Peter, Paul & Mary to NOM: Stop playing “This Land Is Your Land”

Peter, Paul & Mary’s cease-and-desist to NOM: Stop playing “This Land Is Your Land” « Prop 8 Trial Tracker.

It amazes me that no matter how many times this happens, these right-wing fundamentalists keep choosing to play songs by openly liberal, tree hugging, gay-loving artists at their hate-fests. Peter Paul and Mary at an anti-gay marriage rally? Really?

Props to PP&M for a very diplomatic F-U to NOM.

Prop 8: Don’t be that guy.

So Prop 8 has been repealed, and now the repeal is being appealed. Everyone expected this of course, but I’ve been thinking about how the whole Prop 8/Perry v. Governator journey will be remembered by generations to come. The odds of equality not being granted to the tax-paying homosexual citizens of this country are extremely low. I’d honestly bet my life on it, because this is not the first civil rights battle we’ve had in this country, and historically, however long it took, forward thinking prevailed and a bunch of bigots ended up looking phenomenally stupid. Lets take a nauseating trip down American memory lane:

“Americans” killed the Native Americans. Somehow, a bunch of assholes convinced themselves that they were entitled to this land that they just “discovered”, despite the fact that other human beings already lived there. Eventually we realized how disgusting that was and cut it the f!^% out, but it took quite a while for that to happen. I don’t think giving the Native Americans a smidge of land and the ability to run casinos is any type of reparation, but the historical consensus is that we were being assholes.

Americans had slaves. Many, many slaves. Human beings treated like objects. Isn’t that amazing to you, my computer-owning friend who probably has never had your life and family threatened over your ability to pick crops? Yeah, we were being assholes. We had a big war about it, and it nearly broke up this country. Let me repeat that: people were so outraged that the government was telling them to stop “owning” other people that they picked up their guns and killed people over it. They thought the government was getting too big, and that it had no business telling them how to run their lives. Some considered owning slaves to be a God-given right. Some people on this dirty, dirty rock still do. History does not smile on these assholes.

American women couldn’t vote until 1920. Anglo white women haven’t had it as badly as a lot of other races of women, but for the purpose of this blarticle I’ll just use this example. Women–half the population–weren’t allowed to vote. Hell, until the last half of the 1900′s, women weren’t allowed to leave their husbands without the man’s permission. So the suffragettes fought, and a bunch of assholes–including the president–fought back. Now we can vote, we’re taking over the work force, we have 2 new female supreme court justices, and… Well… Sarah Palin. But hey, we never would have been gifted with “Who’s Nailin’ Paylin” if women weren’t in politics, and we have the suffragettes to thank for that! (Just for poops and giggles, I recommend researching women’s suffrage in the US vs. polygamy in Utah.)

Americans were segregated. While women were celebrating their suffrage, blacks were still getting utterly and truly f!#ed by their former massahs, and if you youngsters have been watching Mad Men, you know that it wasn’t all that long ago. In fact, it hasn’t even been 50 years since the Civil Rights Act was passed. A lot of people fought to uphold segregation and the ‘Merica of their youths–that perfect, utopian ‘Merica where the economy was good, government was smaller, women didn’t vote and where white men were proud of themselves for not owning slaves, but didn’t have to drink from the same water fountains as the darkies. They said blacks were dangerous, a menace to society and a threat to the white way of life. Despite that passionate argument, segregation ended.

I was born in the 80′s, so I really don’t understand how large groups of people in this giant narcissistic country of ours, so proud of its ability to lead the world and herald the future, could ever have thought that segregation was any type of sane. South African apartheid is a whole other brand of crazy, but South Africa has never gotten onto a podium and jerked itself off while talking about how much the entire world looks up to it. My point being that history regards the people who fought against ending segregation as a bunch of assholes.

Now we have Prop 8, and a bunch of assholes are once again fighting to continue oppressing a group of fellow human beings. The most ironic, and saddest thing people should know about Prop 8 is the degree to which the African American population in California was manipulated in order to get Prop 8 passed. I don’t know the exact figure, but exit polls showed something like a 75% “yes” vote for Prop 8 by the black community, and without that, Prop 8 would not have passed. (Is it any coincidence that Prop 8 was on Obama’s ballot?) The pasty white assholes who 50 years ago would have been fighting to uphold “Separate but Equal” spent a pretty penny manipulating African Americans, and it’s extremely sad to me that it didn’t occur to them that their voting “yes” on Prop 8 turned them into the assholes their families fought against.

Perry vs. Schwarzenneger is ultimately going to pave the way for equal rights for our gay brothers and sisters. Gay and transgendered marriages will no longer be put in a separate category, DADT will be repealed, and a lot of people are going to feel phenomenally stupid. I can’t tell you how long it will take, but I will say this to everyone fighting against it: Do you really want to be that guy on the losing end of a civil rights battle, fighting to keep human beings from being treated equally?

No matter how disgusted I get with the BS happening on this planet, I know that on a long enough timeline, our understanding of humanity evolves towards compassion. I don’t think we’re in a very good place at the moment with our civil rights blind spots, environmental murder and this whole “selfish is the new generous” movement, but critical people, both conservative and liberal, have always been saying that the world is going to hell, and that now is the “worst” period in history (see my EFH2T post “The Superlative Now for more on this).

You don’t have to get a banner and wave it around to show what you believe in, but you should decide which side of history you want to be on. And hey, if you disagree with me, we’ll just let history decide who is the asshole.

Haiku/Random SYTYCD thoughts: Homoerotic!

Homoerotic!
My bad girls, these dancers are
totally straight. Wink.

Well José probably is, but I’m just glad they’ve embraced guy on guy choreography. Not only is it making a lot of their demo happy, but we get to see so much more than the usual boy-meets-girl story. And I’m enjoying the new format more and more!

I’m referring to the Afro-jazz piece between Billy and José on tonight’s episode of So You Think You Can Dance. If you don’t watch SYTYCD, they usually act like all the obviously gay male dancers are straight on camera. Jesus H, if there’s one place a man should feel comfortable being into other men, it should be the effing dance world. I’m sure it’s just FOX being FOX. Adam Lambert didn’t “admit” to being gay until after Idol.

Is it a step in the right direction, or invitation for outrage from conservative families who don’t mind when the female dancers wear napkins as costumes and rub up against the boys’ penises (the way God intended), but won’t tolerate any queers corrupting their childrens’ fragile, straight little dance-watching minds?

Haiku: Banana Hammocks

Banana Hammocks,
Gyrations, glitter, hot pants…
Happy gay pride, y’all!

Current Events: DC Court Rejects Bid for a Gay Marriage Referendum

DC Court Rejects Bid for a Gay Marriage Referendum – NYTimes.com.

Nice to see that some judges aren’t afraid to point out the obvious:

“D.C. Superior Court Judge Judith N. Macaluso ruled Thursday in favor of the city. She said the board’s action was justified because the initiative would in effect authorize discrimination.”

Nobel prize as encouragement?

I am certainly an Obama supporter, but I think his Nobel win is not such a good thing at a time when he is subject to such merciless criticism over his 9 month tenure as president; some of the criticism is justified, and some of it is based solely on our overblown expectations of the man we assigned the job of “hero”.

From a CNN.com article:

Jagland said he hoped the prize would help Obama resolve the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, last year’s laureate, said it was clear the Nobel committee wanted to encourage Obama on the issues he has been discussing on the world stage.

“I see this as an important encouragement,” Ahtisaari said.

What I and I’m sure many others on both sides of the debate are wondering is whether or not this form of incentivizing is really helpful, and what kind of message it sends to the people with whom Obama is trying, albeit sometimes passively, to influence in a positive way. If someone was trying to negotiate with me, and I hated everything that person stands for, I don’t think I’d be encouraged by that person getting rewarded preemptively for an assumed victory in pressing their agenda upon me.

That said, I do hope it works.

The timing is terrible. The announcement of the Nobel award comes just days after Obama’s decline to meet with the Dalai Lama, which has been criticized as a placating move to appease China, a renown human rights offender. Also, Obama’s under fire from the LGBT community for his lack of follow through on his promised support for gay rights, including his policy on repealing the “Don’t ask don’t tell” policy, which is that, well, they’re just not going to deal with it right now.

But the biggest problem with this award is that he’s under fire from pretty much everyone in the U.S. who went to bed on election night with Utopian dreams of equality, peace and prosperity on January 21st, only to discover nine months in that unfortunately, Obama is human and not miraculously flipping off the partisan bicker switch, pulling money out of his ass, and making everyone in the world love each other. We had high hopes for him–what happened? Well, we saw an imaginary superhero, and some people don’t want to admit that maybe our expectations were a little bit deluded. And some people have elevated themselves to Lex Luthor status to foil the plans of this superhero, also not willing to admit that maybe it’s all a bit overdramatic.

So I think this award is a bad thing for Obama because it reinforces the delusion. I’d rather wait until he actually stops a speeding bullet.