Surreal
Surreal sounds like the wrong word to use at times, but at other times it's the only word that describes what I'm feeling.
I'm not sure how else to say this except to just come out and say it. My stepbrother died in a car accident two weeks ago. It was obviously unexpected and a complete shock to me and the rest of my family. Shock would be an understatement.
The day after he died, my dad told me it was the worst day of his life. It was mine too.
Things are getting better each day for me, but I still have trouble believing that it's true. I guess that's all I'm going to write about this now. Maybe I'll go into it all more at some point.
Gay Marriage Announcement
There's a
post up over at Queerty about a couple of guys that are suing their alma mater, American University, for falsley announcing their same sex marriage in the school's magazine (the guys say they're straight). The two are upset that American University for not checking their sources before printing the material. The magazine also incorrectly reported that one of the two was the CFO of a (fictional) group called the Gay Rights Brigade.
This sounds like a fratermity prank to me, and I think if the two guys are going to be suing anyone, they should be suing the people that are responsible for the prank itself. Then again, a lawsuit sounds like a pretty sad way to respond to something like this.
If you really look into it, this is either 1) a get-rich-quick scheme by the two guys (even if someone did create this prank at their expense) or 2) latent homophobia. The optimist in me (if I can even use that term here) thinks that this is just a case of 2 guys that saw the opportunity to pathetically try to make a buck through a frivilous lawsuit. But, I can't help but think that if this prank was announcing a fictional marriage between two people of the opposite sex, these guys would have just laughed it off and asked the school to print a correction.
Are we really at an age where being called gay is worth $1.5 million in damages? I sure hope not, but like I've been saying, this whole gay thing isn't as smooth sailing as some people like to claim.
For the record, my alma mater printed the announcement of my ceremony to J in the montly email and the quarterly magazine (and as far as I've seen, we were the first gay marriage to get announced). Hopefully stupid stuff like this won't prevent them from continuing to do so.
Don't Blame Gay Marriage Unless You've Got Proof
In the Republican Presidential Debate last night, presidential hopeful (read: needs a miracle) Sam
Brownback offered his take on gay marriage. As you can imagine, it wasn't a very favorable review. Thankfully he got booed by a good number of people in the audience. Unfortunately, he took the opportunity to twist the facts about gay marriage in front of the whole country.
I'm not thinking that enough people read this blog for me to be able to make a difference, but maybe someone out there will see it and start to realize how much anti-gay marriage folks have to manipulate the "evidence" to prove their points.
Here's what the Senator had to say:
“I understand this is a divided audience on this, and I understand we as a country are struggling with this question, but these issues aren’t done in a vacuum. I had a question earlier about family values, and I think this is important for us to rebuild the family structure. In countries that have redefined marriage, where they’ve said, okay, it’s not just a man and a woman, it can be two men, two women, the marriage rates in those countries have plummeted to where you have counties now in Northern Europe where 80 percent of the first-born children are born out of wedlock. We don’t need more children born out of wedlock; we need more children born into wedlock between a mom and a dad bonded together for life.
“When you do these vast social experiments — and that’s what this is, when you redefine marriage. It’s a vast social experiment. They’re not done in isolation. They impact the rest of the culture around you. When you take the sacredness out of marriage, you will drive the marriage rates down. And currently in this country, currently we’re at 36 percent of our children born out of wedlock. You can raise a good child in that setting, but we know the best place is between a mom and a dad bonded together for life. (Boos, cheers, applause.)”
Somehow
Brownback jumped from gay marriage to children born out of wedlock in the blink of an eye, which is funny because I'm not sure how allowing people to get married has any correlation to kids then being born outside of marriage. Even funnier that he's addressing banning gay marriage, not trying to fix the real marriage and divorce problems that he's actually referring to (even if he doesn't admit it).
Some people may trust
Brownback and think he really believes that allowing 5% or so of the population to marry does, in fact, cause divorce rates to sky rocket. I don't, unfortunately. I'm of the belief that he's so anti-gay (for whatever reason), that he'll use any statistics he can get his hands on to try to get the country to agree with him, even if they don't have any real correlation (much like his example above).
As for
Brownback's claim that allowing gay marriage somehow causes straights to stop getting married en
masse, Massachusetts currently has the
lowest divorce rates in this country, even 2 years after allowing gay marriage.
Also, check out this
page for a nice take down of his claims on gay marriage causing out-of-wedlock childbirths in Europe (including that the
nonmarital birthrate in these countries was already increasing significantly before gay unions began and that the US divorce and cohabitation rates have risen dramatically since interracial marriage was made legal in the late 1960's, but somehow
Brownback gives that a pass). It's a
doozy of an article picking apart these absurd claims.
I'd think anyone being honest about this issue would have to see
Brownback's argument holds no water. He seems to be so blinded by an attempt to get votes (or his own anti-gay stance), that he doesn't seem to care what the facts really are.
One Last Thing About the Larry Craig Incident
Alan
Keyes may be one of the people I most dislike in American politics. Luckily his political pull doesn't go very far these days, but somehow he still has enough people listening to him for me to know who he is.
Alan
Keyes didn't write this
article, Michael
Bresciani, did, but it's posted on
Keyes'
Renew America website, so I'll give both of them the blame for writing/posting this shameful piece of writing. Sadly
Bresciani describes himself as a Christian in the short bio after the article. Apparently deliberately misrepresenting a story to demonize gay people is A-
Ok according to his brand of Christianity. It's not
ok in mine.
Here are
Bresciani's own words:
All the hype about Larry Craig's demise leaves something out. Conspicuously missing is the attention that should have been paid to the appalling habits, the seedy haunts and inconvenient places gays have chosen to further their sleazy activities. But lets not forget that just as the undercover cop who nabbed Larry Craig, may have never expected to nab a U.S. Senator; neither did the gays who frequent the stalls at the airport bathroom. Their preferred targets, victims, would be younger men perhaps even underage. Just like your sons.
Just like your sons? Wow.
Somehow
Bresciani managed to blame gays for Craig's tryst (even though, as I already pointed out, Craig is living as a straight man) and even throws in the pedophile card for good measure. In case you're wondering, nothing about this case or any other remotely related to it even implies that there is any sort of
pedophilia going on.
Some people should really be ashamed of themselves.
