all, but that we are not worthy.

This is why giving same-sex couples access to marriage desecrates it.  That is why they use the language of desecration when we agitate for the right to marry.  By enacting the rites of marriage, we don’t celebrate it, we can only desecrate it.  That can only make sense if you regard gay people as incapable of experiencing love and intimacy as profoundly, as urgently, as heterosexuals do.  And that only make sense if you see gay people as irredeemably damaged goods.  And that is the thinking.  Same-sex marriage desecrates the Institution of marriage because homosexual love is only one step removed from pornography, if that.  That is why, exactly why, you hear them saying that same-sex marriage means "anything goes."  That simply does not follow absent the view that homosexuals don’t really love, they just have sterile, barren, pitiable sexual assignations, and pretend that it’s love. 

The People Of Good Will may be disgusted at the thought of gay sex, or they may feel pity for us and think themselves progressive because they would have us be treated with compassion and concern, just as you would treat anyone with a profound handicap.  But you don’t hang forgeries in an art museum, you don’t sell water as whiskey, you don’t treat someone who bought a degree over the Internet as though they’d actually been to college, and you don’t treat a same-sex couple as though they are married.  To do otherwise is to cheapen marriage into meaninglessness.   Same sex couples do not experience intimate romantic love as profoundly as heterosexuals do.  That Is the thinking. 

And that is why civil unions will never be equal to marriage.  The statutes defining them could read absolutely identically, word for word, comma for comma, period for period, and they will not be treated equally to marriages, because the basic premise defining them, the bedrock they rest upon, is that homosexual love is not the real thing, but a cheap, if not ugly mockery of the real thing.  No injury, no foul.  Civil unions, as a substitute for marriage, are not even a consolation prize.  They are a facade of respect, erected upon what heterosexuals consider to be a facade of love.

And that understanding of our love lives, of our humanity, has consequences.  Does anyone actually believe that most people voting against both same sex marriage and civil unions really don’t understand they are voting away both?  Do you really think that people who believe we desecrate the institution of marriage will respect our unions if they merely go by another name?  Wake up please.  Ask William Robert Flanigan Jr. how well a substitute for marriage works.  Ask the civil union’ed couples in New Jersey and Vermont who found out the difference between a marriage and a civil union that had all the same rights on paper, but not the same regard in the eyes of people who know that a civil union is a civil union precisely because it does not represent a sacred human bond like marriage does, but at best a pale imitation of one.  In the courts, in the public square, in the neighborhoods and villages, in the emergency rooms and in the funeral homes, absent the kind of recognition of our humanity that would make civil unions superfluous anyway, every civil union they encounter will be weighed by heterosexual people for what it is, not for what it isn’t, and what it isn’t is a marriage.

This is not a fight over a word.  It’s a fight for that acknowledgment of our humanity, and to have our human needs and our human dignity respected.  As long as heterosexuals view our relationships as being something fundamentally different from their own, they will treat them as something fundamentally less then their own.  And they will, never doubt it, apply the law as though they are something fundamentally less from their own.  Something other then marriage, is inevitably something less then marriage.  That has in fact, been the documented experience in at least one state, New Jersey.  Nothing should have been less surprising.  It is simply, it is inevitably, because applying two different labels, one to the union of opposite sex couples, and a different one to the union of same-sex couples, establishes that they are different things, and gives people permission to treat them as different things.  And as long as people believe they have that permission in the spirit of the law, they will use it regardless of the letter of the law.

There is no ‘but’ in equal.  We know who our friends are.  They are the ones who may worry about a backlash, may question tactics and means, but not that the fight is necessary and just.  They understand that love is something to be cherished and defended from hate, not compromised in the face of it.   They know how important it is to us to defend the honor and the dignity of our love, because they can look at us, and see people not unlike themselves and they would do the same in our shoes.  We are not damaged goods.  We are friends and neighbors.  Fellow citizens of the American Dream.  Shallow understanding, is no understanding at all.  It is the person that is shallow, not the understanding.  All it takes to understand why we fight, is to have ever loved someone.

To the folks who don’t want to fight this as an all or nothing battle: I’m sorry.  Nobody should have to grow up and go through life taking one wound to the heart after another.  This fight tears people apart.  I’ve seen it.  I hate it.  I don’t blame you for not wanting to deal with it.  But you need to understand this: you found yourself in an all or nothing battle with hate, the moment you first realized that you are gay.

[ Edited a tad…]

And as a follow-up to the post below…  

Therefore, the ruling to impose homosexual "marriages" upon California was tyrannical, unconstitutional, and immoral. Like many state legislatures that refused to accept the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision saying slaves were property not persons, Californians must not accept the California Supreme Court’s edict that marriage is no longer only for a man and a woman.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen the right invoke Dred Scott.  They’ve done it routinely over abortion too.  They’re calling for massive resistance to the courts and claiming as moral justification the ruling upholding the legality of slavery. 

Ever see them invoke Plessy v. Ferguson?  No?  Me either. 

From Dan Savage over at SLOG…

Issuing Marriage Licenses to Gay Couples the Moral Equivalent of Gassing Jews

So says Save California, an anti-gay group that is calling asking it supporters to call county clerks and demand that they refuse to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. From their website:

Ask your county clerk if they were a Nazi officer during WWII and had been ordered to gas the Jews, would they? At the Nuremberg trials, they would have been convicted of murder for following this immoral order.

Ask yourself if any of the morally righteous folks over at Save California would have refused to sign an order sending a gay man to the concentration camps.  Go ahead.  Try not to laugh.

Good catch by Timothy Kincaid over at Box Turtle Bulletin.  Gary Glenn, President of Michigan klavern of the American Family Association, waves the Homosexual Menace scarecrow over at Peter LaBarbra’s Americans For Truth.  Beware the gays!  Beware the Gays!  Beware the Gays!  Glenn is warning us about the Homosexual Menace.  Can you spot the problem with this passage about the Homosexual Menace…?

Michigan’s largest homosexual activist group says once marriage is legally redefined to include homosexual couples, business owners and even news media outlets who refuse to recognize such marriages should be jailed or sued and “publicly slapped,” a Jewish and openly bisexual columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News reported Monday.

They call them Freudian slips.  And hey…wasn’t Freud a Jew too…

I should start a running Every Boy Needs A Good Father series a’la Dan Savage’s Every Child Deserves A Mother And A Father posts…  The Ex-Gay theorists will tell you that every boy needs a strong masculine father figure in his life to prevent his turning out queer.  Good men of strong will and aggressive manly masculine temperament like…well…this guy here…

Austrian Found Guilty of Attempted Murder with Poisoned Praline

An Austrian innkeeper has been sentenced to 20 years prison for attempting to murder his local mayor with a chocolate candy laced with poison.

Helmut O. attached the chocolate, which contained a deadly dose of strychine, to his victim’s car’s windshield wipers alongside a card that read: "You are someone very special to me." When the victim Hannes Hirtzberger, the mayor of the north Austrian town of Spitz, ate the cherry brandy praline the next day, he suddenly became ill and suffered a heart attack.

During the trial, prosecutor Friedrich Kutschera said the motive for the attempted murder had been delays in a planning application that the defendant had submitted. Helmut O. wanted his inn and its attached vineyard to be reclassified to allow construction on the site, so he could sell it or use it for a hotel project, Austrian newspaper Kurier reports on Wednesday.

Those wacky Austrians…what are you going to do with them, eh?  But seriously…what’s a man to do when effete nanny state bureaucracy gets in his way?  Kill the bastards!  There’s a real man for you.  And what else does a real man do?  Why…try to implicate his sons in the crime of course…

Throughout the proceedings Helmut O. had maintained he was innocent of the allegations. Yet, DNA evidence massively incriminated him, German news agency DPA reports Wednesday. The defendant’s genetic fingerprint was found on the inside of the deadly chocolate’s wrapper, the court had heard.

And the case against him became more convincing after his sons testified that their father had asked them to spit into a marmelade jar after police had requested DNA samples from potential suspects in the area during their investigations.

It probably never occurred to the nitwit that his sons would have the DNA signatures of both him and his wife which would make theirs clearly and obviously distinct from his, and yet would still lead police right to him once they looked at it.  Oh…it’s this one’s father…  But real men don’t think twice.

I’ve been wondering about this for years now…

Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

I’m only (yes…Only!) 54 years old and I’ve been struggling with the sensation for years now that my world is getting too full of information.  But I’ve always reckoned that to be a consequence of the information age. 

Maybe not so much… 

Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.

“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students

“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review…

You know…I remember that.  In school, whenever I stumbled over something that didn’t seem to make any sense, I’d just roll on by and hope that I got something later on that made the awkward piece fit in.  I try to do that now, and my mind just won’t seem to let the awkward piece go and move on.  It gets frustrating.  I feel as though I’m learning more slowly.

And I’ve always…Always…been easily distracted.  Unless I’m totally focused on something, in which case I’m more like an obsessive then an absent minded little geek.  But that total mental focus comes in spurts.  Like when I’m drawing something, or photographing something, or deep into code at work.  Then it’s almost as if I’m in a trance.  I just can’t keep that up for long though.  And the totally focused moments are always in familiar mental territory.   When I’m working with the camera, or at my drafting table, I Know what I’m doing.  Beyond those moments, I seem to be more and more adrift in a restless sea of information, where my attention is constantly being grabbed by this and that.

And I get pissed and start tuning things out.  Much of my day is a struggle to filter.  In my adolescence I used to dislike most advertising.  Now I loath it.  Never mind spam…mainstream corporate commercial advertising just seems to get more and more Insistent every year that you Have to pay attention to it, and always right at some moment my mind is busy with something else. The reason I stopped listening to broadcast radio long ago was that I didn’t like being busy with something around the house with music playing in the background, and suddenly my attention is yanked away from whatever I’m working on by a commercial.  They work Hard to grab your attention.  It isn’t just they compress the audio so the commercials seem louder, they use a host of sound gimmicks besides that to draw your attention to the ad.  Ever notice how a lot of ads are conversations now between two people talking in an urgent, or excited tone of voice?  Or maybe it’s someone who sounds vaguely like a friendly authority figure from your past…someone you used to respect and listen to a lot.  You can’t help but listen.  Lets hear it for the off switch.

I actually spend a lot of my day at home now in complete silence and I don’t even notice it.  When I do listen to music, it’s usually via the iPod while I’m fussing around the house doing chores.  There was a time I liked to have the radio or TV going in the background for company.  Now I very seldom do that, because it’s just too distracting.  For quite some time now I’ve been wondering, and worrying, if this is because my mind is getting older and slower, or because my world is just getting too crammed with information demanding my attention.  It might be neither.  My 54 year old brain may just be getting better at sucking it all in. 

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.

Creativity has always been my trump card in life.  Pulling rabbits out of the hat as I like to think of it.  It gets me by when my plain looks, horrible fashion sense, and general social geekiness seem like a ball and chain.  I can figure things out, usually before any of the cool kids do, and that keeps me in the game.  I can think outside the box.  I can create.  And this is why, ultimately, I didn’t end up in a dead end job.  Yes, there was a lot of luck involved too, but some brains just can’t recognize a dead end when they encounter one.  There are no dead ends, only difficulties that you can’t let go of until you understand them. 

But every Yin has its Yang and severe social geekery may not be so much a curse as the price you pay for having that creative mind.  That, and a feeling of being overwhelmed more and more as you get older.  I’m not getting stupider after all.  My bandwidth isn’t narrowing, it’s still slowly getting wider and wider as I walk through life learning more and more and that has consequences I wouldn’t have expected.  And unexpected consequences means that life is still interesting and I’m still in the game.  So I reckon I need to adjust my coping mechanisms somewhat. 

Relax and enjoy the inevitable as Heinlein would say.  I’m beginning to see now why older people seem to always look so bewildered.  It’s not that life is passing them by.  Some of them anyway.  It’s that it’s all rushing in on them more then when they were young.  I probably need to just get comfortable with constantly feeling like I’m swimming in a torrent of data.  That feeling of being overwhelmed means that my brain is still working the way its supposed to, not that it’s getting tired and loosing its edge.  So just get on with it.

On the one hand, ten dollars gets you about one-hundred pesos.  On the other, an item selling for ten dollars here in the United States costs about one-hundred pesos in Mexico, apparently…

Via Box Turtle Bulletin…  The African anti-gay pogroms gain momentum…

President plans to kill off every single homosexual

Gambian President Yahya Jammeh says he will “cut off the head” of any homosexual caught in his country.

Addressing supporters at the end of his meet the farmers tour here Sunday, Jammeh also ordered any hotel or motel housing homosexuals to close down, adding that owners of such facilities would also be in trouble.

He said the Gambia was a country of believers, indicating that no sinful and immoral act as homosexual would be tolerated in the country.

He warned all homosexuals in the country to leave, noting that a legislation “stricter than those in Iran ” concerning the vice would be introduced soon.

I have a question:  Where are all the love the sinner, hate the sin faithful here?  Last week the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of giving same-sex couples access to marriage and Pope Ratzinger was Instantly out of the gate with a statement condemining same-sex marriage.  So were the usual suspects in the protestant religious right.  All the while piously declaring that they were not acting out of any sort of hatred towards homosexuals.  Yet here’s a head of state declaring that he will cut off the head of any homosexual caught in his country and the silence from the erstaz followers of Christ is deafening. 

Let me hazard a guess as to why: the thought of loving same-sex couples being allowed to marry disturbs them more then the thought of thousands of homosexuals being butchered by a madman.  They don’t hate us, they just want us gone.  It isn’t hate to believe that everything would be fine if there just weren’t any homosexuals.  It’s…love…

And you thought today’s kids were unruly.  Some early school rules of etiquette from around 1900, from Horton Cooper’s North Carolina Mountain Folklore (1972):

• Neither boys nor girls must wink at one another.
• Boys shall not carry any girls in their arms or on their backs unless heavy rains or much ice have made the creeks and branches impossible to cross.  No hugging, squeezing, or kissing shall take place while the girl is being transported across the water.
• Don’t pretend to see ghosts in an effort to frighten younger pupils.
• You shall not go swimming naked within 200 yards of the schoolhouse.
• You shall not bring to school any hawks claw for use in pinching the ears and noses of others.
• Do not put any dead pigs, polecats, or other dead animals in the schoolhouse loft to create a stink.
• You shall not argue hotly as to whether the earth is round or flat.

In some schools around this country they’re probably still arguing about that.

Shorter Rod Dreher:  Protestantism is to blame for same sex marriage.

It is astonishing, though, how quickly gay marriage went from being something as unthinkable by most people as legalized polygamy is today, to being considered a constitutional right by high courts, and accepted by roughly half the populace. I was thinking today that there’s a parallel between what happened to the Catholic Church, especially in Europe, in the 20th century — how it went from being apparently strong and vital to facing all kinds of crises in the blink of an eye. As those familiar with the arguments know, there is a tendency among the right to blame the Second Vatican Council, but the truth is if the Church were as strong as she seemed, things wouldn’t have fallen apart so rapidly.

So it is with the institution of marriage. Gay marriage is and is not a sudden shift in the meaning of marriage. It started with the Reformation. The reason I think gay marriage cannot be stopped, only delayed, is because it is only the latest manifestation of deep social trends in the West going back centuries. These currents run so deep in our civilization they carry us all along without many of us being aware of how far from shore we’re receding.

Ah…for the good old days, when heretics, witches and homosexuals were burned at the stake.  Dreher has tried, oh so hard in recent months, to seem like a decent man.  A love the sinner, hate the sin kind of man.  Not a bigot…just someone who has very strong moral values.  And then California goes and does this to him.  One good thing to come from the California Supreme Court ruling the other day is that reflexive release of stench from that open sewer Dreher’s kind like to call a conscience.  We don’t hate homosexuals…honest…really…we just don’t want THEIR PRESENCE DEFILING OUR SACRED INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE!!!  We need to get these from time to time, so we don’t start believing all that crap about them kind actually being anything other then somewhat more publishable in family newspapers then the Westboro Baptist Church. 

And Much more verbose.  Fred could distill Dreher’s entire column of crap down to a single poster sign that reads: GOD HATES FAG AMERICA.  No kidding…go read the damn thing.  Dreher is literally calling same-sex marriage a symptom of the inevitable destruction of the west that began with the Protestant Reformation.  Take that all you Christian fundamentalists who oppose gay rights.  You’re just as much a threat to western civilization as homosexuality as far as Dreher is concerned.

This is why I don’t see any hope of stopping gay marriage. It did not come out of nowhere, but emerged as the working-out of the logic of our civilization and its exaltation of individualism.

You know…all that American stuff about freedom and liberty and justice for all.  Why Dreher doesn’t come right out and say that the very existence of United States Of America is a symptom of the inevitable decline of the west too I’ve no idea, other then he likes having that stars and stripes thing on his passport.  Oh…and the standard of living in a free country is kinda swell too.

I think the most common, and superficially common-sensical, questions that comes up in discussions of this issue is, "How does Jill and Jane’s marriage hurt Jack and Diane’s?" The idea is that unless you can demonstrate that a gay marriage directly harms traditional marriage, there is no rational objection to gay marriage.

But this is a shallow way to look at it. We all share the same moral ecology. You may as well ask why it should have mattered to the people of Amherst, Mass., if some rich white people in Charleston, SC, owned slaves. Don’t believe in slavery? Don’t buy one.

Look at that carefully.  Dreher may seem to be throwing moral relativism back in the face of liberals, but what he’s actually doing is employing it as a weapon.  What mattered about slavery was the wrong done to slaves, regardless of who did or did not choose to own any.  The question remains, what is the wrong done to Jack and Diane if Jill and Jane are free to marry.   But Dreher has an answer for that too…

Redefining marriage to include same-sex partners within its definition radically changes the institution, reinforcing the idea that it has no transcendental meaning, but can be changed at will.

Transcendental meaning.  Same sex marriage destroys marriage, by depriving it of its Transcendental meaning.  And whatever that Transcendental meaning is, it’s something that only heterosexuals can bring to it.  By virtue of their being…well…heterosexual.  Whatever it is that same sex couples bring to a marriage, it cannot be marriage because it cannot have that Transcendental meaning.  Only heterosexual coupling can possess that Transcendental meaning.  Which means that only heterosexual families possess that Transcendental meaning.  Because only heterosexual love possesses that Transcendental meaning.  

Here…let me decode that: Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  Only now the thinking is we don’t even have that.  We only have make-believe sex.  Mere genital stimulation.  Nothing more then that.  Certainly nothing Transcendental.  We are shallow, empty beings.  Creatures who only resemble true humans.  Our hearts can hold none of that Transcendental Meaning that heterosexuals wake up to and regard favorably in the bathroom mirror every morning.  Our brief barren assignations are just pitiful imitations of true heterosexual love.  And by demanding that our pseudo unions be regarded in marriage as being on the same Transcendental plane as the rich and noble and truly human heterosexual unions are, we do more then mock their genuine human capacity to love…we destroy the institute that enriches and sustains it.  And take down western civilization with it.  And thus, the Protestant Reformation finally achieves its goal.  Praise Satan.

That pretty much sum it up Rod?

Over at Box Turtle Bulletin and Ex-Gay Watch the discussion is about how to reach out to the other side.  But you can’t.  Not to the other side.  To your neighbor…yes.  Even if they oppose gay rights bitterly.  Neighbors must always be reached out to.  But you need to understand this…the other side isn’t the anti-same sex marriage side.  Listen to Dreher again.  Here is the other side:

This is why I don’t see any hope of stopping gay marriage. It did not come out of nowhere, but emerged as the working-out of the logic of our civilization and its exaltation of individualism.

This is the side that has been bitterly opposed to everything fine and noble a human being could ever become since the caveman days.  This is the side that would rather make you bow down to the gods and beg forgiveness for being born with a heart and a brain, then live in a world where the human spirit can soar.  Because the sight of everything a human can be, that they cannot, is more offensive to them, more frightening, then a landscape of beaten bent and broken humans in chains.  When Rod Dreher accuses liberals of using the rhetoric of slave masters, he’s laughing in your face, and then spitting in it.

It is one thing to reach out to a neighbor, and another to reach out to the one who presumes to be your master.  They get only the finger, and that so long as they keep their hands to themselves.  So…in the spirit of dialogue…Go Fuck yourself Rod…

You and all the other haters of humanity, and everything fine and noble human beings are capable of, and all the beauty they are capable of making, and giving to one another.  I’ve got your decline and fall of western civilization right here you gutter crawling bigot…

And if this image frightens you less then the sight of a devoted loving same-sex couple being joined in marriage in the eyes of the law, never mind your Nazi Pope’s, then you can just go fuck yourself because it isn’t the death of western civilization you are worried about because western civilization isn’t anything to you but a perch to shit and squawk on.  You never had to go through anything like this to marry the one love of your life…

…so save your pusillanimous rhetoric about the Transcendental Meaning of marriage for someone who thinks you really give a flying fuck about it more then pissing on the courage of lovers who would walk through fire for the sake of their love.  Would you go through the gauntlet gay couples have to go through for the woman you married?  Would you hold her hand in public if it meant the two of you might get your skulls bashed in?  Would you take her hand in marriage if it meant that someday some fanatic might decide to kill both of you to avenge the institution of marriage and prevent the fall of western civilization?   Would you have the nerve to love, if you had to have the nerve gay couples do?  I doubt it.  Because only cowards try to incite passions toward minorities.

And that’s what bothers you isn’t in Dreher.  Not that in our struggle for equality people come to see our humanity after all, but that they’ll finally see what a bunch of runts your kind are.  It isn’t the end of western civilization that keeps you awake nights.  It’s the end of pretense.

Whilst browsing Fark.Com I came across this site, and this photo…

This is from a G. C.   Murphy’s store, circa 1968.   I was 14 back then.   Note the ad above one of the portable sets on the second shelf above the boy RCA – First In Color TV…   Color sets were just starting to become affordable to the average person back then.   Still hugely expensive, and most TV shows throughout the day were still broadcast in black and white.   But all the prime time stuff by then was in color, and they all advertised that fact proudly…

And so did the networks…

I still vividly remember the impact of watching the premier of the second season of Star Trek in color the previous fall of 1967, when our downstairs neighbor bought a color TV.   I’d grown up watching TV in a black and white world and my little teenybopper jaw just dropped watching those scenes of the planet Vulcan in color.   The next summer mom bought a color TV, pretty similar to the one you see above.   Within a year TV seemed like it had always been in color.   I had a little GE black and white portable in my bedroom by then, and the only thing I bothered watching on it were the old reruns of TV shows that had been filmed in black and white.  

Never mind the clothes and hair styles in the photo above, the first thing I noticed in it were the legs on the TV set.   They mark it as being of its period.   It seemed back then that nearly every piece of furniture you laid eyes on had legs like that…dark wood pegs turned down to a shiny metal cap at the bottom.   In my household we had a TV, a record cabinet and a beautiful Eumig mahogany Hi-Fi console with legs like that.   Teens reading this now note the…Dials…on the set.   That was how you changed the channel back then.   And there were only 12 of them, starting at channel two and going up to channel 13 (whatever Did become of channel one???).   Now you know why all the local TV stations everywhere are somewhere in that range.   The other two large dials were probably a UHF tuner and the volume control.   In theory the UHF channels gave you channels 14 to 69.   In practice there were very few UHF channels.   The Washington D.C. area where I grew up, had 14, 20, 22, 26, 45, and 53, and half of those were PBS stations.   The row of small knobs were probably the brightness, color intensity and tint controls.  

The set almost certainly was powered by a bunch of vacuum tubes and if you looked behind it you would see a Masonite servicing panel with a bunch of holes drilled in it for ventilation.

So…anyway…having found the Pleasant Family Shopping Blog…I decided to do a little shopping.   He links to other sites that have images from the period I grew up in, and I think I spent about half the night browsing, and occasionally shouting with delight like the little teenybopper I once was…  

Oh!!…Fizzies!!!!

You can’t see it…but the back of the pack is a sheet of eight little square aluminum foil packets, each with a tablet in them about the size of an Alka-Seltzer.   And they did pretty much the same thing as Alka-Seltzer did…they fizzed…only these tablets turned the water in the glass into a bubbly soft drink.   Between the ages of 7 and 10 I was addicted to those things.   I pretty much stopped drinking that stuff when I was old enough to have an allowance that let me buy real soda.

Oh!   Crazy Foam…!

I think the most delightful part of last night was finding something I’d played with as a kid and completely forgotten about.   This stuff was a thick foam soap for a kid’s bath.   It was so thick it stood up on it’s own when you squirted it out of the can…practically like some kind of caulking compound.   It was almost as much fun as silly putty…

And as much fun as finding things I’d played with, was finding photos of the architectural environment I grew up in.   They made buildings different back then.   The style was…well…very sixties.   Here’s a shot of a Sears store that really brought it back for me…

Note the palm trees poking up one side of the store.   We didn’t have palm trees where I grew up, but that building just shouts its period.

Here’s what you probably would have found had you walked over to the snack bar…

According to the photo, that’s circa 1962.   Note the signage, the hanging lamps and the chairs.   Oh…and the color scheme.   Here’s what a grocery store might look like…

Back then they actually gave you double lines separating the car spaces.   Here’s what you might see inside at the frozen foods area…

Freezers with no doors.   A couple rows of them usually.   Those things worked because cold air sinks and the electricity to run them was cheap.   These days they mostly use standup freezers with glass doors to keep the cold air in.   I used to hang my head over the edge of these things and look sideways down an entire row for the thin layer of fog that formed in the zone between the warm store air and the cold freezer air.   Note the analog butcher’s scale over in the meat department.

That’s enough nostalgia for now.   I had an absolute blast going through Pleasant Family Shopping.   And some of the sites he links to.   And it really startles me how immediate some of the memories were that those images brought back.   It just doesn’t seem like it’s that long ago.   And while I would not want to go back to those days (not back to a time before the Internet, not back to a time before cell phones and home video and safer cars, and absolutely not back to a time before the APA took homosexuality off the list of mental illnesses!) I can appreciate a little better now why the times I live in irritate me so often.   One thing I think is so appealing about the iPhone is it’s display is made of real glass and the chrome trim around the edge is really metal. I like solid things in my life.   The Mercedes for example. Things used to be made like that.

Now that I have a passport (yes…more on that later), the need to learn other languages besides English, if only to be polite and not the Ugly American when I travel to other countries, has become more pressing.  The logical choice for a first other language for me here in the U.S. is Spanish, and as my first trip out of the country will be to Mexico, I’ve been trying to pick up a little basic tourist Spanish, although they say in most resort areas by the beach English is spoken enough that you can get by.  But I want to be polite.

For various personal reasons I am also trying to pick up some German (read that however you want).  So I was attracted to this headline on Fark.Com…

EU wants more people to learn German. You know…just in case

Never mind the gratuitous Nazi joke there…the comment thread on that article became really absorbing…

Ugliest language on earth.

—- 

A long time ago, I was playing a recording of the Vienna Boys Choir. My aunt stopped, listened, and said, "That’s beautiful! They must be singing in French!" And I said, "No, it’s German."

A friend of my mother’s wanted me to say something in French, so I did. She made me repeat it, I did. She said it put shivers up and down her spine, it was so beautiful. She asked me for a translation. I said, "Take out the garbage."

If you say a language is beautiful or ugly, you reveal more about yourself than the language. 

—

To us southern California folk, people in Spain sound remarkably like gay Mexicans. 

—

No, actually, I think Moroccan Arabic (if not Arabic in general) holds that honor. Never have I heard an angrier sounding language. Even spoken in normal tones, it sounds like people are arguing with each other.

German *can* sound quite sexy. Arabic, not so much.

Arabic can sound pretty damn sexy too. My husband sounds almost like he’s purring when he rolls his r’s and I just adore it. Maybe I’m a little biased because I love him so much. :)
But you’re right, the Moroccan dialect does come across a little harsh. Palestinians and Egyptians are a little more lyrical and pleasing to the ear. And the Algerian dialect is beautifully intertwined with French.

Anyone here know what language the Vikings spoke and whether it’s still around? I wonder if THEY sounded angry.

—

It´s quite easy for Germans to learn English, because most English terms evolved out of the German language and therefore have many similarities.

—

The vikings spoke norrønt mål (aka Old Norse). The closest living equalents today are Icelandic and Faroese – allthought as a Norwegian I have little trouble understanding written norrønt given a bit of time. And personaly, i don’t find any of the North Germanic languages to sound particulary angry…

German is the perfect language for giving commands in though; even to tell someone you love them (Ich liebe dich!) sounds like a direct order.

—

German is an brilliant language. I dare someone to find me a another language that has more words for "the".

—

It has one word for the, its just inflected. 

—

Oh fine, if you wanna get all nit picky…

"I dare someone to find another language that has more variations for "the"". Is that alright? Does my point make sense now? I hope the German’s aren’t going to be that pedantic when I go to Wacken.

—

You’re a brave man, doing that in front of the Germans.

—

On a related note, whoever invented different genders for words should be drawn and quartered.

THIS

I live in Switzerland and not only do I have to learn Hoch Deutsch in school but I have to try to understand Berndeutsch, which is a dialect that is totally different from German. I love hearing Germans speaking in the streets because I actually understand what they say. It’s damn frustrating to leave German class and stand open-mouthed at some store clerk who has mumbled some simple question to you in Swiss that you, of course, don’t understand.

Btw, I read somewhere that the different gendered articles for nouns probably originated from assigning articles to animate objects versus inanimate ones and that eventually evolved into a gender-based system. 

—

And we don’t sound angry all the time. But a swearing german is scary.

Am arsch! I find German is missing a good substitute for the word fark though. 

—

I’ll have to agree on that. "Ficken" doesn’t sound quite right for swearing.

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Also, I never realized how much Spanish I knew until I tried to survive in Germany and learn German. Spanish comes to mind easily. German is like getting blood from a stone.

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I live in a town of about 13,000 people about 1.5 hours north of Hamburg by train. I have found a local primary doctor who speaks English (trained in Boston), a pediatrician who speaks English (fluent enough, but sometimes we miscommunicate), and there is a teacher at my child’s school who speaks English well enough. I travel 15 minutes to a nearby town for banking because there is someone there who speaks English well. I can order in a store in German well enough and I traveled to Kiel for purchasing appliances etc. The salespeople there were fine. There are fluent people around, but most people studied it in school (decades ago) and then never used it or just know enough phrases to minimally interact with tourists. The good part is that it forces me to work on learning.

—

That must be nice, when I use german here they just respond in English, which is why I have been here a year and my skills are mediocre at best.

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English and Mandarin are the languages of business. I would add Spanish. If a person knows these three language, they can travel anywhere in the world and communicate with most people.

A person who speaks 3 languages is trilingual. A person who speaks 2 languages is bilingual. What do you call a person who only speaks one langauge?…an American.

Good day!

Heh.  Of course that’s not fair, we’re not all like that.  But I can see how we might seem that way to the rest of the world.  Hopefully when I go traveling abroad I won’t be doing my part to reinforce any negative stereotypes.  One of the things I wish now that I could do over again, is have traveled abroad more.  But there was never a whole lot of money for travel in my household…we pretty much stuck to the beaches a few hours drive away…and I never had enough nerve to try wandering all over Europe with only spare change like some kids did back in the 70s.  I’m starting to appreciate in my middle age now, how that lack of nerve I always had stifled my life in so many ways besides romance.

Via the Austen-American Statesman (Texas)…   What it’s come to…

Imagery in Bastrop school mural stirs controversy

A mural meant to bring people together is causing a rift in the Bastrop community.

The painting in question, a student project completed in 2003, adorns a wall in the corridor leading to the Bastrop High School gym. It depicts the sometimes unpleasant history of the town, showing scenes of a Mexican and Comanche raid and slaves working in a cotton field, as well as unifying visions of children of different ethnicities reaching out to one another.

Bastrop school board members were surprised when almost a dozen district residents who signed up to speak at a community forum Tuesday evening wanted to talk about the mural, some calling for its removal on religious grounds and others with arguments for keeping it up.

…

Bastrop resident Lauren Hansell, who made the original complaint, homeschools her children but visits the school on Fridays to pray with students at the flagpole.

A Christian, Hansell said she wants the mural removed because of the war and slavery scenes and depictions of Buddha and ancient gods. Hansell said girl’s basketball coach Dee Deshay pointed out the mural as a potential problem.

"When she showed it to me, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ " said Hansell, who added that the mural presents a new age idea of peace and unity that could be confusing to Christian students.

Emphasis mine.  Hansell waves her finger at the depiction of many faiths in the mural…

Among the images on the mural are an Aztec sun, ancient Egypt’s King Tutankhamen, Buddha and Shiva, a Hindu deity, dancing on a demon of ignorance.

Hansell, who at first interpreted Shiva’s dance as a message in favor of abortion, said laws that bar Christian symbols from public schools should apply to the mural.

Here is the tack being played now by the KulturKrieger: If one religion is kept out of the schools they should all be kept out.  But fundamentalist hysterics notwithstanding, Christianity isn’t being kept out of the schools and never has been. Here, the Austin-American Statesman actually does some journalism …

The First Amendment, which bans government-sponsored religious activities even as it protects religious expression from government interference, allows students to pray during school in informal settings, according to U.S. Department of Education guidelines. The guidelines say students have the right to "express their beliefs about religion in the form of homework, artwork, and other written and oral assignments free of discrimination based on the religious content of their submissions."

Valdez, the muralist, said the purpose of the project was to represent the history and cultural unity in Bastrop. Although no one symbol can represent a culture, he said the students chose the mural’s imagery to represent unity.

That’s the problem.  That was always the problem.  Not that Christianity is being kept out, but that kids of other faiths are allowed to feel welcome…to believe that they are a part of the American fabric too.  That was why the fight was waged back in the 50s and 60s to stop public schools from forcing prayer on students.  That is why people work hard to this day to keep the fundamentalists from co-opting the American public school system.  The public schools are for all children, not some.  And that’s because America is for people of all faiths, not the people of one faith.

That idea is anathema to the fundamentalists, who think Jesus smiles every time they spit in a Samaritan’s face.  If they can’t beat the heathen children down one way, they’ll try to beat them down another.  One way or another, the heathens must be forced to give up their faith.  If they can’t be forced into school prayers.  Maybe they can be forced into silence.

The point was always to coerce everyone into Christianity.  Their brand of Christianity.  This is why the depictions of unity on the mural might be confusing to their children.  It includes everybody.

I wonder what they’re talking about tonight on the 700 Club…?

Via numerous sources…  When the homophobes say gays are obsessed with sex, count on them to describe the sex we are obsessed with in more detail then most gay pornography.  So naturally, in the wake of the California decision, we see Peter LaBarbra framing the issues involved in his own demure way…

How Will California Homosexual Couples Consummate their Counterfeit ‘Marriages’? 

Oh I suppose they’ll…Go To Disneyland!

Whatever.  Here’s how my gay couple consummated the Lawrence v. Texas decision that finally overtuned the sodomy laws…

For someone who thinks same-sex sex is so ugly Peter, you sure do think about it a lot…