Video Space-filler

Sunday was spent tending my injured athlete son, doomed like... well, the literary reference escapes me at the moment, but doomed like the literary character who unwillingly plays out his destined role in carrying the family curse. You know, that one guy? Yeah, him. In this case the curse is soccer-shredded knees, and also in this case, I am tired.

Anyway. Yesterday's rehab activities, between bouts of ice, ace bandage wrapping, and fetching pizza rolls and ice cream, mainly involved sitting and watching Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel. The bird of paradise courtship displays are very impressive.



Even cooler was footage of a bunch of otters messing with a crocodile, but I can't seem to track down that video. And somewhere in Africa there are tiny wild pigs the size of rabbits. And great white sharks can jump completely out of the water while eating seals. And caribou have winter hair that is hollow, providing excellent insulation.

Much was learned.

On Arming Students

A letter in this morning's Arizona Daily Star:

People in schools are often afraid that if they let guns on campus, something like the Virginia Tech incident will happen. The sad truth is it happens anyway. It shouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine that a person who does not care about breaking the law by shooting and killing innocent people would be deterred by lesser laws prohibiting guns in schools.

By prohibiting guns, the government and schools take away the ability for law-abiding students and faculty to defend against the threat of a lawless murderer. If only the students could have had guns at that school, it is conceivable there would have been only one death instead of 33. The gunman could have been shot and killed before he had his chance to destroy the lives of 32 other people. That would make for a much happier ending to the story.

The writer identifies himself as a student, so maybe he's too young to remember the day back in 1999 when a mentally ill guy named Jean Pierre Lafitte pulled a gun after a traffic accident near the University of Arizona. Dr. Richard Carmona (future Surgeon General; at the time a SWAT doc and sherrif's deputy) happened on the scene, grabbed his .45, and tried to convince the guy to put his own gun down.

Lafitte appeared to begin to put his gun down, but instead raised it and fired, grazing Carmona's balding head. Carmona returned seven shots. Three hit Lafitte. Two struck Lafitte's truck and another round hit the windshield of a car driven by Wendy Hernandez, a former special magistrate at City Court.

This is one of those maddening bits of anecdotal evidence that you can take as you will. The letter writer, Wayne LaPierre, and the rest of the NRA crowd can look at this and say, see, a citizen with a sidearm stopped a deranged man before he could kill anyone. Other people might look and say, here's a guy with extensive firearms and SWAT training who had time to retrieve his gun from his car and get ready to fire before advancing on the threatening man--about the best amount of control you can hope for in that situation--and in the process of firing still managed to land only 3 of 7 shots, while getting lucky that the errant slug he sent through someone else's windshield didn't hit her.

What's the key in that for me? Extensively trained. Regular time at the range. Fully mature man with SWAT experience that teaches snap decision making and discourages panic. Short of an active cop or Marine, this is the guy you want pulling the trigger in that situation because he knows exactly what to do. And he still sent four rounds into things other than his intended target.

Now have the deranged shooter burst into a room full of 19-22 year old kids who may have pistols in their packs or on their belts but do not have a fraction of Dr. Carmona's training. Are you still convinced of a happy ending in that confined space? I'd very much like to be, but I'm not. Popping a .45 or .357 isn't the same as playing Duke Nukem down at the mall. It takes a good amount of practice to be accurate even within 20 feet with the bigger calibers. Identify, acquire, fire. Not blaze away indiscriminantly. The thought of classrooms and dorms full of barely out of their teens 007 wannabes is not comforting to me. Maybe it's the answer. Maybe not.

John McCain Is a Douchebag

There's this:

``I'm very happy about the decision given my position on abortion. Partial birth is one of the most odious aspects of abortion,'' Arizona Sen. John McCain said while campaigning in South Carolina.

``I think we should take this moment to celebrate the fact that the United States Supreme Court ruled that no longer will this outrageous procedure be allowed in America,'' McCain said. ``The fact is, we need to continue to work to change the culture in America so that they will understand the importance of the rights of the unborn.''

And then there's this. Oh, Mr. McCain, you're so funny when you're joking about causing the deaths of thousands of people and starting World War III to boot!

Dahlia on Gonzales v. Carhart

The wonderful Dahlia Lithwick on the Gonzales (intact dilation and extraction; I refuse to propogate the "partial-birth" meme) decision (h/t to Top!Secret G-woman):

What hasn't changed is that Anthony Kennedy finds partial-birth abortion really disgusting. We saw that in his dissent in Stenberg. That's what animates and drives his decision. His opinion blossoms from the premise that if all women were as sensitive as he is about the fundamental awfulness of this procedure, they'd all refuse to undergo it. Since they aren't, he'll decide for them.

... His opinion pretty much unfurls a roadmap for states seeking to enact broader bans on abortion. As Ginsburg points out in her dissent, the court's rationale for upholding the ban on intact D&Xs would support a ban on the (far more common) nonintact D&E as well.

The floodgates are open, sprung by a procedure that accounts for a minimal percentage of all abortions (0.17%; for context, abortions occurring after the 21st week of gestation account for 1.4% of the total; based on CDC data from 2000, this represents roughly 1,458 intact D&X procedures). Intact D&X is usually the endpoint of an agonizing series of decisions. It is not a procedure elected lightly, sandwiched between the manicure and the colorist. Fewer than two thousand women each year find themselves facing circumstances that make carrying a pregnancy to term a nonviable option (yes, that word was chosen deliberately).

Now the anguish of that decision is being compounded by the court arbitrarily eliminating the procedure that has been demonstrated to be the safest option for terminating a late-term pregnancy, because the religious right has succeeded in focusing on our emotional reaction to an imaginary Gerber baby's gruesome death rather than the reality of parents faced with an enacephalic or hydrocephalic fetus that is guaranteed a short, miserable life should it survive the rest of its gestation and birthing process at all, parents whose ability to make the most loving choice they can imagine has now been stripped away.

Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, Alito, and Thomas, Esq., M.D.

Oh, goody. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the ban on intact dilation and extraction. As CNN so coyly worded it in their breaking news e-mail,

U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling upholds a law banning what some call "partial birth" abortions.

"Some" meaning, of course, "religious fundamentalists hell-bent on demonizing all abortion by wrapping it in language guaranteed to tug on the heartstrings."

I'm so glad the justices are now also medical experts who are qualified to evaluate abortion procedures and determine that

the procedure is gruesome, inhumane and never medically necessary to preserve a woman's health. That statement was designed to overcome the health exception to restrictions that the court has demanded in abortion cases.

I am speechless, but probably not for long. Ann at Feministing is not.

American Tragedy

The McDonald's I drive past on my way to work every day has its flag at half-staff this morning in a salute to the 32 dead at Virginia Tech. 32 people gunned down by a faceless assailant. It is terrible, unthinkable that such a thing should happen, and I can't begin to imagine what it was like to be a student in one of those classrooms, or a parent unable to reach my child on his cellphone in the hours after the shootings.

The pro-gun and anti-gun people, the politicians and the preachers and the pundits all jumped up, elbowing each other out of the way to unleash the salvos of blame before the bodies have even been buried, all sides with their simple solutions shouting past each other, interested not in discourse so much as noisemaking for its own sake.

And then I think about the fact that 31 US soldiers and marines have died in Iraq in the past nine days, that over 700 Iraqi civilians and security forces have died this month, that it's such a regular, ordinary occurrence that it's been pushed well off the front page of the newspaper. What happened on Monday in Blacksburg was horrible and ripped hundreds of lives apart. I am trying to imagine taking that feeling of horror, that shock and anger and grief, and replaying it on a daily basis, trying to conceive of how a society and its individuals can find the strength to go on living another day in the face of it.

The nation collectively mourns, as we should.

But the flag is lowered and the president shows up to the memorial service only when the unpredictable, random killing happens down the road a piece from the White House. Our flags should be at half-staff every day.

On the Other Hand

A commenter over on Ed Brayton's blog, responding to yet another yahoo insisting that gays decide "(yes, DECIDE)" to be that way, drew an analogy to being left-handed, pointing out that most people nowadays accept handedness as an innate trait that stubbornly resists efforts to change it. It doesn't take much poking around to find that while geneticists have the handedness gene sort of surrounded, more or less, with a vague idea of its chromosomal location, they do not, in fact, have the little bugger tied down yet.

From LiveScience.com:

Like many traits, handedness is probably determined by a complex interaction between genes and the environment, experts figure.

Left-handers are more likely to have a left-handed relative. But researchers have yet to find the gene or set of genes that pick one hand over the other.

Most scientists agree that handedness exists on a continuum. The idea helps explain why some people bowl with their left but hold a spoon in their right. Truly ambidextrous people, who have indifferent preference for either hand, are extremely rare.

Hmmm. So we have scientific acknowledgment of a handedness continuum, but no "left-handed gene" identified... yet no rational person would argue that the roughly ten percent of the population that is left-handed consciously chose that trait. No rational person would support elementary schoolteachers returning to the days when lefties had their hands slapped or tied behind their backs in an effort to force them to use their right hands--you know, to be normal--because we recognize that handedness is innate and cemented at such a young age as to be unchangeable, and, equally important, that attempting to change handedness is traumatic and largely pointless.

Then I thought about other preferences. Favorite flavors, favorite colors, temperatures at which people are most comfortable. I can't stand olives or anise, despite numerous attempts to enjoy them in different preparations. Gotta try new foods eight times to be able to like them? They just never took with me, despite dozens of attempts and the fact that most of my relatives adore olives. On the other side of things, I love high-cocoa-content dark chocolate, and cilantro by the bushel--two intense flavors many people don't like. And what's the usual extent of the conversation about such things?

Do you like this?
No, I do not.
Have you tried it?
Yes, and I do not like it.
I do not like it either, but my sister does.

Is a proven genetic component required before the average person will consider handedness valid? Of course not. What about flavor and color preferences? Of course not. De gustibus non disputatum est is one of the most under-recognized guiding principles of our society... unless you're talking about sexual preference, of course, which requires a unanimously concurred upon genetic pedigree before many people will treat it like a hundred other innate traits they never give a second thought to.

You can choose to try anise or cilantro if your parents or dinner host ask you to. You can choose to try men or women if your parents and society expect you to, but when you are not innately oriented toward the opposite gender, all the experimentation and intentions in the world won't make a difference in the result. Some tastes can't be acquired.

Orion

So I'm not the only person who maintains some odd cross-state-of-matter relationship with Orion, even if we take different things away from our conversations in the dark. Chris Clarke, missing Zeke, resents Orion for still having Canis Major at his side. I glance up on my way back in from the recycling bin, notice he's still chasing that damn bull from horizon to horizon, and wish him better luck tonight.

Years ago, when things were more or less falling apart, the early-morning walks with the dog managed to carve out precious little tunnels in time and space where I could find stillness and solitude despite being outside in a semi-suburban neighborhood. In the late fall and winter, Tucson is pitch dark at five in the morning, quiet and mostly asleep, giving me sole claim to the streets I trundled down with the dog. No streetlights in the old neighborhood, and the porch lights were mostly shaded, creating the illusion of walking in a low-visibility bubble surrounded by blackness. It made for brilliant stargazing. Our cadence was softly measured by the clicking of the dog's nails on the asphalt and the puffs of her breath fogging in the cold air, both only occasionally drowned out by the tires and headlights of a passing car.

I walked under the constellations, pondering both a disintegrating marriage and the unanswered questions about myself that served as a solvent, and looked up at Orion caught between Taurus and Lepus and felt some solidarity with him on his futile nightly quest. Wondered what kept him from deciding the rabbit right at his feet wasn't enough, what kept him in pursuit of the handful of stars perpetually flying just beyond his grasp.

It's no more nutty, I guess, to have a group of stars as your confessor than to pray to an invisible god. At least I could see Orion, and as I never expected him to do anything about my stuff, I was never left disappointed. He was a handy sounding board in the cold and the dark. Tiny lights in the black sky impassively watching and going on their way as I hunched my shoulders and, turning the dog, trudged back towards home.

Ruination Day

Hey, I'm from Illinois and am compelled--by statute, I think, but I'll have to check with the boys in Springfield--to be wistful and avoid stage productions today.


















Now he belongs to the ages.

When Semantics Are More Than Just Semantics

Not too long ago, the question of the day on Bilerico wondered if gay readers would marry if marriage equality was enshrined in law, and if we are hell-bent on having marriages, or if we'd settle for civil unions. I responded yes, the girlfriend and I would get married in a heartbeat, and that as long as the legal protections were equivalent, I wouldn't care what label they slapped on it. If they're legally functionally equivalent, I said, "marriage" or "civil union" is just semantics.

Except when it's not.

Civilly unionized gay couples in New Jersey are finding, to their dismay, that many private entities are seizing on the absence of the term "marriage" on their legal documents to deny healthcare coverage and other benefits.

Nickie Brazier called U.P.S., where she is a driver, to add Heather Aurand to her health insurance the day after their Feb. 22 civil union in New Jersey, knowing it would save them $340 a month. But U.P.S. said no. “They said it was because we’re not married,” Ms. Brazier recalled.

Dr. Kevin Slavin was able to sign his partner up for the health plan at the hospital where he specializes in pediatric infectious diseases but soon learned that both men’s benefits would be treated as taxable income — not the case for his married coworkers — and that his partner could not collect his pension if Dr. Slavin died.

The New Jersey civil union law was designed to fulfill that state's Supreme Court ruling that "every statutory right and benefit conferred to heterosexual couples through civil marriage must be made available to committed same-sex couples." The state legislature balked at legalizing same-sex marriage, but contended that civil unions would meet the requirements laid out by the court. Barely two months later, it is clear they fall woefully short.

[R]esidents who work for companies headquartered in other states, and those whose insurers are based outside New Jersey, have found it difficult if not impossible to sign their partners up for health insurance. Unions and employers whose self-insured plans are federally regulated have also denied coverage in some cases. Staff members in doctors’ offices and emergency rooms have questioned partners’ role in decision-making. Confusion abounds over the interplay of state and federal laws governing taxes, inheritance and property.

And some of the contortions insurance companies have gone through to avoid full compliance with the law are comically insulting.

Then there are cases like that of the lesbian who was told that she was likely to be denied coverage for a mammogram after she added her partner to her insurance. The insurance company changed the employee’s designation to male since there was no spot on its forms for “civil union spouse.”

Simplicity is rarely the hallmark of legislative action. And empathy is ever more rarely the hallmark of The People's reaction to it. Granted, insurance companies are cutthroat, always on the prowl for new and creative ways to deny coverage. If company policy requires extending benefits only to married partners, and the words civil and union never appear consecutively in the contract, then the claims department is going to go completely by the book and deny coverage to anyone who can't produce a state-issued marriage license.

Despite the inevitability of the cases detailed in the Times article and their source in the faceless rules-driven bureaucracy of state and corporate HR departments and insurance companies, it is difficult not to view this as one more damn knee to the groin. Marriage amendments are defeated in Arizona and Indiana (hooray!) not because voters recognize them as unconscionably discriminatory against a group of their fellow citizens, but because they fear the amendments would adversely impact unmarried heterosexual couples (oh). Marriage amendments are passed in Michigan and Ohio partly because their proponents insist that gay couples' existing benefits and legal contracts will not be affected (well, okay...) and then, as soon as the governor's signature is dry on the paper, lawsuits are filed forcing the state and its institutions to curtail those benefits (oh). And now, the New Jersey legislature offered up all the benefits, rights, and responsibilities of marriage to gay couples, insisting that calling that arrangement a union instead of marriage is only semantics, preserving the holy word for straight couples (whatever, but hooray!)... and we find that the answer to "What's in a word?" is quite a lot, actually.

Friday Carnival of Nothing

Nothing! I got nothing here.

Thank god I have friends who have something. Alert reader Top!Secret!G points out Dahlia Lithwick's excellent essay in Slate exploring the Duke lacrosse rape case as an object lesson in why quality prosecutors matter (and why putting ideologues from Regent University in charge of personnel at Justice is problematic).

Some people in Tucson are doing handsprings over the city council approving a taxpayer-funded $130 million arena downtown, the latest sure-fire idea to revitalize an area that was largely bulldozed in the 1970s to make way for government buildings and a cement monstrosity of a convention center. An additional $60 million is being committed to revitalizing said convention center. I must confess that I don't get it, unless plans are in the works to regularly hold marquee University of Arizona basketball matchups in the arena, or to lure a semi-pro hockey team or something else, anything else, that would regularly draw maybe 2,000 people downtown on a given weeknight.

The city and county dropped the ball ten years ago when they decided to build a very nice minor league baseball park/major league spring training facility in an industrial area across the street from the juvenile court/lockup instead of downtown where the existing, if sparse, gastronomic infrastructure of bars and restaurants had a shot at growing in response to pregame and postgame noshers. The sheer number of games on a baseball home schedule delivers potential customers on a regular basis--and when they're being delivered to Ajo Way, they typically sprint into the stadium, watch the game, and then sprint back to their cars and leave in a hurry. Will people be drawn downtown just to gawk at a shiny new arena without regularly scheduled and attractive events? Will wildly popular and successful restaurants and pubs spring up around the periphery and do a rollicking business even on nights when the Icecats aren't playing? Perhaps. I hear the arena will look like a desert tortoise. I guess that's something.

Maybe the Be Good Tanyas will play there. Not likely, though, so you should probably go to their website and listen to them there, and then wait for them to come play at Solar Culture or something.

Archaeology Photoblog

Not Boltgirl's usual day at the office

On those days when I'm not busy punching out Nazis or mackin' on Karen Allen--it's exhausting, but I do what I can--my work as an archaeologist looks a lot like this:




















Pile of 1,000-year-old stone flakes

The prehistoric stone technology I study is pretty well summed up by the lame-o joke about how to sculpt a statue of an elephant (take a block of marble and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant). When long-ago people made a tool out of stone, say something cool like a spearhead, they started with a fairly hefty piece of rock and knocked small chips, or "flakes," in the parlance, off of its edges in order to shape it into the final product. Needless to say, the waste flakes generally outnumber cool final products by a score of several hundred to one, so most of my time is spent looking at and thinking about these piles of little broken rock fragments.

The process looks like this (the demonstration artifact is a gunflint from the Tucson Presidio, the fort built by the Spaniards in the mid 1700s for protection against Native Americans):














Identify the artifact: hmmm, it's a gunflint.














Measure the artifact: 30.89 mm long.














Weigh the artifact: 8.98 g.














Enter measurements and other info in the database. Note the lightning quick fingers.

Repeat a few hundred times per day and voila, it's the glamorous life of the lab archaeologist. Honestly, I have to chase Nazis and rob Egyptian tombs just to relax.

Look back at the gunflint for a moment; it actually is more interesting than it might seem. The honey-colored chalcedony this flint is made from indicates it came from France. The fact that it was tossed into a trash pit in the Tucson Presidio dating to the later 1700s shows that Tucson was on the tail end of the Spanish supply line; by this time on the Continent, the Dutch had wrested control of the gunflint market from the French and had been supplying all the armies of Europe with flints that looked very different from this one for a couple of decades already.

It's sort of like the French discovering Jerry Lewis movies in the 1980s and thinking they were cutting edge. Or maybe like American soldiers in Iraq getting crappy Interceptor body armor instead of the newer, much more effective Dragon Skin.

Yes, that's why archaeology is interesting and, perhaps, comforting. No matter how old the artifact in your hands is, it usually ends up showing you that human society hasn't changed appreciably between then and now. Only the details are different; the underlying motivations and behaviors are pretty much the same.

Best Top 40 Deconstruction EVER.

I am hot because I am fly. You, sadly, are not fly, and thus by definition cannot be hot. QED.











Courtesy of the Village Voice, via my Top!Secret G-woman source.

Urban Nature Report

I am nursing the wounds of being an unwilling bachelor this week. The girlfriend is off on an excursion back east, which would explain why I am up at this ungodly hour, fully dressed and almost coherent despite the sun barely peeking over the Rincon Mountains.

The back yard has become the early morning roost of choice for a noisy coffee klatsch of house finches. It took several mornings of lying in bed half-awake to sort through the offset cascade of calls before I was able to extract a single identifiable phrase. They seem to start their songs a half-second apart, resulting in a rippling sound that is more like a maniacal giggle echoing through a canyon than the benign twittering of a couple dozen five-inch birds. It was kinda disturbing until I figured it out.

Once the sun comes up, the gaggle disperses somewhat and the individual songs come through more clearly, now joined by the three descending notes of the verdins and the occasional squawk of a Gila woodpecker. The thrashers keep to a more civilized schedule than these smaller birds, waiting until later in the morning to start knocking their beaks through the dust in search of breakfast. They neatly lopped off the first sweet peas to sprout in my garden a few weeks back, but have so far ignored the second batch of vines, as well as the three tiny tomatoes warily peeking out from inside their cages.

Wildflowers are scarce in the yard this time around. A few globe mallows have straggled in on the edges, but only one has flowered. Every year about this time I remember that I forgot to scatter seeds in the fall, and make a mental note to do better next fall. Then the note promptly falls off the bulletin board in my brain and joins the collection of other reminders like fix the screen door and call your grandmother that are gathering dust under the fridge or whatever other large appliances I may be keeping in there.

Despite the lack of flowers, I am heartened by the apparent health of the two little volunteer mesquite trees in the front yard. The wretched, hateful acacia trees are at least showing signs of growth, meaning they will now be shading roughly nine square feet of dirt apiece, an improvement over their previous useless, hateful existences. Seriously. You can't get close to these trees. In fact, don't even look at them or think about them too hard when you're out there or you'll find yourself stuck in the little bastards.

The thrashers have started their whee-wheet calling, which is my signal that it's time to go to work.

Easter

Easter in the Boltgirl household this year meant a picnic at the park with the kids, dogs, and part-time housemate. The weather chipped in with sun and just enough breeze to keep things cool in the shade of the big eucalyptus we chose. Himmel Park was teeming with life, with a mongo ultimate frisbee tournament on the fields on the east side, kids at the playground, picnickers filling every available table and shade tree, and every grill doing a Krakatoa of charcoal smoke. Burnt offerings for the pleasure of the sky god, perhaps not so much. Grilled offerings for the pleasure of nostrils all around, definitely. We stuck around long enough to watch successive shifts of picnickers at the adjacent tables, including one group who very energetically hid eggs for the toddler faction of their party. At least five eggs ended up about six feet up in a tree; maybe they were planning on tossing the kid up there to see what would stick to her on the way down.

Candy preferences vary widely enough with my group to make trades easy. I would be happy with a basket of nothing but robin eggs--those heavenly speckled malt balls I can eat by the handful--preferably the mini ones. The boy and the part-time housemate favor jelly beans, which I really don't like, and everyone but me likes milk chocolate, meaning all the Hershey's Special Dark fun size bars end up in my pile. Hey, the gym will still be there tomorrow.

The downside to the rapid negotiations and trade agreements is the speed at which the hi-graded piles are stashed in big ziplocs and squirreled away. How the hell am I supposed to steal robin eggs out of the boy's basket when I don't even know where he hides it?

In Which We Contemplate WordPress

Might be moving over to WordPress soon, although my desire to import the entire archive (oh, vanity) means it will be held up until I can get all the goddamn pictures optimized.

Random notes for a Friday morning:

Ahmedinejad played the British sailor saga like a Stradivarius. I haven't heard any explosions from the other side of the globe yet, so maybe the hotly rumored Good Friday Tactical Nukefest was only a rumor after all. That would be the best news of all.

We're not out of the first week of April yet and the Cubs are comfortably sub-.500, hitting their midseason stride three games out of the gate, losing their opener on the strength of ten guys stranded and no extra-base hits, losing the third by virtue of a seventh-inning collapse ignited by a walk, a wild pitch, and a passed ball.

Disney's all for equality now, opening up their Fairy Tale Wedding extravaganza to gay couples. Now we too can lay out 8K to ride in a pumpkin carriage to the castle where Mickey and Minnie will witness our commitment ceremonies in formal wear. Actual adults apparently lap this shit up. I'm not sure I understand, but that's okay. Now, if SeaWorld threw weddings in the manatee exhibit or, better yet, in one of the squid dissection labs, I'd be all over it.

Archaeology drama in Tucson! Read all about it here. That's all I can say.

Photo Escapism

W's performance leave a bad taste in your mouth? Get away from it all for a moment with some lovely images of Tucson in the springtime.






















An American Shoveler (duck) admiring his fine reflection
at Sweetwater Wetlands
























Morning Primrose at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum
























Desert Marigold at the Desert Museum


















Ocotillo juuuuuust thinking about blooming

The equinox was last week, or the week before (to be honest, I lost track), and daylight savings happened about the same time (I don't have to pay attention since I live in Arizona, where we never change our clocks except on the Navajo Nation), so I'm not sure when spring officially began for the rest of the country. It officially began for me yesterday, when the formerly bare branches of the mesquite trees along the fence where I park at work suddenly sported feathery, lime green leaves. This morning they had already transformed into the deep green leaves of summer.

Plot, Plan, Attack [bzzt] Plot, Plan, Attack [bzzt] Plot...

Another Bush press conference. He couldn't cram more old cliches in this thing if he tried. He threatened to veto any spending bill that includes a withdrawal date, claiming it would hamstring his vaunted "commanders on the ground," failing to mention his need to repeatedly replace those generals when reality finally broke through and they could no longer agree with the need for a continuing flow of warm bodies into the meat grinder.

When David Gregory asked him if the Congress isn't, in fact, simpy doing what the American voters elected them to do, Bush insisted that the voters actually want a Congress that will support the troops. Unfortunately, Bush's vision of supporting the troops involves keeping them in the middle of a religious civil war where both sides are shooting at them, in a country whose civilian government is teetering on the brink of disintegration, on rotations so tight they're being sent back into battle unrested, untrained, and unrecovered, their numbers increasingly supplemented by grievously injured men, mentally ill men, and felons. My vision of supporting the troops involves getting them the hell out of there while there are still one or two left standing, unscathed. Apparently my vision is one of failure and weakness:

The way to fail would be to leave before the job is done... Failure in Iraq would embolden the extremists... We have to defeat them there so we don't have to face them here... A failed state would be a safe haven from which to plot, plan, and attack. That's one of the major lessons of September 11th.

Another reporter--didn't catch the name--followed that up with, "Are they really going to follow us home?"

Yes, just like on September 11th. They plotted, planned, and attacked.

Oh. Okay. One more time, say in the span of less than twenty seconds?

Because that's the lesson of September the 11th. If there's a safe haven, the enemies will plot, plan, and attack.

I didn't catch the beginning, so I don't have an accurate September the 11th count, or safe haven count, or extremist count, or any of the other words that show up on the word dice he must roll on the lectern before he starts each press conference. But there was nothing new here. Nothing less than blind acceptance of a war without end will be accepted.

On the Importance of Coming Out Stories

The week-long whirlwind of family-related activity ended yesterday morning with the departure of the last of the uncles and parents. Then I promptly hopped in the truck and drove up to Phoenix to meet up with an old school friend I haven't seen in over twenty years. Got home last night tired but exhilarated. Now this morning I have absolutely nothing to do for the first time in nine days and am feeling a bit lost.

The friend lives across the country but was in Phoenix for a vacation with her parents and siblings, so sure, I said, I can go up and meet you for lunch and a drink. I had wondered what the hell we were going to talk about after 22 years of no contact at all, but as soon as I walked into the lobby of her hotel, bam, we were both instantly 16 again, jabbering away like it had been a week or maybe a month.

The conversation took care of itself. After maybe half an hour of catching up on the chronologies of our major life events, she carefully asked, so... you're out, but you had that whole marriage thing, and, uh, how exactly did that happen? I gave the short answer, which boils down to it having taken a while to find my way past the expectations and cultural norms I grew up in enough to be able to recognize some fundamental truths about myself. And she replied that she was going through a similar process of figuring things out herself.

She's out to only about three other people. None of them are family members. She wasn't asking for advice, I think, so much as to hear my story so as to find some commonality of experience. Her siblings will be okay with it, she's sure. Her mother, she's sure, won't be, despite knowing and fully accepting other gay people. She fears it will be different for her mother when it's her only daughter who's coming out. She is weary of not being fully open with the people she loves the best, of having to hide her relationships to protect the identity status of a closeted ex-girlfriend, of showing up to these family gatherings alone.

We share the experience that most of the people we've come out to have not acted surprised. The friends she's told have said they already knew she was gay. She finds it as annoying as I do--for chrissakes, when you screw up your courage over the span of a few months or a few years to tell someone something you thought was that momentous, it's pretty damn deflating when their response is, uh, yeah, I know that, so what's your news? While the responses have been uniformly positive, at least on the surface, at least one guy--who I assume thought he was being supportive--told her there are two kinds of gay people, those who are born that way and those who choose to be that way, and he figures she's just choosing and isn't really gay.

That doesn't help. Really, it doesn't.

She talked about going over her high school and college years in her head, trying to find the signals everyone else saw so clearly while she stayed oblivious. For the record, at the time I was as oblivious to her orientation as I was to my own. Midwestern girls at a Catholic school in a socially conservative town. We never had a chance.

We chuckled over the names we came up with of girls we had thought at the time we just liked for other reasons but who, looking back now, we probably had crushes on. Shook our heads at being aware of the stereotypes of gay men but never quite conceptualizing the existence of lesbians, much less the possibility that we fell into that camp ourselves. Talked about one of the obviously gay guys in our class who was murdered in LA after we were out of college, how the hometown newspaper said he'd taken a wrong turn in a bad neighborhood instead of reporting the truth that he was the victim of a bigot with a knife. Wondered how anyone can think we chose this. How anyone can think that telling us we chose this is a good idea.

This won't be the week she comes out to her parents or her siblings. She doesn't want to gamble a too-rare vacation together on the chance that their response won't be we know but rather we can't accept this. At the end, my only advice was to be prepared for the possibility that even the people she feels safest with, and whose support she is most confident of, might react negatively--but to carry the hope that with time and effort, they might come around. She knows it's a chance. She also knows that she can't continue living this way, hiding an essential part of her life from the most important people in her life. I hope I helped her find the courage to find her voice.

Notre Dame Our Mother

I wonder how much matters to anyone, ultimately, until it becomes personal. I like to think my compassion is boundless, not situational, and then reality comes and smacks me upside the head.

The SoulForce Equality Riders are a group of young 'uns (remember, I'm old) who have been visiting religious colleges and universities across the country, attempting to deliver messages of inclusiveness and justice, urging these institutions to adopt gay-friendly policies for their students and staff, getting thrown off campuses and arrested left and right. Huh, I thought, sucks for them, but that reception probably wasn't completely unexpected. And they must at least have gotten the satisfaction of standing up for the right thing.

Then Soulforce hit Notre Dame.


Some of the Equality Riders, accompanied by a couple of gay Notre Dame students, were charged with trespassing when they laid a wreath at the Tom Dooley statue at the Grotto, the lovely shrine that replicates the Grotto at Lourdes in France, a quiet refuge of rock, moss, and trees that's the first visit for many people when they make their pilgrimages back to campus.

If you don't know Notre Dame (or if you're under 50), you may not know the name, or you may know it only from the ancient Kingston Trio song. Dooley, a Notre Dame grad, was a Navy doctor in World War II and went on to work in southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, rescuing 600,000 Catholic Vietnamese and relocating them to South Vietnam. God, Country, Notre Dame. Dooley epitomized the Notre Dame spirit of service to humanity and, above all, love of the university, a love immortalized by a bronze plaque at the Grotto bearing an excerpt of a letter he wrote in December 1960, as he was dying of cancer in Hong Hong, to University President Fr. Ted Hesburgh:

But just now . . . and just so many times, how I long for the Grotto. Away from the Grotto Dooley just prays. But at the Grotto, especially now when there must be snow everywhere and the lake is ice glass and that triangular fountain on the left is frozen solid and all the priests are bundled in their too-large too-long old black coats and the students wear snow boots . . . if I could go to the Grotto now then I think I could sing inside. I could be full of faith and poetry and loveliness and know more beauty, tenderness and compassion.

The only thing that could possibly tarnish the image of the revered Dooley, the sainted Dooley, in the University's eyes, is the fact that he was most likely a gay man. That's why they SoulForce guys wanted to put their wreath at his feet. And for bringing up that uncomfortable truth about a Catholic university's poster boy hero, the riders were charged with criminal trespassing and the students were threatened with suspension.

I knew before, of course, that ND is a pretty conservative place. Hell, half the students are enrolled in the College of Business Administration, most come from affluent families, and it's Catholic. But I still managed to think the best, to focus on the social justice preached from the pulpit most Sundays when I went to Mass at the Basilica, to remember the spirit of the Notre Dame family that buoyed me through countless days of adolescent angst.

No, I didn't go there. I got in and was named a Notre Dame Scholar, thankyouverymuch, but received a better scholarship from Northwestern and so went there instead. But my heart never left Notre Dame. I had gone to high school across the street from campus and lived just a few blocks away, attending Mass there and even biking over for vespers every evening in the summertime. I spent hours at the Grotto near Dooley's statue, sometimes praying, sometimes meditating, sometimes just sitting and soaking in the history and vibes of the place. Even after my mom left South Bend and I moved to Chicago, it was the home I always came back to. It was a constant, and my place there was secure.

I sit here and type this with the aid of a mouse scooting across a Notre Dame mouse pad. I have ND shirts for every day of the week. My office is divided from the larger lab room, in part, by a Notre Dame flag. A hockey jersey autographed by the captain of the '81 -'82 team hangs on my wall. There may be a link in the sidebar on the right to the DomeCam. On October 21 of this year, when Brady Quinn's 45-yard toss settled into Jeff Szmardzija's hands to cap an improbable comeback against UCLA, I damn near hit my head on the ceiling, and when the players stood arm-in-arm in front of the student section after the game, singing "Notre Dame, Our Mother," the tears in my eyes came from that particular swelling of the heart and soul only the Golden Dome can inspire.

Yeah, if you understand, no explanation is necessary; if you don't, well, it probably all seems more than a little psychotic.

When I came out, I worried about rejection from several different quarters. I didn't think to worry about Notre Dame. So when I read about the SoulForce kids being arrested, the students suspended, and the fact that AllianceND (the campus GLBT group) is not only not officially recognized by the university, but also barred from meeting on campus, it felt like a personal kick in the teeth. Yes, yes, I know ND's conservative, but... this is me. It was minus an order of magnitude, perhaps, but still very similar to the feeling when my coming out to my dad didn't go as well as I'd expected. Yes, I know he's conservative, but, but, but... this is me.

Dad's still in the process of coming around, seven years later, but at least it's in progress. What's the dad:university ratio? How many years does that mean it will be before the university so many of us love and consider a spiritual home decides to come around and accept all of its children unconditionally?

Hang down your head, Tom Dooley,
Hang down your head and cry.

Wages of Age

God, I'm old. Sometimes I say an event or, say, a weekend was more fun than I should be allowed to have. This weekend was one of those, and the issue apparently is not how much fun I should be allowed to have, but how much fun my cranky aged body can stand to have.

Friday night was Gaelic Storm, playing to a decent house at the Rialto. I am a very bad lesbian. I keep falling in love with male Irish guitarists. God, can those boys (and the female fiddler) put on a show. Excellent guitar by the scruffily cute Steve Twigger (friend of Woy Wogers? I must ask), fine accordion and showmanship by Pat Murphy, most excellent work on the bagpipes, tin whistle, and uillean pipes by the Canadian guy, who was raffled off after the show. I stopped drinking at the intermission when I realized I was about one pint away from buying every CD and shirt they had, as well as putting in a bid on Mr. Twigger. The only disturbing image was the piper playing the electronic bagpipe, which is basically a chanter hooked up to a cord. Well, that part's fine. The bad part was the way he held it. Conversation in the bathroom line:

Me: The piper is really good.
K: Except that it looks like he's playing his penis.
Woman in front of K: He was totally playing his penis.
Me: So I guess it really is a bag pipe.

Anyway, the evening featured three Guinness pints that were more or less danced off, so I told myself, having crowed beforehand with K about Guinness' relatively low caloric and carbo baggage. Jesus. As thrilled as I was to have gotten through three without falling down, it bothered me to be evaluating my beers on the basis of carb levels. Truth be told, it bothered me to be excited about getting through three without falling down. In the old days that would have been naught but a warmup act.

Shite.

Saturday saw three more beers go through the system, albeit over a longer span of time than Gaelic Storm's first set (love them! did I mention that already?). The family started hitting town, the first wave being my uncles and their wives, which meant a trip to El Charro for piles of carne seca.

Maybe it was the last beer on top of a slightly dehydrated day. Maybe someone in the kitchen selectively poked my plate, my girlfriend's, and the part-time housemate's. Maybe, by pure coincidence, the three of us developed carne seca intolerance at the same time. Gastric distress ensued and lasted through the next morning. It is not a hangover, I kept telling myself. I am certain this is sheer coincidence.

Sunday, then, started out on something of a draining note, built up on a crescendo of a soccer game on a hot field, and finished with the clanging cymbals flourish of the Fourth Avenue Street Fair.

Several thousand people on 4th Avenue.

I didn't buy anything, but did notice many different vendors and cool stuff. Wheat weaving! Metal art! Blue fading to purple was the glaze de rigeur at every ceramics booth. And it was heartening to see that not many people dragged their dogs out onto the hot asphalt.

Blown-glass octopus I coveted mightily. But I left my $95 in my other pants.

So I spent a dollar on the KXCI prize wheel and picked a Built to Spill single out of the box. Not bad. The rest of the evening was devoted to dinner and more than I am used to drinking, even though "more" here means "two or three followed by a glass of red wine." Monday was rough. I am officially a lightweight. Why, oh whyyyyyyyyy?

Bil Asks, Bil Receives

From Bil Browning:

I'd like to ask you to point your readers to my most recent post (a few minutes old!), Tony Dungy and the whole shebang. I'm pointing folks to the American Values Alliance's site - let's send them some money as versus the cash raised for the Indiana Family Institute. The AVA will put the money to good use. I know, I'm the Executive Director. :)

http://www.valuesalliance.org
http://www.bilerico.com/2007/03/002599.php

Busy, Busy

I really meant to do a stunning photoblog of my very exciting life as a lab archaeologist, but forgot to bring my camera to work. Picture the scene when you drop a beer bottle on a tile floor, and then scoop up all those shards of glass plus a thousand more, pretend they're made of flint instead of glass, and dump them in a pile on a desk. Add some calipers, a digital scale, a keyboard, and several cups of coffee to get the full effect of my daily professional existence.

All those tiny rocks tax my sanity enough to require occasional distracting breaks. I should have learned by now to just look at pictures of puppies, but instead, my status as an expatriate gay Hoosier has led me to Bil Browning's blog and the posts about Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy's efforts on behalf of the anti-marriage equality lobby in Indiana.

The volume of comments left on those posts were enough to crash Bil's server yesterday, and the mean-spiritedness and downright asshattery in their content was enough to crash my good mood. Cruise through the comments to see my very astute musings, if you want; not much point in cross-posting them here except for ego stroking, and the asshats have beaten that ego down to just about nothing.

Gaelic Storm at the Rialto tonight.

A Brief Respite from the Madness

Gonzo's on his way out but the boys bogged down in Baghdad are not. Garrison Keillor apologized, sort of, but I still don't get it. Property taxes are up 25%.

So, naturally, my thoughts turn to books. The latest reads in the Boltgirl household have been The Mammoth Cheese, by Sheri Holman, and Lighthousekeeping, by Jeanette Winterson. The storycrafting of The Mammoth Cheese evokes Jane Smiley at her best, with the bonus of being free of annoying characters I would sooner strangle than read one more sentence about. Think Moo and Lidie Newton, or A Thousand Acres before people start going nuts. Anyway.

I had looked forward to Lighthousekeeping for a long time, after reading excerpts on Winterson's website, and I'm not sure if I am let down or merely finally comfortable enough with her writing style that it didn't register as much more than a blip when I finally read it through in one sitting. It was okay. She plays around with the narrative structure in a different way than in the other books of hers I have read (granted, each one is an exercise in a different style), and it works. Pew is a good character, not one of her most fanciful creations, but serves his purpose well.

NCAA basketball? My men's bracket is hopelessly screwed and my women's is heading toward a tanking as well. No big bucks coming my way this year. Kim Malkey still annoys the shit out of me. But at least there have been a few stunners on the women's side to make up for the general lack of upsets by the men. Go! Heels!

Four Years of War

March 19, 2003, I was propped up in the living room watching TV through the fog of a major concussion. I dimly remember the flashes of shock and awe against the Baghdad skyline, the hazy green night vision images of the 82nd Airborne parachuting into the city, the breathless dispatches from embedded reporters, the vague sense that we should be worried for the boys in the army and marines but that it was going to be another 52-hour Gulf War cakewalk with a few scratches and more casualties from traffic accidents than from hostile fire.

My head hurt and my stomach lurched through appointments with neurologists I can't remember to this day. I know my partner and the kids were there at home with me, but all my recollections are of being alone with the jigsaw puzzles I obsessively worked, and the war on TV constantly.

It took a full year for my brain to completely emerge from the fog. And today, March 19, 2007, four years after the beginning of the war that Rumsfeld assured us would be over in no more than six months, the war that Cheney assured us would resolve with US troops being greeted as liberators? Today 3,217 Americans are dead, no one can say for sure how many Iraqi civilians have joined them, and the fog of war is thicker than ever.

Friday Music Smackdown

Whatever. I read and re-read the Keillor column and roughly a bazillion comments on each side and still am missing the big obvious boat on what a brilliant piece of satire it is. And in the process I managed to be so deeply ironic and satirical myself that even I didn't notice my own apparently brilliant argument that gays don't have to put their kids before their own lives, as the anonymous commenter on the last post pointed out.

Which only goes to show that you can take the girl out of the southern Illinois trailer park, but even a tornado won't take that trailer from where it's firmly jammed up my ass, impacting not only the sigmoid colon but the complex reasoning centers of my brain as well. Thanks for that. I remain befuddled.

In that case, I'll forego misguided social commentary/rabid gay hypersensitivity/lack of reading comprehension or understanding of literary devices for the rest of the afternoon and point Irish-minded readers in the direction of Liz Carroll and John Doyle. Saw them last night at the Berger Center and was blown away. This was the first time I'd seen Carroll live. The fiddle remains elusive to me, maybe because of how in untrained hands it sounds like a cat being skinned alive, so when I watch a master at work (like Carroll or Eileen Ivers), it's pure magic. Doyle just makes me want to burn my guitar. He is an amazing craftsman, both on guitar and mandolin. I first saw him years ago when he was touring with Ivers and the incomparable Jerry O'Sullivan, and tentatively fell in love. It's a sealed deal now. I could listen to him forever.

In a side note, all Green Linnet CDs are 20% off through the end of the month.

In Which We Realize We Spoke Too Soon

There is some fresh outrage left after all, I find, when the attacks come not from the predictable right but from someone I thought was on my side. Sort of like when I came out to my dad.

I’m used to being attacked by right-wingers obsessed with gay sex and fixated on anti-gay stereotypes. It’s a new and different sensation to be attacked so crudely by a man of the left—particularly when that man’s fat ass squats in a large glass house.

Garrison Keillor's mind-boggling column trashing same-sex parents on Salon.com, here. Dan Savage's most excellent takedown (and the source of the above quote), here.

UPDATED: while opinion is divided, comments on Salon.com, Slog, and other blogs are running about 4-1 in favor of "wtf" over "satire." Keillor's column was baffling, given his progressive track record, which in itself tends to support the possibility that it was intended to be satire. However, I'm disinclined to accept that, if for no other reason than that a writer as experienced and precise as Keillor (whether you like him or not, his ability as a wordsmith is pretty much beyond reproach) should be able to understand that satire only works when it's thinly veiled. Readers need to be able to see through the absurdities on the page; they must function as a lens through which society's shortcomings and leaders' failings are magnified and made clear. The kinds of cues needed to accomplish this are absent in this piece. When the end result is bafflement, not only is the piece not effective satire, but it becomes something that can be used against the very cause it's purportedly written to support.

Another Big Gay Boat Ride Post

A co-worker who has been out in the field for the better part of the past month was back in the office this morning, catching up on the past few weeks' worth of low-grade work drama and the outrages of the greater world. Again, the latest blows raining down from various quarters shock and sting her, while my sense of them is older, less acute. Punch the same spot on my shoulder over and over and eventually it begins to numb, successive hits blurring into a dull ache. She feels them only indirectly, but because of that sympathetically feels each one in the distinct sharpness of the slapping sound it makes.

My co-worker is straight, and stunned to have heard, in the last fourteen days or so, Ann Coulter smugly and publicly call John Edwards a faggot and Joint Chiefs Chair General Peter Pace piously and publicly call homosexuals immoral. Have these things become more prevalent in the last few years, she wonders, or are we just more sensitized to them by the paradoxical evolution of our societal sense that kneejerk attacks on gays aren't that acceptable any more?

In either case, she's appalled and angry.

Me? I think I spend far too much time online, so I find out not only about the high-profile salvos from Hardaway and Coulter and Pace but also the ones that go to more specific, second-tier audiences (such as Michael Savage) or the ones that only hit the local news and then are picked up by the gay blogs (such as the 72-year-old gay man in Detroit beaten into paralysis and, two weeks later, death). When the world is aggressively sought out in this fashion, the barrage is unrelenting.

It makes me tired more than anything. Tired of consequence-free bigoted approbation coming from "legitimate" sources who would be pilloried if they made the same broad, sweeping, blatant distortions and lies about a religious or ethnic group. Tired of public figures and private individuals getting a free pass for the ugliness they spew and the oppression and violence they sow because "it's the way I was brought up" or "it's what my religion teaches."

Tired of wondering what fresh crap my son will have to put up with tomorrow or next week because his mom's a dyke. Tired of wondering how many kids are going to find themselves kicked out of the house tomorrow because they gravely miscalculated how safe they were in coming out to their parents. Tired of hearing other people reduce my entire existence, and the lives of people like me, to a single sex act they find repulsive.

Tired of the sting not being sharp and fresh any more.

Dick! Dick! Dick!

Dick Cheney has plenty to say about the Democrats' hazy plans to end the war by curtailing funding for new troops:

"When members speak not of victory but of time limits, deadlines and other arbitrary measures, they are telling the enemy simply to watch the clock and wait us out," Cheney said in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Of course, when our guys are outnumbered 1,000 to 1 and regularly blown up by devices that don't pose much risk to the insurgents planting them--unlike, say, the risk of injury or death sustained by people who engage in an actual firefight--watching the clock between explosions and waiting is pretty much the strategy of choice too.

Amazingly, Cheney hasn't had much to say about another issue at the center of presidential war spending, you know, the surprise announcement that obscene war profiteering, no-bid contracting, Cheney pension paying Halliburton is moving its headquarters to Dubai.

Texas-based Halliburton, which was led by Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995-2000, did not specify what, if any, tax implications the move might entail. It plans to list on a Middle East bourse once it moves to Dubai -- a booming commercial center in the Gulf. The company said it was making the moves to position itself better to gain contracts in the oil-rich Middle East.

"This is an insult to the U.S. soldiers and taxpayers who paid the tab for their no-bid contracts and endured their overcharges for all these years," said judiciary committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat.

Halliburton's malfeasance is responsible for a sizeable chunk of the war's drain on the treasury ($2.7B in overcharges, at last count) and enormous profits for its executives and shareholders ($2.3B last year, a record). And now Halliburton is a Dubai-based corporation that will be pouring exactly no tax dollars back into the American treasury to, say, help fund the VA programs and hospitals returning soldiers and marines rely on to patch up their bodies and psyches. In the face of this, Dick Cheney has the temerity to castigate the Democrats for "not supporting the troops" when they show signs of balking at continuing to dump dollars on the conveyor belt running to the Iraqi incinerator.

Dave Lindorf at the Atlantic Free Press sees something darker than mere profit lust at the base of the Dubai move, given comments describing the move as "putting Halliburton in the 'primary theatre of the entire product' and a 'move into the hub for the entire world':

So how do we feel knowing that virtually the entire supply line for our over-extended troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is now in the hands of a Dubai corporation, and that it has its hooks into the central policy arm of our government, Blair House and the Office of the Vice President?

Next time Halliburton’s KKR subsidiary serves our troops toxic, bacteria-ridden food, or puts untreated Euphrates River water into their canteens, maybe we should look harder to see if this was just another case of corporate corner and cost-cutting, or whether something more sinister was at work.

We — and members of Congress, if they still remember how to do their job — ought to be asking whether Halliburton's move to Dubai has anything to do with anticipated business should Cheney get his way and the U.S. attacks Iran this spring. Since such a war would inevitably include the destruction of much of Iran’s state-owned oil industry, it would represent a huge new business opportunity for Halliburton, which first and foremost is an oil-services company.

This smacks of a little too much tinfoil conspiracy thinking for my tastes, but the Iran possibility could certainly be a tasty little chocolate shaving atop the larger tax-break cream pie Halliburton's helping itself to. Shame has become a rarer commodity than oil.

Sudden Onset Summer

Summer slammed into Tucson yesterday, as if it had been hiding behind a saguaro in order to jump out at us when we least expected it. It came on much the way winter did, all of a sudden after weeks of mid 50s, clouds, and occasional rain. Then wham, Wednesday brought sun and 80s and I don't think we're looking back. It was like hopping a plane and getting off in a different place, with no gradual acclimation. The sun is suddenly staying up later, or maybe I'm just noticing it now because I'm driving around after dinner with the windows down and can see the light and feel that the thermometer isn't threatening to bottom out with the clock.

The change of seasons, abrupt as it may be, always reminds me that my frame of reference for such things is firmly anchored in my school days. I still get the whiff of carefree summer days right around the corner, and in unguarded moments am driving my dad's truck around a little town in southern Illinois instead of dodging traffic on Campbell Avenue in Tucson. It's a different place and I'm a different person.

This evening I put in this season's crop of doomed tomato plants. No peppers were to be found in three stops at different big box stores; perhaps they heard through the underground that they should hide when I come calling to escape a certain yellow, crispy fate. The cilantro breathed a sigh of relief when it was potted in terra cotta and placed inside the kitchen window. Here's hoping for at least a salad's worth of fruits before the hundred-degree days take their toll.

On Being Michael Savage's Syrup of Ipecac

Yes, these days we do need a scorecard to keep track of which right-wing commentator made which bigoted statement about gay people; no news there. No news, old news, so what else is new? They're coming with jaw-dropping speed and frequency, almost to the point of making it difficult to keep getting worked up about them, but if we don't get worked up I fear the attacks will regain some cachet of 1950s legitimacy.

I will leave the business of Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a faggot, for now, since she's being thoroughly shredded and eaten even by fellow conservatives.

Michael Savage, though, gets a special (if overdue) shout-out this morning. Savage presented his radio audience with this little tidbit (a clip of Melissa Etheridge's Oscar acceptance speech) on February 26:

ETHERIDGE: I have to thank my incredible wife, Tammy, and our four children, Becky and Bailey and Johnnie Rose and Miller, and everyone --

SAVAGE: Turn it off. Get her off my show. I don't care what her name is. I don't like a woman married to a woman. It makes me want to puke. How's that? I want to vomit when I hear it. I think it's child abuse.

He repeated the "child abuse" accusation shortly thereafter, although it was nearly swamped by the other bon mots used to describe gays:

You say there are people who are sexually confused, who think that they're men when they're women. They're not normal. Normal people are not like that.

Maybe the police will come and take your child away in a few years if these scum-sucking vermin continue this brainwashing garbage.

So we get the gist: gays are child abusers, and raising a child in a home with two parents of the same gender is abusive. Too bad Mr. Savage wouldn't know what real abuse was even if it slapped him in the face.

Normal people are like Mommy and Daddy. Mommy and Daddy are normal.

Because straight is normal. And normal is not abusive. So when Daddy bundles eight-year-old you into a single-engine plane and crashes that plane into Grandma's house to get back at Mommy for divorcing him, well, that's not abuse. Or when Daddy kills four-year-old you and stuffs your body into a plastic tub in a storage unit and is strongly suspected of offing your five-year-old brother as well because Daddy's in a nasty custody dispute with Mommy, gee, that's not abuse either. But when Melissa Etheridge accepts her Oscar and, like every other Oscar winner, lovingly references her partner and children, that's abusive.

Is that hyperbolic on my part? Yup, totally. Because while rational people would not project these two cases of heterosexual filicide onto all heterosexual parents as evidence of their unfitness to raise children (despite the reporting of such heinous acts on a near-daily basis), anti-gay people tend to seize on any individual instance of child abuse by a homosexual (whether that person is a parent to the abused child or not) as rock-solid evidence that gays shouldn't be anywhere near kids, let along allowed to parent them.

And then, most disturbingly and dangerous of all, are the people like Mr. Savage, whose visceral reaction at the mere thought of gay parents--even loving ones--is all the evidence they need to "prove" that gays are abusive, abnormal, uh... scum-sucking vermin.

At least he's honest. He's the face of anti-gay bigotry laid bare, stripped of the Bible-based, child welfare-based, natural law window dressing piled on, layer after layer, in an attempt to conceal the nonrational gut reaction at the base of all the opposition to civil rights or even recognition of gay humanity: If it makes me want to puke it has no right to exist.

Thanks, Mike. You're a beautiful fucking human being.

Here We Go Again

Here we go again, gearing up to go around again.

In November, Arizona became the first and only state in the nation to turn down a measure defining marriage.

Now Matt Daniels, president of the Alliance for Marriage, says he is counseling Arizona lawmakers to make sure they offer a more acceptable ballot measure next time around — one that doesn't ask voters to deny benefits to couples.

Great. The anti-marriage equality Prop 107 narrowly failed at the polls last November, purely because the campaign against it went to great lengths to avoid all but the most oblique or buried (three or four clicks deep on the website) references to gay people. It was probably too much to hope that the anti-gay side would stand down after that volley failed, content with banning same-sex marriage at the statute level rather than by constitutional amendment. Way too much to hope, as it turns out.

But forces in this state have already said they won't settle for anything less than a constitutional amendment that makes it illegal for even straight couples to enter into civil unions or receive domestic-partnership benefits.

"I strongly disagree with Matt Daniels' comments," said Cathi Herrod, president of the Center for Arizona Policy, which authored Proposition 107. "Our goal has been to protect the institution of marriage, not just the name of marriage."

Bullshit. Your goal, Ms. Herrod, has been to kick gay people in the teeth any way you can under the guise of a moralistic "will of the people" ballot measure. If you wanted to "protect marriage" according to the arguments your side has spewed, you'd do better to outlaw divorce, outlaw civil weddings (and perhaps any religious weddings not performed under the auspices of a Christian or Jewish ceremony), and mandate procreation.

Of course, this forces me into the paradoxical position of having to root for a Herrod-formulated proposition to be the one landing on the next ballot, given that version's failure the first time around. If the Center for Arizona Policy puts forth a reworded measure explicitly denying civil unions or benefits only to same-sex couples, while preserving them for straight couples, there's no way it would pass constitutional muster. The downside would be the huge symbolic gobsmack of seeing exactly how many of my fellow citizens would gleefully vote for such a vindictive piece of legislation.

It wouldn't be surprising, but that wouldn't make it any less sad.

The Center for Arizona Policy's mindset is summed up by this passage from their position paper on "Public Policy and the Church:"

Sure, Christians could and should strive to obey God's Word without worrying about everyone else. But if we really believe that God loves everyone, and we know that His revelation about how we should behave would benefit everyone, isn't it the ultimate expression of Christian love to strive to have public policy reflect the perfect wisdom of God's law in every way possible?

So hey, we could go ahead and live and let live, but wouldn't it be so much more loving for us to impose our narrow interpretation of our religion's holy book through legislation compelling everyone in the country to live by the rules we chose for ourselves? Fuck. What truly galls me is when these people insist they're not really Dominionists; it's just that their vision of perfect wisdom to be enforced with the cudgel of the law coincides--amazingly--with a fundamentalist reading of the Bible. And then they howl that by not formalizing Christian religious dicta into American civil law, we're forcing the True Christians to live like us heathens.

Mandating marriage equality does not compel straight fundamentalist Christians to marry someone of their same gender or eschew a church ceremony, any more than legalized abortion compels all pregnant women to go in for a D&C. That's the reality-based version of the world. In their twisted zero-sum version of the world, opening all civil contract law to all competent, consenting adults constitutes the creation of special rights that diminish their own.

I am sick of it all.

Measles shot? Check. TB? Check check. HPV? Aaaaaiiiieeee!!!!

Chalk this one in the column of ongoing things I just don't understand. This would be the Gardasil kerfuffle, the consternation raised by Merck's introduction of a vaccine that has tested at near-100% effectiveness in preventing two of the most common strains of cervical-cancer-causing HPV. One in four women carry the virus, which can be identified as causal of nearly 70% of all cervical cancers.

The rational world short version: get the vaccine before becoming sexually active and dramatically decrease your chances of contracting cervical cancer.

The fundamentalist short version: get the vaccine and have carte blanche for a lifetime promiscuous, unprotected sex starting right now.

Actually, that's not really fair to fundamentalists, since they're not the only ones balking at vaccinating preteen girls against a sexually transmitted disease. Some people object to the cost ($400 for the three-shot regimen), others to the addition of another mandatory vaccine to a growing list of requirements for their kids to attend school, others to the sense of a creeping nanny state... and some otherwise rational folks just get the willies when faced with the need to dovetail "sex" and "my daughter" into the same thought. Even the revered Ellen Goodman isn't completely immune:

Nor am I surprised that parents are queasy. It's not easy for any parent to accept that their middle-schooler should get protection from a sexually transmitted disease, even with the risk of cancer.

This queasiness is shared by other people I have talked to, people who, again, are usually more in line with what I consider clear thinking [disclaimer: granted, I'm a generally leftish nutter, but still].

Me: What's the problem with it?
Them: 12-year-olds? They shouldn't even be thinking about sex.
Me: That's exactly the point. You need to administer the vaccine before they're sexually active for it to have the best chance of working.
Them: Yeah, but 12?!?
Me: ...

If HPV were spread as innocuously as mononucleosis or viral meningitis, in morally neutral ways such as getting sneezed on or sharing a can of soda or--brace yourself--kissing someone, as even abstinent teenagers are wont to do, we wouldn't be having this discussion. There might be outrage at the cost, but not at the mere idea of vaccinating children against a virus that can lead to suffering and death when they become adults.

People who don't skip a beat when talking about their dreams for their far-in-the-future grandkids or wonder how much they'll have to pay for their daughters' weddings suddenly get green around the gills when forced to think about the sexual implications of those dreams and plans. Look, here it is. Your sweet little girl, god willing, is going to grow up someday, and will most likely engage in sexual intercourse with at least one person in her lifetime. Even if she completely abstains from sexual contact of any kind until she's in a committed relationship, there is absolutely no guarantee that her eventual partner will be HPV free.

And if you don't want to think about your daughter having consensual sex, should I even bring up the possibility that she will be sexually assaulted at some point? How about the fact that one in three victims is under the age of 12?

Cervical cancer is only one of a myriad of health concerns facing adult women in the US. But the vaccine has given us the chance to scratch one big bogeyman off the list. Uneasiness with the reality of your daughters' sexuality is a sorry excuse for balking at the opportunity to protect them against a completely preventable condition. The next time you dream about your grandkids, dream about them having a healthy mother.