Should Homosexuals be Allowed to Marry?

Here's a copy of my response to the Washington Post blog question, "Should homosexuals be allowed to marry?"

Should homosexuals be allowed to marry? Actually, the word Allowed implies a power issue that should not be there in the first place. Who are the we that allow or forbid another group of people from marrying? Are we the majority? Does our power to allow or forbid come from the fact there are simply more of us out there?

And even if the power to allow comes from numerical superiority, isn't it our greatest task as a Democracy to maintain the rights of minorities, as Tocqueville maintained nearly 200 years ago, warning us to avoid a dictatorship of the majority?

The only question is, then, what exactly is the threat? The children, of course.

However, the same people that avoid one scientific proof after another for global warming will wave in your face a study by a social scientist claiming a child needs a mom and a dad.

The same people that cry over the number of unwanted, out-of-wedlock babies will tell you that a baby raised by a married gay couple, which clearly worked harder than heterosexual couples to have that baby, will be neglected and mentally abused.

They will tell you the child will have a better chance of growing up gay. Well, even if we take that into consideration, there is only one remaining question in this debate: Is growing up gay a bad thing? They will tell you that Yes, the life of a gay person is difficult, mainly because he or she will not have the same rights heterosexual people have.

And here the paradox is complete. By taking away the rights of homosexuals we give reason to this denial of rights. The majority in Europe denied Jews land ownership and then complained when Jews turned to money lending. The majority denied African slaves an education and then treated them like animals with no learning capacity. Similarly, the majority now wants to deny homosexuals the right to marry in order to protect children from growing up as an underclass. The solution seems very simple. Now can we concentrate on getting out of Iraq?

On the Republican Base

There is a slight fear; a slight deja vu feeling to it all. Here we are, two years later, and events seem to be repeating themselves:

Most people are against the war and critical about the way it has been run by Rumsfeld, and even a seemingly good economy doesn't mean a thing to most struggling Americans.

Yet, just like two years ago, with gay marriage in the news, is the topic of conversation about to be changed again?

You can bet Rove was celebrating the New Jersey Court decision of last week. Here was finally what the Republicans have been hoping for since Bush's "I have a mandate" speech backfired and started the downfall of the Republican Party. Here was, finally, a hope of restoring the faith of the Republican base.

But much has changed in the last two years, which makes the New Jersey decision meaningless for Republicans, and this is clearly evident in debates and Republican talking points: While in 2004 the GOP was successful in creating an illusion of positive All-American values, the topics of conversation are different now.

They try to scare voters with threats of taxes, trying to paint themselves again as the party of laissez-faire small government, but ask any Republican who had invested money and time on gambling websites and it's evident that the GOP is now considered by a majority of Americans the Big Brother party. Billions of Dollars in deficit is not something they can hide with threats of taxes or with speeches about trickle-down theories. The more they mention taxes the more people think about what the last six years have done to the country's economy and the more hypocritical they all seem.

Speaking of hypocrisy: between a book detailing the contempt Republican leaders feel for religious leaders and daily scandals involving Republicans, it is clear the religious "base" is not motivated anymore. "If we mobilize all our voters, we'll do well on Election Day," says John Boehner. Well Mr. Boehner, you should have thought about that before you gave away the government to lobbyists and mobsters, before you let pedophiles ruin the lives of children, before you let incompetent fools run FEMA and the Pentagon, before you gave the Vice President a gun permit, before you claimed a brain-dead woman smiled at her birthday as you let thousands drown in New Orleans.

John Boehner and Carl Rove want to mobilize the base, and they hope a threat of gay marriage will do that, but when people who actually feel threatened by the prospect of gay marriages have two parties to chose from, they cannot vote for the party of scandals and world-wide destruction. The days of the Republican Party base are over.

Jesus! Brick Walls! Matching Yellow! Bad Facial Hair! Laboranashbinashak!

Life as a Target Market

It’s one thing to be an adult and realize I don’t have to embrace every trend, but it’s another thing to feel it’s too late for me to see what’s out there.

So I watch commercials and think, when did I become a target-market?

Soon I will leave my target-market and join another one. I’ve already left the Video Games market and am now on the borderline between the Car Insurance and the Erectile Dysfunction markets. Soon it will be Retirement Vacations. So many things to buy, so little time.

The Vietnamization of Iraq - On Today's Press Conference

They still call it "the liberation of Iraq" and "the defining challenge of our era."

They used to say timetable was a dirty word but now they say "Success in Iraq is possible and can be achieved on a realistic timetable."

They call the corrupt government "a beacon for the entire Middle East."

They use euphemisms like adapt and adjust, as well as assess and alter.

Then they tap each other's back and say, "we have continuously adapted to stay ahead of the enemy and to ensure that our service men and women have the proper tools and support they need to accomplish their missions."

They talk about 12 to 18 months.

But we all know what's really going on here, don't we?

For a moment, we can at least be content knowing we were right all along: that the Iraq war was a terrible idea and that maybe humanity has learned that wars in general cannot be won in this age. But two points need to be clear:

1. Iran is mentioned five times and Syria seven times. Our generals have learned nothing, and they seem to be eager to continue their crusade.
2. People are still dying for nothing, and will continue to die for nothing while the US is in Iraq. We can't wait 12-18 months. Like Kerry said before he became a politician and had to be more careful not to upset anyone,

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

And finally, many people are torn. Is Bush an idiot or a madman? Are we experiencing another Vietnam-era tactic resurgence, namely, the Madman Theory?

Buddy, Wake Up. The Daily Show is On.

Center of the World, Again.

When I was twenty-two I was standing on a bridge in Camden Town smoking a cigarette, and I saw a group of tourists walking up from the street. They took some pictures of each other standing by the canal and then one of them pointed the camera at me and took a picture. I had long, purple hair at the time, and I was wearing a purple silk long-sleeves shirt.

I’m not embarrassed. I was young and had to distinguish myself somehow, so for me at the time it meant having silly hair and silly clothes and a cigarette.

Anyway, these people were taking pictures of me, thinking the best way for them to describe to their friends back home what Camden or even London was like in the ‘90s was to show a picture of a young man with a cigarette and a purple velvet shirt that matched his hair.

Young people from all over the world come to New York and to London and to San Francisco in the hope not merely of having a good time and having their quirks accepted by a community of bigger freaks, but often in the hope of defining what makes these places what they are. I didn’t move to London to be a part of something, but to dictate the definition of that something.

Now I live in a small city and I’m ten years older. In my community at the moment I’m usually happy to go to the grocery store without getting into a fight, and finding a parking spot close to my house on my way back. I wish I could say it’s just about getting wiser and understanding the real important things in life, but I somehow feel there’s a bigger problem here. Sometimes I feel there’s something wrong with losing the will or the need to define the world on my own terms.

A School Opens in the USA, Yet the Media Focuses on Republican Scandals. Typical.

Weekend Edition

Foley's excuse, Rev. Macaca, admits he'd done something wrong, but he's not quite sure what it was. He was just a little bit too high. Damn.

The Great-Centrist-Hope threatens to kill himself if Democrats win the election, yet fails to support a Republican, leaving him hanging with a sign and an empty promise... Just because he's involved with the Foley cover-up.

We were about to settle down and reflect on the Republican Scandal of the Week, involving a corrupt family in a Republican stronghold, a whistle-blowing campaign staffer, Serbians, the Russian mob, Kuwaiti businessmen, money laundering, and real estate.

But then, of course, another day, another October surprise: the FBI searches the office of a California Republican congressional candidate to find the source of a letter threatening immigrants with possible deportation if they try to vote. The letter was written in Spanish, which is very considerate.

But the FBI can't leave those poor Republicans alone for a second. Here's another investigation. This time the man received classified information, put it in an ad, and then denied knowing it was illegally obtained, saying "he did not know how the information was obtained, but that if it was done illegally, whoever did it should be held responsible." Yea...

With all these FBI investigations and cover-ups and scandals and the terrible month in Iraq, one has to ask oneself, why doesn't the media report on the good things that happened last week? I'm sure somewhere in the US there was a school opening, right? And what about the pseudo punk winning Project Runway? And the Baltimore Flugtag? IE7? Keith Urban is in rehab, shouldn't that be at the top of the news? Isn't it time for Janet Jackson to expose another nipple?

Floating Leaf

(Sorry, it's from my cellphone)

My Near-Death Experience (or, Another Missed Opportunity to Learn Something)

Then I remember going to the bedroom while the party was still going strong in the living room. I remember taking my clothes off and puking out of the window directly onto the plants. I blame the wine for that one. I remember lying down and closing my eyes with my head spinning, and then I remember the tunnel.

I say tunnel because that’s what people know. I didn’t really see a tunnel, although it was similar. With my eyes closed I could clearly see my formless self floating up in what looked like an eye of a storm. I looked around me and saw faces where the walls of the Hurricane were supposed to be, and I remember thinking that these people represented everyone I’ve ever met and everyone I’ll meet in the future and everything I’ve ever done and everything anyone else has ever done. It was the simplest thing in the world, just like the song: Everything was everything. I didn’t only see my past rolling like a movie before my eyes, I experienced everything I’ve ever experienced, and not only that: I experienced everything anyone else has ever experienced. Then I kept floating up, and the gray point in the sky became white, and then it grew bigger. It was calling me, just like they all say, and going there seemed, I can almost feel it again now, like the easiest thing in the world; like I was meant to go there.

But then—and I can’t say why—I realized that if I left the eye of the storm and floated toward the light I would never come back to the world, and the world—the real world—was something I was aware of again, and I was filled with love for the real world, and I wanted to stay in the real world and experience more of its beauty and pain, and that light, I remember thinking, would be there next time. I’d be back, but not now. I opened my eyes and felt alive. Then she came to the room and took care of me for a while.

She tells that story now, about the night I talked to God and puked out of the window naked. It is a funny image, I’ll give her that.

Another View From the Right

Ten soldiers were killed today in Iraq and the Right is not afraid to talk about it!

Michelle Malkin attacks Angelina Jolie while giving us the real reason behind the war:

You want to talk about wasted resources? That $10 billion Saddam Hussein siphoned off in the U.N. Oil-for-Food debacle could have fed a lot of hungry people...

Malkin brings up the Oil-for-Food scandal. I guess that makes the war worth it. Here we have the new justification for war: not WMDs, 9/11 connection, or reverse domino theory, no. We went to war in Iraq because Saddam reportedly stole $10 billion Dollars.

What else?
LGF talks about Iraq, especially about the great work the government (sorry, the anonymous Iraqi exiles' group) is doing in the war against terror, specifically targeting suicide bombers. An ad, produced by an LA company and filmed with American actors, shows the effect of suicide bombings Matrix style. That's a step in the right direction for winning hearts and minds in the Middle East. Now, if only we can rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure, all while putting an end to the civil war, ridding the country of US-installed corrupt officials, ressurecting 655,000 people, and oh, getting the hell out of there.

And of course you can always count on Free Republic to bring out the irony lover in you. Discussing a speech by Rumsfeld:

You can not help but come away positive and upbeat to know that such a man is at the top of the military under a President who knows what the military is for and how well it does what its mission is...whatever that may be.

San Francisco

When I was fifteen, my family did the Coast to Coast thing.

We were in San Francisco, having lunch outside the car. This meant turkey sandwiches, just to make things clearer. We didn’t go to restaurants, except those inhabited by the clown. This—and excuse the side note—was a major part of my development as an adult, this idea that I didn’t go to restaurants as a kid. Now, I talk about how much I owe my parents for taking me abroad and expanding my mind, or at least allowing me to expand it on my own, but it is a fact that we didn’t go to restaurants. It wasn’t a money thing; maybe it was my dad being a Homer Simpson, which meant my mom was too embarrassed to take him out because he would get lost in the menu, chat with the waiters, and the way he ate… just short of licking the plate after a good meal. He was an army man; what can you expect? So my mom didn’t want to take him out, and we didn’t go to restaurants. I grew up not knowing the proper way of using a knife and a fork, not to mention chop sticks. As a result, I am now like him. When I go to restaurants I get lost in the menus, I make jokes with the tired waiters, and I eat like a Neanderthal. No big deal. At least I don’t eat in McDonald’s anymore. And I’m a vegetarian.

So we were in San Francisco eating turkey sandwiches, when I saw a homeless man dragging his leg. Now, this was ’88, and what I knew from various random sources was that in the US there was a thing called AIDS that affected gay people and people that used drugs. I didn’t know how it affected them; I just knew it did, before killing them. I also knew that in San Francisco there were many gay people and many people who did drugs. Could this be one of them? I turned to my only source of knowledge at the time, a know-it-all filled with trivial knowledge about types of clouds and military history: my dad. I pointed at the man and asked, “Why is he limping? Does he have AIDS?”

“Probably,” he said.

It took me a few years to realize that being homeless and having a bad leg doesn’t equate having AIDS, but at the time I didn’t care to find the truth from other sources. Here I was, facing a man with the latest buzz word: AIDS. In the news in Israel they were talking about a far away place where interesting things happen, where people died because they were addicted to drugs and because they were gay, and here I was, a fifteen years old kid at the center of the world.

Isn't There A War On?

After a long battle, "Bully" is finally cleared.

Many have tried to remove violence from video games; good people like Hillary Clinton and Ricky Santorum. George Carlin's book, Brain Droppings, includes this truism: "The word bipartisan usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out." For example, this was true in the Tipper Gore-Joseph Coors collaboration, creating the PMRC, which tried to stop black kids from listening to rap music that told them white people didn't understand their problems. As an English major I appreciate irony.

That Santorum was there shouldn't surprise anyone, but Hillary... Here's just another disastrous cause for a main-stream Democrat. When will they understand there are bigger problems than gay people and video games and Marijuana? Will Main stream Democrats ever get a voice of their own, or are they doomed to pick and choose Republican talking-points to support or oppose? With all the recent Republican scandals, it seems like the word Republican is about to become an offensive term for an entity on a self-destructive route. Now is the time for Democrats to find their voice.

Hillary, we forgive you; you didn't know what you were doing. You had bad advisers telling you video games destroy our youth. Eight years ago, a small group of people petitioned Congress to forget about nonsense and concentrate on running the country. Now that the game has been approved, can we finally move on?

Ali G - Animal Rights

An Insignificant Moment

I remember when I was fifteen, on the family’s US coast-to-coast trip, when my dad woke me up to see the sun rising over the lake in the middle of the desert while my mom and sister were left to sleep in the car. I also remember the moment I heard the explosion in Lebanon when I was nineteen, and didn’t think much about it until I saw the helicopters and heard what happened on the radio.

Those moments one happens to remember are usually significant. But what of those other moments? What about the rest of one’s life? Well, that was the experiment I made when I was eight-years-old. I remember standing in front of the large window overlooking the field. It was early in the day and no one was outside; just a quiet empty morning of birds and sun. And I remember concentrating on my reflection in the window and trying hard to remember that moment. And I did. Later that afternoon I made a note to myself to remember standing in front of the window in the morning, and then the next morning I remembered to remember again. The rest was taking care of itself, and eventually I never forgot that non-magical, insignificant moment.

Even as a child I was proud of the way I fooled life’s tendency to pay close attention to significant moments. Maybe it was some unconscious human rage at the fleeting nature of life or even at the trivial nature of existence, or maybe it was indeed a significant moment, when I came up with my first original thought; I can’t be sure. Haven’t had too many of those.

Do it yourself and think what you want, no camera involved; no picture-a-day-for-three-years trick. Stand up and look out of the window. Try to notice the outline of your face. Look at the people outside, bearing no meaning to your own existence and your world; extras in your biographical movie. Then, remember this moment. Remember the people walking under your window, and remember the shape of the clouds, and remember your face as you take all this in and without judgment or comment watch the world for this insignificant short moment, and remember. Next, remember to remember as soon as an hour from now. Don’t worry if it seems silly. You should feel good about it because you’re fooling God or nature’s way of deciding for you what’s significant and what’s trivial. Nothing is trivial. Even an empty, quiet moment can be something you will remember for the rest of your life.

Who Did That?

Betrayed

That must have felt great.

For years they had to make a choice between the lesser of evils--two parties with meaningless differences--and so, they didn't vote. Who cares about taxes or even gun control when both parties had been led by people religious only in photo-ops before elections? Sure, abortions were a serious issue, but still, there was a feeling that no one really cared.

Then came Bush, a born-again Christian admitting to his addictions and sharing his regrets; one of us: fragile yet decisive.

He cared about the life of Terri Schiavo (he cared so much, he even tried to save her life in the middle of his vacation), and he cared about the sanctity of marriage, and he cared about the ten commandments, and he cared about the lives of those poor stem-cells, as if anyone even knows what it means.

So they stood by him. So many of them voted for Bush, even Diebold executives were left in shock. They supported the war in Iraq and Social Security reform, and they averted their eyes when the budget tanked and their civil liberties were taken away. Heck, they could even stand an Abramoff or two, and a Delay and a Kerik and Halliburton and CIA outing and Abu-Ghraib and Guantanamo torture and Afghanistan and Iran and North Korea and... Gosh help us all... even the Foley cover-up.

How said is it for them to find out it was all a lie; that trying so hard to reach God, they had signed a deal with the Devil? First, Little Tucker admits "elites in the Republican Party have pure contempt for the evangelicals who put their party in power," and then the excerpts from a revealing new book by David Kuo, which claims "some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as 'the nuts.' . . . 'ridiculous,' 'out of control,' and just plain 'goofy.'"

It must have been great to imagine the party in power cared about them.
Stay home next time. Nobody cares.

Underworld - Cowgirl (Live)

Now Can We Have Our Rights Back?

First thing I thought when I watched the news was October Surprise, where any diversion will do.

But then I realized that this is the proof of Bush's six years of bullshit. He can roll up his sleeves on aircraft carriers and come to us with frightening speeches about good and evil, but no one can stop a plane from hitting a building in New York, not even "A War President" that's supposed to be tough when it comes to the war on terror.

They told us 9/11 changed everything in relation to Iraq, Iran, military budget, tax cuts, abortions, and civil liberties, but today all these argument have been debunked.

When you can stop a plane from hitting a building in NYC you can start tapping my phone again.

A Reason

Thing is, there must be a reason. Too many variables have contributed to my potential success or at least to my reason for being and it seems like the only thing stopping me from achieving the success I was undoubtedly born to achieve is my inability to get off my ass and a tragic lack of imagination.

The main variable is the accident of my birth. No big deal, a lot of women find out they’re pregnant and have to think what to do about it. In my case, according to my dad, he wanted me and she didn’t. What a terrible thing to do to a man, turn him against his mother like that.

Just joking. Who gives a damn.

I was about twenty-two, sitting in the back seat of the car, and they were having another fight. The argument itself was meaningless, but as long as I was there I was supposed to call the winner, and therefore declare my parental preference. It went back and forth for a while before he said, “She didn’t even want to have you.” Now, I was happy to let it slide. I was old enough to understand that a woman with little money and a two-year-old girl needed another baby like she needed another mother-in-law, but my mom was shocked and even started to cry.

“It wasn’t like that. I love you very much.” And to my dad, “Why did you do that? Why did you tell him that?” And again to me, “I never regretted having you. Never. Do you believe me?”

There are other variables: There was a near death experience, there’s a grandma that tells me she knows I'll be succesful because she knows. And how does she know? Well, she was born with her coat on, so she knows. It would seem almost impossible to fail with so many things pointing at a sure success.

Then again, of course, people live, experience shit, and die all the time. Every day, millions of them just live and die with no reason, and the world keeps turning, unaware of their existence, unmoved by their unoriginal desires and meaningless prayers.

Before You Enlist!

The Good, the Bad, and the Uneducated

Can someone please stop these people from lowering the standards for recruitment? How high were they in the first place?

The new standards put aside silly formalities like education because having an education doesn't mean a soldier will have "loyalty, duty, honor, integrity or courage." If that's really the case, maybe the No Child Left Behind should concentrate more on honor and integrity. Just a thought.

This continued reduction of standards comes at a crucial time in American history, where opinions regarding the army are split much as they were during the Vietnam war. Soldiers are being told they are doing a noble thing in Iraq while they experience the result of the moral bankruptcy of the government that sent them there.

Most of these soldiers believed, at least at the beginning, that they were doing a noble thing. When some are finally allowed to return home, they shouldn't face criticism for the crimes of others on the one hand, and the offensive publicized reduction of recruitment standards on the other hand. Soldiers should be left alone to make their own conclusions about their time in Iraq. Some will still think they did a noble thing. Some will change their minds.

Stop the reduction in standards.

• We will have better educated soldiers, which means less chance of another Abu-Ghraib.
• We will have less soldiers, which means less opportunity for future Neo-Cons misadventures.

And stop the Don't Ask Don't Tell. Frankly, it's an embarrassment to this country.