Did you remember to count all the hungry mouths you feed…?

More Mark and Josh tax time fun, here and here.   I missed getting one in for 2005.  The 2003 cartoon is obviously an early effort at drawing the two…I’d only just discovered them recurring in my political cartoons.  They’ve managed since then to get themselves a better kitchen table set, and a slightly better artist. 

While the Washington Post is busy providing its readers with balance by adding a drooling racist, sexist, war mongering homophobic nutcase to its web site, the rat faced git they’ve already had on their pages for years, Charles Krauthammer, is busy arguing that same sex marriage is like polygamy because…well, just because.

As Newsweek notes, these stirrings for the mainstreaming of polygamy (or, more accurately, polyamory) have their roots in the increasing legitimization of gay marriage. In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one’s autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement — the number restriction (two and only two) — is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.

This line of argument makes gay activists furious. I can understand why they do not want to be in the same room as polygamists. But I’m not the one who put them there. Their argument does. Blogger and author Andrew Sullivan, who had the courage to advocate gay marriage at a time when it was considered pretty crazy, has called this the "polygamy diversion," arguing that homosexuality and polygamy are categorically different because polygamy is a mere "activity" while homosexuality is an intrinsic state that "occupies a deeper level of human consciousness."

But this distinction between higher and lower orders of love is precisely what gay rights activists so vigorously protest when the general culture "privileges" (as they say in the English departments) heterosexual unions over homosexual ones. Was "Jules et Jim" (and Jeanne Moreau), the classic Truffaut film involving two dear friends in love with the same woman, about an "activity" or about the most intrinsic of human emotions?

To simplify the logic, take out the complicating factor of gender mixing. Posit a union of, say, three gay women all deeply devoted to each other. On what grounds would gay activists dismiss their union as mere activity rather than authentic love and self-expression? On what grounds do they insist upon the traditional, arbitrary and exclusionary number of two?

 Well I have one.  His name is Gideon…

ST. GEORGE, Utah — Abandoned by his family, faith and community, Gideon Barlow arrived here an orphan from another world.

At first, he played the tough guy, aloof and hard. But when no one was watching, he would cry.

The freckle-faced 17-year-old said he was left to fend for himself last year after being forced out of Colorado City, Ariz., a town about 40 miles east of here, just over the state line.

"I couldn’t see how my mom would let them do what they did to me," he said.

When he tried to visit her on Mother’s Day, he said, she told him to stay away. When he begged to give her a present, she said she wanted nothing.

"I am dead to her now," he said.

Gideon is one of the "Lost Boys," a group of more than 400 teenagers — some as young as 13 — who authorities in Utah and Arizona say have fled or been driven out of the polygamous enclaves of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City over the last four years.

…

Some say they were sometimes given as little as two hours’ notice before being driven to St. George or nearby Hurricane, Utah, and left like unwanted pets along the road.

Authorities say the teens aren’t really being expelled for what they watch or wear, but rather to reduce competition for women in places where men can have dozens of wives.

"It’s a mathematical thing. If you are marrying all these girls to one man, what do you do with all the boys?" said Utah Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff, who has had boys in his office crying to see their mothers…

This isn’t some theoretical criticism of polygamy, we can actually watch this happening right here on American soil.  It is happening in Colorado City. A few dominant males are rounding up females like chattel, and competing with the other dominant males for harem size. The women are rendered progressively more and more powerless, dependent, and ignorant, because independent, strong willed, intelligent women are systematically selected out of the culture by men who don’t want their women straying out of the harem to find their own sexual and emotional fulfillment. Very young girls are taken by dominant males before they’re old enough to make their own choice, and maybe go with some other guy they actually like. In Colorado City, the local government has been utterly corrupted by the practice. And as of at least last summer, when that article was written, they were dumping their male children by the road out of town like so much human garbage.  They do this because every boy born in a polygamous community is a potential challenger to the harem of the dominant males the moment they reach puberty.

This is actually happening. We can watch it happening. Somebody tell me why this isn’t the necessary outcome of polygamy.  The question is always raised by jackasses like Krauthammer, that if we allow same sex marriage, why not polygamy too? Well…there’s why.

The problem for homophobic morons like Krauthammer is that their rhetoric about the danger to society of same sex marriage are all, without exception, either myths, lies, or superstitions.  Anti-gay propagandists like Stanley Kurtz have to lie about the effects same sex marriage has had on other countries to make their case. 

But Kurtz’s smoking gun is really just smoke and mirrors. Reports of the death of marriage in Scandinavia are greatly exaggerated; giving gay couples the right to wed did not lead to massive matrimonial flight by heterosexuals.

Currently there are nine European countries that give marital rights to gay couples. In Scandinavia, Denmark (1989), Norway (1993), Sweden (1994), and Iceland (1996) pioneered a separate-and-not-quite-equal status for same-sex couples called "registered partnership." (When they register, same-sex couples receive most of the financial and legal rights of marriage, other than the right to marry in a state church and the right to adopt children.) Since 2001, the Netherlands and Belgium have opened marriage to same-sex couples.

Despite what Kurtz might say, the apocalypse has not yet arrived. In fact, the numbers show that heterosexual marriage looks pretty healthy in Scandinavia, where same-sex couples have had rights the longest. In Denmark, for example, the marriage rate had been declining for a half-century but turned around in the early 1980s. After the 1989 passage of the registered-partner law, the marriage rate continued to climb; Danish heterosexual marriage rates are now the highest they’ve been since the early 1970’s. And the most recent marriage rates in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland are all higher than the rates for the years before the partner laws were passed. Furthermore, in the 1990s, divorce rates in Scandinavia remained basically unchanged.

Of course, the good news about marriage rates is bad news for Kurtz’s sky-is-falling argument. So, Kurtz instead focuses on the increasing tendency in Europe for couples to have children out of wedlock. Gay marriage, he argues, is a wedge that is prying marriage and parenthood apart.

The main evidence Kurtz points to is the increase in cohabitation rates among unmarried heterosexual couples and the increase in births to unmarried mothers. Roughly half of all children in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are now born to unmarried parents. In Denmark, the number of cohabiting couples with children rose by 25 percent in the 1990s. From these statistics Kurtz concludes that " … married parenthood has become a minority phenomenon," and—surprise—he blames gay marriage.

But Kurtz’s interpretation of the statistics is incorrect. Parenthood within marriage is still the norm—most cohabitating couples marry after they start having children. In Sweden, for instance, 70 percent of cohabiters wed after their first child is born. Indeed, in Scandinavia the majority of families with children are headed by married parents. In Denmark and Norway, roughly four out of five couples with children were married in 2003. In the Netherlands, a bit south of Scandinavia, 90 percent of heterosexual couples with kids are married.

(Emphasis in the above mine)  The right has to lie about the effects of same sex marriage, and they do it brazenly, because their audience is mostly gay hating bigots like themselves who don’t actually give a flying fuck what the truth is, they just want excuses to keep hating homosexuals.  They lie about its corrosive effects on society and culture.  They lie about the harm it causes to children raised in same sex households.  And when their lies are exposed, they merely repeat them more and louder.  But you don’t have to lie about what’s going on in Colorado City, to make a case against polygamy.  You can see it happening for yourself.

Can we put this argument about same sex marriage leading to polygamy to rest now?  Well…no.  Because, see, it never was an argument to begin with.  The homophobic right has never argued their case against gay rights in good faith.  For decades it’s always been one transparent lie after another.  Can we finally start admitting that fact now, because it says it all.  Their minds will not be changed, because this was never about reasonable rational fears of what giving gay people equal rights might do to society.  It was always about hate.  Mindless, knee jerk, hate, and nothing more.  We could have same sex marriage in this country for a thousand years with no ill effects whatsoever, and if he could manage it, Krauthammer would still be arguing that same sex marriage will destroy us all, still babbling every crackpot theory about the dangers of homosexuality to anyone who will listen.

A straight seventeen year old high school senior has been expelled from his school for showing his video project to his class. It was about a gay high school romance …

Brandon Flyte, a student at West Linn High School in West Linn, Oregon, was recently expelled for airing a video project he had been assigned in class which includes a same-sex "snuggle" scene. The film, Brokeback High, is a "gay love story" based on themes from Brokeback Mountain, but set in a modern day high school. The shot above was the one that got him expelled.

Flyte writes on his website: "One has to wonder if any of this would’ve happened had the two characters snuggling in my film been male and female. We’re led to believe that diversity is encouraged in schools, but when a 17 year-old straight kid makes a serious gay love story and is expelled for it, it just begs the question of exactly what kind of policy was the administration following?"

Well…let’s see…a quick lookup of the high school web site leads you to a main page with this text very prominently displayed for all to see:

It is the policy of the West Linn/Wilsonville Board of Education and School District that there will be no discrimination or harassment on the grounds of race, color, sex, marital status, religion, national origin, age or disability in any educational programs, activities or employment.

Notice what’s missing…? The school administration wasn’t just sending a message to the gay students, but to the straight ones too. Stand up for the pariahs and you’ll be treated like one… Now that this kid’s plight is getting some internet attention, wait for the school to ban him from his graduation too, in retaliation. I sincerely hope it doesn’t happen, but adults who kick kids around like this for supporting for their gay peers have no conscience.

[Update…] According to Pam’s House Blend, after much local media attention the school has relented and are letting the kid attend classes again. Good.

There’s some discussion in the Pam’s House Blend post about how conservative that particular part of Oregon is. That’s not especially surprising. What is, is this little detail they dug up, from the School District (as opposed to the school’s) policies:

The district shall promote non-discrimination and an environment free of harassment based on an individual’s race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, parental or marital status or age or because of the race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, parental or marital status or age of any other persons with whom the individual associates.

Which is, in one obvious case, more embracing then the one displayed prominently on the schools’ own web site. I assume the district policies outrank the school’s, but you have to wonder if that one omission was deliberate nonetheless.

Reacting to a change in fertility clinic rules allowing gay men to become sperm donors, a local crackpot is demanding that people be warned that using their sperm is likely to result in a horrible consequence …namely the birth of little gay babies…

After a complaint to the Human Rights Commission, New Zealand’s biggest fertility service, Fertility Associates, has decided to accept sperm from gay men – previously barred because of a supposed higher HIV risk. Responding to the move, Canterbury University associate professor of genetics Frank Sin called for potential recipients of sperm from gay donors to be told that "the gay gene(s)" could be passed on to the child.

Dr Sin told The Dominion Post that it was "not daydreaming" to suggest that sexual orientation could be inherited. Animal models had clearly shown the existence of a gene that controlled sexual behaviour, he said. Though there was nothing so conclusive in human studies, there was strong evidence – particularly from twin studies – of a significant genetic component.

Environment also played a role, Dr Sin said. Though he had nothing against homosexuality, Dr Sin said people had the right to know the trait could be passed on.

Notice however, that he’s not saying that anyone with gay relatives in their bloodline should also have their sperm so labeled.  My parents were both straight, as are the parents of most gay children…and yet they produced a gay son.  So who does this guy think he’s fooling?  Perhaps he’s got nothing against homosexuality, but he’s clearly got a problem with homosexuals.

The ACLU says that a homophobic pastor’s arrest for propositioning an undercover policeman was probably a violation of his civil rights…

The American Civil Liberties Union says that a pastor who frequently speaks out against homosexuality and was arrested last week for propositioning a male police officer was charged in violation of the Supreme Court’s ruling on gay sex. The Rev. Lonnie Latham, 60, appeared briefly in court on Thursday on charges of lewd conduct, a misdemeanor. Latham was arrested January 3 after allegedly asking an undercover officer to join him in his hotel room for oral sex. Police impounded Latham’s 2005 Mercedes. (story) He was released on a $500 bond. As he was leaving jail he said: “I was set up. I was in the area pastoring to police.”

The ACLU is right of course. The police were conducting a prostitution sting in the area, and the lewd conduct charge was apparently laid on Latham because he never suggested that money change hands. But in that case his arrest can only be for propositioning the cop. That’s speech, and since Lawrence they can’t argue that he was propositioning the cop to commit a crime. This is the second state now that I know of, that seems to be flaunting the Supreme Court decision that overturned the sodomy laws. Virginia being the other. Back in the days after Brown v. Board of Education, some people, including lawmakers in the old Confederacy, were calling for “massive resistance” to racial integration. You can just see something similar brewing over Lawrence. How dare you say we have to treat homosexuals as if they were citizens too… And if president Junior is able to stack the Supreme Court with religious right nutcases like Scalito we may live to see a day when same sex couples are once again made into criminals. The Oklahoma District Attorney seems to think he’s merely being even handed about it…

Oklahoma County District Attorney Wes Lane said Oklahoma law prohibits a person from offering to engage in a lewd act “regardless of whether money is sought for or engaged.” “In this case, that is exactly what Mr. Latham is alleged to have done. To his misfortune, that individual was an Oklahoma City police officer,” Lane said.

…which is another way of saying the law criminalizes a certain kind of speech. But no…this is just a backdoor way of trying to keep people from having sex. I guess the theory is if they can’t ask, they don’t do. Next time you hear one of these rightwing crackpots bellyaching about liberals and nanny government, just laugh in their face.