Tag Archives: personal

Live your life with honesty

news, , , ,

My scouting career was like a patchwork quilt. I joined Cub Scouts in second grade. I don’t think I was a particularly outstanding member of the troop, but I’m also not sure how outstanding any 8-year-olds really are.

In third grade we moved twice during the school year (and once during the summer between the end of third grade and the beginning of fourth). One of towns we moved to didn’t have any scouting troops, it was just two small. Another we didn’t stay long enough to finish unpacking before Dad’s company said, “No, we need that oil rig back in Colorado. Time for y’all to pack up your families again.” That town may well have had a troop, but we weren’t there long enough to find out.

I don’t remember much about the troop I joined when we moved to Ft Morgan, Colorado. I do remember having to say good-bye again just before Thanksgiving. But what I really remember is how shocked I was, once we settled into the next town, that there was only one troop and it was associated with a church that (at the time) Southern Baptists considered a cult rather than a denomination. The feeling was more than a bit mutual. I was informed that the only way to join the troop would be for our family to convert to the other church.

That was only the beginning of a lot of bizarre experiences that most people think could never happen in America as we tried to get by in a town where more than 95% of the population belonged to the same church. Those experiences convinced me at an early age of the true value of separation of church and state.

That would come later. At that point, I was simply dumbfounded to learn that I wasn’t welcome. I hadn’t really understood, before then, how closely the Boy Scouts were tied to churches. Yes, my original troop had been sponsored by the church my family belonged to, but several of the boys in our troop weren’t members of our church. My subsequent troops had been similar. I’m not sure if it was because all of the towns were so small that each had only one troop that drew from all the churches in town, but I had never before felt that my membership as a scout had been dependent upon being a member in good standing of an “acceptable” church.

By the time we were once more living in a town that had a troop which wouldn’t exclude me because of which church I belonged to, puberty had hit and finally told me in no uncertain terms that all the bullies at each school who had called me “faggot” and “queer” had been on to something. I don’t know if the Scouts explicitly had the no gays rule at the time, but it was quite clear to me that “boys like me” weren’t going to be welcomed by “boys like them.”

A frame from the Family Research Council "Stand With Scouts" video.
A frame from the Family Research Council “Stand With Scouts” video.
So the current controversies about Boy Scouts of America polices strike close to home. I wasn’t kicked out for being gay. I wasn’t ever formally kicked out at all. But I certainly felt the sting of rejection, and can’t completely understand why there are so many people who claim to have the well-being of children in mind while they are being coldhearted and bloodyminded. It’s bad enough that people believe and repeat the lies that all gays are pedophiles, that all gay kids are predators, et cetera, but some of them seem compelled to lie about anything and everything to further their bigoted agenda.

The notorious Family Research Council has posted a video calling for people to stand firm on the Scout’s ban on gay members. The script of the video is full of all the usual lies and distortions, but also the image I’ve included here. A bunch of people in some sort of meeting room, with the Boy Scouts’ emblem on the wall, and a sign visible on the left that says “2013 Planning Meeting.”

Except it’s a lie.

U.S. District Court photo originally from LegalGeekery.com.
U.S. District Court photo originally from LegalGeekery.com.
The original photo was found, by Jeremy Hooper of the Good As You blog, to be from a 2009 story published at LegalGeekery.com, where it is identified as the federal district court for the District of Massachusetts.

It’s clear that someone swiped the original picture, cropped it a bit, then Photoshopped the BSA emblem in place of the U.S. District Court seal and the fake 2013 meeting sign on top of the closed circuit TV screen.

You can say that the stolen image is pretty trivial. Nothing they did to the image itself causes any harm to any gay scouts, but it’s still a lie. And it’s just one of many lies in the video. Why, if their cause is so just, must they lie so much?

They like to quote the part of Scout Law that calls for every scout to be “morally straight.” But when my old scout handbook explained that particular phrase, the explanation begins, “By morally straight we mean you are to live your life with honesty…”

So why does the Family Research Council—an organization that has been caught lying again and again about matters both great and (as in this case) exceedingly trivial—get to advise anyone on morality?

My week to complain about news coverage

news, , , ,

I thought it was bad enough when a New York Times article asserted that authorities are looking into connections between the Boston Marathon Bomber and Al Qaeda because the bombs used a design which was once posted on an Al Qaeda website.

That is bad reporting. Or at least bad thinking. Spectacularly bad. The design was posted on line several years ago. That alone means that anyone in the world could have the design. They don’t need to have any connection to the people who posted it. Because it was posted online. But that isn’t the half of it. Pressure cooker bomb designs were being published long, long before Al Qaeda existed. A version is in the Anarchist’s Cookbook, for instance, published back in 1971 (and reprinted again and again).

But no, CNN couldn’t let NYT out-do them in thoughtless reporting. They had to report an unconfirmed rumor as if it were an absolute fact, spending well over an hour repeating the rumor, finding pundits who knew absolutely nothing about what was actually happening to speculate on what sort of person the allegedly identified suspect might be.

As sources such as CBS and NBC reported that the FBI was saying these reports were false, CNN just got more insistent, announcing that the FBI had already arrested the suspect, describing the suspect as “a dark-skinned male” and reporting other details which supposedly came from anonymous law enforcement sources who allegedly claimed that they had triple-checked the facts.

The FBI finally had to issue a very specific (and rather scolding) statement that there had been no arrest, reminding news media that reporting unconfirmed reports sometimes has rather devastating unintended consequences, and strongly suggesting that media personnel should confirm rumors themselves in the future.

In a less serious example, a South Florida gay newspaper published an editorial some call scathing (the word they are actually looking for is ‘petulant’) about pop singer Adam Lambert. The editorial isn’t really scathing about Lambert, rather, the editor turns his venom on his own associate editor for running a story on the pop singer while the chief editor was on vacation. The editor thinks that people who are interested in pop stars are shallow. Though he seems particularly angry at this specific pop star. Not only that, the editor is pissed off because his associate editor got the scoop that Lambert had broken up with his boyfriend, causing so many people to come to their web site to read the story, that it crashed their server.

Okay, let me get this straight: you make money selling ads on your web site and in your paper. You make more money the more people come to read your web site. You’re angry that your underling got an entertainment scoop that brought millions more readers to your web site than usual. Have I got that right? And your underling got that scoop because this pop star you don’t like was in your city performing as the headliner at the community’s Gay Pride Festival.

You’re a Gay Newspaper, and you’re upset that your employee wrote a story about the headliner for the city’s big annual Gay Festival?

I get it. He’s just a pop star. But sometimes people want to read about the people whose music they like. And sometimes they want to read about people whose music they dislike. And if a musician draws a really big crowd to a local event, people expect to read something about the event and the musician in the local paper, particularly when the event is thrown by the very community your publication claims to serve.

When I was editor at two different college newspapers, I often published stories about things that I was not the slightest interested in myself, because I knew some of the readers would be interested. That’s your job when you’re publishing a community paper.

Just like it should be your job, when reporting on a national network, to actually try to confirm your rumor with someone other than the original person who told you the rumor.

Just like it should be your job, when reporting about a specific news event, to apply a little bit of intelligence and logic.

Should be.

Misdirect, don’t lie or withhold

writing, , ,

The are times, as a writer, when you want to surprise your readers or give them a puzzle to solve. That’s clearly a major part of a murder mystery, of course, but you do it in other stories as well.

Anyone who has ever aspired to write mysteries has read about the rule of not cheating the reader. Cheating is when you completely withhold information required to solve the mystery. All information has to be available to the reader. It is okay to obfuscate it, but leaving it out entirely is a no-no.

The classic example of the wrong way is describing your detective, perhaps despondent, looking down at his feet and seeing something. He bends down, picks the something up, and then smiles as he slips it in his pocket and the narration informs the reader that this thing is the vital clue that makes everything fall into place. But the writer doesn’t tell the reader what the something is.

The proper way to hide a clue is in plain sight. I remember one mystery once had three characters talking about something, when the father comments on his daughter’s dress the night before, saying it was a nice shade of green. One of the other characters tells him the dress was red. The father goes, “Oh, well, I guess it is.” The way the scene is written it seems that the father is simply not very attentive or perhaps distracted. Later in the story, it is revealed that he suffers from a form of color blindness, and that is an important clue about an aspect of one of the murders.

I’m currently wrestling with a version of this issue in a non-mystery. My current novel in progress (which is a light fantasy) includes a mysterious masked person who has appeared a couple of times, thwarting an assassination attempt directed at a princess, preventing a sorceress from getting some information, and a few other things. In the very first scene his mask is commented upon, and an explanation for why he is hiding his identity is provided.

So I wrote a scene last week where he confronts the man behind the assassination plot. I realized midway through that I could make the scene far more creepy than it already is, but I think I would be cheating if I did.

It occured to me that I could have the masked man reveal his face to the conspirator just before killing him, and show the conspirator reacting with shock at the identity… But withholding the identity from the reader. Certainly movies, television shows, and comics have used that particular cliche many times, so one could argue it’s acceptable. But even then, usually the reaction of the character to the revealed face provides an extra clue about some aspect of the story other than the identity of the mysterious person.

Besides thinking the technique is overused in those media, I’m not sure it makes any sense for the masked man to do it. The most obvious reason, “I want you to know who defeated you,” simply doesn’t apply to this character and his relationship to the conspirators. Besides being out of character, it would also be a bit too self-consciously coy. By this point the theoretical reader is either curious about the identity of the masked man or already has a theory. A melodramatic nonrevealing reveal is more likely to annoy than fascinate, I think.

And this little mystery isn’t the main plot. If I’ve done the rest of my job correctly, what I hope the reader is more worried about by this point in the book is: whether one grief-stricken character will go through with killing some innocents to bring another character back from the dead, whether one protagonist will clear his name and rescue his nieces, whether other characters will prevent a war, and whether one villain will be redeemed.

My mystery man is important to the plot, and why he’s attempting to act incognito is totally in keeping with his personality while moving the plot along, but it isn’t the main concern.

A puzzle as a subplot can be fun for the reader. Keeping the reader guessing about a few things without annoying them is a tricky balancing act. You want to provide enough information so that your reader can guess, while leaving some doubt. You want the reader to feel almost as if he is your accomplice–as if both of you are exploring this thing together.

Doing something such as having the detective find something which you blatantly label a clue which you withhold from the reader, or the unmasking without showing the reader, is the equivalent of a stage magician declaring, “Ha! Ha! I know something you don’t know! I know something you don’t know!”

And that’s just annoying beyond belief!

The thinks you will think…

music, , , , ,

We saw a musical last weekend.

Several years ago, when Michael and I had season tickets to one of the local theatres, we saw a national touring company of Suessical the Musical, with Cathy Rigby (former Olympic gymnast most famous since for playing Peter Pan in more than one revival on Broadway and numerous national tours) as the Cat in the Hat. It was fun.

This last weekend we saw the musical performed by a bunch of middle-school kids, one of whom happens to be my godson. It was also a lot of fun. And that isn’t just my prejudice as a doting godparent.

At least some of the fun is remembering what it was like being on stage around the age, and not feeling at all as fearless as these kids seemed to be. It was quite amazing to hear the voices on a few of those kids, who did not sound like “kids” at all.

It was also fun to remember all that Seuss. The musical takes elements from a bunch of Dr. Seuss books (most prominently Horton Hears a Who and Horton Hatches an Egg) and weaves them together to make one story.

It would be easy to be cynical and dismissive of the play, what with the themes of accepting yourself for who you are, loyalty, and respecting others. And since people usually accuse me of being the opposite of cynical, it should surprise no one that I’m not going to go there. In fact, what I found myself thinking about most during the drive home was how easy it was to fall into the imaginary world with very simple costumes and minimal props. You don’t need a lot of special effects to believe that a group of monkeys are trying to steal a clover with a dust spec from an elephant. Just a few hints and a bit of body language is all that’s required.

Which was a good thing to be reminded of while I’m slogging away on my novel, occasionally wondering how words on a screen can compete with animation and music.

It’s the story and the characters that matter. Everything else is window dressing.

A beach, a blanket, and a song

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I’m not quite old enough to remember the original Mickey Mouse Club. It was cancelled almost exactly a year before I was born. Three years after cancellation, the original hour-log recordings were edited down to half-hour segments that were shown in syndication for a few years, and my Mom said I watched it fairly faithfully. I don’t know how much of my memories of the show are from that exposure, because those edited episodes was re-re-released into syndication around the time I was in middle school. I watched some of those episodes, though if my friends caught me, I claimed that I was just watching it to humor my younger sister.

I was already an Annette Funicello fan before. I remember her most from the Beach Party movies co-starring her and Frankie Avalon. When I was in grade school, before modern cable systems, when most places had only three or four stations, there always seemed to be one of those stations that ran movies in the afternoons. Silly comedies were a staple of those afternoon movies, so Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Pajama Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo, and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini made frequent appearances.

The movies were extremely silly, with outlandish plots. Despite being movies about kids spending a summer at the beach and the ensuing romantic soap opera, a lot of them had at least one sci fi/fantasy element (the professor’s ability to paralyze someone by touching a “nerve-cluster” at the temple, the “improved” chimpanzee that could surf and dance better than a human, a Martian teen-ager sent to the beach as an advance scout for an interplanetary invasion, a mermaid falls in love with one of the surfers, and Frankie hires a witch doctor is to send a sea nymph to the beach to keep the other guys away from Annette while he’s in the Navy).

Not exactly high-concept, but probably a big part of the appeal to grade-school-aged me.

She was in a few of the sillier Disney films of the sixties, as well (The Shaggy Dog, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, and The Monkey’s Uncle).

In all of those movies she played the wholesome good girl. The girl any boy would be lucky to have. Setting aside all the levels of sexism in that, it meant when I was a kid, I wanted to be her. I didn’t consciously admit it. I’m sure that to some of the adults in my life they assumed that I learned all the lyrics to all of her songs, et cetera, because I had a crush on her. (And for the record, I didn’t have a crush on Frankie; his pretty boy persona was totally not my type.)

So I’ve always had very fond memories of Annette and was sad to read that she died. I’m a bit miffed that news of her death has been overshadowed by reporting about the death of a certain former British Prime Minister. I certainly understand why the latter is considered more newsworthy.

Good-bye, Annette. I hope that somewhere you’re strolling along a beautiful beach, surrounded by love and music.

“I’m looking for pie”

life,

In the middle of the day Wednesday, my mom sent me a picture of a plant she’d found growing in front of her house and asked if I knew what it was.

Mom's mystery plant
Mom’s mystery plant
I replied “Rhubarb?” Because that’s what it looked like, right?
A reference image from the web of one variety of rhubarb.
A reference image from the web of one variety of rhubarb.
There are other things it could be, but rhubarb seemed a reasonable guess.

At about the same time I was looking at the picture Mom sent, my husband sent me a text, explaining that he had come home from work sick. Somehow, my reply to Mom went to Michael instead. I didn’t realize it until sometime later when Michael replied, “Heh. Sure, I guess!”

So I had to re-send my answer to Mom, and send an explanation to Michael that I had actually been answering Mom.

During my walk home from work, I kept thinking about the rhubarb. I felt as if I had raised Michael’s hopes for some pie, only to dash them when I explained that I’d been talking to Mom. So I stopped at one of the grocery stores near our house, one that often carries pies which are made without added sugar (most fruit actually doesn’t need it) and with a whole grain crust. I had been thinking it was still a little early in the year to be finding rhubarb pies, but, lo and behold, there was a no-sugar added strawberry-rhubarb pie. So I grabbed it and a container of vanilla non-fat frozen yogurt and headed home.

I also picked up a few different options of the comfort-food variety for dinner. Though when I showed Michael what I’d picked out, I pointed out that depending on how much comfort he wanted, we could just split the pie for dinner. Instead, he picked mac and cheese, with pie for dessert.

All day at work I’d been feeling inexplicably grumpy. At home that night, I tried to get some writing done, but just couldn’t string words together. Thursday morning when the alarm went off, I felt as if I hadn’t slept in days and my stomach was hurting. A lot. I checked my temperature and I had a low-grade fever. So I called in sick and crashed back into bed.

When I woke up a few hours later I felt less awful. Not better, but less awful. I stumbled into the kitchen, looking for some juice. I saw the pie we’d cut into the night before, and the sudden realization that I could have pie for breakfast made me feel that life might just be worth living, after all.

So, pie for breakfast, then pie again for dessert that night. And I picked up a couple more small pies (different flavors, this time), because we both seemed to be enjoying it so much.

When we were next in the grocery store together, Michael headed into the bakery section after we’d gotten other things on our list. I asked him why.

“I’m looking for pie.”

When I pointed out that we hadn’t, yet finished off all the pie we had, he said, “I know. But we will, and we’ll want some more, after.”

Of course, he was right. He almost always is.

My afternoon cuppa

life,

At work I drink the coffee provided in the kitchen in the mornings. They have a big grinder that is set to deliver a measured amount of grounds, and the coffee selected isn’t bad. There are enough of us drinking coffee that the pots usually contain reasonably fresh coffee throughout the morning.

I switch to tea in the afternoon. I don’t really remember when or why I started doing it. It was before I came to work at this place. And usually I make the tea using stuff from my private stash, rather than the variety of teabags provided in the kitchen.

One of my co-workers, who grew up in China, seriously dislikes the very notion of tea bags. Sometimes you can even get her to explain why loose leaves are better (you can actually see and smell the quality, for one). That’s not why I keep my own stash. Mine are bags, after all. Yes, some of the teas I bring in at least look more like a pinch of loose leaves inside a little cloth baggie, rather than unidentifiable clippings inside paper, but it’s still teabags.

I just have certain teas that I like, and they aren’t the kind that get stocked in an office kitchen. My very favorite is a lavender-earl grey. Alas, it hasn’t been in stock for months at the store where I used to get it. Which means I’ve been drinking a lot of my second fave: jasmine blossom green tea. Or aged earl grey. Or sweet ginger black.

I try to keep two or three varieties in stock in my desk, so that I always have a choice. But I’ve lately been having trouble finding good versions of my alternates. I probably just need to shop further afield. At least I hope that’s all it is. I hope there hasn’t been some sort of global lavender or bergamot shortage. More my luck that not enough other people like it to justify shipping the product.

That happens with a lot of things I like. When I find something I like, I want to keep enjoying it. Yet what makes products fly off the shelf (or at least one of the things that makes this happen) is being new and different. In order to make room for new and different, something has to go, at least temporarily. Of course, I’m as much a part of that problem as anyone. Before I discovered the lavender earl grey tea, one of my faves was this rspberry black tea—the bags had little dried raspberries mixed with the tea leaves, and the taste was incredible. I stopped buying it when I started drinking the lavender, and I didn’t even notice that the raspberry wasn’t on the shelf any more.

It doesn’t just happen with teas, of course. I am a sucker for the serial story. Whether it be a good television series or series of novels. I love coming back to find out what happens next to characters I have come to love (or love to hate in the case of a well-done villain). It’s probably why when I’m working on a novel, I’m also thinking about the sequel. I just can’t help it.

Though lately I think it’s gotten me into a bit of a jam. I keep having scenes that have nothing to do with the current plot—scenes that can’t happen until after the end of this novel—popping into my head when I’m trying to work on this one. I gotta figure out how to get them out of the way so I can finish the story at hand.

I’ll let you know if I find a magic solution…

Green(ish) thumb

nature, ,

When Ray and I first started dating he had a small collection of houseplants, each with a story. Ray had been working in the home health care industry for several years at that point, and a lot of his work had been taking care of people who were dying. The families of several of his patients had sometimes asked him to take a plant that the patient had been tending. Ray said that often friends of people who were that severely sick would bring in plants to give the person a bit of the outdoors, or something. So after the patient died there might be a dozen plants in the person’s room

I had once or twice previously tried to keep a houseplant or two, but they never lasted long. When Ray and I first moved in together, taking care of the plants was his chore.

We acquired a few more. I wound up with some office plants from him (it had to do with my employer moving to a new building and several of us experiencing weird hay fever type symptoms in our offices; once I had a couple of big plants, mine went away). I had to learn to keep the plants alive. So I bought a couple of books. Soon, I was keeping multiple kinds of plant food around, managing the rotation of which nutrients and how concentrated based on the time of year.

When Ray got sick, I went from merely helping him with the home plants (while being fully responsible for my office plants) to being in charge of all of them. By the time he died, when a bunch of people sent flowers and sometimes plants, I was no longer convinced that any houseplant I was taking care of was doomed.

So it was a bit of trauma for me when one of the plants I had inherited from Ray—one of the plants he’d already owned when we met—began dying. At first I told myself that maybe it was just naturally dying of old age. But then I learned that Christmas Cactuses have lived for 70 years or more in greenhouses, getting to be the size of small trees. So, I learned more about them. I re-potted it, I checked the moisture level and pH of its soil every couple of days, and basically obsessed over it for weeks.

It still died.

This weekend I finally admitted that four of the houseplants that have been dying for months are unsalvagable and replaced them. Some of my friends think I should have given up on a couple of them a while back. I frequently adhere to the rule best articulated by the character of Keith the AIDS patient in the movie Latter Days: “We never throw anything out that isn’t completely dead. Right?”

It is April, and sometimes I am a fool…

life, , ,

…but I am not posting an April Fools’ Day joke.

I have done a few. In college as member of the editorial board of two different campus papers, I helped produce a few April Fool’s Day editions. On my old LiveJournal I am still rather proud of the post I wrote explaining why I had decided to become a Gay Republican and start actively working to oppress myself.

If I were to do an April Fool’s Day post, I would adhere to the following rules:

  • I plan it out in advance, giving myself time to edit it a time or two before it is posted.
  • The topic is not something that will make people worry (nothing about fake injuries or illness, not pretending to be angry at my friends, anything like that)
  • The butt of the joke needs to be me

I have, over the years since I started blogging, only come up with a few that met those conditions. Even though I tried to pick things that I didn’t think would upset someone, I managed to do so two of those times—the opening sentence of the Gay Republican joke made one friend think that Michael and I were breaking up, and one of my fellow bibliophile friends fell for the one where I Michael and I decided to throw away all 6000+ books in our house.

The point of a joke is to make people laugh. If they aren’t laughing, it isn’t funny.

I am fond of a good news April Fool’s Pranks. Among my favorites:

NPR: Portable Zip Codes

NPR: Exploding maple trees

Garden News: Dinosaur vine

And I can’t find a link to this one: one of the local radio stations did a story claiming one of the island out in Puget Sound had come loose from its moorings and was floating wildly around the Sound. They kept giving updates throughout the afternoon as the island was sighted in different places, along with attempts to try to capture it and tow it back.

Skewed polls and secret money

news, society, , , , , , , , ,

A few days after election night, when the leader of one of the local anti-gay groups conceded that voters had approved marriage equality, he groused about how the pro-gay groups had outspent them three-to-one. Just a week earlier he had been insisting that the polls which were all predicting passage of the referendum were skewed. “People are reluctant to say what they really feel to a pollster, because the pro-sodomy side has tricked the media into calling support of traditional marriage as bigotry. But when those voters are in the privacy of the voting booth, they will vote their true feelings.”

They did vote their true feelings. Fortunately for those of us who believe in equality, they had also been telling their true feelings to the pollsters. Surprise, surprise!

Sadly, I believe it was a complete surprise to the opposers. It shouldn’t have been. They had other evidence, and it was right there in that hypocritical comment he made about spending. It was hypocritical because it had only been four years before, during the Proposition 8 campaign in California that the anti-gay side had been doing the outspending. And for years before that, each ballot measure that came up in any state related to marriage equality or civil unions, it was the anti-gay side that always seemed to have the money advantage.

This time around, in Washington, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota, the forces of hate came up short both in the ballot box and fundraising. And it wasn’t simply a matter that suddenly our side was better at raising money. No, the big story is that they have, in just the last few years, experienced a serious drop in donations.

It isn’t just the amount of money. What’s more significant is the number of donors. The national organizations have been very secretive about their funding. They have refused, again and again, to reveal their donor lists, even when they appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost, they have tried to keep that secret. Eventually, some details are beginning to emerge:

Each year, according to [the National Organization for Marriage]’s tax filings, two or three donors give NOM between $1 million and $3.5 million apiece; another two or three give between $100,000 and $750,000; and 10 or so others give between $5,000 and $95,000. In 2009 the top five donors made up three fourths of NOM’s budget; in 2010 the top two donors gave two thirds of the year’s total donations; and in 2011 the top two donors gave three fourths of NOM’s total income. But those funders’ identities are a mystery. Their names are redacted on NOM’s federal tax returns.

My emphasis added. Whoever those mysterious top two donors are, their donations have became a larger and larger proportion of the pot, as the thousands who gave less than $5000 dollars a year have dwindled to hundreds.

Statistics tell us the the most vehement opposition comes from the oldest voters, so a percentage of that drop off represents to reality of demographics. As elderly opposers die off, without a compensating proportion of supporters coming up in younger generations, some of that is just inevitable. But the drop off in support to the anti-gay cause in the last three or four years is far in excess of what could be accounted for by mere demographics.

People are changing their minds.

There will always be a hardcore group opposed to equal rights for gay, lesbian, bi, and trans people. Just a couple weeks ago at the big conservative conference a guy stood up and argued in favor of slavery because he believed it was a self-evident truth that whites were superior to blacks. He wasn’t an invited speaker, and to their credit, panelists and audience members challenged him on it, but during the ensuing back and forth he also made a comment to the effect the women shouldn’t have the right to speak up in public, either. So, just like that unrepentant racist and misogynist, there will always be homophobes among us.

But as more of the moderates and non-hateful conservatives come around, that view will be limited to the lunatic fringe where it belongs.

In the months since the vote in Washington, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota went our way, the opposers’ spokespeople have gone from saying that they were outspent 3-to-1 (which turned out to be a small exaggeration in our state) to claiming they were outspent 4-to-1, then 5-to-1… the last quote I read was “more than 7-to-1.” I believe their exaggerations get worse due to desperation. They hope that skewing their claim of victimhood will prompt more people to donate more money, which they think can turn the tide.

What they don’t understand is that the only skewed “polls” were their own. They fell into the common trap of thinking that because most of the people they know and like agree with them, that it absolutely must be the case the most people, period, do so. They think that since they still manage to raise a lot of money that there is still a lot of support, ignoring the fact that it’s a smaller and smaller number of people sending in the money. Because they are convinced of the truth of their cause, they believe that the only reasons polls and voting can be going against them is some kind of chicanery. They think that calling us pedophiles, comparing our relationships to bestiality or incest is “civil discourse,” but if we call them bigots we’re being bullies.

Most of all, many of them believe all the lies and distortions that they tell about us. Lies that other people can no longer believe once they get to know us: