Hey, remember that article I wrote about Obama’s speech to the Human Rights Campaign? You ought to, I just wrote it like two days ago. Anyway, in that article I may have written words to the effect of “as President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Obama has the power to end the ban on gays in the military right this second. He can issue an executive order ending the ban any time he wants.”

Actually, it could have been those exact words. I’m not sure, it’s just so hard to remember . . . And anyhow, that’s why I hyperlink things — so you can look them up yourselves.

Whatever. The point is, for the first time ever, I was wrong. Worse yet, I should have known I was wrong from the start, because I’ve been told the right thing in the past, I was just too stubborn/stupid (feel free to choose among those two) to go with it. Yesterday on my Facebook page the great Rick Rottman (he of Bent Corner) left a comment on a re-post of that article that said, “Obama couldn’t just allow gays to serve openly by executive order. DADT is federal law. He cannot just do away with a federal law. It would take a new law passed by the Congress and then he as President could sign it into law.”

And furthermore, “even if he could just do away with DADT by executive order, gays in the military would have it even worse than they have it now. The UCMJ still bans homosexuality. Instead if being discharged with an honorable discharge, they would once again be investigated and face possible time in prison along with a dishonorable discharge for being gay. Like they were before Clinton.”

Rick is a veteran who was once subject to that Uniform Code of Military Justice, so he knows a fuck of a lot more about it than I do, and he’s mentioned this before. After he mentioned it this time, I did what I should have done as I was writing the original article, and looked it up for myself. (Damn, getting contradicted by someone smarter than you goes down hard, don’t it? Ask Ashley once how I react when she proves me wrong. It’s like a scene from a role-play in a child psychology class.)

My research, which consisted of Googling “Uniform Code of Military Justice” and clicking a few links, confirms that Rick is right. The president can’t simply issue an executive order to lift the ban on gays in the military. See, since I never bothered to look it up before, I had always assumed that homosexuality was banned under Article 134 of the UCMJ, the General Article that basically covers everything that isn’t specifically mentioned in the rest of the code’s punitive articles. Article 134 is the one invoked to punish members of the military found to be committing adultery, for example, which isn’t named specifically in the code, but is interpreted to fall under “conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces.”

Yes, being a shitty spouse can get you kicked out of the army.

Unfortunately for gay folks wishing to serve their country proudly and openly — and, more importantly, for me wanting to have been right — the ban on homosexuals is not pursuant to an interpretation of Article 134. It gets an article all of its own: Article 125. Sodomy.

(a) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense.

(b) Any person found guilty of sodomy shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

Why yes, those are the exact words of an enforceable section of the United States Code in the year 2009, though I understand why you would feel the need to ask.

Incidentally, that code banning sodomy is listed in the UCMJ before the codes banning arson, extortion, assault, burglary, perjury, and fraud — but after the ones covering murder, rape, and maiming. It really helps to have a strong sense of your priorities, I find.

So, to recap the important points:

1) I was wrong. President Obama does need an act of Congress to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and end the ban on gays serving openly in the military; and

2) The United States has at least two totally embarrassing, ridiculous laws that need to be stricken from the books immediately. The first is that article from the UCMJ, and the second is that bullshit about making motorcycle riders wear helmets. What the fuck is that? William Tregoe had it right in Airplane!: “I say let ‘em crash!”

Saturday night President Barack Obama addressed the annual National Dinner of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the largest and most visible gay rights organizations in the world. In a speech interrupted 35 times for applause, the president declared his support for the LGBT community, pledged to work for “the same rights and responsibilities” for gay couples as for straight and to ask Congress to repeal the “so-called Defense of Marriage Act” (though he again stopped short of fully endorsing same-sex marriage), and promised to end the discriminatory ban on gays serving openly in the military by the end of his administration.

As I watched the speech on C-Span, I thought to myself, “This is why I voted for this man.” Far more than any of his predecessors, Obama has positioned himself as supporter and ally of the gay rights movement. It’s impossible to imagine George W. Bush giving a speech to this audience — and not just because Bush never seemed all that interested in the disenfranchisement of his gay fellow Americans, unless he was being asked by his conservative base to promise not to end it. What would Bush have even said to an audience of HRC activists? “As president I am proud to stand with you and declare to all the world that, yes, I agree with you that Liberace’s skill as a pianist have been unfairly maligned all these years.”

Or no, even better: “To those in this audience who say my administration has worked against your interests, let me remind you that my vice president’s daughter is a dyke just like a lot of you.”

I don’t think many members of the gay community and their straight allies need to be convinced that Barack Obama is light-years ahead of the last guy — of any of the previous holders of his office — on the issues of foremost importance to them. What is troubling a lot of us, though, is the president’s lack of action to go alongside all of his encouraging talk.

As I write this Sean Hannity is on the radio calling for President Barack Obama to fire Kevin Jennings from his position as Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools (or as the post is informally called, the Safe Schools Czar). This is nothing new. The right-wing media and Hannity in particular has spent most of the last two weeks attacking Jennings, who has been denounced as unqualified for his post, and possibly even a criminal, for failing to report a sexual affair between a young student and an older man when he was working as a teacher in 1988.

The student in question, as it turns out, was 16 years old at the time of the affair, over the age of legal consent. Therefore Jennings was under no obligation to report the relationship to anyone, and was perfectly within his rights to keep his conversation with the student to himself. End of story, right?

Eh . . .

With Hannity and his fellow conservative chatterboxes continuing to lose their shit over this man’s post in the Obama administration long after he has been definitively cleared of any wrongdoing, you already know there’s more to this. So here it is, if you haven’t heard already: the 16 year-old student who approached Jennings for advice in this affair with an older man was male. The student, who Jennings refers to as Brewster, was a young gay man. Brewster approached Mr. Jennings for advice because he knew Jennings was also gay, and might have some insight into what he was going through. Jennings, who has publicly shared the story both in print and in speeches and never made any attempt to cover it up, told Brewster at the time that he hoped he would use a condom.

(Previously published at The Gay-Atheist.)

One of last year’s best films was Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, a wonderfully acted, intimate little movie about — get this, now — a girl named Rachel, getting married. It made a lot of end-of-the-year top ten lists, and won praise for Anne Hathaway’s performance as Kym, Rachel’s troubled sister. It was shot and cut in an unobtrusive, naturalistic style, it was full of great music, it was funny and joyous and just all around a great piece of work. And there was something else I noticed about it that made it very interesting. Rachel’s marriage is to be an interracial one. She is a young, fair, waifish white girl, and her fiancé Sidney is a hulking, dark-skinned black man. And the movie never, ever mentions it.

Rachel Getting Married is a movie about an interracial wedding that isn’t about an interracial wedding. To me, this seems quietly revolutionary. I feel like an asshole even bringing it up, since that’s the exact thing the movie didn’t do, but I do because it represents an important step in our culture, and hopefully foreshadows another, similar step we’ll be taking in the not-too-distant future.

In Rachel, Demme made a quietly emphatic post-racial movie. Rachel is white, Sidney is black, and the movie could not possibly care less. Both families get along splendidly, seem to genuinely like each other, are totally comfortable together during the various celebrations they share. Rachel’s father, Paul, treats Sidney as a son, not as an enemy, and — just as importantly — not as an opportunity to demonstrate his own racial tolerance. The issue of race is simply never, ever, ever brought up. It’s not what the movie is about. A white woman marrying a black man is treated as no big deal and not even worth commenting on.

Remember that until very recently there were still laws in much of the United States prohibiting a white woman from marrying a black man, and consider what an amazing thing this film is. Sure, we still have a long way to go. But look at the attitudes embodied by the characters in Rachel Getting Married and see how far we’ve come.

While I smile in appreciation at the long overdue arrival of post-racial cinema, I also have to wonder how long it will be until we see films that handle sexual orientation the same way. How far away is post-gay cinema?

(Previously published at The Gay-Atheist.)

Last year supporters of anti-gay bigotry managed their highest-profile victory to date, the passage of a ballot initiative in California, Proposition 8, that banned the state from recognizing any further marriages of same-sex couples. But the California anti-gay movement didn’t do it alone. It had a lot of help from folks a couple of states over. Much of the pro-Prop 8 advertising that flooded California’s media in the days and weeks leading up to election day was bought and paid for by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — the Mormons — headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The backlash over their involvement in the passing of Prop 8 has caused some right-thinking Mormons to leave the church, or at least stop attending services. The church itself has responded to criticism by largely digging in its heels. Last month a gay couple was arrested after security guards observed them kissing in a church-owned park in Salt Lake City. Today, in Salt Lake City and in cities all across the country, gay couples and straight supporters took part in “kiss-ins” to protest the treatment of homosexuals by the LDS church, and other anti-gay groups.

Gay folks aren’t the first American out-group the Mormons have had a problem with. The history of Mormonism is filled with bigotry, even more than American history in general. Which is strange, given how persecuted they themselves have been for much of their existence. But maybe not. That’s just human nature. We eagerly declare and celebrate our own martyrdom, and ignore how many martyrs we ourselves have made for the other guys. Before it was so stridently anti-gay, the Mormon church was also anti-black. So anti-black that it actually had that particular bigotry inscribed in its scriptures. The Book of Mormon, the half-plagiarized holy book written by the church’s con artist founder Joseph Smith, teaches that modern blacks are descended from the Lamanites, a race cursed with dark skin for rebelling against God. After Smith was murdered by an angry mob in 1844, his successor, Brigham Young, taught that dark skin was the Biblical mark of Cain. Either way, dark skin was viewed as the result of sinful behavior, and a sign of low character. (Incidentally, this is touched on in an excellent article at The Root, which also rips Glenn Beck a new asshole, so you definitely ought to check that one out.)

But here’s the thing about Mormonism that makes it a little different. Its doctrines are just as stupid and based just as purely on fiction and myth as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and whatever other religion you’d like to name, but it also has a built-in correction device. When Joseph Smith would take things too far, or talk himself into a corner somehow, he would extricate himself by announcing that God had given to him a new revelation. The founders and early prophets of most other religions did this all the time, too, but they have the advantage of having lived thousands of years ago, mostly beyond the reach of history, so their bullshit has acquired this sheen of remote plausibility that allows believers to accept it. The Mormons, never seeing much use for plausibility in the first place, have continued to use the idea of the new revelation to tweak and refine their church teachings whenever necessary.

For instance, in 1890, when the church was threatened with complete destruction by the U.S. government over its sanctioning of polygamy, church president Wilford Woodruff reported he had received a vision from Jesus Christ telling him that the church should immediately cease all plural marriages.

That Jesus, right? He comes through in the clutch . . .

Something very similar happened in 1978, when the Mormon leadership officially abandoned its anti-black teachings and announced that blacks could now become full members of the church, and be eligible for ordainment to the priesthood and all those other sweet Mormon privileges. Yes, 1978. It took the Mormons until 1978 to officially abandon their bigoted position against blacks. Though something tells me that if their racism had threatened their tax exemption, the new revelation would have come along a lot sooner. Because as we all know, if you really want to piss off Jesus, hit him in the wallet.

With this self-correction device in place and still in use, it seems to me a good time for another self-revelation about gays and same-sex marriage. Christianity’s holy books were written thousands of years ago and are, we are told by fundamentalists, complete and final and perfect. That’s why I generally admire gay Christians a lot more than bigoted straight ones. They can’t just get in there and rewrite what the Bible says — they have to try really hard to make their viciously homophobic religion into something just and humane. But Mormons don’t have that problem. They can just have Jesus change his mind! Maybe this time they should help themselves out, end this controversy right now in the best way possible and just announce that they’ve received a new revelation telling them to stop fighting against gay folks having the same basic rights and privileges as heterosexual citizens of the United States, and to welcome their gay fellow Mormons into the fold as brothers and sisters.

It should happen, and it could, whenever the folks in charge of concocting the new revelations want it to. I doubt it will, though, at least not any time soon, even with all the fuss rightly raised about the church’s anti-gay bigotry.  In this issue, as with their racist views of blacks, the Mormons seem sadly content to remain decades behind the times. It’s just a shame they feel the need to ruin things for everyone else at the same time.

One of the most common arguments I hear from people who support banning same-sex marriages is that gays are fighting for a right they already have. “A gay man has the same right that I have,” a straight fellow might say, “to get married to a woman.” I suspect I’m preaching to the choir here, but just in case you, dear reader, are one of my fellow heterosexuals who opposes same-sex marriage on those grounds, I invite you to join me in a little thought experiment.

In our imaginations, let’s take the paradigm of human sexuality and flip it upside down, so that homosexuality is the orientation of most people — or normal, if you prefer — and heterosexuality is perceived as the aberration. As a result, same-sex marriage is the bedrock of our proud Judeo-Christian tradition, the backbone of our families, and is naturally nice and legal. But you are not among the majority of Americans who identify themselves as homosexual. For whatever reason — a slight variance in your genetic code, some subtle aspect of your upbringing, or just because you like it — you are straight.

And you’re in love. You’ve found the person of your dreams, a member of the opposite sex who represents everything you could possibly want in a partner, a lover, a companion. If you were gay the next step would be obvious: pop the question, and hope to spend the rest of your life content in wedded bliss. There’s a problem, though. Huge sections of your country, including it just so happens the area where you live and hoped to keep living, refuse to recognize your opposite-sex marriage. Some areas even have amendments to their constitutions specifically banning heterosexual marriages.

This is frustrating for you and your partner, and one day you decide you’ve had enough. You decide drastic action is needed, so you march right into the office of your member of congress, a conservative old queen who prides himself on his pro-marriage, pro-family voting record. You stand there in front of his desk and tell him your story, tell him you’re a human being the same as he is, a citizen of this free country the same as he is, and you’ve found the person of your dreams who just so happens to be of the opposite sex, and goddammit you don’t want any special treatment, you just want the same right to get married that gay people have.

Your congressman, who has been listening all this time, leans forward and pulls off his glasses and says, “You do have the same right to get married that I have. You can get married any time you like — to a person of your own sex.”

How do you feel? When he says that, does it make sense to you? Does it sound fair? Does it feel like your rights as a citizen are being respected? Because that’s not how it feels to me.

The debate over same-sex marriage is really about whether or not we want to live in a truly free society. It’s not about the rights of men to marry other men, or women to marry other women. It’s about the rights of all of us to live our lives the way we see fit, to do what makes us happy so long as it doesn’t intrude on the rights of another person. Consenting adults of the same sex who want to get married aren’t intruding on the rights of anyone. They just want to be able to do what straight folks have been able to do in western cultures for millennia — marry the people they love.

This thought experiment isn’t a very good rational argument, I’ll admit. It relies entirely on an appeal to the emotions. But I think it’s a decent rhetorical play, if the person you’re trying to convince isn’t persuaded by things like logic, reason, and basic principles of fairness. It’s difficult to get someone to actually walk a mile in someone else’s shoes (there are bound to be sizing issues, for a start); but sometimes just getting them to pretend a little can be a help. Because the honest answer to the questions I asked earlier is, of course you feel discriminated against. What good does the right to marry a person of the opposite sex do a gay person? It’s like affording swimming privileges to a cat, for Christ’s sake.

I just signed a petition in support of Lt. Choi, who’s going to court this Tuesday to challenge his discharge from the Army National Guard. Over 45,000 others have signed this petition in the last few hours, and I think it would be great for at least a few members of my tiny blogging audience to add their names to it, as well.

Firing a soldier as capable and dedicated to the service of his country as Lt. Choi should only be done for a good reason. Bigotry is not a good reason. The prohibition of gay men and women serving proudly and openly in the military is contrary to the values of a free society and debasing to our common humanity, and it must end now, starting with the reinstatement Daniel Choi, who by all accounts has been a splendid soldier.

Please sign the petition in support of Lt. Daniel Choi, right now. Tell the United States military to keep Lt. Choi and end the despicable “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

Earlier in the spring I took a creative writing class, and there was a girl who professed great knowledge and love of penguins. She was also a diehard Tolkien fan, thus again proving that old adage about nobody being perfect. But back to the penguins. She seemed to know a lot about them, including how many species there are (like 20, which blew me away when she said it, ‘cause I would have guessed, like, three). I wonder if she knew what great parents same-sex penguin couples make.

I got this from Metro.co.uk, by way of Weird Universe:

“Gay” penguins hatch chick

Two “gay” penguins have successfully hatched an egg that was rejected by its parents, a German zoo claims.

Zookeepers say the two penguin dads, Z and Vielpunkt, are now rearing the chick as their own.

“Since the chick arrived, they have been behaving just as you would expect a heterosexual couple to do,” the zoo told BBC News.

A loving, responsible same-sex couple raising a child just as a heterosexual couple would.

Imagine that.

Despite stories like this, and the countless incidences of same-sex human couples raising normal, well adjusted children, there are still many who claim that gay adoption should be discouraged, or flat-out prohibited, on the grounds that it isn’t natural.

It’s perfectly natural, of course, not just among humans but among a wide variety of animal species in which homosexuality has been observed, both in the wild and in captivity. I know, I know — two male penguins raising a chick isn’t analogous to two men or two women raising a human child. It’s not the same thing with people, it’s more complicated, more issues to consider, yes, yes. Always getting ahead of ourselves, us gay rights supporters. Maybe it won’t seem so bad once the rest of the world catches up.

In an op-ed published this morning in the Boston Herald, Bill O’Reilly actually gets it right. “[I]f you oppose gay marriage,” he writes, “your opinion makes you a bigot. Did you know that?”

Sure did, Bill. I also know that if I oppose interracial marriage, that opinion makes me a bigot, too. And if I believe a woman ought to be paid less than a man for equivalent work, or that the military ought to be segregated along racial lines, or that a same-sex couple ought not be allowed to adopt children, guess what that makes me. These opinions make one a bigot because there are no valid reasons for holding them.

But what if one is led to his opinion by his religious faith? Does that excuse one from being called a bigot? Bill thinks so:

I understand that most Americans believe heterosexual marriage deserves a special place in our society. Our Judeo-Christian traditions, which have made the United States the most prosperous and just society the world has ever known, speak to a family built around a responsible mother and father; certainly the optimum when it comes to raising children.

Two things occur to me immediately. For one, why is it relevant that most Americans believe heterosexual marriage deserves a special place, if giving it that special place denies the privilege to homosexuals? In a prior paragraph, O’Reilly cites a recent poll where 54% of those who responded claimed to oppose same-sex marriage. He also reminds us of the passage of Proposition 8 in California this past November. The United States is a constitutional republic, governed indirectly by the will of the people. That doesn’t mean anything goes as long as there’s a plurality of the popular vote to support it. The Constitution and the laws it empowers, enacted by the elected representatives of the people, are the final authority. If the people vote to disenfranchise a number of their fellow citizens who have broken no laws and committed no offense of any kind, that vote is meaningless. The majority doesn’t have the power to deny rights and privileges of citizenship to people it doesn’t like.

For another, why is it that O’Reilly and his fellow conservatives/”traditionalists” (as he insists on euphemistically identifying himself) always cite our Judeo-Christian heritage as the source of our prosperity and freedom, as though it’s a self-evident fact? The United States was not the first nation in history to be founded by Christians, not by far. It wasn’t the religion of our founders that made us unique; it was their wisdom to write their religion out of the government. It is our secularism that has made us a just society in the past, and which continues to push us kicking and screaming toward a greater justice today, not our religion. Apologists and defenders of the various faiths claim that religion calls us to be better people, but in my experience it most often just gives people divine permission to go right on being the assholes they already were.

Legalizing gay marriage isn’t the right thing to do because it’s popular, or because gay equality is the hip civil rights struggle at the moment. It’s the right thing to do because there is no reason not to do it, and because to do any less is unworthy of a truly free and just civilization. Legalizing gay marriage doesn’t make it illegal to oppose gay marriage. Christians, Jews, Muslims, whoever, will still have just as much right to hold and express the ugliest, most bigoted tenets of their dogmas as they do in non-gay-marriage states today. If you’re straight, your life won’t change in the slightest bit. Your marriage, if you have one, will still be valid and will still mean just as much to you and your spouse and the state as it ever has. The difference will be in the lives of same-sex couples, who will be able to have their unions legally recognized the same as straight couples, and in the life of the United States, which will finally be redeemed of one of its longest standing sins.

Yesterday I posted the latest entry in my Fatcats Club series, this one taking off from the dismissal of Lieutenant Daniel Choi from the Army National Guard for violating the ban on homosexuals serving openly in the military. Chris Rovzar has a piece about President Obama’s unsatisfactory performance on gay rights issues so far up at New York Magazine’s website. It’s called “Why Obama is Punting on Gay Issues,” and fella, you oughta read it. Rovzar sees Obama’s inaction on things like repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and legalizing same-sex marriage more or less like I do, as the president playing political defense. Understandable from Barack’s point of view, I guess, but a shame for everyone else.

In the New York Times magazine today, there’s also this interesting write-up by Lynn Hirschberg about Conan O’Brien closing up shop on Late Night in New York and moving to Los Angeles to take over The Tonight Show. Hirschberg not only offers an interesting sort of peak behind the curtain, but also somehow manages to make one comedian taking over a late-night television show from another comedian seem absolutely epic, when in fact it could hardly be less consequential. My favorite part: Jay Leno quoted as saying he doesn’t plan to have a desk on his new primetime show, followed immediately by an anonymous Leno staffer declaring, “I guarantee he’s got the desk.”

Finally, there’s this funny little article by Jonathon Gatehouse from Macleans in Canada. It’s titled “Our National Blood Sport,” and it’s about hockey — I’m with him so far. It’s this subtitle that trips me up, though — “Hockey’s vaunted moral code is in a shambles.” Pardon? Hockey has a moral code? No shit. Gatehouse cites examples from the postseason of how fighting in the NHL is as worse at it’s ever been and a disgrace (what must MacGyver be thinking?), then treats us to a list of the top ten cheap shots from the 2009 playoffs. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, I guess. Fun fact: reading about hockey is a lot more fun than watching it.

The Fatcats Club:

“Ask and Tell”

Above the Oval Office, in the president’s private residence, is his real office, the one that’s not a stop on the tour, the one where most of the real work gets done. One of the president’s personal assistants led Lieutenant Daniel Choi down the corridor and rapped on the door. From inside the office a voice called “Come in!”

The assistant opened the door and showed Lt. Choi in. Sitting on a leather couch, dressed in a t-shirt and light cotton trousers, a pair of Birkenstock sandals on his sockless feet, was Barack Obama, the President of the United States. He folded the day’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times he’d been reading and tossed it aside. “Welcome, Dan. Thank you for coming,” he said, standing and offering his hand.

Lt. Choi squared his shoulders and saluted the president. Barack grinned and waved him off. “Thank you, Lieutenant, but that’s not necessary.” They shook hands and Barack offered him a seat on the couch.

“Sorry,” Dan said as he sat down. “We’re trained to do that.”

“No sweat.” Barack took a seat on the opposite end of the couch, crossed one leg over the other and folded his hands in his lap. “So. I got your letter.”

Dan nodded. “Are you going to help me?”

“I am,” Barack said, “but you have to understand that this is a very complicated issue.”

“That’s not how I see it, sir,” Dan said. “To me, it couldn’t be simpler.”

The vote in the state senate was overwhelming, 23-5 in favor of overriding the veto. In the house it was closer, 100-49, a hundred votes being the minimum needed to override. But regardless of how close it was, the result is a momentous day in the history of the United States. Vermont is now the fourth state to legalize gay marriage, but the first to legalize it via the legislature. Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Iowa all recognize same-sex marriages as well, but that recognition came as a result of a court decision — Iowa’s coming in just the last several days. In Vermont it didn’t take the judiciary throwing out a discriminatory law or constitutional measure; it took the freely elected representatives of the people doing what was right.

That’s a big deal. It forces opponents of gay equality to adjust their arguments somewhat. The loudest bat in their line-up before today was the fact that same-sex marriage had not found significant support in state legislatures. Just the opposite is true — more than half the states in the union have passed amendments to their constitutions specifically outlawing same-sex marriage. Before Vermont, gay couples had only gained legal status for their marriages through the courts, allowing opponents to argue that gay equality was being imposed on an unwilling public by an activist judiciary. If the courageous action taken by the Vermont legislature encourages others to take up the issue, then places where same-sex marriage has not yet been settled definitively — like my home state of Maryland — could see the rights of their gay citizens affirmed as well, and by democratic means, not through the courts.

I don’t mean to disparage the courts that have recognized same-sex marriage. The destination is more important than the route, in this case. And, as Andrew Sullivan writes, commenting on the recent Iowa decision, striking down laws which seek to write bigotry into the state code is not just an appropriate role for the court — it’s the court’s highest possible duty.

But obviously, I’d rather see gay marriage legalized via votes than verdicts. If we leave it to the courts, then the courts must act — but why must we leave it to them? We should vote to legalize same-sex marriage because it’s the right thing to do, because there is no reason not to, because it is immoral to do otherwise. This is not a religious issue. This is not a political issue. To oppose legalization of same-sex marriage is to stand up for bigotry. The dogma that leads you to your opposition is irrelevant. The religion that claims to justify it is inapplicable. We call ourselves a free country, but until the unions of same-sex couples are recognized as identical to those of heterosexual couples under the law, that’s only an aspiration, not a fact. We must legalize same-sex marriage, not just in Vermont but in every other square inch of the United States, if we ever want to truly be the nation we have always hoped to be.

Near the end of his life Moses finds himself opposed by the Midianites. This tribe, descended from one of the sons of Abraham, has long been a thorn in his side, most recently by sending prostitutes into his camp to tempt the young men of Israel into idolatry. To avenge this soul-imperiling offense, God orders Moses to war.

Twelve-thousand Israelites gear up and take the battle to the people of Midian. Under the personal command of Moses, the Israelites kill every Midianite man. They also kill the kings of Midian, and their wicked prophet Balaam. And they don’t stop there. The Midianite women and children are taken prisoners, and their cities are burned. The Israelites claim their livestock as spoils of war. The twelve-thousand return victorious and present their captives to Moses.

And Moses says unto them, “Have ye saved all the women alive?” He reminds everyone of the sin to which they were tempted by these Midianite women, which he names a crime not just against the Israelites but against God himself. Moses orders his men to kill all the little boys among the prisoners, but to save the little girls and any other virgins. “Keep them alive for yourselves,” Moses tells them. In all, the Israelites claim thirty-two-thousand virgins. Thirty-two are set aside for God himself. God asks Moses to see if Eleazar the priest wouldn’t mind looking after them for him. Eleazar receives the thirty-two virgins without protest.

Even a great man like Moses cannot outrun his sins. He’s led the children of Israel through the wilderness for forty years, seeking their promised land. But God punishes Moses, informing him that he will die before his people have reached the end of their trek through the desert.

Why is Moses penalized so severely, denied the completion of his long and arduous quest? It isn’t for the genocide, the infanticide, the enslavement and rape of thirty-two-thousand women. It’s for being a smart-ass while following God’s directions to draw water out of a rock to slake the thirsty Israelites and their animals. Instead of soberly calling on the rock to bring forth the water, Moses, who has been having a hard time of it recently, gathers his people around and says to them, “Must we fetch you water out of this rock?” Frustrated, he hits the rock with his staff. God keeps his word and makes with the water, but takes the cynicism of Moses as a grave personal offense and condemns him to die in the desert.

Making war on an entire race, burning their cities, murdering their children and taking their young women as sex slaves is all well and good, but even God has to draw the line somewhere. 

Check it out below.

Is funny, yes? Funny and, especially with Black’s number, with the ring of truth. Many of the opponents to recognizing same-sex marriage cite religious reasons, and most of these folks profess to one flavor or another of Christianity. They oppose recognizing the rights of their gay fellow men and women because the Bible condemns homosexuality and the people who practice it.

But, as Jack Jesus points out, even most people who claim to be 100% Bible-believing Christians are very selective about which Biblical tenets they incorporate into their lives. The nutritional guidelines of the Old Testament go unobserved by everyone but the most orthodox Jews, and yet the homophobic verses only a few lines away are treated as inviolable edicts.

Some would argue that Old Testament verses no longer apply to Christians, whose salvation is guaranteed by the new covenant sealed by the blood of the crucified Jesus. Luckily for homophobic Christians who take this interpretation, St. Paul is just as willing to declare gay folks abominations and assure all us straight folks that the fags are all worthy of death and going to Hell. Except that most Christians today reject, or at least overlook, most of the vicious misogyny sprinkled throughout Paul’s epistles, such as his insinuation in Romans that “the natural use” of women is to have sex with men, and his recommendation, repeated throughout his writing in the New Testament, that wives ought to keep quiet and obey their husbands.

Then of course there’s this blindingly sagacious little treasure from I Corinthians 7:1-2:

Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman.

Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.

In other words, according to one of the most revered saints of the church, the mighty apostle who spread the good news all throughout the Roman world, marriage is not the sanctified and blessed and sacrosanct ideal union between two souls that religious opponents of same-sex couples wish to preserve for their own; it’s a necessary evil required to keep us all from fucking each others’ brains out. Funny how I don’t hear this one quoted all that often.