"wHy cAn'T wE Do tHaT?"

1. Because it's a stupidly dangerous idea
2. Because a nuclear bomb would need to be surrounded by tons of additional air that we have no way of moving on that scale to affect just the eye of a hurricane
3. Because a hurricane's tradewinds would spread the nuclear fallout on a far more massive scale over water and land and create catastrophic environmental devastation
4. Because the idea was first presented and quickly shot down in 1959 for these very reasons
5. BECAUSE A RUDIMENTARY GOOGLE SEARCH WOULD TELL YOU THIS FASTER THAN YOU COULD SPUTTER OUT THE DUMBASS GIBBERISH IN THIS QUOTE

The fucking little bitch is probably going to fucking block me

#TrumpsterFire

Either he's a big fat liar or he's not a big fat liar. Either way, he's a liar.

#Hannity

If. Only.

Just this month, Franklin Graham in a fiery keynote speech at the World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians -- yes, apparently that's a thing now -- declared without citing figures or sources beyond his own made-upness that "I am sure the number of Christians who are in prison or martyred each year would stagger our mind if we really knew what the total number really was."

Oh, the heartbreak of "if only." And I'm sure the collective singular "our mind" was just a typo in the transcript. Because surely these hapless persecution victims have more than one mind between them.

#TheCognitiveDissonance

Oh, Scott. Scott, Scott, Scott. Bless your heart. I'll try to keep this short so you can get back to showing off your import:

1. The fact that you feel obligated to state that you're not afraid is tacit acknowledgement that we're well past the tipping point where most of your swamp friends are afraid to admit they support Melania's Profound Regret and all thinking people are afraid for reasons that are apparently beyond your understanding.
2. Speaking of understanding, "tacit" means "understood or implied without being stated."
3. Really. One little sticker is more than enough to proclaim to the world your catastrophic lack of judgment. But five little stickers AND an entire bottle of rub-on shoe polish? That just exponentiates your bad judgment about your bad judgment.
4. "Exponentiates" means "raises one quantity to the power of another."
5. Don't worry. Betsy DeVos took that last one off the test. Math is apparently too Satany.
6. Your car photo doesn't show your license plate so I can't discern what state you live in -- gratuitous "of denial" and "of delusion" jokes notwithstanding -- but a perfunctory google search just showed me that obstructing your rear window outside of a varying allowance of a few square inches in each corner is considered dangerous and illegal in all of the state traffic codes I read.
7. STATES' RIGHTS! YEAH!
8. "Perfunctory" means "carried out with a minimum of effort."
9. I apologize. I know I promised to keep this short. But there are so many things profoundly wrong with you.
10. Mazda is a Japanese multinational automaker based in Fuchū, Aki District, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. Four of the five little stickers on your Japan-is-not-America Mazda clearly -- CLEARLY! -- state "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" In all caps! With exclamation points! One has to wonder the level of cognitive dissonance required to put multiple pro-America stickers on an imported car and declare a "love" of "showing off" that car in presumably pro-American "support" of a by clear implication pro-American "president."
11. "Cognitive dissonance" means ... oh, never mind. Betsy won't allow it on the test either. Enjoy your metaphorical obstructed-view drive.
12. "Metaphor" means ... oy ... let's just say it's one fewer than metaphive so you won't have to count so high.

Well hello, Jackie Schneiter of Farm Bureau!

"I ran across your resume on Monster and your experience fits nicely with what we are looking for at Farm Bureau. I’d like the opportunity to discuss your resume with you further."

Why is my inbox suddenly overflowing with vaguely written, nonchalantly lying emails equating my 30 years' writing experience with a burning desire to sell insurance? And no, Jackie Schneiter of Farm Bureau, you didn't "run across my resume on Monster." I haven't updated my Monster profile since I lived in Chicago so I'm more than certain that Monster's algorithms have suppressed it as inactive and your desperate little search bots had to dig long and hard to find it. If you want me to not make fun of you by your made-up email name and your actual company name on Facebook and on my blog, your first six words to me are not allowed to me to be lies.

But it's lovely that you look forward to hearing from me. Just wait by your computer. I'll get back to you promptly. (Also six words!)

Thank you to all who sacrifice so much so that we can be free to marry draft dodgers and tax evaders!

Whine as old as time

Read the article here
Remember when Rick Santorum led the Evangelical charge against "man on dog" just 15 short years ago? Either Evangelicals have irresponsibly let their anti-bestiality standards catastrophically implode in the last decade and a half (apparently the slippery slope of moral collapse is steep once you elect a black president) or "girl on goat" (or wolf or beast or whatever) is far more godly in the Evangelical anti-bestiality hierarchy.

Because even though this show has been about and has been VERY UNAMBIGUOUSLY CALLED "Beauty and the Beast" through an animated movie, a Broadway musical and now a live-action movie revival FOR 26 YEARS, this in-your-face girl-on-goat love story has not ONCE inflamed the delicate moral sensibilities of the Evangelical Persecution Complex Network™. Until now.

"Beauty and the Beast" debuted in 1991. Twelve celebrated girl-on-goat years later, Rick Santorum led the charge against "man on dog" bestiality in a 2003 USA Today interview. And now -- 15 years after that, as Disney once again breathes fresh new life into this wholesome, timeless girl-on-goat love story -- Rick Santorum's Evangelical anti-bestiality progeny are FINALLY launching an epic biblical boycott of the once again unambiguously named "Beauty and the Beast" franchise because of ... a vaguely implied and wholly unrequited possibly gay sub-sub-sub storyline in the movie.

Grotesque, hate-filled religious hypocrisy. Tale as old as time.

Does this make Rush a "zerofer"?

I didn't know the Oscars offered a bundling discount for oppressed minorities. And here I am just a plain-old gay guy. I'll NEVER win my damn Oscar.

Read the article here

Jesus. At LEAST have enough self-esteem to write in horizontal lines.

Happy now, Maggie?

And Rush? And Glenn? And Bill? And Michele? And Ann? And Dubya? And Pat? And Carrie? And Newt? And Sarah? And John? And Sally? And Mike? And Mitt? And Rick? And Tom? And David? And "God"?



YOU and your words and your actions told these bastards that it was OK to hate gay people. YOU are responsible for planting the idea in their heads that gay people are punching bags. THIS is what your campaign to "defend" marriage and "protect" families and "fight" a "war" on morality has caused. YOU chose assault imagery to fire the passions of the easily manipulated in your unholy campaign to teach the world to hate gay people. YOU declared us an "enemy" that needed to be stopped at all costs.

And look! You did it! You spread your hatred so thoroughly and so malignantly that now we're being beaten into comas in the street.

There is NO defense for your words and the actions like these that they inspire. So SHUT THE FUCK UP before you open your mouths and try to vomit up some sort of rationale that tries to separate you from what you've wrought. You're all vile and hateful and beneath contempt.

And you'd be wise to keep your distance. Because your work has also taught us to see you as punching bags.

How many giant dicks do you see?

Is that really what his tongue looks like?

Dear Michael Duvall,

You're one kind of douchebag for cheating on your wife, defiling your "sacred" marriage vows and being a fucking hypocrite about your bullshit "family values."

But you're a whole new level of douchebag—the kind that goes way deep into places nobody ever wants to think about—for bragging so cavalierly about the women nobody really believes you have the actual capabilities to screw.

Oh ... and you're just a plain-old douche for being too retarded to know how a microphone works.

And your resignation? Though it's the only smart choice you made in this epic fuckup, it just shows the world that douchebag is exponentially too polite a word for you. I quote: “I am deeply saddened that my inappropriate comments have become a major distraction for my colleagues in the Assembly, who are working hard on the very serious problems facing our state. I have come to the conclusion that it would not be fair to my family, my constituents or to my friends on both sides of the aisle to remain in office. Therefore, I have decided to resign my office, effective immediately, so that the Assembly can get back to work."

We're not as stupid as you are, Michael. We all see very clearly the subtext left swirling around in the gaping hole in your words. Allow me to translate:

"I am deeply saddened that my inappropriate comments have become a major distraction for my colleagues in the Assembly. I am not, however, deeply saddened by any harm or humiliation or devastation or medical danger my actions have caused my family. You can tell because I didn't say I was saddened by the effects of my actions. I mentioned only my comments. Because I am an arrogant piece-of-shit scabby-whore douchebag. And those sexual things I said I did to those women? You and I both know I'm way too old and unattractive for any of that to be true. So I'm basically losing my job and my family over nothing."

It's because of the words and the actions of bullshit "family values" douchebags like you, Michael, that I will never ever be polite or kind or respectful or understanding to anyone who says or does anything to perpetuate the myth that my family is not worthy of the rights and the protections that yours enjoys. The rights and the protections whose mouths you just pried open and shit into. I hope the pain and humiliation you feel—or at least should feel—right now never go away.

I’m having a dialogue!

You may remember Richard Mouw, the evangelical who is not a religious fundamentalist who recently wrote a Newsweek “My Turn” column expressing his shock and sadness—and tears!—over gay people’s angry reaction to his vote for California’s Proposition Hate.

I wrote a response to Newsweek that never got printed. So I posted it here because hey! free blog post!

Mouw is the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, and a google search of his name brings up thousands of links that are everything but my humble little blog. And yet he found it. And he actually wrote a response on his own blog.

Well, kind of a response.

I called him a solipsist in my post. And an asshole. And while anyone who’s ever read this blog knows I tend to use more swear words than a clumsy porn director, I really do regret saying things like that about people. I’m a 40-year-old professional writer with a prodigious vocabulary. Words like asshole are beneath me … and they’re a devastatingly efficient way to undermine anything I’m trying to say.

Did I mention I tend to wander off topic when I write too?

In any case, my post challenged Mouw on a range of logical flaws, implausible conjectures and the ugly realities his actions force gay people to face every day. Mouw’s response focused on … the solipsism. And the asshole. So to speak. Plus he totally lied about me in his description of my post.

And though I really don’t care to have an ongoing dialogue with the man, I posted this response on his blog:

Considering the ostensible premise of your “My Turn” column, my use of profanity in my response was an unfortunate choice. But I swear all the time. It’s probably my worst habit, right after drinking too much diet soda and ignoring the dishwasher when it needs to be emptied. So don’t interpret a swear word from me as the first horseman of the civility apocalypse.

And before I comment on the rest of your post here, Richard, I have to say I’m concerned how cavalierly you turned “Newsweek didn’t print my letter” and “I wrote this response to Newsweek” into “[Jake] expresses his rage over the fact that Newsweek failed to print his letter” … especially given the fact that your god’s celebrated Ten Commandments expressly forbid the bearing of false witness.

Here’s a link to what I wrote. Please note the complete absence of the rage you describe:
http://nofo.blogspot.com/2009/02/newsweek-didnt-print-my-letter.html

But you are correct in assuming I’m quite angry with you. And more than a little exasperated. My anger comes directly from the actions of people like you who work so tirelessly to deny gay citizens equal protection under the law. People like you who go on to defend their actions—and absurdly try to play the victim—in national newsmagazines.

While your musings here on solipsism are lighthearted and entertaining, they pretty efficiently reinforce one of the arguments in my rage-infested blog post: When faced with the challenge of providing concrete, measurable, plausible justifications for denying marriage equality to gay citizens, you people just trot out irrelevant, misleading distractions. The fifth sentence of your “My Turn” column implies that changing the definition of a word is too burdensome a price for equality. The definition of a word! Really! By the time you finish your article, you’ve raised the specters of three-way relationships, Hollywood’s portrayal of religious folk and the transubstantiation of church talk into “hate speech.” You even trot out the time-honored horrors of having to talk to your kids about gay people.

And yet you still don’t explain why my husband and I are forced to invest thousands of dollars to approximate the legal protections heterosexual couples take for granted when they get married. And why—according to our attorney—there are still uncloseable loopholes in everything we’ve done to protect our home, our relationship and the developmentally disabled adult we’re raising. Here’s a little bit more about him: He was abandoned by his father years ago and savagely beaten and emotionally abused (she repeatedly told him he should commit suicide) by his mother for more than 10 years before we rescued him. In addition to the horrors they inflicted in their own disabled child, these two heterosexuals have also racked up four marriages and at least two affairs between them. And yet you used your moment in Newsweek as a platform to complain about how stripping us of marriage equality made you cry instead of grabbing the opportunity to lash out at the heterosexuals who daily make a mockery of marriage by repeatedly cheating, divorcing each other and destroying their families.

I cover a lot more than diversionary tactics in my blog post. In between all that rage, that is. Here are the rest of my points that you ignored—or tacitly agreed to?—in favor of your folksy stories about solipsism:

• The malicious denial of marriage equality has real consequences for real families like mine.

• People like you have no right to be shocked, saddened or surprised by gay people’s angry reaction after you stripped us of our equality.

• Reducing our highly justifiable anger over Proposition 8 to mere “worry” and “anxiety” is patronizing oversimplification bordering on calumny.

• Your slippery-slope arguments are intellectually lazy and logically desperate … and easily trumped: If we follow biblical mandates on marriage, then we’ll have to follow biblical mandates on adultery, divorce, reproduction and the subjugation of wives.

• Your selective interpretation of your chosen mythology has nothing to do with my right to equal legal protection in the real world.

• Your baffling assertion that “gays and lesbians have a right to ask me what my sincerely held convictions mean for how they pursue their way of lives” undermines every plea you make for “dialogue” and a “flourishing pluralistic society.”

• You can’t vote away my equality, defend yourself in a national newsmagazine, dodge your accountability with transparent diversions, falsely accuse me of emotional instability on your blog and then rationally expect me to sit down and have a friendly chat with you about it.

UPDATE: As I figured, Mouw wasn't deleting comments on his blog post. It looks like he'd just set his commenting software to let him approve comments before they went live. I do the same thing. It took three days, but it looks like all your comments have now been approved and posted.

Newsweek didn’t print my letter

Fortunately, I still have the Internets at my disposal.

Richard Mouw, an evangelical who states emphatically that he is not a religious fundamentalist, wrote a Newsweek “My Turn” column on February 9 proclaiming that he voted against marriage equality in California’s Proposition Hate … and then expressing shock and sadness—and tears!—over gay people’s angry reaction after he helped strip us of our equality.

Mouw is a solipsist and an asshole. He reduces our highly justifiable anger to mere “worry” and “anxiety” and thinks that if we all sit down and have a talk—ostensibly to agree that his mythology-driven opinions trump our right to equal representation under the law—we can all live happily together in a “flourishing pluralistic society.”

Mouw also—curiously—implies that he and gay people have an “intimate relationship” and “care deeply about each other” … right before he launches lockstep into the standard litany of laughable arguments against marriage equality: we shouldn’t change the definition of a word, homosexuality is not “normal,” children shouldn’t know about gay people, Christians are the true victims here. He even takes a stab at a couple slippery-slope arguments, the hallmark of intellectual laziness and logical desperation. (Here’s one for you, Richard: If we follow biblical mandates on marriage, then we’ll have to follow biblical mandates on adultery, divorce, reproduction and the subjugation of wives.)

Most impressively, Mouw actually states: “Gays and lesbians have a right to ask me what my sincerely held convictions mean for how they pursue their way of lives.” While I give him points for balls-out impudence, his chosen mythology—sorry, “sincerely held convictions”—have nothing to do with the real world, my life or how I live it. And that “right to ask” goes both ways. Which is why I wrote this response to Newsweek:

If Richard Mouw doesn’t think we deserve the legal and social protections of marriage, that’s his choice. But he can’t rationally expect us to sit down and have a friendly chat with him about it. The dialogue that Mouw purports to want with gay people isn’t like a spirited debate over the existence of a god or the best candidate for a Senate seat. The active denial of marriage equality has real consequences for real families.

We have invested thousands of dollars to approximate the legal protections heterosexual couples take for granted when they get married. And our lawyer informs us there are still uncloseable loopholes in everything we’ve done to protect our home, our relationship and the developmentally disabled adult we’re raising.

Arguments about redefining words and protecting children and silencing Christians are nothing more than misleading distractions thrown into the discussion by people like Mouw who are unwilling to own up to their own prejudices. If Mouw wants a “gentle” dialogue with us, he can start by apologizing for playing the victim after voting to strip gay people of our equality.

Jake and Justin

We never liked you, Dubya Bush

We never liked your monkey face,
Your Jeebus-lovin’ master race,
Your evil axis, your pet Dick,
Your obviously elfin prick,

Your fake Iraqi weapons trove,
Your puppetmaster Karl Rove,
The way you swing at words and miss,
Your inarticulatedness,

Your utter lack of common sense,
Your federal funds for abstinence,
Your intellectual bourgeoisie,
Your selfish foreign policy,

Your Halliburton gravy boat,
Your nine-eleven “The Pet Goat,”
The fact that you’re a fucking dunce,
That pretzel chips could fool you once,

The Constitution you destroyed,
Your deficit, your unemployed,
Your screw-the-poor economy,
Your hurricane goatfuckery,

Your loathing of the Fourth Estate,
Your love for Proposition Hate,
Your house of cards, your brain of cheese,
Your Nazi SCOTUS appointees,

Your solipsistic “stay the course,”
Your outright lack of true remorse
For leaving the United States
A country that the world now hates.

We never liked you, Dubya Bush.
And so we kick you in the tush
And get you gone and throw a rope
To Obama, our newfound hope.

Wow

I wrote my last post to express my white-hot anger over not just Proposition Hate, but the very notion that marriage equality is somehow up for any kind of discussion ... or that it is dependent on the opinions of voters who clearly lack the intellectual qualifications to vote.

Imagine my surprise, then, when it went whizzing virally around the Internets in a matter of hours, generating exponentially more comments and linkbacks than I've ever received in more than five years of blogging.

Once I saw how it had taken off, I steeled myself for the inevitable hostile religious backlash. But it has yet to come ... though I've gotten hate mail in the past for the most benign posts. I figure either this post hasn't yet fallen into the hands of the people who most need to see it, or they just realize they can't win an argument with me on this topic and for once they are wisely keeping their indefensible opinions to themselves.

In any case, I am touched and encouraged by all of you who have taken the time to link this post on blogs and newsgroups, email it to your friends, leave your own stories and comments, and just let me know that I am not alone in my frustration, anger and sucker-punch pain over being repeatedly codified as something less than equal by legions of voters I can no longer look at as compassionate, human or even American.

Many of you have asked for more information about Thomas and the things we have done to protect ourselves and him. I didn't include granular details in my post because it was supposed to be primarily about Proposition Hate ... and because I tend to ramble anyway and the post was already longer than the average novel. But here are some more pieces to the story:

Thomas
First of all, I should clarify that he's 38, so we're not raising a physical child. He and the domestic partner share the same parents, though they have not lived together since the domestic partner was 10. When Thomas moved in with us last October, I decided to keep him and everything he'd been through out of my blog, especially as I was struggling to wrap my brain around the horrors he'd endured. Once in a while he popped into a narrative that involved him, but the domestic partner wasn't really keen on sharing with the world the embarrassing details of his family, so I continued to keep the blog focused on its usual topic: me. But over the last year, every time the struggle for marriage equality appeared in the news, I knew our story could silence every retarded (and I'm using that word on purpose) argument made by the American Taliban. So after the election, and with the blessings of both the domestic partner and Thomas, I laid everything out here.

The mom
On the surface, she's an attractive, bubbly, pleasantly kooky woman. And when I first met her I was excited to have Mame as a mother-in-law. What gay man wouldn't? The domestic partner had warned me that she was probably not the woman she portrayed herself to be, but since he has seen or talked to her only a couple times a year for the last 10 years, it never occurred to us to find out what his mom had really become.

How nobody knew what was going on
Again, there are a lot of family details that the domestic partner just doesn't want splashed all over the Internets. But here's some context: His parents went through an acrimonious divorce when the domestic partner was 5, and over the years the domestic partner, two of his brothers and his father ended up in Illinois and Wisconsin and his mother and Thomas ended up living in a gated community in Florida. The guard at the gate ensured nobody could get in without her permission, she let all her calls go to voicemail, and she and Thomas made only rare appearances at family gatherings. And when they did show up, she never let Thomas out of her sight. The few times I'd met him, he was skittish around people and completely uncommunicative, but I just figured that was part of his disability. It was only when a cousin who happened to be in Florida on business managed to talk his way past the guard that Thomas, whose mother had left him alone while she was on a cruise, felt emboldened to ask for help.

Thomas' stay with us was supposed to be for just a few months until we could find him permanent housing suitable to someone with his disability. But as far as we know, his parents had never bothered to diagnose his condition or get him in the social services system, and we've found roadblock after roadblock as we've tried to find him a caseworker and understand what we should and shouldn't be doing for him. The domestic partner is so wracked with guilt over having not seen what was going on that he views keeping Thomas with us where at least we know he's safe as some sort of penance. And Thomas is such a low-maintenance houseguest—he does his chores without fail, he keeps his bathroom freakishly clean, and for some reason he's taken it upon himself to make sure we never run out of milk or bananas—that having him in our guest room is absolutely no trouble ... except whenever we have guests.

Insurance
Thomas is ineligible for Medicaid because his mother and her second husband listed him as a phony employee at the second husband's company so they could lease a car (and do who knows what else) in his name. So on paper, he's earned too much income to qualify for federal assistance. At least that's what we've been told by Social Security. But we've gotten him a part-time job that will qualify him for health insurance after he's worked there for a year. Which will be in February. My insurance provider told me point-blank that they would never insure him, which I didn't even realize was a possibility. Remember how John McCain and Sarah Palin ranted incoherently about the horrifying threat of socialized medicine? This is what they apparently want: for developmentally disabled, unskilled people like Thomas to go without insurance—and, by extension, medical care that they could possibly afford–all in the interest of saving a few bucks in taxes.

Legal protection
The domestic partner and I went to what was promoted to us as the best gay attorney in Chicago to make sure we had all the legal protections of marriage. He drew up a thousand dollars in wills and powers of attorney and related documents, and we thought we were all set. But since then we've learned from our financial planner and some other attorney friends that mere wills—especially the wills of gay domestic partners—are easily contested by blood relatives and we need to fork over thousands more to have trusts and who knows what else drawn up to protect ourselves. So we're looking for a better attorney who will give us the legal protections we asked for in the first place.

The mortgage
We have now quit-claimed and refinanced the house so everything is in both our names and—as we've been told but I've learned to believe nobody—that the house is safely ours no matter what. But if we had marriage as an option, we wouldn't need to jump through all these goddamned hoops and have all these unanswerable questions.

Why we haven't pressed any charges
It's a family decision.

One final, kinda selfish thought
I figured that a nice little byproduct of all this exposure might be tons of sponsorships for my upcoming Hustle up the Hancock. But it's generated no donations yet. Ahem.

Proposition Hate

Thomas (not his real name) came to live with us on October 13, 2007. Developmentally disabled since birth, Thomas had been essentially abandoned by his father years ago. He’d been living with his mother for the last 15 years in a personal hell he still doesn’t have the skills or even the understanding to describe. From what he’s been able to tell us, she was grotesquely abusive. Instead of merely beating him, she’d make him bring her whatever she was going to beat him with to prolong his terror and humiliation. When she beat him until he bled, she wouldn’t let him clean up the bloodstains on the walls and floor … so he couldn’t escape the reminders of his beatings anywhere he went in the house. When he didn’t make his bed the way she wanted, she made him sleep on the floor next to it. For five years. When a man she was having an affair with committed suicide, she told Thomas she wished he had been the one to kill himself. She clearly had never taken him to a dentist. Or even taught him how to brush his teeth. And while she was constantly dressed in sequins and hats, she dressed him like a retarded, homeless stereotype: pants that were too short, used underwear that was 12 sizes too big and cracked plastic shoes that made him walk with a limp.

Once the domestic partner and I realized what was going on and rescued him (his mother had left him alone for a week while she went on a cruise, telling him he couldn’t go outside or even watch TV while she was gone … and that she’d call the cable company when she got back and beat him severely if they told her he had turned on the TV in her absence) we brought him to live with us. The poor guy was a shell of a man, afraid to talk, assert himself on any level or even make eye contact. And he was clearly terrified that he was going to be punished for causing so much fuss on his behalf. In those first few days in our house, he even apologized to me when I “caught” him using one of our glasses to get a drink of water.

Over the last 13 months in our home, he’s learned to smile and talk to strangers and make terrible jokes and hold a part-time job and be responsible for the simple chores we’ve assigned him and feel safe functioning in a world where he knows his caretakers won’t repeatedly, relentlessly abuse him. In our house, he’s free to watch the shows he loves (which, to our chagrin, involves heavy rotations of WWE), socialize with our friends, sleep in a big comfy bed, and live a life free of the fear of beatings and psychological cruelty. In short, we’ve been the first to give him the responsible, loving parenting that gay-hostile “Christian” conservatives arrogantly declare can come only from straight people. And Thomas’ very existence blows massive holes in the meaningless “every child deserves a mother and father” inanity that these cretins parrot endlessly in their emotionally violent crusades against marriage equality. NO child deserves Thomas’ mother and father, so what these moral charlatans are saying is a grotesque oversimplification of the truth. Rational people call it a lie. Legitimate Christians and their autocratic, jealous god call it “bearing false witness.”

Now consider the fact that Thomas is my domestic partner’s brother.

If the domestic partner dies, their parents have legal access to all our shared property, including our house. The mother who told her other son that Thomas “made her” beat him could share ownership of our home and have every legal right to move in and resume abusing him. The father who has NEVER ONCE contacted us to see how Thomas is doing after surviving 15 years of abuse and then living for more than a year with me, a complete stranger, could assume half ownership of our house and try to sell it, leaving Thomas and me struggling to find a place we could afford to live. And I’d have no legal recourse. Because legally I’m little more than a roommate.

And the blame for all of this falls squarely on the shoulders of “Christian” hatred junkies who are so consumed by their unholy loathing for me and my domestic partner and gay people everywhere that they’ve spent billions of dollars convincing voters across our country to deny us equal access to the legal and financial protection of marriage.

In addition to “every child deserves a mother and a father,” these self-professed “Christians” use meaningless, grotesquely misleading catchphrases like “sacred institution” and “threat” and “protect” and “redefine” and, when they don’t get their way, “activist judges” to further their loathsome agenda to vilify gay people and teach the nation to hate and fear us. The fact remains that nobody—“Christian” or otherwise—has yet to articulate a plausible or even fact-based justification for denying us marriage equality. “Sacred institution,” “threat,” “redefine” and their ilk are nothing but a lazy, artless code for “religious extremists are consumed by a pathological loathing for gay people.” And whether or not they choose to own up to it, they know in their cold, black hearts that it’s the truth.

And while these cretins spent a staggering $73 million in California alone to scare voters into passing Proposition Hate, the domestic partner and I struggle to pay exorbitant dental bills to undo decades of damage wrought by Thomas’ parents’ neglect. And after 13 months, we’re still searching to find someone who will provide him basic health insurance and a social services caseworker who isn’t too overwhelmed to return our calls and help us understand how to care for him and help him build a network of peers beyond the adult gay men who come to our house for the occasional movie or game night.

This grotesque juxtaposition of robustly funded propaganda vs. cash-strapped social services is the perverse, inexcusable legacy of Proposition Hate and the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” and every related money-wasting act of gay-hostile social, political and emotional terrorism wrought by the American Taliban.

If you have ever used words like “sacred institution” or “redefine marriage” or “threat to family values” without irony or—worse yet—harbored thoughts or cast votes against marriage equality, you are not my friend. You are not welcome in my life. I honestly see you as intellectually compromised. And I don’t care what you think your god tells you to believe. Your mythology does not trump my reality. And if you try to defend your indefensible thoughts or words or actions to me, be prepared to have your vile, repellant opinions reduced to the vile, repellant garbage that they are.

And when I’m done with you, the domestic partner and I will calmly go back to caring for Thomas and working to repair the decades of damage caused by the celebrated heterosexuals who are apparently free to marry and divorce and have affairs and abuse and ignore their own children without generating interest a single constitutional amendment, television ad, campaign platform or even a godfuckingdamned T-shirt by the godfuckingdamned American Taliban.


UPDATE
I'm amazed and humbled that my little post from my little blog has gone so exponentially viral. The original point of this post was mostly to rant about the staggering retardedness (and I use that word on purpose and with more than a little authority on the subject) of Proposition Hate and the vapid arguments against marriage equality. Since this post was getting so long, I left out a lot of the more boring details. If you want more information about the wills, insurance and legal protections we've tried to put in place, you can read probably way more than you want to know here.