doubting thom

Wow. The headline below pretty much says it all:

“Michigan Preparing to Let Doctors Refuse to Treat Gays”

Doctors or other health care providers could not be disciplined or sued if they refuse to treat gay patients under legislation passed Wednesday by the Michigan House.

The bill allows health care workers to refuse service to anyone on moral, ethical or religious grounds.

The Republican dominated House passed the measure as dozens of Catholics looked on from the gallery. The Michigan Catholic Conference, which pushed for the bills, hosted a legislative day for Catholics on Wednesday at the state Capitol.

The bills now go the Senate, which also is controlled by Republicans.

…Paul A. Long, vice president for public policy for the Michigan Catholic Conference, said the bills promote the constitutional right to religious freedom.

“Individual and institutional health care providers can and should maintain their mission and their services without compromising faith-based teaching,” he said in a written statement.

This makes me absolutely sick. Well, thank goodness I don’t live in Michigan, then.

And this was pushed by a religious organization? A so-called Christian religious organization? It almost makes me wish there really were a god and heaven so these hate-filled fanatics would get their just reward in the end, when Jesus meets them at the barred Pearly Gates to remind them that they believe that he had healed lepers, eaten with prostitutes, and praised the good Samaritan over the pious but uncharitable Pharisees and exhorted his followers to do no less. Since when does “faith-based teaching” suggest that the faithful aren’t supposed to help others, even if not especially those with whom they disagree, or suggest that the faithful, in fact, are to let others die while they stand idly by secure in their hateful, smug false piety?

What has happened to America? I don’t need to be told by “Christians” that I’m going to hell; I think I already live there.

[Via Tin Man]

Today is a black-letter day in the Commonwealth of Virginia. As Equality Virginia reports, earlier this afternoon the state legislature ratified a bill that would outlaw any “partnership contract or other arrangements that purport to provide the benefits of marriage,” with the likely chilling effect of stripping such otherwise legal contractual agreements between same-sex partners as powers of attorney, estate planning and wills, and custody decisions, among others. It goes further than any other law in the U.S. in stripping rights from gay Americans.

In an outrageous and short-sighted defeat for fairness and common-sense, the General Assembly today ratified the so-called “Marriage Affirmation Act,” one of the most discriminatory pieces of legislation to be considered by the General Assembly in decades.

By a vote of 69-30 in the House and 27-12 in the Senate, the General Assembly narrowly missed garnering a 1/3 vote in each house that would have killed the bill outright. Delegate Robert Marshall (R-Manassas), patron of the bill, led the charge with a barrage of anti-gay rhetoric during the floor debate.

“Today, Virginia codified second-class citizen status for the hundreds of thousands of gay and lesbian Virginians,” said Dyana Mason, Executive Director of Equality Virginia. “We are not only disappointed, but we are outraged that short-sighted Virginia extremists succeeded in condoning a return to an era of legalized discrimination.”

HB 751 not only prohibits the state from recognizing civil unions (which it already didn’t do), but strips private contractual rights between same-sex couples by outlawing any “partnership contract or other arrangements that purport to provide the benefits of marriage.”

Once this bill is enacted, it will likely deprive gay and lesbian Virginians of some of the few choices that they currently have to protect their families including:

*Advanced Medical Directives (also known as Power of Attorney)
*Custody decisions and arrangements
*Health Insurance coverage through those companies in Virginia currently able to offer benefits to unmarried partners. [Not many, since Virginia is also alone in the nation in prohibiting private companies from deciding whom they will insure, specifically prohibiting them from offering insurance to same-sex partners of their employees.]
*Estate planning and wills.

Because each of these “arrangements” grants rights contractually that are otherwise available only through marriage, they can be set aside or voided by the action of the General Assembly.

“Unfortunately, gay and lesbian Virginians can no longer call Virginia home,” said Joseph Price, Equality Virginia Board Chair. “Because of this hostile legislation, it is clear that many families will choose to move to Maryland or other states that embrace diversity and welcome difference.”

Last week, Governor Mark Warner made recommendations to remove the most egregious and unconstitutional language surrounding contract rights. Those amendments were sent back to the House for ratification where they were rejected by a vote of 65-35.

“Equality Virginia will now get to work to challenge this law in every appropriate forum,” said Mason. “In the courtroom, or in the General Assembly, we have no doubt that this law will quickly be found unconstitutional. We call on all fair-minded Virginians to send a strong message to their elected officials that this fight is far from over.”

Shortly after posting my previous item about seeing Elegies: A Song Cycle last night, I received the following email from Metro Weekly in my inbox:

For a chance to WIN A PAIR OF FREE TICKETS to Signature Theatre’s production of
William Finn’s ELEGIES: A SONG CYCLE, please send an email to

<wintix@metroweekly.com>

with the word ELEGIES in the subject line, or simply reply to this email by no later
than Sunday, April 25, at 11:59 p.m.

Please include your FULL NAME and a phone number where you can be reached during the
day. ENTRIES WITHOUT FULL NAMES will be discarded.

FIVE LUCKY WINNERS will be selected at random from all entries received. Tickets are
good for the Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday performances April 27-28 and May 4-6.
Winners will be notified via email on Monday, April 26, at noon, with instructions
on how to claim their tickets.

Last night Jeff and I went to see William Finn’s Elegies: A Song Cycle at Signature Theatre here in Arlington. It was a simple but very well-performed and powerful production of two dozen songs Finn (best known for his Falsettos musicals on Broadway) wrote to memorialize the dead and dying people (and, in one case, pets) in his life.

The Washington Post provided a terrific review last month. Rather than trying to improve upon it, I’ll just quote some sections that particularly resonated with my own experience of the production:

Easily one of the high points of the season, Signature Theatre’s “Elegies” is, in a word, heavenly. Performed to perfection by a gifted, seamlessly assembled quintet, William Finn’s cycle of songs about death and dying transcends a gloomy subject with the healing power of wit. If any human attribute offers consolation, it’s talent.

…”Elegies” is a tapestry threaded with sentiment, but never of the cheap variety. Finn’s idiosyncratic lyrics, which loop and twist over the rambling melody lines like curls of smoke, see to that. …

Signature’s trademark garage space has been stripped bare for the production, the elegance confined to the presence of a baby grand piano; artfully handled by Jon Kalbfleisch, it is the singers’ only accompaniment, and all they really need.

[Director Joe] Calarco keeps the embroidery simple. James Kronzer’s set is the mere idea of one: a door frame, a few bolts of fabric. Chris Lee’s mood-enhancing lighting paints the stage in brilliant stripes and shadows. The monochromatic costumes, a stylish eggshell-and-cream wardrobe by Anne Kennedy, provide a satisfying counterpoint for the broader palette of color in Finn’s music and the actors’ voices.

The five performers display extraordinary control over their material, and they quickly establish a winning rapport. There is the vague suggestion of a tight unit being formed, a family organized around grief. At the opening of the show, each of the singers is frozen in a spotlight, clutching a cherished photo. By the evening’s end, the memories inspired by those snapshots will have all but brought their subjects back to life.

On a level of technical achievement alone, “Elegies” offers some of the loveliest vocalizing on a Washington stage in quite a while. The head-turning cast is all doing top-tier work. …

Death, it must be reported, becomes them all, just as intimations of mortality seem to bring out the best in Finn. It’s strange to say, but this melodic trip to the cemetery gates leaves you feeling swell. Dearly departed, indeed.

The staging really was perfect in its simplicity. It was amazing how the stark industrial cube of the Signature’s space evoked, with only a single door and a few chairs, all the spaces and settings of the songs–a hospital waiting room, a hospital bed, a small suburban house, a funeral home, a theater (within a theater), and more. Occasionally, there was also some simultaneously understated yet suitably dramatic and unexpected use of the vertical aspect of the space.

And the performers simply were wonderful. Stylistically each very different, and well-suited for their individual solos, yet they also were remarkably able to blend into pairs, trios, a quintet of the whole. They very aptly projected a sense that they’d known and loved not only the people about whom they were singing and memorializing, but each other–and even us–all their lives. I was really quite touched.

The program, performed without an intermission, runs a little more than an hour and a half, and continues through May 9. Several days Signature has offered half-price tickets via Ticket Place; two weeks ago we couldn’t take advantage of that deal because the show sold out by the time Jeff got to Ticket Place, but yesterday he was able to get the half-price tickets. Less than half the theatre actually was occupied last night; in a way, though, that just enhanced the sense of poignancy and intimacy this show fosters.

Next Sunday I’m heading to a government IT conference in Cambridge, Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay. I was looking at the web site of the event hotel–the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay Golf Resort, Spa and Marina–which in some ways sounds pretty sweet: its own 18,000 square-foot spa, attached marina, multi-level indoor and outdoor pool, etc. However, I also discovered that they charge $7.50 per fifteen-minute period to access the Internet in their business center. The last few hotels at which I’ve stayed included free business center use and high-speed Internet access; the Roger Williams in New York, where Jeff and I stayed over Valentine’s weekend, additionally had wireless access points on each floor. At a minimum $200/night for the room (though that’s the non-conference, non-government rate), I think it’s absolutely obscene for the hotel to charge an additional $30/hour for PC and Internet access. And given that I don’t golf (though with the name T[h]om Watson, I’ve heard all the jokes) and couldn’t afford the green fees anyway, and that the onsite spa is likely to be very expensive (though maybe I’ll treat myself at least to a massage)–I don’t actually know, since they don’t provide any information about what’s included, what’s not, and what the various services cost–I guess I’ll be spending my non-conference time vegging in-front of the TV rather than at the keyboard. Sigh. At least there are walking trails and a wildlife refuge on the grounds; I wonder if they’ll even try to collect a fee for those. Although, given that they also offer kennels for the hunting dogs of their guests, I’m not sure that I’ll want to be outside near the waterfront, refuge or not.

My boss had suggested that I take Jeff along and that we make a mini-vacation out of it, given the location and amenities, and since the room and mileage (I’m driving) wouldn’t cost any more for two as for one. Unfortunately, Jeff’s already planned to take the latter half of next week off to visit his folks in California, so he can’t go with me. So I’ll be away Sunday morning through Tuesday evening, and then he’ll be away Wednesday evening through the following Sunday.

Dorchester County, though, does sound both interesting and charming. It was on the route of the Underground Railroad and, in fact, Harriet Tubman lived in Cambridge (as did Annie Oakley, who apparently had the roofline of her home altered so she could step outside her second-story windows and shoot waterfowl over the bay). Nearby there’s also the unique-sounding Neild Museum, devoted to agricultural history of the region, and its colonial-style Herb Garden.

My site has been moved (relatively) smoothly and successfully from its old host to its new. I’m having some trouble with the automatic crossposting to my LiveJournal site, but I’m confident I’ll work out the kinks soon.

I’m in off-site training all this week, without access to the Internet (and in fact they confiscate our cell phones and electronic devices when we enter the classroom; it’s security training in a secured classroom), which is why I’m not posting much this week, even to my quicklinks or my mid-century modern blogs. Because I’ve been working on migrating the web site and blogs to my new hosting provider, I’ve barely had time to keep up with my personal email in the evening, much less post.

Jeff already has posted about our delightful brunch at David Greggory earlier today, after he performed his duty as a Christmas-Easter Catholic (I did my part by driving him to the Metro but, as pretty much a naturalistic pantheist/atheist I didn’t even bother going to my own liberal Unitarian-Universalist services today).

I enjoyed the brunch a great deal, though I must confess to feeling a little guilty at times about the extravagance (the brunch regularly features an entire roast pig). My food critic moment, spoken innocently and earnestly at the time–that “the bison is kind of dry, but the polenta is very good”–nonetheless postprandially leaves me feeling a little conspicuous in my consumption, especially after such a overindulgent trouser-tightening brunch of bison with horseradish and three kinds of mustard, roast pig, a whole salmon, three kinds of bacon and at least that many of sausage, mimosas, fine cheeses, crême brulée and much–way much–more. Marie Antoinette, c’est moi.

Brunch also provided us with a Wonkette moment, or what passes in Washington as a celebrity sighting. The attractive African-American couple seated next to us looked familiar, and their conversation with each other and with the group seated on their other side moved between discussions of famous Northwestern alumni, Stanford’s success at attracting a diverse student population, housing prices in such upscale DC neighborhoods as Kalorama, and what sounded like a mention in passing that they both had been part of the Clinton administration. My suspicion that the gentleman was Larry Irving, former assistant secretary of commerce under Clinton, and as such the former boss of one of my former bosses and the originator of the phrase “the digital divide,” turned out to be correct; and his beautiful wife, it appears, is a colleague of mine at the Department of State.

Over the next few days, I’ll be moving my site from one hosting provider to another. Since the new hosting provider offers PHP and MySQL, not available at the same price point on my current host, I probably will reinstall Movable Type from scratch to take advantage of the additional functionality. Because of this, and since the domain names will be migrating as well, the site might be wonky until everything’s fully transferred and up and running smoothly on the other server. Bear with me.

This evening after work I picked Jeff up at the Metro and we headed over to Alexandria Toyota, where we’d been invited to a new owners’ “Thank You” event. After all, they promised food and drink, door prizes, and a coupon for a free oil change just for attending. For some reason I was thinking that it would be just Prius owners, but when we arrived and saw the quite large crowd (probably 40 or more), it became apparent that the invitation had gone to all recent purchasers from the dealership. And the first portion of the evening–when the host talked about warranties, service schedules and the like–clearly was geared to the non-Prius-owning bulk of the crowd, as some of the information just wasn’t correct when applied to the Prius.

After that, we were split into smaller groups; one group was invited for discussion and a view under the hood of a quintessential Toyota–a Camry or a Corolla, probably–while another was offered the same opportunity for a look under another, with the understanding that the groups would switch after some time. After a few minutes, a third mechanic arrived to take the Prius owners to go over the unique engine and maintenance of a Prius, and to answer any of our specific questions.

So the very small subset of the larger group–just three sets of Prius owners among us–separated at that point. There was an older gentleman there alone–he owns an older Avalon and a brand-new Prius–and the other gay couple there that evening, who had been sitting behind us during the earlier presentation. The Avalon-Prius owner moved on to one of the other groups, but the four of us continued to talk about the Prius. Eventually we briefly joined one of the main groups getting the under-the-hood presentation, but it was so unrelated to our cars and our interests that we ended up talking among ourselves until the group was brought back together as a whole for the closing remarks. Mark exhibited the same Prius-obsession to which I’ve admitted, so I told the two of them about my Prius blog and the 2004 Prius Yahoo group that has lots of good information, especially in the files section; after getting back home, I emailed them the URLs. They were really cool guys, and it was nice to connect with them in the midst of the room of strangers, even more so since the evening was largely just a big marketing ploy for the dealership to continue to enforce that we need to come back to them for all our parts and service; given that I’ve bought $20K+ of extremely new technology, I’m not likely to take this car anywhere but a Toyota dealer for service, so the commercial was a little unnecessary. But who am I to pass up free chocolate chip cookies and star fruit? Star fruit? It’s like they were expecting us queers.

And then there was all that talk about the express lube jobs and having our fluids topped. On the other hand, though, none of the service technicians present were at all likely to fuel any of my garageman fantasies; they looked nothing like the “mechanics” gracing any number of issues of Men or in the Colt and Falcon stables.

After telling my stylist–the wonderful John Cullen at Studio 2000, where I’ve been going since 1996, just above Larry’s Ice Cream on Connecticut Avenue half a block north of Lambda Rising–that I was conflicted about whether to stay long or go short, but that I’d been getting a fair number of comments on the longer, curlier hair, I left the decision pretty much in his hands. In the past, he’s generally recommended taking my hair pretty short, but this time we agreed to try something a little different, going just to the shorter side of in-between. He did a fabulous job of cleaning up the hated bushiness on the sides, while leaving some curls in front and some wave in back. Actually, I’ve never known anyone else who spends so much time focusing on cutting the back just right; today my boss, who had begged me not to get it cut short, nonetheless confessed that she thought he’d gotten it right, and specifically mentioned how nice the back looked.

So I’m pleased. It’s short enough that I can grow it out again if I want, but with just enough body to make it not look like the prototypical short gay ‘do.

Jeff went with me, so he got to meet John, who himself has recently become engaged. John showed me some pictures of his fiancee; she’s adorable. He also remarked privately to me how cute Jeff is, and out loud how much he likes Jeff’s hair; I concur. Afterwards, Jeff and I decided to do dinner downtown and headed over to Lauriol Plaza, but the huge crowds and estimated 45-minute wait changed our minds. We ended up at Mercury Grill instead, where we had a fantastic dinner outside at dusk on a (so-far) rare and very welcome warm spring day. We also ran into my dear friend Randy, the first friend I made in DC twenty-two years ago when I first came to town one summer as an intern at the State Department. It was so wonderful to see him, and to have a chance to introduce Jeff. All in all, it was a truly delightful evening.