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The Homometer

Come read how gay marriage has ruined everything. Better yet, watch this exclusive report from The Daily Show.

Lesbian minister defrocked; gay man excluded from congregation

The United Methodist Church has issued a series of anti-gay rulings.

Love in Christ, judge not, etc., etc.

Takei gay

George Takei, of Star Trek fame, just came out publicly. He's been living with his partner for 18 years. Poor guy, it's gotta be particularly hard to be closeted and in a relationship for so long. He must be so relieved!

Brushing against bigotry

The boyfriend and I decided to go for a quick jaunt to Downtown Crossing to do some winter shopping. We were jostling with the Saturday afternoon crowd trying to get out of the rain and into Filene's Basement, when this short Asian lady shoves a clipboard in front of Knox, and points at it, trying to get us to read it and sign it. On the clipboard is a computer printout, in a large font, urging us to "SIGN PETITION TO DEFEND TRADITIONAL DEFINITION OF MARRIAGE."

Ooh, that got me angry. I rushed past the lady into the store, throwing her a scathing look and saying as pointedly as I could, "We're GAY." Did she understand me? I'm not even sure she spoke English, given how she kept pointing and gesturing. At any rate, my blood was was boiling, and the frenzy of shoppers in the store did nothing to calm my nerves.

Later tonight, we were thinking that maybe I should have told her that "traditional marriage" would have her in the kitchen, pregnant, barefoot, and rightless, or that if she weren't enjoying the fruits of a liberal society she would be working in the mines or in a sweatshop.

Sigh.

Outing "closet heterosexuals"?

I believe people's private lives are generally nobody else's business, but there are exceptions. "The personal is the political," they say, and that is true when policies affect lives or when hypocritically grandstanding to take away people's rights under the veneer of "moral values."

This brings us to the Republican Party. Pretty much, if you work at the upper echelons of this administration, you are complicit in its gay-bashing, and the American people deserve to know that for all the rhetoric, you, an LGBT person, are employed there. Same goes for Congress: if you advocate measures that deny gays and lesbians equal rights, or if you fail to raise your voice against such measures that others bring, your are participating in an injustice. If you yourself are in the closet, then the American people deserve to know where all your blustering is coming from. (On the other hand, if you're out and advocate anti-gay measures, well, that's just sad but at least voters would know what they're getting and where you're coming from.)

So, all that said, here's an article on the administration's "closet heterosexuals" and how the mainstream media is complicit in not discussing their personal lives and rumors around them when it is the administration itself insisting that personal lives are the purview of government.

Catholic church using the pulpit to deny gay civil marriage

Parishioners across the state were urged yesterday to sign the anit-gay marriage petition that would place a state constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2008.

It's sad, really. There are many pressing social problems the Church could be dealing with: poverty, education, health care. There are even enough internal issues to keep the Church occupied: how to prevent the pedophile tragedy from happening again. Instead, the church chooses to scapegoat gay and lesbian people for forming stable families before the eyes of civil authorities. (And it chooses to scapegoat gay priests rather than dealing with the real causes of the pedophile scandals.)

''As I say, it's not against anybody, it's for children and it's for the stability of marriage, which is really the foundation of our great nation,' said Raymond L. Flynn, a former mayor of Boston and Vatican ambassador whose name appears on the petition as one of its chief sponsors.

What a lie! I've yet to hear of a heterosexual marriage dissolving because gay neighbors down the street could get a marriage certificate. I've yet to hear of children being better off because their parents are second-class citizens before the law. The Church, any church, is free to accept or reject the marriages it chooses, but it should not impose its dogma on a pluralistic society.

It's the great irony of American history, isn't it? Part of the American ethos is our foundation as a refuge from religious persecution, and yet we have always had a very theocratic streak. The Puritans, after all, weren't seeking to establish universal freedom of conscience but rather a place where they could build their own vision of the Biblical "City on a Hill," undisturbed by others.