gay

I am very happy that one of the most anti-gay U.S. Senators will not be coming back for a second term.

Unfortunately, the same-sex marriage super ban was approved in Virginia by a solid majority. It’s already banned, but now it’s in the state constitution, written with unerasable ink.

How homophobic is Virginia?

Gay marriage is already barred under state law. Enough? No. A constitutional amendment was proposed to prevent not only marriage for gay people, but any type of same-sex partnership.

The amendment has to be approved by both houses in the state legislature two years in a row before being brought to the voters for approval. It did so overwhelmingly both years. The governor, a moderate Democrat (or in Virginia, a left-wing radical) is against the amendment. His argument? The amendment is so loosely worded that it may deny the rights of other straight people.

Wow.

Canada, sorry for poking fun at you last week. We need a foreign exchange program. Half of Virginians for the same number of Canadians. We don’t have ice hockey, and our beer isn’t that great, but you can legally carry a gun in the state house (I found this out when one of the delegates accidentally discharged his weapon last week).

I tuned in late to President Bush’s SOTU address and entertained myself by getting a running tally of standing ovations vs. smirks. It was 17 standing ovations to 14 smirks when he said he supported a constitutional amendment against gay marriage and some Republicans leapt out their seats and erupted in glee.

I haven’t seen people get this excited about discrimination since the 1950s. It’s too bad our leaders don’t get as excited about reducing the budget deficit. Bush mentioned “deficit” once and “freedom” 21 times. If only someone could get him to view the issue as “Freedom…from deficits!” or to reframe tax cuts as “Freedom cuts” we would be getting somewhere.

I wonder how long the President’s mention of a gay-marriage amendment will go to satiate the religious conservatives who threatened to withhold supporting his Social Security proposal if he doesn’t submit an amendment to Congress. (Evidentially, Jesus hates Social Security and gays.) I almost feel sad for the conservatives that thinks he really cares about it. Bush is going on daily trysts with his Social Security privatization proposal, doodling hearts over its name, spending all his time daydreaming about it, fantasizing about gliding his fingertips over Privy’s rippling muscles that will tear Social Security apart out of love for him.

Then he gets home to Ms. Anti-Gay Marriage, her hair in curlers and covered by a fishnet cap, her pink bathrobe tightly knotted at the waist to squeeze in her corpulent belly. She is on the verge of tears. “I need to know: do you love me?” George sighs. “Yeah, yeah. Of course.” She grabs his shirt, almost pulling it off with her pudgy, chocolate-covered fingers on it. “Then take me.”

George muffles his revulsion. All that escapes is an almost imperceptible shudder. “How about next week? I’m really tired” he says and runs off to the bedroom before she can argue.

He pulls the covers tightly over his head. She pays the rent, but he won’t need her for ever. “Just a few more months. A few more months.”

I thought I wasn’t going to write anymore about the debates. With the lack of novelty of the debates and some projects that are constantly swirling around in my head, the motivation just wasn’t there.

But in one of the fastest responses I have seen, Lynne Cheney has already commented on Kerry’s answer to the question, “Is homosexuality a choice?”

You can read her response here. In essense, she says this part of Kerry’s answer, “If you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as” is a cheap, political trick.

Thank God she isn’t my Mom.

If my Mom chose to defend a man who, when asked is homosexuality a choice, said “I don’t know” over a man who said “No, it isn’t, and you should know better,” I’d have a big problem with her.

“I don’t know” isn’t a response. “I don’t know” means either “It is a choice, but I won’t want to seem like an extremist” or “It is how you are born, but I don’t want to piss off the bigots in my base.”

Maybe twenty years ago “I don’t know” was an acceptable response, but it doesn’t cut it today. I’d love to hear what her daughter has to say about this.