Gay marriage in Las Vegas

Catalan Police Couple Marry in Full Uniform

Despite reaction and hostility by the rabid right, despite fulminations by the church, things are steadily changing for the better.

This charming report of two Catalan policemen getting married in uniform will warm your heart, and make you feel better all day.  Note the tweet from the Catalan police's official Twitter account congratulating the couple.

And who doesn't like a man in uniform?

Gay Marriage

A Cathy Wilcox cartoon (from The Sydney Morning Herald)

(click to enlarge)

Finally

Gay marriage is now legal throughout the US.

Marriage equality

More and more ppl in the US favour marriage equality.  The ChrisTaliban are losing.

Religious freedom

Loneliness

Photograph: Feri Lukas/Rex

A profound piece by George Monbiot in the Guardian, The age of loneliness is killing us.

Some quotes:

When Thomas Hobbes claimed that in the state of nature, before authority arose to keep us in check, we were engaged in a war “of every man against every man”, he could not have been more wrong. We were social creatures from the start, mammalian bees, who depended entirely on each other. The hominins of east Africa could not have survived one night alone. We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others. The age we are entering, in which we exist apart, is unlike any that has gone before.

Three months ago we read that loneliness has become an epidemic among young adults. Now we learn that it is just as great an affliction of older people. A study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness in England blights the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1m women over 50, and is rising with astonishing speed.

Ebola is unlikely ever to kill as many people as this disease strikes down. Social isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; loneliness, research suggests, is twice as deadly as obesity. Dementia, high blood pressure, alcoholism and accidents – all these, like depression, paranoia, anxiety and suicide, become more prevalent when connections are cut. We cannot cope alone.

Yes, factories have closed, people travel by car instead of buses, use YouTube rather than the cinema. But these shifts alone fail to explain the speed of our social collapse. These structural changes have been accompanied by a life-denying ideology, which enforces and celebrates our social isolation. The war of every man against every man – competition and individualism, in other words – is the religion of our time, justified by a mythology of lone rangers, sole traders, self-starters, self-made men and women, going it alone. For the most social of creatures, who cannot prosper without love, there is no such thing as society, only heroic individualism. What counts is to win. The rest is collateral damage.

British children no longer aspire to be train drivers or nurses – more than a fifth say they “just want to be rich”: wealth and fame are the sole ambitions of 40% of those surveyed. 

We have changed our language to reflect this shift. Our most cutting insult is loser. We no longer talk about people. Now we call them individuals. So pervasive has this alienating, atomising term become that even the charities fighting loneliness use it to describe the bipedal entities formerly known as human beings. We can scarcely complete a sentence without getting personal. Personally speaking (to distinguish myself from a ventriloquist’s dummy), I prefer personal friends to the impersonal variety and personal belongings to the kind that don’t belong to me. Though that’s just my personal preference, otherwise known as my preference.

[Read more here]

I'm lucky. Even though I have no real friends (I lost 2 of the straight friends I had when I came out to them), I have a wife and one child back home, and 2 other children whom I see often.. But I am bisexual.  I have a close family,  What about those who don't?  What about gay men, never allowed by a judgemental society to get married?

The Secret History of Same-Sex Marriage

An interesting historical perspective from Faramerz Dabhoiwala at The Guardian.

Will you marry me?

The myth of gay affluence

Chart from this article

This article in The Atlantic skewers the myth that all or even most gays are rich.  In fact, it's the opposite.  More gays and lesbians are poor than straights.

Who are America’s gays? To hear it as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would have it, gays are a privileged set, living it up in cities across the country. As the justice wrote in his dissent to Romer v. Evans—a landmark 1996 case that overturned a Colorado state constitutional amendment prohibiting legal protections for gays and lesbians—“Those who engage in homosexual conduct tend to reside in disproportionate numbers in certain communities.” Even more ominously, to Scalia, they have "high disposable income," which gives them "disproportionate political power… to [achieve] not merely a grudging social toleration, but full social acceptance, of homosexuality.”

In reality, gay Americans face disproportionately greater economic challenges than their straight counterparts. A new report released by UCLA’s Williams Institute found that 29 percent of LGBT adults, approximately 2.4 million people, experienced food insecurity—a time when they did not have enough money to feed themselves or their family—in the past year. In contrast, 16 percent of Americans nationwide reported being food insecure in 2012. One in 5 gays and lesbians aged 18-44 received food stamps in the last year, compared with just over 1 in 4 same sex couples raising children. The LGBT community has made huge political strides over the past decade, but in economic matters they still lag far behind the rest of the country.

Read the rest of the article here.

Marry me

We all know the way it goes.  Finding out you're gay; hiding it from your family and friends;  telling them and all the stress and angst that involves; trying to find someone to love and falling foul of the cum-and-go culture; and at last, if you're lucky, finding someone to love who loves you.

This wonderful heart-warming video has that whole story.   Filmed in Oz (mostly in Sydney as far as I can see), it's just lovely.

Gay Marriage turns toxic for pollies

No, not for those who support it.  For those who oppose it.

We've already see how  in the US presidential election, Obama's support for gay marriage delivered the small but crucial edge which led to re-election.   Now, in Australia, polls show that gay marriage is a vote winner, especially among younger ppl:

Kevin Rudd's support for same-sex marriage could significantly lift Labor's vote in the election, a new poll shows.

A survey of 1000 people, conducted by Galaxy Research for Australian Marriage Equality, found 30 per cent of voters would be more likely to vote for Labor as a result of Mr Rudd's stance on the issue, while 19 per cent said they would be less likely to vote for Labor.

The Prime Minister's views were particularly popular with younger voters. A little more than half of those aged 18 to 24 were more likely to vote for Labor, compared with 18 per cent of those over 50.
(read more here)

This wasn't a major point of differentiation before Kevin Rudd's re-ascendance to the leadership of the ALP, but he came out (as it were) before he was re-elected and said he'd changed his mind about gay marriage and was now in favour of it.  The Liberals (= conservatives in Oz), led by Tony Abbott (the bloke depicted on the masks in the photo above), a former seminarian, are opposed to gay marriage.

Opposition to gay marriage is now toxic for pollies.  It gives the impression that they are backward, bigoted, narrow, and out of touch.  And of course, they are.   And it loses votes.

Gay marriage advances in the US

Source: the BBC

An excellent piece from Blue Truck Red State.

And a map from the Beeb showing countries where gay marriage is now legal.  Note the UK isn't included because it's still not law, as the bill has to pass further readings in the House of Lords and then get Royal Assent, but both are only a matter of time.

Gay Marriage

Marriage is a state issue under the US constitution.  And step by step, US states are voting for the right to same-sex marriage.  This .gif shows the trend over time.

It's worth remembering that interracial marriage wasn't legalised until 1967

Gay Rights Logo

Gay marriage is coming.  The tide has turned.  Emphatically turned.  Irresistibly turned.

Gay dads

Gay marriage UK

Time for Australia to do the same.

Promoted by a Conservative PM, too, while our atheist PM and our soutane-wearing would-be PM, Tony "Cane Toad" Abbott are resolutely against it.

The ChrisTaliban strike again

Hetero Awareness Month?  Good grief!  These drongos really love their victimhood.

The story is that the son of Rick R Reed, the author, saw this specious tosh at this Facebook page, and responded thus:

"How come nobody asked me what I want?..." It's clear to me that no one who was involved in the creation of this BS site ever bothered to ask children of gay parents how we feel about it. Well, even though you scrupulously avoided asking (because you knew you probably wouldn't like the answer, and it certainly wouldn't be useful to this campaign of slander), let me tell you, as the son of a gay man. My father is a remarkable man, he's an accomplished artist, he was a caring and involved father and mentor, and I love him. Therefore, I'm glad he was lucky enough to find love and happiness with someone who loves him back and appreciates him. I certainly don't care what that someone has between his legs; that's your PRURIENT AND WHOLLY INAPPROPRIATE CONCERN, and I really wish you'd stop putting it on people like me. You already claim to speak for gay people ("It's a choice," "Every gay relationship is dysfunctional," "No gay person can really be a Christian," etc) is that not enough? Do you need to appropriate the speech of their children too?

Not long after he posted this, the comment was deleted and he was banned for life from that site.  Just as happened with me and so-called NOM.

These hate-mongers aren't interested in debate or discussion.  They just want to take a hammer and pound their narrow obscurantist pre-Copernican opinions into our heads.  Anybody who disagrees, no matter how politely, is silenced.

You can read more here.

Backwards

North Carolina votes to enshrine in their constitution het marriage as the only form of legal relationship.

Love one another as I have loved you.

Yeah, right.

[Pic from Blue Truck, Red State]

Strong and Sweet

All men can be heroes.

All men can be husbands.

Have a tissue handy.  It'll bring tears to your eyes.

 

With thanks to Hunter