Wednesday, June 07, 2006

early afternoon

Gay Marriage - A More Educated View

This was written in a lovely manner (she’s been on tv as a commentator a lot since the OJ trial, so she’s probably writing from a lovely manor too).  She gets digs in at Bush, supposedly on behalf of the religious right.  Then, she comes out fully in favor of gay marriage.  I’ve always liked Cynthia Tucker, but I thought this was particularly well-written in order to get her points across.
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ANTI-GAY MARRIAGE PUSH GETS BUSH’S HALF-HEARTED SUPPORT By Cynthia Tucker
2 hours, 5 minutes ago

President Bush should be ashamed. He has treated religious conservatives with more disrespect than Hollywood or the so-called liberal media ever could. He has used their opposition to gay marriage as nothing more than a political prop to be trotted out just as the election season begins, and he apparently believes they are naive enough to fall for his clumsy and half-hearted gestures.


Last weekend, after two years of virtual silence on the subject, the president used a radio address to launch a low-profile push for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning same-sex unions, although he knew perfectly well that the amendment would not pass the U.S. Senate. It’s not even clear that he wanted it to.


After all, his wife, Laura, recently told Fox News that gay marriage should not be “used as a campaign tool.” Vice President Dick Cheney opposes the amendment, as does his daughter, Mary, a lesbian who lives openly with her partner of 14 years. Mary Cheney has called the amendment “fundamentally wrong.”


But the GOP is in trouble. Polls show that voters are more inclined to trust Democrats than Republicans on important issues, and Bush’s own popularity ranks right up there with Simon Cowell and Barry Bonds. Even Bush’s most faithful constituents—religious conservatives—are dispirited, believing the president has ignored them since he was re-elected.


So now, just in time for the campaign season, Bush trots out a ban on gay marriage, expecting religious conservatives to show the same missionary zeal for GOP candidates that they did two years ago. In 2004, GOP operatives managed to get gay marriage bans on the ballot in 11 states, an initiative that drove social conservatives to the polls and probably gave Bush the winning edge in the battleground state of Ohio. Karl Rove hopes to recapture some of that magic in November.


But the president’s heart isn’t in it. On Monday, when Bush assembled a group of religious conservatives to talk about a gay marriage ban, they met in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building rather than in the Rose Garden, where the president usually launches important initiatives or promotes prominent causes.


By all accounts, Bush takes religion quite seriously. So why is he treating an article of faith among his ultraconservative constituents as if it is just another wedge issue to be exploited for a few more votes? He ought to treat their sincerity with the respect it deserves by telling them the truth: A constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is not an issue on which he wishes to expend what little political capital he has left. It is not one of the pressing issues of our time.


Prohibiting same-sex unions would have absolutely no effect on the state of traditional marriage. Britney Spears—whose first marriage lasted less than a day—has done much more to discredit traditional marriage than gay couples have. (If an aversion to gay unions showed a commitment to traditional marriage, then black America could serve as the model for healthy heterosexual unions. After all, few voting blocs show a stronger antipathy to gay marriage than black voters do. Yet marriage is in decline in black America.) Nor does the Bible bestow a singular blessing on unions between one man and one woman. The marital arrangement most often cited in the Bible is polygamy.


Besides, as Bush well knows, the stability of a pluralistic democracy depends on laws that respect the equality of all men and women, whether they are Muslims, Jews, Baptists, Wiccans or atheists.


Among James Dobson and his right-wing ilk, there is a misconception that mixes up religious traditions with civil marriages. Churches may control who is married by their clerics and institutions. But no group’s religious views should stand in the way of two consenting adults—two men, a man and a woman, or two women—who want to go to a courthouse, city hall or Las Vegas love chapel to get married, if they so choose.


Catholics worked this out a long time ago: If you wish to be married in the church, you must follow the teachings of the church. Otherwise, you can go to the courthouse, or you can find another church that suits your beliefs.


What Dobson and his followers are trying to impose is a Christian version of sharia—religious law. That wouldn’t bode well for an Iraqi democracy, and it wouldn’t bode well for this democracy, either.

(Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She can be reached by e-mail: .)

evening

Idiots of the Day - Senators Inhofe, Vitter, and Hatch

This afternoon on the Senate floor, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) stood before a large photograph of his family and shared this important fact: “I’m really proud to say that in the recorded history of our family, we’ve never had a divorce or any kind of homosexual relationship.”


Along the way to the vote, (Louisiana!) Republican Sen. David Vitter defended the GOP’s efforts on the election-year measure by saying: “I don’t believe there’s any issue that’s more important than this one.” <--- not fixing things after Katrina?


“The Republican leadership is asking us to spend time writing bigotry into the Constitution,” said Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, which legalized gay marriage in 2003. “A vote for it is a vote against civil unions, against domestic partnership, against all other efforts for states to treat gays and lesbians fairly under the law.”

In response, Hatch fumed: “Does he really want to suggest that over half of the United States Senate is a crew of bigots?” <--- psst, yes.

Monday, June 05, 2006

lunch time

Save Marriage - It’s Up To You!

An Action Alert from AmericaBlog.com - watch the video, some poor straight person’s marriage may depend on it.

Here’s what you’ll see on the video:  Marriage is under attack - by Republicans who get blown by hookers, have trysts with lobbyists, dump their wives and families, strangle their lovers, call gay sex lines, and engage in acts of gay and straight sodomy. John Aravosis challenges the GOP to put up or shut up by signing the PTV Marriage Protection Pledge.

lunch time

I Should’ve Known Better Than To Trust Such An Ugly Site W/ My Blogroll

Update:  Oh hey, it’s back.  Everyone, make a hard copy of your links right this instant!

Blogrolling.com is down and from the text on their home page, it doesn’t look very promising.  Ugh.  This is just part of it (from 2004 yet):

New Services Evaluation Program Overview
Summer, 2004

To ensure that Tucows continues to develop services that meet the needs of you and your customers, we have created a New Services Evaluation program. The program has been designed to let participating Tucows service providers help us define and design new services.

Whatever.  It’s time to learn how to make ExpressionEngine’s LinkList work.  Too bad I didn’t copy all of my Blogroll links before they disappeared into the ether.  Lesson learned.

Friday, June 02, 2006

lunch time

I Never Ever Thought I Could Dance

So You Think You Can Dance is back for a second season, and I must admit that I’m even more hooked this season than I was last season.  I swear I didn’t mean to watch, but oooooh, the delicious snark.  Ooooh, the bad dancing.  Ooooh, the vomiting during an audtion.  Ooooh, the Orthodox Jew who, while actually being a very good dancer, smashed his face into the floor during his audition.  And best of all, Lauren Sanchez has been replaced by Cat Deeley.  Lauren Sanchez seemed like a very nice person, but Cat Deeley is F-U-N, fun!  And cute.  Fun & cute.

Another SYTYCD second season bonus - someone has obviously made Ballroom Mary Murphy take speech lessons.  She’s still harsh to listen to, but she’s SO much easier on the ears this season.  Mia Michaels, whom I loathed at first last season, has grown on me, but I wish she was less sloppy.  She’s kind of cute in a hippy dippy modern dancer kind of way, but she’s so sloppy.  She’s overweight, but I don’t care about that, it’s the sloppiness that bugs me.  It makes her look kind of like she’d smell badly.  My nose is very sensitive, even if it means imagining that someone on tv is stinky.

One thing I don’t like about this season is that the judges seem meaner.  There’s no reason to rip apart the nice people.  So their dancing isn’t good enough to get them on the show, that doesn’t mean their dreams need to be destroyed.  There are enough jerks auditioning, so they can direct their nastiness at them, not the innocent dork who just loves to dance.  Oh well, soon enough the auditions will be over and the competition will start.  The bad dancers will be gone and we’ll be able to snark on bad attitudes.  Yay!

I LOVED Sophia Wang...and they were just totally mean to her.  Watch Sophia and tell me that you love her too.