March 2004 Archives

Beating me to the punch yet again, Jeff has blogged about our dinner Friday night at Nectar. This restaurant, in the spot near the Kennedy Center formerly occupied by another favorite of mine, Zuki Moon (home of the best homemade caramel and green tea ice creams), really was quite nice. It's a little pricey (one appetizer, two entrees, one dessert, one ginger ale, and two coffees--and we had no wine or cocktails--ran us just shy of $100 before tip) for frequent visits, but definitely worth checking out for a special occasion.

In addition to the odd mix of over- and under-attentiveness (on the one hand, one server came over to pour more water every five minutes or so, but all failed to offer seconds on bread or to bring the check until we specifically asked, well after it was clear we were waiting), there was an interesting melange among the furnishings of the common--one server made a point of telling us that the candle holders were available at Target, when he thought I was admiring them--and unique--the beautiful glass plate on which Jeff's salmon was served is part of the owner's private collection, and is signed by the glassmaker.

I had the duck which, like several of their entrees, interestingly and appealingly is not a single item but a medley, consisting in this case of rare duck tenderloins in a wine sauce, a small salad on duck carpaccio, a duck leg on polenta, and foie gras with a delicate mint sauce. And the individual baked Alaska I had for dessert was spectacular, though the hazelnut praline ice cream within the absolutely perfect meringue was perhaps a touch still too hard to eat easily; the "invisible chocolate" sauce--a clear chocolate liquer--poured over it, though, added another interesting touch to the dessert.

In a bold but very successful move, Nectar doesn't own a walk-in freezer, so the menu changes sometimes as frequently as daily according to whatever ingredients are available freshest that day. So use the menu on the web site only as a guide to possibilities rather than as a strict reference.

Jeff has reported on our Friday night outing to see the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington's all-male performance of Bye Bye Birdie, and I concur that it was a fun show. I knew beforehand that all the roles would be played by men, but had assumed that the roles usually played by women would be done in drag. While, as Jeff notes, that was done for a few roles (notably Mae Peterson and Mrs. Macafee, as well as Kim's best friend Ursula), the Chorus also took the inspired step of reworking the two female leads--"Rosie" (short for "Roosevelt") Alvarez and Kim Macafee, the intended recipient of Conrad Birdie's "last kiss"--as male characters.

And what a world those changes created--in this production, Sweet Apple, Ohio is part of an alternate U.S. where some boys kiss girls, some kiss boys, and some kiss both, and it's all completely normal, unremarkable and "really sincere." In the world of this production, even adult married men aren't immune to the swoon-producing effects of Conrad's pelvic thrusts.

And the recasting of the Shriner's meeting as the back room of a leather bar was priceless--this scene, and the hunky actors in it, received some of the night's loudest applause and obvious audience appreciation.

As states across the U.S. continue to move toward banning gay marriage and, in many cases, any legal protection for gay men and lesbians in long-term relationships, the rest of the world keeps moving forward.

The Observer reported yesterday that laws giving gay couples the equivalent legal recognition and rights accorded to marriage will be unveiled this coming Wednesday.

The first laws giving gay people the right to "marry" are to be unveiled this week in one of the most significant changes to Britain's social make-up since the passing of equal opportunities legislation in the 1960s.

Attempting to show it still has a radical edge, the Government will say that all couples who sign up to a committed relationship should have the same rights, regardless of sexual orientation. ...

Under the Civil Partnerships Bill to be published on Wednesday, same-sex couples will be able to sign a register held by the register office in a procedure similar to a marriage. Although the Govern ment will insist it is not officially a "marriage" but rather a contract between two people, the fact that couples will have to announce their intentions beforehand in a similar way to the reading of the banns before a wedding reveals its true effect.

Couples will have rights to pensions similar to married couples, will not have to pay inheritance tax on property passed between them when one dies and will have access to hospital records similar to that allowed for a spouse. ...

A Whitehall source said it simply and best, "It is about equality. It is not about special favours--they will have the right to commit to one another and the responsibilities that brings."

Last night I got a note that someone on Orkut had added me to her friend's list. Soon thereafter I got an email from the person in question asking me if I were the Thom Watson she'd known from Harvard, and also pointing out that we have some real-life friends in common.

It turns out that while the latter is true, and I did go to Harvard (class of 1984), I was not the specific Thom Watson (class of 1991) she knew.

As a kid I already was aware of professional golfer Tom Watson; the founder of IBM, Thomas J. Watson; and even Southern Populist leader, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel. I thought that my spelling of Thom with an h, however, would help my name stand out a little.

And in the small pre- and early-Internet world, it did. Between 1994 and 2000, sites owned by or related to me generally were the only ones returned for the search term "Thom Watson." No more, though. My personal site is still the first result from Google, and other sites with which I've been affiliated speckle the results, but even the more unusual spelling now returns a plethora of results, many of which I've tied to specific individuals. At a minimum, there's the:

• Psychic Healer and Reiki Practitioner, also known as "Grandfather RavenWolf";
• Florida sports journalist;
• Maine politician (Representative, D-Bath);
• Producer and director at the Studio Theatre of Bath, Bath, Maine;
• Music licensing professional, stage actor and film coordinator. This one sometimes gets confused with me, because we've both done work over the years for PBS;
• Diocese of Coventry (U.K.) Board of Education member;
• Guitarist for New Zealand band "Head Like a Hole" and frontman for band "Cassette";
• Former member of the Concord Arizona "Blue Devils" Drum and Bugle Corps;
• Keyboardist, vocalist and percussionist for "moth," a "three-piece gothic soundscape ensemble";
• Project manager at a Texas architecture firm and president of the Bulverde (TX) chapter of Optimists International;
• Dabbs Area Vocational Center (Birmingham, Alabama) welding test supervisor; and
• Everett (WA) Community College Maintenance Supervisor.

We're nothing if not a diverse bunch, we Thom Watsons.

I've been remiss. On Monday I received a wonderful surprise. When I got home from work there was a package for me from Amazon; inside was a copy of the terrifically funny Muriel's Wedding DVD from my wishlist, a gift for no apparent reason from the wonderful woman over at Go Fish.

I sent a private thank-you, but I also wanted to take the opportunity to publicly thank her for the "Happy March" present. Thanks, sweetie!

A proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage was tweaked Monday to give states the right to recognize same-sex civil unions, but sponsors shied away from including language that could squelch legal challenges in Utah to the constitutionality of prohibiting polygamy. ...

Still, the Colorado senator [Wayne Allard] acknowledged that he and [Colorado Rep. Carolyn] Musgrave purposefully did not define marriage as a union between "one man and one woman," which would have effectively eliminated any possible ambiguity over the unconstitutionality of plural marriage, which Congress outlawed in 1882.

"We had a real definite debate on that," said Allard. "If you say 'one man and one woman,' that creates issues about divorces and remarrying, so we didn't want to go into that. So that's why we have 'a man and a woman.' "

The Salt Lake Tribune, March 23, 2004

Every day these folks make it clearer and clearer that the intent of the Federal Marriage Amendment is not, in fact, to "preserve the sanctity of marriage" but merely to enshrine in the Constitution their contempt (if not outright hatred) of and bigotry towards gay people.

Given that they were so careful about the language in this one phrase, though, it certainly belies their claims until recently that the original language of the amendment wouldn't prohibit legislated (as opposed to constitutionally or judicially mandated, which they still intend to ban--so it's ok for Congress to take away rights using the federal constitution, but not for states to given them with their own) civil unions, language they've now changed explicitly.

I must admit to some gleefulness contemplating the potential fallout if they hadn't seen this potential problem with their words, and had ended up constitutionally prohibiting divorce and remarriage.

[Via Bug]

File under "Yet Another Reason to Move to Canada"

Following similar rulings from Ontario and British Columbia, the Quebec Court of Appeals (the province's top court) ruled today that same-sex couples indeed have the right to marry.

Both Eugene Volokh and Considerettes had something to say recently about Wednesday's story in the Las Vegas Sun reporting that two student legislators at Western Oregon University have launched an effort to ban the Red Cross from conducting blood drives on campus, claiming that the donor screening process discriminates against gays. To wit, the Red Cross bars any man who has had sex with another man since 1977, even once, from donating blood; its contention is that this helps protect the nation's blood supply from HIV-tainted blood.

While I agree with one conclusion of both Volokh and the author of Considerettes that this has the potential of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and I personally wouldn't support a ban on blood drives (Volokh invokes the words "mighty foolish" and "folly"), I think that both bloggers have missed an opportunity to look at the full story and the history behind the Red Cross's stance and the FDA regulations, since medical research and the blood supply advisory community tend to believe that there is no scientific basis for the categorical ban, and to see whether there might actually be some anti-gay discrimination or at least some logical inconsistencies in the Red Cross's policies that go beyond their stated public health rationale for rejecting blood from any man who has had a single episode of sex with another male.

• If you are a woman who has had sex, no matter how many times, with a man who has had sex with another man, you are asked to refrain from giving blood only for a year after your last sexual experience with that man.
• Similarly, if you are a man who has had sex, no matter how many times, with prostitutes, as long as you've never had sex with another man you also are asked to refrain from giving blood only for a year after your last sexual experience with a prostitute.
• If you are a woman who has been raped, even if you have no idea of the sexual history of the man who raped you, you may begin to donate blood again one year after the rape.
• However, if you are a male who has had sex with another man, even once, since 1977, you are prohibited from giving blood. Even if you have been celibate, in a monogamous relationship or have engaged only in heterosexual activity since, and test negative for HIV, you still may not donate blood.

According to the CDC, racial and ethnic minority populations in the United States, primarily African-Americans and Hispanics, make up more than 60 percent of the HIV infections in the U.S. Yet the FDC and the Red Cross do not ban African-Americans, Hispanics, or those who are engaged in heterosexual sexual relationships with African-Americans or Hispanics from donating blood.

Among new HIV infections in the U.S., sixty percent of men were infected through homosexual sex. However, seventy-five percent of women were infected through heterosexual sex, yet we do not categorically ban heterosexual women from donating blood.

The ban as written seems to have a double-standard. The same risky acts performed by heterosexuals generally merit only a twelve-month waiting period to donate blood, while for gay men status alone, regardless of sexual history for the past 27 years, suffices for a categorical ban.

Finally, the Red Cross hides behind the FDA, claiming that it is the FDA's regulations that require the ban. However, they do not disclose that the Red Cross, as a member of the FDA Blood Products Advisory Committee, has been the lone voice preventing any change to the FDA's regulations, while FDA staff and its other advisory organizations have suggested that the categorical ban is unjustified and unwise in the face of the ongoing blood shortages the country has continued to encounter over recent years.

In testimony at a watershed meeting of the FDA Blood Products Advisory Committee in September 2000, where the FDA was reviewing possible modifications to the gay ban, the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB) strongly advocated changes, and America's Blood Centers (ABC), which collects nearly half of all the nation's blood supply, also supported modifications. The American Red Cross (ARC) stood alone in opposing any change. Roehr reviews reports that the Red Cross opposes changes for financial reasons, and seeks to market itself as the "safest" source of blood through a policy which is not scientifically justified. BPAC support for changing FDA policy failed at that meeting by only one vote.

A recounting of events over the last few years clearly indicates that opposition to changing the policy on blood donation by gay men does not come from the FDA staff, the association representing professionals in the field, or the association representing agencies that collect about half of the blood in the United States. Opposition to changing the policy comes primarily, one is tempted to say solely, from the American Red Cross, which wields a de facto veto over the process.

The power of the Red Cross comes from the fact that it is a centralized behemoth that carries out a multitude of activities with an annual budget of about three billion dollars. It has a massive public relations machine that maintains its iconic image before the American public. The other organizations may represent equal or greater interests in the field of blood donation and use, but their resources are diffused and they are no match for the ARC.

What motivates the American Red Cross to maintain its opposition to changing the policy? Their rhetoric focuses on maintaining minimal risk within the blood supply, but that is at odds with the policy of the AABB to which many of their professional members belong.

Some past board members and lower level officials resigned from the Red Cross in past years, charging that the ARC was homophobic. ARC spokesmen have denied the charge, but the legacy of suspicion remains.

It seems likely that money, marketing, and sheer arrogance are factors contributing to ARC's maintenance of the policy....

Regardless the course taken, it seems likely that internal and external pressure will have to be brought to bear on the American Red Cross for it to abandon its lone opposition to changing the policy. Even if the FDA decides to modify the policy, the ARC can always undercut it by maintaining its own, stricter policy. The most effective public argument in moving the ARC is likely to be one of identifying their position as one adopted for strictly for financial reasons, to save processing costs, while discriminating against a segment of American society when there is no valid scientific reason to do so.

From an article in the March 22 issue of TIME entitled "Raising the volume":

As the Bush team sorts out its internal mechanics, it will press the advantage of incumbency. Administration sources tell TIME that employees at the Department of Homeland Security have been asked to keep their eyes open for opportunities to pose the President in settings that might highlight the Administration's efforts to make the nation safer. The goal, they are being told, is to provide Bush with one homeland-security photo-op a month.

Well, I sure feel safer now, knowing how employees at DHS are being asked to spend their time.

A recent article on Alternet, "Cashing in on Tragedy," also points out the inherent hypocrisy in tactics like these:

While the White House now says Bush "has every right" to politicize 9/11 and the War on Terror, it was President Bush and Vice President Cheney who reassured Congress after 9/11 that national security would never be used for political purposes. On 1/23/02, President Bush said, " I have no ambition whatsoever to use [national security] as a political issue." On 5/17/02, Vice President Cheney even said legitimate questions about the White House's failure to better defend America before 9/11 were "thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war." On 3/4/03, Senate Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-AL) was asked if his party should use the war for political gain and responded, "Absolutely not. And as a Republican, I would deplore such tactics. I think that what we've got to do in a bipartisan way, as Americans, is win this war."

According to the new director of the Office of Special Counsel, which oversees complaints of discrimination in hiring and firing in the federal government, while I still can't be fired or demoted for gay behaviors, I can now be fired or demoted simply for being gay, and there's no one to whom I can appeal.

Gene and Mac both refer today to the unbelievable (my boss, a straight woman, actually called it "unfuckingbelievable" when I showed her the article) position taken by Scott Bloch of the OSC that the list of prohibited personnel actions of the Civil Service Reform Act does not, in fact, cover discrimination based on sexual orientation. I first blogged about the OSC's planned review of this policy, and its removal of all references to sexual orientation as a protected class from its website and written materials, several weeks ago.

More bizarrely, though, Bloch goes on to say that conduct and sexual orientation are not the same thing (ok, I'll buy that, but look at where he goes with it next...), but that conduct potentially is covered while orientation is not; you cannot be fired for being in a gay pride parade, but you can be fired for being gay. This twisted premise, though, seems to suggest that he also should be forced to interpret the Act as protecting those who exhibit womanly or Black behavior, but not those who are, in fact, women or Black.

Jeff, dear, I know you're itching to head back to California, but I tell you, in all seriousness, Canada just is looking better on a daily basis.

Despite the fact that my family tree has been firmly rooted in the U.S. for many generations, and that I'm clearly a mongrel descended, at a minimum, from English, Irish, Welsh, Scot, German and Dutch forebears, I've always identified more closely with my Irish ancestry than any other. To be more accurate, I've identified with a mythologized, pan-Celtic Irishness, and its in this identification that my sometime nickname--"elflad"--and lifelong attraction to elf and fairy lore have their roots.

As early as first grade, for example, I can remember the other kids calling me a "leprechaun" and, over the years, this eventually morphed into "elflad"; the "elf" moniker has maintained an influence even now in several of my web domains as well as the name of the blog itself.

I'm also a huge fan of Celtic music, from traditional Celtic folk to more contemporary New Age and x-Celtic fusion. In fact, Celtic and Celtic-inspired folk and New Age make up the single largest genre in my CD and MP3 collection.

I've never been a big fan of the excesses of St. Patrick's Day--the drunken revelry, the homophobic parades--but when I lived in Cambridge and Boston, I particularly enjoyed St. Patrick's Day "Evacuation Day", especially since there it offered an additional holiday from work.

Today started out fairly positively. I was actually looking pretty good in my green A&F sweater and one of Jeff's black leather jackets. My boss's boss--a McMahon--complimented me on my wearing of the green, and poured me a strong Irish coffee--a tradition he maintains in his office every March 17th, complete with Jameson, brown sugar, and whipped cream. But the day went largely downhill from there. Meetings from noon straight through to 2:30, the same time both the cafeteria and sundries shop close, meant that I'd had to forego lunch, again, while crisis after crisis kept me stressed until close of business. Then I walked outside to discover that it was sleeting.

Jeff had suggested that we might get a drink after work, and I had replied by email that it depended on the level of misanthropy I was still feeling by then, and contingent on my getting something to eat beforehand. Later, though, I decided it was a very good idea after all, so after I picked him up at the Metro, we went for a few drinks and a bite at Arlington's one gay bar, the gloriously tacky Freddie's Beach Bar. The calamari was only so-so, and the turkey wrap and pasta were pretty dreadful, but the chocolate martini and cosmo follow-up were tasty and fun (even if the bartender did end up briefly drawing attention to me with his "Sir?! Hey, sir? Did you want that martini made with white or dark chocolate?" I might as well have been sitting there with a pink parasol and a big beehive drag wig.), and the coconut ice cream was very yummy.

OK, so none of that was particularly Irish, but still it was a nice relaxing end to an otherwise horrible day.

Today on Rebel Prince, Jeff writes about cartoonist William Haefeli, pointing out some of his gay-themed 'toons available at the New Yorker's Cartoon Bank, a great resource for framed and matted prints, original art and other gifts based on the cover art and cartoons from the magazine.

I'm a fan of Haefeli as well, but my very favorite New Yorker cartoonist of all time has to be Roz Chast, whose shaky drawings based on wry and witty plays on word and turns of phrase, along with the occasional trigonometric alien mother, grim reaper or scary blank-eyed circus clown, often find me very nearly literally rolling on the floor laughing. I have, in fact, fallen out of bed from laughing so hard at some collected Chast cartoons.

One recent cartoon that had both of us chuckling was "The Pessimist and the Paranoid," in which the pessimist unsurprisingly suggests that the glass is half-empty, while the paranoid, wringing her hands, worries that "That glass is too close to the edge of the table! It's going to fall and break and somebody's going to step on the shards and get hurt! What is that liquid, anyway? Something hideously caustic, no doubt."

Every now and then I get a piece of spam that actually makes me smile. The ones that seemingly have been run through a translation engine from an Asian language into English, like the one I received today, occasionally can be mildly amusing:

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To suspend from this great, Implausible and Amazing mails send any email here lovely and love Burlen: mailto:[email deleted].

It's like an advertisement for a circus--well, maybe an erotic circus like Cirque du Soleil's new adult show, Zumanity. Step right up and see the great, Implausible and Amazing mails! Expect I have wonderful intelligence and superb show for you at the moment! Bring all your sweetheart lacivious friends! Experience the thrill of salacious sugar!

Both Jeff and Cornelia already have reported on our dinner together last night, though I did at least beat them to the punch in getting a few pictures from the evening uploaded before I went to bed.

Dinner was great. Annie's is loud, crowded and smoky, yes, and the music selection last night was a little strange, but I haven't had as good a filet mignon in quite a while. "Medium," "medium" and "medium-well" (I guess I love you anyway, dear, despite the sacrilege) were the first three responses as our server, "211 Scott," asked around the table before getting to me--Tre being oddly mute all evening--when I exclaimed "just as rare as you're willing to let it go," whereupon Jeff added on my behalf "as rare as legally possible." And it was deliciously red throughout (if not, unfortunately, as rare as I'd cook it on my own) yet simultaneously melting--like buttah--in my mouth. Really, really superb.

And since the restaurant was observing the Dining Out for Life event, we did good while eating well, since the restaurant would be contributing half of our total bill to Food and Friends, to help feed people living with life-challenging illnesses.

And Cornelia and Kat. Wow, what a cute, lovable, sweet pair. As I noted in a comment on Cornelia's post, while Jeff and I are relative newlycan'tbeweds, the two of them have been together over 6 years, yet are still openly affectionate. It's so wonderful to see. Moreover, conversation was easy and fun (though I suspect we irritated the hell out of the surrounding tables as we got a little flash-happy with the cameras), and the evening was a wonderful success. I really want to spend more time with the two of them.

The guy at the urinal next to mine just a few minutes ago was talking away merrily on his cell phone the whole time.

I keep imagining what the person on the other end of that conversation must have been thinking.

It's been a while since I participated in a blog meme, but I do like the one that I've seen circulating on a number of LiveJournals: Type your first name into Google, click on the "Images" tab, and then "Google Search." Choose an image from the first page of results.

For the name I generally go by, I got a couple of intriguing choices from a site with pictures of Angkor Thom in Cambodia. Because the site explicitly notes a copyright on the photos, I won't reproduce them here in my journal, so here is my favorite.

"Thom" is actually from my middle name, "Thomas." For my real first name, which I only use on official forms, the Google image search offered me a bizarre selection of images, many of burping wild deer (apparently my first name is the Dutch word for either the sound of these burps or the act of burping!), and one of Jaguar's triple carb system, but the scariest result of all was a photo of Celine Dion. Yikes!

And a search for my last name, in a cool coincidence, returns as its third image a photo of a Maine Coon cat who is not my own Alex yet looks remarkably like him.

Tonight after dinner with Cornelia and Kat (an adorable, delightful couple, but more on that later), the four of us were standing outside Annie's near a psychic who had set up a couple of chairs on the sidewalk, where she was inviting people to have their cards read. A man walking near them apparently tripped or fell on them and a little drama ensued.

After things had quieted down, I mused, "Shouldn't she have seen that coming?"

Earlier today I added a quicklink about MyStacks.com, a site that lets you create auto-refreshing lists of links generated from the results of searches in blogs and other syndicated resources on terms that you select. For now I've added a stack containing the ten most recent search results for the phrase "gay marriage" to the right sidebar of the elf-reflection main page; it's amazing how many items are being posted that contain the phrase and how quickly, then, items are dropping off the bottom of the stack.

[Update: The code for the stack was screwing up the page validation, so for now I've moved it to a page of its own, where I'm pulling the most recent fifty results rather than just ten.]

Last June, I posted an entry about the depressingly ultraconservative politics of Virginia, the state in which I was born and where I now live, with only a 7-8 year gap during and after college. I think it's not hyperbole to suggest that Virginia, for whatever possible reason I cannot fathom, may be the most anti-gay state in the union, beating out even those of the deep south.

In the Washington Post today, for example, columnist Marc Fisher describes Virginia as "a state where gay marriage is a topic for a future century (on another planet), legislators trade openly gay slurs, and the state attorney general resists relaxing the anti-sodomy law even after the U.S. Supreme Court orders up a change." Every year sees a steady stream of anti-gay bills introduced in the state legislature. This year our lawmakers already have passed two resolutions urging the federal government to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage; of course, the latter already is rather busy engaged in the really important issues facing America today: steroid use in professional baseball and the protection of fast food franchises.

The latest news from Virginia is that the state Senate voted yesterday, by a 28-10 margin, to broaden the state's already existing ban on gay marriage by stripping same-sex couples of legal rights they might gain from unions in other states. As Queer Day notes, in reporting on a story in The Virginian Pilot, "In fact Virginia is poised to become among the first in the nation to deprive gay couples of the right to share health insurance, visit their partners in hospitals and even keep custody of their children." Just in the last couple of weeks, the legislature here voted not to overturn a law prohibiting private employers--private employers--from being able to extend health insurance to their employees' unmarried partners. Yes, in Virginia the social conservative animosity towards homosexuals trumps the true conservative principle of less government intrusion in the lives of private citizens and in the business decisions of corporations. In Virginia, the government tells private employers to whom they may and may not offer insurance; it is the only state in the country that has so restrictive a law.

Last month, a man in Virginia was sentenced to three years in prison after an undercover police officer met the man in an online chat room and then persuaded him to meet him in a public restroom, where the man then allegedly propositioned the police officer, for which he was arrested for "solicitation to commit a felony." In Virginia, actual public fornication among heterosexuals, a misdemeanor, has a maximum 12-month sentence (and prostitution is just a misdemeanor in Virginia as well), yet a gay man will be jailed for three years for propositioning a police officer, a police officer, moreover, who initiated the encounter and was the one who suggested that they go to a public place! Unless an appellate court overturns the sentence, this gay man will spend three years in prison just for something he said.

It sickens me.

In June, I wrote that I didn't want to give up the state of my birth, and to some degree of my self-identity, to the radical right. But more and more I'm reconsidering that position. San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver and Toronto are looking better and better every day.

Yes, it's another gay marriage post; I hadn't intended for this blog to become so practically exclusively focused on that debate, but at the same time I can't deny that it has a very personal dimension for me. But if you read no other article about this issue, please read this powerfully moving story, a story a year old but never more relevant. I found the link at Go Fish and, just as Mac decided therein, I don't want to try to distill it to quotes; I think it's important that you read the whole thing.

As Jeff noted last week and Cornelia followed up yesterday, tomorrow is the DC area's Dining Out for Life event, in which a number of local restaurants will donate between 25% and 100% of their meal proceeds to Food & Friends, which "prepares and delivers meals and groceries to nearly 1,000 people living with HIV/AIDS and other life-challenging illnesses such as breast, lung and colon cancer" (and for which I used to volunteer when I worked downtown; I need to look into doing so again here in northern Virginia).

Jeff and I will be meeting Cornelia and her partner, Kat, for dinner at Annie's Paramount Steakhouse, a DC institution popular among the local queer community. Cornelia's bringing her camera, and I need to try to remember to take mine, too; I just wish I'd been able to get a haircut recently, so I didn't look so Bozo-the-clown shaggy.

The list of DC GLBTQ blogs and journals is now up to 117 118 sites, with 89 90 of those having RSS feeds. The OPML file for the latter also is available.

[Update 03.10.04 10:20: Just added Jol's television-related blog to the list. Welcome, Jol.]

Today's Times has an article ("Gay and Republican, but Not Necessarily Disloyal to President") about gay Republicans who have decided to continue their support for Bush and to vote for him come November, despite his call for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Now, at some level I understand the concept that a given gay person might consider their ability to get married to be less critical than their personal economic situation or the greater economy, terrorism or other political issues, but it's very difficult for me to see how they could continue to ignore so blithely such a clear and consistent rejection and antipathy from the Republican party (or how they can consider Bush to be particularly good for the economy or against terrorism--I sure as hell don't feel any safer now, though I certainly feel a lot less free--but that's another post). Nor can I understand how they are able, as several gay Republicans are quoted in this article, to so easily separate their personal--what they call their "private," though this administration has made it anything but--lives from their professional activities. The article notes, for example:

Mike Smith, the former executive director of the Colorado gay and lesbian community center, who became friendly with Ms. [Mary] Cheney in her old job as liaison to gays and lesbians for Coors Brewing, said that in the 2000 race he asked her how she made peace with her father's politics. "She said they have a very close relationship, and that he had come to understand her and to love her partner," Mr. Smith recalled. "She had tried not to involve his political life and her private life, in the same way she felt that her own work life was separate from her private life."

When your father's political life suggests that you are a less valuable citizen of the community, and that your relationship is worthy of being singled out for Constitutionally-mandated discrimination, how do you separate it from your personal life? Precisely what kind of "love" and "understanding" does a father have for his daughter and her partner when he is willing to write into the Constitution that their relationship is of an inferior degree?

The article continues:

In the last election, Mr. Bush did little to court gay voters. He appeared at Bob Jones University, an evangelical Christian college that teaches that homosexuality is a sin. He refused to meet with the Log Cabin Republicans. And he opposed some legislation intended to protect gays from discrimination. But after he was elected, he appointed a handful of gays to his administration.

Brett Robben, another gay friend of Ms. Cheney's in Denver, who used to work in Washington, said he learned to discount antigay statements from politicians. "Those stands were more for the constituents back home," he said. "It wouldn't be that offensive because it was just, you know, politics."

What? We don't generally forgive racist, sexist or otherwise hateful or ignorant pronouncements by our legislators as "just politics" for the folks back home. Why are these gay Republicans, then, willing to give them a pass for their antigay remarks?

Ingrid E. Barnes, a lesbian who is associate director of undergraduate admissions at Pace University in New York and a Republican, said she was shaken but not necessarily deterred from voting for Mr. Bush.

"I believe in small government," Ms. Barnes said. "I believe in taxpayers holding on to their money. I believe in individual responsibility."

She added, "I think we need to work against this amendment passing, and I think we have to stand with our president on the national level."

Let's put aside the bizarre implication that Bush is in any way a force for smaller government, or for individual responsibility. But how exactly do you do both these things? How do you simultaneously stand with the president and work against him?

And then there's the gay Republican, in a long-term relationship--whose viewpoint I found most frightening, most incomprehensible and most reprehensible in this article--for whom the right to carry a handgun apparently is more important than her right to marry the person she loves:

As a lesbian in a long-term relationship, Margaret Leber objects to the idea of amending the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

But Ms. Leber, a software engineer and a registered Republican in Jeffersonville, Pa., is also a member of the Pink Pistols, an organization of gay and lesbian gun owners, and marriage is not the only issue on her mind.

"Right now, I am leaning toward Bush," Ms. Leber said. "All the Democrats just rolled into Congress to vote for this gun-control bill. Somebody with my values and beliefs can't be a single-issue voter."

Today during my departmental staff meeting with my boss and her direct reports, our librarian talked about an upcoming conference she'll be attending on libraries and computing; she noted that there was going to be a session on "blogging," and that she hadn't known previously what that was. So I ended up defining and describing blogging, and at the same time acknowledging my own experience as a blogger. So it will be interesting to see if any of my colleagues end up searching for, finding and reading elf-reflection, something I first mused about last May and after which I've realized that--although I thought I would not--I have occasionally censored myself when writing about my job and my co-workers, just as I've probably left some relationship musings unblogged now that I'm partnered with a fellow blogger. The latter, especially, I find intriguing to ponder. There's nothing in that category I haven't shared directly with Jeff, but some of the details of my--now our--private life now feel less solely mine to divulge, and certainly less anonymous, since the man in my life has an online face, name and identity of his own.

As I sat here on the futon reading a column by Jonathan Rauch on nytimes.com, I pointed it out to Jeff (a few days ago he had noted another upcoming Rauch article in the Atlantic, which he was reading at brunch today), who mused as he pulled it up on his own laptop about this being in some way the modern equivalent of the stereotypical couple reading the Times together in bed Sunday morning.

Anyway, in today's Times article, "Power of Two," Rauch points out that in calling for a constitutional ban on gay marriage, Bush actually "established himself as the most prominent advocate of the best arguments for gay marriage, even as he roundly rejected gay marriage itself."

Rauch dissects the salient points of Bush's statement, showing how "[t]he logic of Bush's speech points clearly toward marriage for all. It is this logic, the logic of marriage itself, that Bush and other proponents of a constitutional ban defy in their determination to exclude homosexuals."

It's a provocative and intelligent article. One thought of Rauch's I particularly like is the following: "So today's real choice is not whether to redefine marriage but how to do so: as a club only heterosexuals can join or as the noblest promise two people can make. To define marriage as discrimination would defend its boundaries by undermining its foundation."

Those who would "save" marriage from gays, then, may be the very ones dooming the institution to irrelevance in a world of civil unions, domestic partnerships and other such legal options available to both straight and gay couples.

"America stands at a defining moment. The only comparison is our battle for independence for England."

No, that quotation wasn't George Bush talking about the war on terror, John Kerry speaking about the dangers of the Patriot Bill, Abraham Lincoln during his Gettysburg Address, or even Ralph Nader's ego holding forth on his candidacy for U.S. President. Rather, it was from Reverend Louis Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, speaking about, of all things, gay marriage (in an Associated Press article on CNN.com). Yes, folks, there are people--and they have the ear of this Administration--who absolutely believe that the fight for and against gay marriage is equivalent to the American Revolution in terms of its importance in defining our country.

The focus of the article in which this quote is found is that many opponents of gay civil rights and gay marriage are actually welcoming the attention on gay marriage, because they believe that it will draw new audiences for their bigoted and hateful rhetoric and beliefs.

Even as they issue dire warnings, many longtime opponents of the gay-rights movement are welcoming the furor over same-sex marriage as a chance to expand the audience for their unfavorable views of homosexuality.

Activists in this camp -- clergy, conservative lobbyists, men and women who say they moved away from homosexuality through prayer or therapy -- have been dismayed by gay-rights advances in recent years. But they see new opportunities for their cause if, as polls indicate, a majority of the Americans oppose the spreading push for gay marriage.

"People are taking us more seriously," said Joseph Nicolosi, a leading proponent of the contested concept that homosexuality is a disorder treatable by therapy.

It's sad and a little frightening that there are people who spend so much time, thought, energy and money to paint gay folk as sick, evil or both. Just think what good they might do if they spent as much time worrying about the real evils that plague our society.

Both Jeffs (mine and the other one) have posted about Mark Morford's recent column in SF Gate, "Where Is My Gay Apocalypse," wondering why we've not seen the wrath of God that the religious right would have us believe should have occurred upon the granting of gay marriages in San Francisco (and elsewhere).

I have been waiting patiently.

I have been staring with great anticipation out the window of my flat here in the heart of San Francisco, sighing heavily, waiting for the riots and the plagues and the screaming monkeys and the blistering rain of inescapable hellfire. I have my camera all ready and everything.

....After all, gay marriage is supposed to ruin the nation, is it not? Induce actual rioting and civil unrest and shirtless anarchy as millions of stupefied citizens pray to a bloody pulverized Mel Gibson-y Jesus for redemption, as they suddenly begin questioning whether ogling the Pottery Barn catalog for more than 10 minutes might mean they're gay.

"It's anarchy," some guy named Rick Forcier, of the Washington state chapter of the Christian Coalition, actually whined. "We seem to have lost the rule of law. It's very frightening when every community decides what laws they will obey." Why, yes, Rick. It's total anarchy. Just look at all the screaming and the bloodshed and the gunfire. Run and hide, Rick. The gay people in love are coming. And they've got tattoos and funny haircuts and want to get married and celebrate their love and be left alone. Hide the children.

It's funny. Go read it.

[Update: 2:41 am. I see that Anna also had posted a link to this piece, as had Mac over at Go Fish. That's what I get for not having had the time to check all my Bloglines feeds since Thursday evening until now. Friday was such a bitch at work, I didn't even get to check my personal email until after 4pm, and only for 5 minutes, and still ended up working an hour and 15 minutes past closing.]

Jeff already has reported on our outing to the HRC-organized rally for gay marriage last night, about which our impressions largely are in sync. Turnout seemed high; a lesbian employee had predicted a small crowd, but the numbers looked pretty impressive to us, though it's hard to tell since the space was not a large open arena. There were a lot of speakers, almost too many, and I'm still not sure why in the world they invited Republican DC Councilwoman Carol Schwartz, who bragged about the huge number of gay friends she has ("more than Madonna") at the same time that she admitted that while she opposes a constitutional amendment she does not, in fact, support gay marriage, exhorting us to be happy with domestic partnership at the back of the bus rather than seeking marriage with the white folks up front. Feh.

The highlight of the evening, though, included an amazingly poised, thoughtful and intelligent 13-year-old Jake, who talked about his life with his two mothers, and the issues he and they face in the absence of a legal relationship between the two women. It was also amazing to look around and see the number of babies and young children in the crowd; Jeff and I walked in behind a cute young lesbian couple wheeling a stroller, and for a while stood next to two handsome young men carrying a baby. And it was a pleasant surprise to hear from two openly gay Republican elected officials--David Catania of DC and a cute goateed man, whose name and state I've regrettably forgotten [update, March 6: a friend of the latter has emailed me to remind me of the name, Karl Rohde from Oregon]--who noted that they would not be supporting W come fall.

It was a beautiful near-spring evening and, despite my sense sometimes that even after 16 years in DC I don't know anyone, I saw at least a half-dozen friends and acquaintances in the crowd. It is disappointing, though, that the pre-Rally publicity was so sparse--it's great that the turnout was so high, considering--and that there appeared to be zero coverage in the press; I watched the local 11:00 news last night for the first time in years, and there was nothing about it. Ditto in today's Post. Still, I'm glad we were part of it.

When I first saw an item in a Forbes column about the amount of money Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is raking in for him, I thought the sentence about his receiving a percentage of the merchandising from the sale of "mugs and nail necklaces" must be a joke. But it's true. The official merchandising site for the movie, Share the Passion of the Christ, in addition to "witnessing tools" like lapel pins and witness cards, is hawking mugs with images of a cross on them and, however tasteless and grotesque it may appear, 1-7/8 inch and 2-5/8 inch pewter "Passion Nail™" pendants on 24-inch leather cords.

It's estimated that Gibson's percentage of the film grosses, merchandising and DVD licensing and sales will net him more than $300 million personally.

Zoethe posted Saturday about the ACLU's offer to fax a message on your behalf to your congressfolk, faxes generally considered to have more impact than a letter or email.

After submitting my fax, I also finally contributed my dollars to join the ACLU as an official card-carrying member, something I'd been thinking about for years without taking action.

I'll say a couple of good things for George and his public stand on enshrining bigotry into the Constitution. He and his administration absolutely have turned me back into a queer activist. For starters, in addition to finally joining the ACLU, I've donated extra money to HRC beyond my annual membership fee, and sent dozens of faxes and emails to Washington; Jeff and I also are attending the HRC Rally Against Discrimination downtown at 5:45 this evening, outside the HRC headquarters building at 1640 Rhode Island Ave. And I'm delighting in the Schadenfreude of so many gay Republicans now speaking out against this administration, and some even defecting from their party.

Last night I was updating my favorite channels list on my DirecTV with TiVo, primarily in order to remove all the latest sports channels from my guide listings and channel search, when I came across a network I'd not seen before, FitTV, apparently another of the Discovery stable of channels. The program on at the time was Urban Fitness TV, a Canadian import, featuring hunky host Derek Noble and what clearly seemed to be a gay male aesthetic, with camera shots almost lovingly focusing now on Noble's sweaty chest, now on his armpit, now travelling along the body of a shirtless male model lying on a massage table, with shots of male nipples even part of the end title graphics; I remarked to Jeff that Urban Fitness TV seemed practically to be soft porn for gay men. [And Googling the names of the host and the show seems to suggest that Urban Fitness TV was created originally for PrideVision TV, the Canadian-originated "world's first GLBT television network."]

While the content of this news, also courtesy of Queer Day, won't surprise anyone who has even the merest honest familiarity with history and/or anthropology--which leaves out, apparently, the current administration and its speechwriters, and part of its right-wing base--"the Executive Board of the American Anthopological Association, the world's largest organization of anthropoligists, the people who study culture," released a statement in response to the president's "call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage as a threat to civilization," noting that the White House doesn't seem to know much about human cultures.

The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples.

The San Francisco Chronicle added:

The statement was proposed by Dan Segal, a professor of anthropology and history from Pitzer College in Claremont (Los Angeles County), who called Bush's conception of the history of marriage "patently false."

"If he were to take even the first semester of anthropology, he would know that's not true," said Segal, a member of the anthropological association's Executive Committee.

Ghita Levine, communications director for the association, said the issue struck a nerve in the profession.

"They feel strongly about it because they are the people who study the culture through time and across the world," she said. "They are the people who know what cultures consist of."

Segal pointed to "sanctified same-sex unions in the fourth century in Christianity" and to the Greeks and Romans applying the concept of marriage to same-sex couples, not to mention the Native American berdache tradition in which males married males.

Also courtesy of Queer Day, the Rocky Mountain News reports that the chief of staff for Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, the originator of the current version of the Federal Marriage Amendment before Congress, claims that President Bush pledged to support the amendment back in November, three months before he made his public announcement in February. The White House disputes this, claiming that Bush only made the decision to push for a constitutional amendment after officials in San Francisco and New Mexico granted marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Even scarier, though, is what the White House does explicitly confess:

White House press secretary Scott McClellan, speaking to reporters after the president's announcement, said Bush resolved to support an amendment after a process that involved consulting with constitutional scholars, theologians, religious leaders and others.

Why is the President of the U.S. consulting with theologians and religious leaders on an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the very document that establishes and enshrines (if you'll forgive the pun) the separation of church and state? What these religious leaders think about the amendment, at least in their role as religious leaders, is not supposed to matter one whit. But then again, I've long believed that George W. was whit-less.

An item in Queer Day today points to an article in the San Mateo Daily Journal about a lesbian couple who were married on February 13 in San Francisco. When they returned to their church, the Santa Cruz Bible Church, the next day for a "power of love" sermon, they stood when a moderator asked couples who had been recently married to stand to be recognized in order to honor the most recent newlyweds.

Soon Boxer and Zapata, just two days into their marriage, were the only ones standing.

A tense silence filled the church. The moderator turned to whisper with church leaders. The lesbian couple stood, surrounded by their congregation, feeling more humiliated by the second, they said.

After several minutes, a decision was reached.

The moderator handed the couple a prize--dinner at a local Italian restaurant--for being the newest married couple in the congregation. Then, Pastor David Gschwend rose and condemned gay marriage.

Well, there's the "power of love" for you, in at least one Christian context. The article goes on to report that the pastor has since extended an invitation to meet with Boxer and Zapata.

"At least I want to look them in the eye and tell them they have value and dignity," [Gschwend] said.

<screech /> Er, whuh?

In my own life, yesterday morning I attended church services with my family in my home town. I decided to let Jeff sleep in and just join us later for lunch, and boy am I glad I did. Every time I visit that church--in which I grew up, and where my family are still very active--I get angry and swear I'll never go back again, yet I always end up going anyway for my family's sake. Yesterday I arrived to find a slick insert in the order of service from James Dobson of Focus on the Family which included an announcement about two upcoming workshops to "heal" homosexuals and bring them into a life of heterosexuality; during the sermon the minister spoke out against faiths, like the historical roots of my own contemporary Unitarian-Universalism, that teach that everyone merits salvation, and went on to note that changes to certain U.S. laws--he didn't speak explicitly about sodomy and gay marriage, but in context I made an assumption that these were included--are "evil" and "wrong"--comparing them, in fact, to laws mandated by Hitler and Stalin--and that "laws of the land" do not need to be honored and obeyed by Christians if such laws go against biblical principles, literally expressed. Personally, I think among our most evil laws that ought to be condemned are those that provide tax exemptions to churches.

And this time I really mean it: I am never going back to that church again. Later, though, I did find it amusing to reflect that what's happening in San Francisco and elsewhere in the U.S. is the result of others standing up to what they see as unjust laws, though I suspect this minister probably wouldn't see it in the same light as his call for Christians to ignore the law. Incidentally, there is divorce and illegitimacy in the minister's own marital and familial relationships, but hey, never mind, even his fundamentalist God still loves and forgives him because he's not a homosexual.