Which sends out notification e-mails to everyone who follows the block, cross-posts, and so on, and so on.
D’oh!
Anyway, please enjoy this video of the teen-ager who decided to give his Great-grandmother the Prom experience she never got as a kid:
(You may need some kleenex while you watch.)
Except that isn’t what she had done, at all.
For a little background, for many years she pulled in a six-figure salary from this group while she went around the country, explaining how letting gay people have either civil unions or get married would destroy families, would harm children, would cause irrepairable harm to non-gay people’s marriages, and so forth. She raised and spent (every year) tens of millions of dollars putting advertisements onto local radio and television filled with lies and distortions about how immoral, unhealthy, et cetera, et cetera gay people were. She sent people into churches to rally the faithful. She repeated the lies on local and national “news” shows, and so forth.
Then, when it became clear that the battle had been lost on civil unions, she and her organization started insisting that they only meant to protect traditional marriage, and they claimed to stop opposing civil unions (though they did keep more quietly funneling money into campaigns opposing those), and asserted they were only against marriage.
She kept repeating the same lies, demonizing gay and lesbian people, quoting all those debunked studies and so forth. They fought tooth an nail, mounting speaking tours, spending large amounts of money on ads to defeat judges and legislators who helped civil unions and marriage equality move forward.
Then, she resigned as president of the organization, letting her longtime friend and ally Brian Brown take over. She still pulls in a healthy, six-figure salary as chairperson of their board of directors. And they still spread the same lies. But now, they spend as much of their time and money trying to block gay adoptions, trying to block transgender rights laws, trying to repeal school policies against bullying gay and trans children, and so forth.
And recently, Maggie has started going on conservative radio shows and the like saying things that, when quoted out of context, sound like she’s surrendering. “Gay marriage is inevitable, now,” and “we’ve lost that fight.” And everyone who has been blogging about and covering the struggle for marriage equality, are repeating those quotes, slapping a “she’s surrendered!” headline on them, and sometimes wondering why she’s going around admitting that they’ve lost.
Here’s what they all misunderstand: admitting that they have lost the marriage argument is not the same thing as surrendering. And if you listen to the rest of what she says in these interviews or go read all of her blog, instead of stopping as everyone seems to assume as a consequence of the admission of loss, you find a different story:
“The rapid collapse of opposition to gay marriage we are witnessing did not just happen, and it was not inevitable. But it is.
“The question now on the table is: will orthodox Christianity (and other traditional faiths), be stigmatized and marginalized as the equivalent of racism in the American public square? Will Biblical morality be wiped out as an acceptable public position in America?
“Or will we regroup, rebuild as a subculture, and survive to become the possibility of a new foundation in the future?”
—Maggie Gallagher
She goes on to lament that “version of America we were born into is no more,” and she talks a lot about how faithful Christians and Jews and Muslims are being intimidated into silence. There are two flaws with this claim. She believes that anyone who doesn’t feel the same as she does about gay rights are not faithful or true Christians, et cetera. And she also believes that not everyone who claims to support our legal rights really do support us.
She then segues to something that may seem a little bizarre and disconnected:
“7 percent of the American people believe contraception—while legally acceptable—is not morally acceptable.”—Maggie Gallagher
This betrays another secret of the anti-gay movement that lots of people don’t understand: they aren’t just anti-gay, they think that birth control (all forms) is immoral. Rick Santorum originally got is name turned into a gross sexual slang term not because he opposed gay marriage, but because he was campaigning for re-election to the Senate on a platform of restricting access to birth control for everyone (including married people), and wanting to impose laws against kinky sex on everyone (including married people), in addition to outlawing all abortions, re-criminalizing gay sex, banning gay marriage, and repealing sex discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination laws.
(Psssst! All of those things were part of his platform for the 2012 presidential nomination, too!)
Maggie quotes that 7 percent statistic for another reason, she goes on to describe how the battle for marriage equality that has been won in the hearts and minds of Americans was pushed by a mere 2 percent of the population. Because she things that only 2 percent of the population is gay and lesbian. From my study of the methodologies of all the studies that have tried to pin that number down, I think it’s closer to 6 percent. But the more important thing Maggie doesn’t understand is the studies conducted by the CDC in the 80s and 90s that concluded that merely 45% of adults have sex with some regularity with members of both genders (the other thing that study found was that Americans, at least, would rather admit to being heroin addicts than label themselves bisexual).
So, while she soothes herself thinking that only 2 percent of the population is non-heterosexual, and therefore if 2 percent of the population can bamboozle a big majority of Americans to decide that gay people are human and deserve the same rights as other humans, her 7 percent will be able to reverse all of that. She also soothes herself by believing (and until just the last week ago, continuing to insist) that the vast majority of Americans agree with her, they just aren’t speaking up.
She’s also using all these things to prepare to keep up the fight. To look for new ways to take away our rights:
the first struggle we now face is internal and spiritual: Will we accept the newly dominant culture’s view of our views—of ourselves—as hateful and bigoted and stand down?”—Maggie Gallagher
She is not surrendering, by any means. She’s saying that they have lost this battle, but the war goes on. Which is best caught by this line from the middle of her most recent blog post:
“There is no line we can draw that pushes gay people “outside” and leaves us free “inside” to be angry, foot-stomping, and morally “pure.”—Maggie Gallagher
Now, last time I checked, children were far more likely to be sexually abused (or at least meet their abusers) in certain churches, parochial schools, and orphanages. Other schools, yes, but not in nearly the numbers as the other places. In fact, the statistics show a rather strong correlation between how anti-gay the rhetoric of a church is, and how likely it is to harbor such child abusers.
Of course, this is all tangled up in notions that Manning has about sexual orientation that have been debunked by many, many studies now. And clearly he isn’t interested in facts.
It was evil and totally reprehensible act whose victims were primarily innocent children.
And what horrors have been visiting on Pastor Manning’s church since his homophobic church sign messages have become news? A lot of news sites and bloggers made fun of them. A woman embarrassed a church employee by showing up to say she was there for her stoning. Someone vandalized the sign with spray paint.
And that’s it. As I wrote before, the spray paint vandalism was wrong, and shouldn’t have happened. But none of these things compare, in any way at all, to the horror or magnitude of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
Usually it’s clueless white people who make the mistake of trying to compare their minor inconvenience to actual hate crimes and acts of terror that resulted in bloodshed. Pastor Manning, as an African American, should therefore be doubly ashamed for this crass attempt at self-martyrdom.
I started to write that words can’t describe how Pastor Manning’s latest antics make me feel. Then I realized that someone has already described Manning and his ilk quite well:
Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.—Jesus, Gospel According the Matthew, chapter 7, verses 22-23
Here’s a collection of news and other things that struck me as worthy of being shared:
America Is Losing Its Religion… and We’re All Better Off Because of It. It’s a statistical fact!
Beware of Those Who Do Things ‘For the Children’. Why don’t they oppose convicted murderers, drug addicts, and even those those convicted of child abuse getting married and having children?
Top Ten Characters Who Need Their Own Novel. If you love books and don’t follow The Librarian Who Doesn’t Say Shhhh, you are really missing out!
The Eye of Sauron Appears Over Sweden. Sunlight and ice crystals in the atmosphere do freaky things!
Watch the video for Brett Gleason’s Imposter.
Local GOP Party Chair Compares Obama To Zebra-Donkey Hybrid Who Is All ‘A**’.
Church Sues For First Amendment Right To Perform Gay Marriages In NC. When the news came out earlier that they passed this law criminalizing ministers performing ceremonies, I was wondering how anyone could have thought this would pass Constitutional muster. I’m just surprised it took this long for someone to fill the lawsuit.
American Family Association LEADER SAYS MISSISSIPPI BUSINESSES DISPLAYING GAY-FRIENDLY ‘DON’T DISCRIMINATE’ STICKERS ARE BULLYING CHRISTIANS. They keep stretching that definition further and further…
Nobody Gets To Tell My Sons What It Means To Be A Man.
We Are Comics. A project in response to the “no girls” folks in the comics world.
93 Percent Of Straight Men In This Study Said They’ve Cuddled With Another Guy.
IOWA LEGISLATURE APPROVES UPDATE TO ‘BADLY OUTDATED AND DRACONIAN’ HIV CRIMINALIZATION LAW.
Biden gets out in front of Obama on LGBT discrimination.
Dark Matter Might Be Hiding In Microscopic Black Holes, Astrophysicists Say.
This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist. It’s easy for polite American society to condemn Cliven Bundy and banish Donald Sterling while turning away from the elegant, monstrous racism that remains.
Nearby galaxy is a ‘fossil’ from the early universe.
“But why does he have girl’s hair?”.
Over the course of 12 years, Richard Linklater made a film about a boy growing up. Here’s the trailer:
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Imposter – Brett Gleason (Official Video):
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Matt Goss – I Do :
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Then I logged into the work network (Friday being my usual work-from-home day), and there was a message from my boss asking everyone to sign time sheets early because he was very sick and was heading home.
But, again, my symptoms didn’t get any worse that day. And I didn’t feel any different Saturday morning. Until a few hours after I got up, when for no apparent reason I suddenly felt super tired and absolutely had to sit down right now… I conked out for a bit more than an hour. When I woke up, my throat was a little scratchy.
I kept running out of energy and being attacked by naps the rest of the day. The pollen count was pretty high, so I kept telling myself it was only hay fever.
Sunday morning I woke up with super bad headache, really sore throat, and body cramps. So, I cancelled our plans for the day.
I continued to have the random nap attacks. I’d developed a fever by Sunday night.
I stayed home from work on Monday, though I logged in and got more than half a day’s worth of work done. When I called in for one of my meetings that day, I learned that several co-workers were working from home because they were sick, and at least a couple had just called in sick and weren’t working at all.
I still had a sore throat and a mild fever Tuesday morning, so I worked from home again. I didn’t have any nap attacks, and by evening the sore throat was merely a scratchy throat. I’m hoping this means I’m getting over the cold.
Despite all of that, I managed to get a decent amount of writing done. I signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo as an incentive to finish off the first draft of my current novel in progress. I was very close to the end, and figured it could be done in a month. I completed the climactic battle, and am now writing denouement scenes. So while I may miss the midnight deadline, I’ve probably wrapped the draft.
Knock wood.
GREG RUCKA HAS SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO SAY ABOUT YOUR GATEKEEPING OF WOMEN IN GEEK CULTURE.
Hubble Drills Deep Into the Universe. Read the article and have your mind blown…
Stephen Colbert bids farewell to “Stephen Colbert” on “The Daily Show”.
A Typographer’s Design History of the Unappreciated Penny. Thanks to Troy for sharing the cool link!
How they filmed the cello scenes for a recent Agents of Shield episode is amazing.
Physicists Say Consciousness Might Be a State of Matter.
New Paper Explains How To Make Supermaterial Graphene In A Blender.
18 Arguments Against Gay Marriage (and why they’re bollocks).
Being Gay Is a Religious Right.
More Than Words: 11 “Queer” Questions From 70 Years Of Gallup Polls.
Poll: For the first time, more Texans support marriage equality than oppose it.
Boy Scouts shut down local troop with gay scoutmaster. Specifically: a local Methodist church needed a scoutmaster, they looked for candidates, hired this 49-year-old now openly gay former Eagle Scout, knowing he was gay. He’s led the troop, the Boy Scouts told the church they couldn’t do that, the congregation decided to stick by their scoutmaster, and the BSA has now kicked the church out of the Boy Scouts. I’ve been following the story, but was surprised when a couple of my straight co-workers brought it up at work. One of them lives near the church, his wife is friends with some of the parents (who all want to keep the scoutmaster).
Oh, and in case you missed it, I wrote about how awesome my husband is: He’s my guy, and I love him.
Peace Mercutio – (And That’s How) Good Charlotte (Got Famouse)”:
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Trailer For Ryan Murphy’s ‘The Normal Heart’ With Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts:
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This made it actually exciting to watch someone play Janga:
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I mentioned earlier that Michael used to say that he considered NorWesCon our anniversary, because he was even worse about forgetting the date of our first date (which is one of the dates I tried to remember as an anniversary) than I am, and neither of us could ever remember the date of our commitment ceremony without digging out the paperwork for our domestic partnership registration.
To be fair, we made it a very small thing we tacked onto another get-together with friends. So it wasn’t like an event planned for months ahead or anything. We needed to file domestic partnership paperwork to get us both on the same health insurance, so we did it and that was that. Just a few months afterward I had already started forgetting what the date was. It just never stuck.
I have not had the issue at all with remembering our wedding day…
I have to be honest, here, and say it wasn’t love at first sight. He seemed like a really nice guy. I thought he was really good looking, that’s true. My late husband, Ray, was still alive then, and Ray commented (later, when we were cleaning up after the party) that “the new guy, the super shy one from Missouri? He’s cute. Too bad he’s straight.”
Because Michael had mentioned his girlfriend when he was introducing himself.
I didn’t see him again until the next NorWesCon. We here hosting a room party again. For whatever reason, that year the room party (our room parties were always more like a writers’ group or artists’ jam than a party—for one thing, we didn’t serve alcohol) was more crowded and busy. And the shy guy from Missouri showed up again… except he didn’t come off as shy that year. He’d grown his hair out, he was much more outgoing. And he managed to mention the fact that he worked as a bartender at a gay bar a couple times.
But the first thing he said to me when coming into the room was once again, “Hi! I’m Michael.”
A couple months later, a new season of the British science fiction comedy, Red Dwarf, premiered in the U.S. with marathons on PBS stations. Ray and I hosted a watching party, which we had announced on a couple of fannish e-mail lists. And once again, when I opened the door, I got that irresistible smile and he said, “Hi! I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Michael.”
That was the last time he introduced himself to me. He hung out at the party (which got pretty crowded), and since he’d taken a bus up to Seattle from Tacoma, and the party went a bit longer than he had anticipated, he wound up crashing on our couch. By the next day he and Ray had bonded as if they had been friends for years. We gave him a ride back to Tacoma after we found out how long the bus ride would be.
He and Ray started corresponding online after that. So several weeks later, on a Friday night when Ray picked me up after work because we were going to go out, Ray said, “I think we should drive to Tacoma and surprise Michael at work.” We had a great time hanging out and meeting the regulars at the small lesbian bar where Michael was a bartender.
It got to be a fairly regular thing, where Michael would take the bus to Seattle on a day off (which were usually in the middle of the week) and meet up with Ray, or we’d go to Tacoma to meet up with Michael. Ray had had his first round of chemotherapy by then, and was no longer working. I was grateful that someone was available to hang out with Ray at least some of the times when I was at work.
He was a great friend.
And then, not long after the second round of chemotherapy (the first one had appeared to help a lot, but it hadn’t gotten everything), Ray had a seizure in the middle of the night and fell into a coma. Michael wasn’t able to make it to Seattle before Ray died.
Michael was one of a rather vast group of people who helped me deal with the aftermath of Ray’s death.
I have another confession to make. I don’t remember when I fell in love with Michael. There’s a lot during that first few months after Ray died that is very fuzzy and confused for me. I remember Michael meeting me a couple of days before Christmas to give me a Christmas present and to tell me he hoped I managed to have a good holiday at my mom’s, even though I wasn’t in a holiday mood at all that year. One of my favorite pictures of Michael was taken that holiday season in my living room, next to the Christmas tree that I almost didn’t even put up (except I had a frantic moment where I became convinced that Ray would be upset at me if I didn’t put up at least a little bit of Christmas; which was followed by a bigger panic when I thought about digging into all our Christmas stuff in the basement because I knew I would start crying and never stop, so I bought new decorations that didn’t have any memories with Ray attached to them). I don’t remember that visit at all. For various reasons, I know I didn’t take the picture that time he came up just before Christmas, but I don’t recall the visit where I took his picture.
Somewhere during all that upheaval, I realized I had fallen for him. We had one awkward week where I thought that maybe he was spending so much time with me because he felt obligated because I was grieving, so I tried extra hard not to do anything that might be considered flirty or otherwise showing that kind of interest in him. And he took my sudden emotional reticence as a signal, and he worried that the earlier signs of interest had actually been because he was taking advantage of me when I was in a fragile state. So he tried extra hard just be be a friend and nothing more. Which I interpreted as a sign that he really was not at all interested. And so on, and so on. It was like the middle act of a romantic comedy for a bit there.
But eventually I asked him out on a date. And he said, “yes.”
It was soon enough after Ray’s death that I was more than a bit nervous about how some of my other friends would react to the news that I was dating someone already. I was incredible relieved when I told Kristin, and her reaction was to grin, make a little victory motion with her hands and say, “I hoped something like that was happening! He lights up whenever you come into the room!”
Sometime long after that, he overheard me explaining to someone why I never called him Mike. “Because every time he introduced himself to me, he said, ‘Hi! I’m Michael.'” He interrupted to say that wasn’t true. So the next several times I heard him answer the phone with, “Hello, this is Michael” or saw him introduce himself to someone at writers’ night or a convention committee meeting by saying, “I’m Michael” I would catch his eye and mouth silently, “Hi, I’m Michael.”
A lot has happened since first meeting him at a science fiction convention in 1996. I could go on and on with stories about what a wonderful man he is. I know that over that time, to the extent that I have become a better person, it’s because of Michael. He’s wonderful, smart, capable, kind, unselfish, funny, and constantly helping people. He laughs easily, and he always finds ways to make other people laugh or feel better. I often suspect that most of our friends only put up with me because my weird opinions and annoying quirks are a small price to pay compared to how awesome Michael is.
And I’m okay with that, because he is so darn awesome. And I’m not just saying it because it’s his birthday.
I have one more confession to make. When I started writing this post, I titled it, “He’s my guy.” But that isn’t true. I could never “have” a man as incredibly talented, sexy, warm, loving, kind, smart, giving, compassionate, practical, unwaveringly cheerful even when he’s being cynical, unselfish, funny, charitable, or just plain incredible as Michael.
He’s not mine. I’m his.
Happy Birthday, Michael. You deserve to have the happiest and most wonderful day all of the time, but especially today.
The first several years we had the futon, it was a nice, comfy couch. It has become less and less so since.
So we’ve been overdue to replace it, and as these sorts of household chores can go, we just kept forgetting and procrastinating. Finally on Sunday we managed to get done with laundry and other things in time to head up to a store that sells these things and get there before closing time. It didn’t take us long to pick one out, though we did have to hurry to drive down to the warehouse near the U-village to actually pick up the futon. It’s amazing how tiny (comparatively) they can package these things thanks to vacuum shrink-wrapping.
The model we got is a flat black with microfiber outer shell. We also ordered a custom cover, which will be a plush violet when it arrives. For now it doesn’t look terribly interesting, but it feels really nice to sit on.
Font Folly 