Look, I’m not married. I’ve never been married. I never wanted to be married — okay, maybe when I was five I played house or something, but once I was out of early childhood, I always knew I would never get married.

No, my parents weren’t divorced, married for over 60 years.

In a way, I was a feminist before I even knew there was such a thing. I rejected marriage before I knew I was gay, before I got overtly political, before I finally called myself an atheist. As a feminist, I think marriage is an archaic institution, and contemporary divorce statistics prove my point while those entering both conditions, serially, nonetheless disagree with my analysis.

I look at marriage as a social contract that was designed to control women and insure paternity of children. It’s the 21st Century, let’s just throw the whole thing out. However, mine is clearly a minority view. Despite the cognitive dissonance, marriage doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Folks just seem to like it (again and again!). I’ve come to tolerate this strange need to get state sanction of relationships. )And unlike some, I don’t feel the need to force my opinion and practice on everyone else.)

In the gay community, the marriage equality movement has been around for quite a while. Lots of gay people would like to get officially married to their beloved, and not just for those rather important legal perks like hospital visitation. It means something to them, just as it does to the serially married heterosexuals. Most gay and lesbian citizens are really more like the Nelsons, the Cleavers or the Huxtables than they are like me. That is the great irony of this whole brouhaha.

So what to do? I think some language adjustments would be helpful. Gays (the lucky ones in progressive states) have been thrown the “civil union” bone as a separate but unequal alternative. In most cases, as I understand it, this takes care of most of the legal ramifications of partnerships in our society. But, in order that some paranoid so-called religious nutcases don’t get their panties in a twist, there have to be two forms available from the state, one for straight couples, one for gays and lesbians. One labeled “marriage certificate” and one labeled “civil union.”

Of course the distinction is ridiculous. Where are those fiscally responsible, small-government conservatives when you need them?

Just have the state — and here I mean government, in every fucking state of the U.S. — provide civil unions for consenting adults, which are easy to get and easy to abolish. It’s a legal and social contract and has nothing to do with anyone’s god or any church dogma.

Frankly, I think it should be available to partnerships of two or more. What’s it to ya? Throughout human history, societies have formed different kinds of affinity groups, and yes, the sacred task of raising children might have been performed by entities other than just the biological mother and father. In fact, I got news for Focus on the Family: the latter system, the “nuclear family,” is NOT the norm, not even close. Somehow, despite this crazy behavior of social elasticity and community building, culture has progressed even to the zenith of producing James Dobson.

With this arrangement, religious groups can then choose to provide an additional imprimatur to the partnerships that fit whatever little corner of humanity they approve of. No one forces them to do anything they don’t want to do. Give these neanderthals the legal exclusions for their cultdoms so they won’t have to employ or give communion to someone that makes them feel icky (or involuntarily and inexplicably horny). Let’s see how that works out for them in the long run. Not well, I suspect. With affirming alternatives, sane people will gravitate away from hate and toward love naturally.

Dustin Bolton of (I think) Norman, attended the counter protest to the Phelps’ gang at OCU on Oct. 24. His photo album is here.

I missed the demo, unfortunately. I never like to miss a demo on a good cause, but this one looked very special, with a lot of caring young people, fighting back against hate with creativity, unity and determination. The signs and banners are great — and a few fun costumes. A fitting tribute to Matthew Shepherd, and once again putting the Phelps to public shame.

I really think Oklahoma is changing — slowly but surely — into a more diverse and tolerant place.  A really good sign of this would be the defeat of Sally Kern, Oklahoma state rep. from Bethany. It’s one of the local races I will be watching most closely on Tuesday. Her re-election will be a disappointment, but not a stop to the process of change against her type of thinking and politics.

Here’s what Dustin said about the event on his Flickr album:

On October 24, 2008, Fred Phelps and family of Westboro Baptist Church came to Oklahoma City University to protest the showing of Leromie Project ( about Matthew Shepard ). Over 300 students and visitors (crowd grew rapidly as it got later) came together to protest against Westboro Baptist, standing up against hate and intolerance. Phelps and family remained quiet during their protest and left fifteen minutes before their ‘protest permit’ ended, contrasting their normal style of yelling and provoking and staying until the end. It is believed they did not expect such a large turnout against their protesting.

Here’s a pre-event article from the student online newspaper Students unite to show support for diversity, church group to protest and the counter-demo was reported in Holding up their message: Church group pickets production, community silently responds.

Sarah Palin is a pathetic, mush-for-brains dolt. I used to think she was monumentally dumb and incurious, but had political instincts that could compensate enough for her to succeed in her corrupt career path for the foreseeable future (like George W. Bush did). She does have a special talent, all right, and is hereby awarded first prize in the contest to be the 21st Century icon of proud Republican know-nothings.

This is Sarah Palin, from a speech supposedly made to demonstrate “Commitment To Children With Special Needs”

This is a matter of how we prioritize the money that we spend. We’ve got a three trillion dollar budget, and Congress spends some 18 billion dollars a year on earmarks for political pet projects. That’s more than the shortfall to fully fund the IDEA. And where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good — things like fruit fly research…

As any half-functional high-schooler knows, much of what we know about the causes and treatment of genetic disorders (like Down Syndrome, which Palin’s youngest child has) is grounded in research on fruit flies.

If this is the path Christianity is on, and it certainly seems to be (with apologies to my intellectual Christian friends who are sadly in the minority of their faith), then, thanks to the principles of evolution, it will be extinct in a couple of generations. Good riddance. That level of stupid simply cannot sustain itself.

A science blog, BiochemicalSoul, said this:

To decry research in [condescending and amazed tone] “the fruit fly” is a testament to the true idiocy of this woman and to the failure of our public education system. In fact, her own father, Chuck Heath, was a biology teacher – obviously a complete failure of a biology teacher.

(Well Palin herself has been a failure in passing on her values — abstinence outside of marriage — to her children, so there you go: epic FAIL.)

But I liked what Newsweek’s Richard Wolfe said: “This is the most mindless, ignorant, uninformed comment that we have seen from Governor Palin so far, and there’s been a lot of competition for that prize.”

So, yeah, Sarah’s a winner of many prizes. Now go back to Wasilla with your crown and STFU.

Update:

Mithras looks ahead to Palin’s designs on 2012, in a very fun, snarky read:

All this just goes to prove one thing: John McCain used to be a maverick, but isn’t any longer. Sarah Palin is the true maverick. She’s so mavericky, she realized McCain was no longer a maverick a millisecond after the convention, long before anyone else. She’s the ultimate maverick, immune to coercion, restraint, prudence, education, facts, intelligence and common sense. She goes her own way. That’s just what the country is hungering for: A combination of early-Alzheimer’s Reagan and George W. Bush circa Katrina.

And found at Crooks & Liars:

In fact, irony of all ironies, fruit fly research has actually aided in understanding a genetic component or predisposition towards autism.

This cartoon makes me think of my Quaker friend Christine O’Brien, who died last November ending a beautiful life, deeply lived. We would have had a great conversation about it, laughing, talking about Zen koans, Quaker meetings in which not a word is said, but everyone feels connected and full of love at the end, or about brief but powerful messages, like “Attention” that get everyone vibrating silently. She would bring out one of her little Paragraph magazines, and read a prose poem we both would consider “cosmic”.

And we would sit and watch the light move across her patio and through the French doors into the dining room, playing shadows across art objects, dried flowers, rows of little stones and beads, books, lots of natural wood and wonderful, wonderful food in handmade plates.

What some people call “religious” is just a bunch of noise and anxiety. You really don’t have to say, or hear, a thing to feel connected to something powerful. In fact, the less said, the better.

I started getting the Waco Trib this week (well, the weekend editions anyway) and will try to write about more local issues on this blog. There are not too many lefty blogs in the Heart of Texas, so it’s a necessary public service.

Today there’s an article about the local MCC church, a gay/lesbian friendly denomination that, in conservative towns like Waco, are usually the core of the GLBT community.

I’m not Christian, or even religious, but I appreciate what MCC does for gays and lesbians, giving them a place where they can express their spirituality without shame or guilt, and of course it also provides social activities, resources for community service and even on occasion a political nudge. It’s a black eye on the rest of the Christians that this ghettoization was necessary in the first place, but overall it’s been a good thing for gays and lesbians by changing the focus of the community’s attention, to some extent, from the bar scene (and other even less productive venues).

The Waco church is having a celebratory reception for MCC founder Troy Perry — whom I met in Florida a few years back — even as I type this, and a dinner tonight which I will try to get to.

I do have one small criticism of CenTex MCC, though. They should have named themselves HOT (Heart of Texas, as the greater area around Waco is known) MCC, because that would be a lot more fun than CenTex, which sounds like a type of stretchy fabric or a condom brand. Seriously, it sounds very corporate, not religious. I’m betting the boys in the church have a much better, affectionate, nickname for their church. If I go tonight, maybe I will find out what it is!

Found at DailyKos

Don’t tell me you’re a Christian; let me figure it out for myself.