Today is National Coming Out Day. If Ray were still alive, it would also be the day we’d be celebrating the twenty-first anniversary of our commitment ceremony (he promised to stay with me for the rest of his life, and he did).
Since I am still occasionally surprised to learn that someone I know or work with hasn’t figured out that I’m gay: my husband (Michael) and I are both men, and we’re very much in love with each other and happy together.
Anyway, here is a collection of news and other things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. I’m grouping them by topic, today. I know there’s even more links related to gay rights than usual, but think about this week in perspective. Wikipedia had to update the map showing which states allow same sex couples to marry, which ban them from it, and which have some form of domestic partnerships instead eight times over the course of the first four days of the week.
That’s just amazing!
So, here are my links for the week:
Creationism Is About Gay Marriage, Not Science. Interviews with the financial backer and the primary “scientific consultant” at the Creation Museum reveal all.
A SWEET TRIUMPH: SAME-SEX COUPLES CAN FINALLY WED ON THE LAS VEGAS STRIP.
Why the GOP hates U.S. history: Inconvenient truths that freak out American conservatives.
Voter ID Explained In One Photo.
This is what same-sex marriage looks like now: as gay as the Mormon missionary position.
When ‘Redefining Marriage’ Meant That Women Had To Be Treated Like Human Beings.
Huckabee Urges States To Ignore Rulings On Marriage Equality, Abortion Rights & Church-State Separation. Related: Why the wingnut base won’t let Republicans move on.
WWE “Going Purple” and Partnering with GLAAD for Spirit Day.
How Straight Spouses Cope When Their Partners Come Out.
Best of the worst: The 10 most unhinged conservative reactions to expanding marriage equality.
Transgender Actress Erika Ervin On Her ‘American Horror Story: Freak Show’ Role. A trans actress playing a trans character! Whoa!
Romanian ‘Orthodox Priests’ Calendar 2015 Pays Tribute To Social Tolerance. “the 2015 Orthodox Calendar features 12 months of hunky models striking homoerotic poses alongside religious iconography.”
Reading Stuff Will Eliminate 90 Percent of Your Stupid Questions.
What If You’re Against Football, But for the Seahawks?
OPEN CARRY ENTHUSIAST’S GUN STOLEN AT GUNPOINT.
Everyday People: 12-year-old boy gains confidence through My Little Pony.
Scientists say DNA determines coffee consumption.
Forget Ebola. Worry about the unvaccinated kid down the street.
New global Mars image from Mars Orbiter Mission features Gale crater.
Strange Red Supergiant-Neutron Star Object Discovered.
An iPad filled with apps weighs more than one with nothing installed.
Why I’ve stopped using Google apps on my iPhone 6 Plus.
New Dark Matter Theory Solves Milky Way’s “Missing Satellite-Galaxies” Puzzle.
Foom! ‘Superflares’ Erupt From Tiny Red Dwarf Star, Surprising Scientists.
How bad user interface design killed a child cancer patient.
5 Fonts that will kill your design (and 5 great alternatives).
Tap, tap, tappity-tap-tap-tappity-tap!.
If Buying Condoms Was Like Buying Birth Control:
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THE LIQUIDATOR ‘Main Title’ – Shirley Bassey:
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Levi Kreis, Handcuff My Soul:
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George Ezra – Blame It on Me:
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Mary J. Blige – Right Now (From The London Sessions):
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[Official Video] Rather Be – Pentatonix (Clean Bandit Cover):
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I have written before about odd encounters with people through social media. One problem is that since some of the places I hang out online are forums and services that cater to specifically gay people, I wind up running into folks who are looking to hook up, but more vexingly, assume everyone else is also looking to hook up.
Consequently, my profile on all of those sites mention, as prominently as I can, that I am married to a wonderful man. My profile also always mentions my interest in science fiction/fantasy, that I write, and that I live in Seattle.
I’ve noticed a very specific phenomenon the last few years: guys who will initiate a conversation, making a comment about either the fact that I’m a writer or that I’m a sci fi fan, but who manage to completely miss the parts about my being married or living in Seattle. Seriously, at least once a week someone will chat amiably for a few moments, then start asking questions about what I am looking for in a boyfriend/long term relationship. When I point out that I already have a husband, they either get confused or flustered.
If they continue the conversation, they usually switch gears to explaining that they don’t have many gay friends, and ask if maybe I and my husband would like to hang out some time. At which point I usually ask, “Your profile says you live in Los Angeles/Jersey City/Houston/fill-in-the-blank; that might be a bit difficult.” Which leads into the part of the conversation where they didn’t realize that I wasn’t local to them.
I try not to be too snarky when I suggest that they might want to look more closely at someone’s profile before chatting them up. But I also try to cut things off, because by this point it’s clear that they either have extremely poor reading comprehension or some sort of memory/attention deficit issue.
Or maybe they’re just really, really dim.
The best one is footnote 12, concerning the closing arguments from the Governor of Idaho:
He also states, in conclusory fashion, that allowing same-sex marriage will lead opposite-sex couples to abuse alcohol and drugs, engage in extramarital affairs, take on demanding work schedules, and participate in time-consuming hobbies. We seriously doubt that allowing committed same-sex couples to settle down in legally recognized marriages will drive opposite-sex couples to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.
You can read the entire ruling here.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court officially declined to review any of the Marriage Equality cases that had been appealed to them thus far. Declining to review means that the ruling by each appeals court is, essentially, upheld. The immediate effect was the stays against those rulings were lifted, and in five more states Marriage Equality now is the law of the land. The secondary effect is that any other states covered by one of the five Circuit Courts whose rulings were upheld will almost certainly become marriage equality states as soon as an appeal gets to the circuit. That means very soon the number of states that have marriage equality will be 30. In fact, officials in Colorado, knowing that the circuit court they are currently appealing to has already ruled against a nearly identical ban in a neighboring state, have decided to drop the appeal, and have told county clerks to start issuing marriage licenses.
Now, there are several other cases that have yet to be ruled on by any circuit court, so those last 20 states may take a while.
Governors of at least two of the states who lost Monday are not taking it gracefully. Most hilarious of these is Mary Fallin, governor of Oklahoma. Fallin’s righteous indignation is so funny because Fallin is a divorced adulterer. Continue reading Traditional marriage?
I’ve been trying to acquire a Smith-Corona Silent-Super portable typewriter in the bright pink with white keys for years. See, my mom owned that model of typewriter since her teen years, so I grew up with that typewriter in the house. And at the age of ten, when Mom decided that she was not going to be typing up any papers for me when I got to that stage in school, she sat me down with her old typing text book and started teaching me to type. I achieved a typing speed of a bit over 60-words a minute on that machine by the time I was in middle school, and being able to hit such speed on a mechanical typewriter is why my computer typing speed is about 105 words per minute.
And the Silent-Super was a dream. It was regarded by many as one of the best typewriters ever made. Mom’s was in great shape, with a touch so light and well-balanced, you felt almost as if you could have typed just by blowing on the keys. Continue reading Tap, tap, tappity-tap-tap-tappity-tap!
When I set my goals for the year, I said I’d do regular check-ins. It’s a new month, so I ought to check in.
I tried to set very concrete steps for achieving my goals. Inspired by a friend’s suggestion, I tried to identify a better habit to replace each bad habit. So how am I doing? Continue reading Goals? I thought you said ‘ghouls!’
It’s Friday! The first Friday in October, a month which contains one of my favorite holidays, birthdays of several people I love, an anniversary, and some of my favorite weather.
In honor of this first Friday in October, here is a collection of news and other things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared:
Cyber harassment study reveals the unsurprising!
OMFG Teach Your Kids Accurate Names for Body Parts Already.
Look: Harlem Hate Pastor Posts Violent New Anti-Gay ‘Biblical’ Message.
Consumer Reports tests suggest iPhone 6 ‘bend-gate’ a bit overblown.
Bendgate Unbent: Apple And Viral iPhone 6 Plus Bender Are Both Right.
No, you probably can’t bend the iPhone 6 Plus. Unless you’re a bodybuilder.
The Death Of The Saturday Morning Cartoon Is Complete.
R.I.P. Buster Jones. The voice behind some of your favorite Saturday morning cartoon characters.
The Secret Goldman Sachs Tapes. “no one feels individually accountable for financial crisis mistakes because management is through consensus.”
High School football death is 3rd in recent days. Ebola has killed zero people in America this week, while High School football has killed three. So, what should we be worried about?
Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out of It: Why Is This Widely Denied?
Strange New Type of Brain Cell Discovered.
Calif. governor signs bill prohibiting ‘gay panic’ defense in murder charges. And that’s not all: Four Exciting New Laws Protecting Gay and Trans People Passed in California!
Man exonerated after 10 years in prison will get $500,000.
Video: Late-night octopus-watching off West Seattle’s shore.
The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times.
The War Nerd: Let’s put Islamic State’s menacing advance into perspective by… looking at a map.
Why the genetic code is not universal.
Building an Ark for the Anthropocene.
Alaska actually wants to use the Jim Crow approach in defending its gay marriage ban.
Weird ‘Island’ on Saturn Moon Titan Puzzles Scientists (Video, Photos).
The Babylonian map of the world sheds light on ancient perspectives.
How American parenting is killing the American marriage.
Rejected Princesses: HYPATIA: THE MARTYR MATHEMATICIAN.
The Unexceptional Devil’s Hole Pupfish.
The Enemy Of Archaeology Is Not People, It’s Salt.
Rumor calls out Windows 95 as the reason Microsoft skipped version 9.
Republicans Angry that a Republican Attorney General Who has been caught having registered to vote in multiple states, has been removed from the ballot in accordance with state law. The irony meter is exploding…
Republicans In ‘Republicans Are People Too’ Ad Are Not Actual Republican People. The entire lame campaign is stock photos.
5 public health threats in Texas scarier than Ebola.
Lost ‘Sherlock Holmes’ Film Discovered After Almost a Century.
‘Science’ Center Teaches Boys Rocketry, Girls Makeup. Internet Certain To Be Pleased. (Updated).
Lesbian Misogyny #YesAllWomen:
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Pharrell Williams – It Girl:
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At Long Last, An Invisibility Cloak We Can Believe In:
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Hollysiz – The light (you may need a whole box of kleenex):
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Handsome Man ~ Matt Alber (Official):
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Even as a little kid I did not sympathize with Goldilocks in the classic fairy tale. There you have the bear family with their neat little house: each family member has a favorite chair, their own bed, their own special bowl for food. And they’ve just taken a walk in the woods while they wait for their dinner to cool down, and this rude girl barges into their house, messes with all of their stuff, breaks a piece of furniture, eats a third of the food, and then decides to go to sleep in one of the beds of this house that she’s broken into.
That wasn’t all that annoyed me. I was also annoyed at how critical Goldilocks was of everything. “This chair is too hard!” “This chair is too soft!” et cetera, et cetera.
But while I can’t recall ever having barged into someone’s house and messed with their property, I do have something in common with Goldilocks: sometimes I want things exactly the way I want them, and I find myself grousing over things being inferior to what I want—sometimes in contradictory ways.
For instance, Continue reading I’m worse than Goldilocks
I had planned to post on several other topics completely unrelated to Pastor Manning and his fellow purveyors of hatred, but then this:
Colleen Hufford was a wife, mother, and grandmother who is described by her neighbors and co-workers as quick to smile. Her husband (the man she has been straight-married to for 25 years) was parked outside her place of work waiting to take her home, as he did every day, when she was murdered by a co-worker who appeared intent on a massive killing spree.
Horrible news, right?
But not horrible enough. Pastor Manning has weighed in. In a video rant (posted on his Youtube channel) that is at the same time disgusting and yet somehow mesmerizing in its sheer stupidity, Manning claims that the killer murdered that Oklahoma grandmother because that Oklahoma grandmother was a Sodomite. The killer felt compelled to murder her because she was a lesbian, Pastor Manning explains, which is exactly what lesbians deserve.
Except, of course, that she was married to a man, was a member of Southgate Baptist Church in Moore, Oklahoma (a church that is very active in anti-abortion activities), et cetera, et cetera.
I have no idea why Manning has decided that this woman was lesbian. Other than, of course, because he’s totally obsessed with gay people and seems to have a pathological need to blame anything bad that happens in this country on us.
Font Folly 