When I am most displeased with my country’s current trajectory, when I feel inclined to toss in the towel and move to a mythical Scandinavian country with a moderate climate that is willing to take in old crabby Americans with few marketable skills, when I despair of moving forward and feel ready to surrender to the forces of darkness, I remind myself of the remarkable progress we’ve made on gay rights, just during my lifetime.
We’ve still got a long way to go. The legal progress we’ve made is under attack, and prominent recipient of stolen goods (in)Justice Gorsuch shows eagerness to once again give force of law to the bigotry and intolerance that reigned for centuries.
But we’ve come a long way, baby. We’ve seen the White House lit up in rainbow colors to celebrate marriage equality as the law of the land. (Thank you, President Obama!) A new generation of young adults rightly believes that love is love.
It wasn’t that way when I came of age in the 80s, during the plague years. The president at that time wouldn’t speak the name of the disease that was killing my friends in their youth. Degenerate, money-grubbing preachers gained political ascendency by telling us AIDS was God’s judgment.
Closer to home during those dark times, I tried to be wing-woman to a beloved gay sister and had a ring-side seat to witness her struggles for acceptance within the family, and in the world. Through her bravery, and the bravery of millions of people who refused to accept second-class citizenship, refused to pretend to be someone other than who they are, the world changed.
A couple for nearly as long as myself and the mister, my sister and her spouse are now legally married, as of a few years back (I was allowed to marry when the Macarena was the hot new dance craze hereabouts). It’s a recurring joke between my sister and me: how easy it is for kids today, especially my gay kid, who never felt pressure — from her family, anyway — to hide her own beautiful self nor conform to someone else’s definition of “normal.”
I could write a “War and Peace”-length account of her struggles, a shame-filled treatise on my fuck-ups as a parent, an angry tirade on how schools and laws and institutions and society failed and still fail LGBTQ kids and adults. I in no way want to minimize the obstacles and injustices they face.
But yes, progress has been made, and Pride celebrations throughout the land have marked the occasion, even if the current clown in the White House and his beady-eyed, homophobic VP fail to do so. I recall the chant repeated in an ACT UP demonstration I attended so many years ago: “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re fabulous! Get used to it!”
And for the most part, America, to its credit, did get used to it. Not everyone. It’ll never be everyone. But enough of us to form a critical mass, I think. We’ll guard our progress and push it forward every day. But there’s plenty to be proud of, even in this shitty epoch. So, Happy Pride!
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
As a country, we have come very far, something that I think even Neil Gorsuck and the other assholes on the Supreme Court can never truly take away. As much as the dicks who want to refuse to serve gays wedding cake want their bigotries legalized, there’s too many if us now for them to succeed. They’ll become pariahs and their businesses will fail
West of the Rockies (been a while)
That opening paragraph reminded me a bit of Moby Dick in tone and phrasing.
efgoldman
And yet, with ALL forms of discrimination, we keep having to fight a rear guard action against the fascists, racists, Islamophobes, homophobes….
Fucking bible bangers…
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
Also, too: none of us are free until all of us are free
efgoldman
@? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?:
I wish I shared your optimism. I see too much backsliding and open defiance: state legislatures passing laws to display religion as a matter of law; businesses that still discriminate on the grounds of race, color, ethnicity, religion; active attempts to roll back civil rights legislation and legal decisions….
Lots of us thought these battles were won in the 60s and 70s. And in some parts of the country they have been. In significant parts, they have not.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@efgoldman: There’s tens of millions of people who believe in the things you mention now. There is no going back, not if we fight for them. And if we end up in a one-party dictatorship, I’ll fight physically if I have to.
The gun-nuts are wrong about using small arms to directly fight government forces. You use them to help sabotage critical state infrastructure and harass the government until it collapses. Like the resistance does in The Man in the High Castle against the German Reich’s and the Empire of Japan’s occupation forces
lollipopguild
I thought that after we elected a black guy to the White House (twice!) that the country had turned a corner and we were never going back. Boy was I wrong!
Amir Khalid
A sobering thought: For now, though, you still have as US Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who feels that civil-rights laws are too great a burden on those who, for whatever reason, don’t care to respect others’ rights.
Eljai
Thank you, Betty, and blessings to your wonderful family. I like to think that what we’re witnessing now are the death throws of a dinosaur. A fearful remnant of a bygone civilization that simply does not want to give up power. So they thrash around and make life difficult for awhile. But, in the end, they’ll lose. You can’t go back. Like Gershwin said, our love is here to stay.
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman: kind of starting to think that life might just be one big rearguard action, against entropy if nothing else.
randy khan
Thanks for this post. It’s important to remember all the progress we’ve made as a people. We have a long way to go and a lot of work to protect what’s been gained, but the progress is, in fact, real.
O. Felix Culpa
Thank you, Betty. We have made progress. Yes, the revanchist forces are fighting a rearguard action and might still win a few skirmishes, but we will ultimately prevail. Ms. O and I look forward to celebrating our first wedding anniversary in September, thanks to Obergefell.
P.S. Parental fuck-ups are unavoidable. My young adult children relish reminding me of mine and I recount what royal pains in the ass they were and then we laugh and remember how much we love each other. Young Cracker chose her parents well. Love and laughter > fuck-ups.
joel hanes
I’m at least a decade older than BC.
When I was a sprout, there were still “whites only” signs south of the Mason Dixon line. Black people travelling across the South were strongly advised to get a copy of “the green book”, a list of motels and restaurants and gas stations that would accept the business of black customers. Travellers who weren’t sufficiently careful of the color line were often arrested for no reason, assaulted, stolen from, or otherwise abused, often by the “officers of the law”. There were three public lynchings in 1955, one of whom was Emmett Till.
So yeah, we’ve made forward progress.
But just today I read that some peckerwood has apparently spent several hours with a heavy tool, stripping the plaques off the historical marker for the place in which Mr. Till was murdered.
efgoldman
@joel hanes:
And speaking of peckerwoods, there was the Jacksonville cop who threatened a kid with jail for jaywalking. Jaywalking! Neither the cop’s color nor the kid’s will surprise you.
NR
DADT repeal was one of the best things Obama did. That archaic and offensive policy needed to go.
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman: since as a white person I statistically think racism against whites is the biggest problem, I’ll assume the cop was black and the jaywalker white.
efgoldman
@Major Major Major Major:
We really need a sarcasm font, or a clear tag.
hellslittlestangel
It’s definitely a better country to live in if you’re gay, but if you’re black you can still be murdered with impunity by a police officer over 150 after slavery was abolished.
Mike in NC
@joel hanes: @efgoldman:Last week we drove through large parts of rural South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. It’s still Redneckland.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: I once represented someone who was pepper sprayed by cops in the process of them arresting him for jaywalking (not an offense for which one could be arrested in Ohio at the time). They tried to add in resisting arrest (see earlier parenthetical) and a disorderly conduct charges, but they didn’t stick. Our civil suit was promising, but my client was a sort of transient guy and drifted away. I was annoyed – I had coordinated with the local NAACP for a protest in front of the police station on his behalf. The cop involved was a racist piece of shit. Also, I jaywalked all the fuck over Columbus, often right in front of cops – they never said boo.
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman: I think it’s //, but I don’t always use it…
Thoroughly Pizzled
Betty, is this the sister you beat with a flyswatter while she was dressed as a cockroach? :)
hitchhiker
@NR:
For real. And thank dog he did it thru the legislative process & not by executive order, or it would have been reversed months ago. This was a fight I had in the early Obama years with a close friend, who insisted that Obama was needlessly dotting i’s and crossing t’s in the DADT project. Turns out he really wanted it to be permanent.
Same with the ACA, of course. He could have swashbuckled like mad … instead bore down on the creaky old machine of our congress and passed a by-god law that is turning out to be the devil to undo. If we let them screw it up, it will take another alignment of stars to pass another one.
O. Felix Culpa
@efgoldman: Sigh. Alas, not surprising. Peckerwood is too kind a word for that pasty cop and his ilk.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@efgoldman: /s after the comment is what I sometimes use
Omnes Omnibus
@NR: @hitchhiker: And yet it was progress at the time.
Anne Laurie
Very true, Betty!
People forget (or never knew): As late as the early 1980s, “normal” folks could claim in all honesty that they’d never even met a gay person. Because, even if the LGBT individuals in their lives were not completely in the closet (and of course a lot of them had no choice but to stay closeted), everyone knew that ‘unnatural’ non-heterosexual behavior was a very very rare perversion, shared by maybe one person in a thousand, clustered around show business, male hairdressers and female gym teachers.
Probably the most bizarre ‘positive’ aspect of the AIDS epidemic was that this “norm” became totally unsustainable. It turned out that all sorts of people had somehow contracted HIV, and only so many of them were hemophiliacs / injectable drug users / victims of sloppy surgical protocol. I was, praise goddess, extraordinarily lucky not to lose any close friends — but a lot of oblivious straight people lost the ‘privilege’ of denial in the worst ways possible, when they lost people they loved. Not nearly as horrible as actually contracting AIDS, of course (although some of them would, when their ‘totally straight’ sex partners turned out to have been less than honest) but it did pretty effectively shatter the Not-In-My-World bubble.
efgoldman
@Omnes Omnibus:
Boston passed an ordnance somewhere around 1971.Shortly thereafter, I strolled across a busy intersection (Dartmouth Street in Copley Square) right in front of a motorcycle cop. Wrote me a ticket. $1 fine that I never paid.
He was courteous and all – I think maybe he thought it was funny.
jl
@hitchhiker: Obama was old school that way. Often frustrating, but for the best in the long term. He had to resort to executive orders and other kluges more and more as his term went on. But that was not his choice. Rather, the GOP Congress forced it on him.
Historians playing their academic games are rating Obama as a top 10 or 15 president. Premature to try to figure that out, but I suppose the work of figuring out his place in history has to start someplace. But IMHO, that ranking will stick. And stick in the craw of our white bigot fellow citizens. I think place of some presidents hard to figure out for awhile. I think Big Dawg’s will go down a bit, and Carter’s will go up with perspective over time. But I think Obama will be remembered as a very, unusually, successful and excellent president.
efgoldman
@Anne Laurie:
I joked the other night (and it WAS a joke) that there weren’t any gay people when I was a kid.
Then I went to a fine and performing arts school….
(Yes I know it’s a cliche. But still….)
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@Omnes Omnibus: Now you did it. N(R) will argue about it for the rest of the night
O. Felix Culpa
@jl: I remember him that way.
ETA: reply to jl’s comment about Obama in #29.
Mike J
@Omnes Omnibus: That 20 years DADT was in effect made it possible to argue that it didn’t interfere with discipline. If not for DADT, the old rules would still be in place.
efgoldman
@Anne Laurie:
Opinions started to change, glacially when a kid got it, and was refused entry to school. Ryan something? In a flyover state. Slower than glacially, but it was part of what changed.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: Oh, C-bus could fine you for it, but not arrest you. My client basically “jaywalked” something that was functionally an alley. Cops were being racist assholes. I could type a lot of details, but the Saab related troubles chronicled below have caused me to drink to wind down, and I don’t fell like typing that much. Just go with racist assholes.
condorcet runner-up
@joel hanes:
It’s more than a little sobering that decades later this is literally still happening.
O. Felix Culpa
@efgoldman: Ryan White, in Indiana. Diagnosed in 1984, died in 1990, one month before his high school graduation per Wikipedia.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike J: I know. I served under the old rules. They were barbaric. Also, Clinton tried to make it possible for gays to serve openly, but the service chiefs revolted. DADT was his fallback. He also tried to do health care. He was a bit of a John the Baptist character.
Villago Delenda Est
10 days ago was my brother’s birthday.
He would have been 56.
He was one of the victims of the plague that Ronald Reagan willfully ignored in the 80’s.
Friends rallied around my parents when he passed. All the bullshit died when an actual human being that they had known was the victim.
So many lives lost through ignorance, stupidity, and willful neglect.
O. Felix Culpa
@Omnes Omnibus: He ate locusts and honey?
Betty Cracker
@Thoroughly Pizzled: My one and only sister, the roach!
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus: DADT was an intermediate step to where we are now. The same arguments used against racial integration were used against gays, by guys like Colin Powell, who just did not get it on both levels.
If you’re a professional, you leave your sexuality behind when you don the uniform. You’ve got a job to do.
Amir Khalid
@NR:
Wasn’t DADT Bill Clinton’s compromise with the impossibility of legislative action to let LGBT people serve? American society as a whole wasn’t anywhere near as accepting of LGBT people then as it is now. Let alone the US military culture of the time, which tended to have socially conservative NCOs and officers, and was anti-gay to the point of actively undermining DADT’s intent: to make it clear that if your private life didn’t interfere with your military role, it was none of the military’s business.
ETA: Omnes said it first, and said it better.
Omnes Omnibus
@O. Felix Culpa: Big Macs and Egg McMuffins. OTOH, I think you may have grabbed the wrong part of my analogy. It may be my fault. If so, I apologize.
O. Felix Culpa
@Omnes Omnibus: No worries. Sending good wishes for the health of your Saab. Plus, I failed to use the sarcasm font, also too.
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: Can you calculate the firing data under pressure?* Do you do your share of the KP, AO policing, etc.? if so, no one should give a fuck about anything else.
*Too artillery specific? You know what I mean.
Amir Khalid
@O. Felix Culpa:
The chitinous exoskeleton on insects makes them a crunchy snack (and a popular one, in some countries) when deep-fried. I’ve never tried them with honey, though.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@Villago Delenda Est: Sorry about your brother.
Omnes Omnibus
@O. Felix Culpa: One worries about loved ones. No matter how silly it is.
@Villago Delenda Est: Sorry about your brother. You know better than I do what DADT and then the ability to freely serve mean.
randy khan
@Anne Laurie:
I met my first openly gay people around 1975. My dad worked at a company in the entertainment biz that had its offices in Greenwich Village. Two of the men who worked there were a couple, and I met them at a company barbecue. I mostly remember thinking they were kind of funny (ha-ha, not strange), but my dad treated them and talked about them like it was no big deal, which in retrospect was quite something in the mid-1970s.
I knew four people who were killed by AIDS, and I have a friend who got diagnosed – years before I knew him – just at the point when effective drugs became available, and who spent a long time thinking he was going to die soon. One of the people who died was a work colleague, someone who was highly respected for what he did, and after he died the guy in charge wrote about Lawrence in the company newsletter in a surprisingly touching way. In thinking about it now, it was symbolic of something of a turning point in how gay people were regarded.
O. Felix Culpa
@Villago Delenda Est: Those were dreadful days and the losses just kept coming. I’m deeply sorry about your brother.
gene108
@efgoldman:
I think you have it backwards. The bigots and fascists are fighting a rear guard action to grind down progress.
If they had their way miscegenation laws would still exist, gays would have no rights, maybe internment camps for Muslims and a complete ban on every person from a Muslim majority country entering the USA*.
We are so far from what they want and moving further away with every generation, they really are struggling to block progress. They will succeed in throwing up roadblocks, but it is a fight they know they are losing for the hearts and minds of most Americans.
* Keep in mind immigration from China and India was completely blocked from the late 19th century until the early 1950’s and really did not become feasibly in any large numbers until the 1965 immigration reforms.
O. Felix Culpa
@Amir Khalid: Fried grasshopper was a seasonal delicacy when I lived in Kampala, but it wasn’t served with honey either. Boys would sell them in paper bags on the roadside.
Omnes Omnibus
@gene108: Very good point. Thank you.
gene108
@NR:
How wonderful were things in the military for gays before DADT?
Just asking, because the way some go on about DADT makes me think it made things worse for gays in the military and everything was just fine for them, before Bill Clinton screwed things up.
Omnes Omnibus
@O. Felix Culpa: I have never eaten them, but my dad has – he says they are very bitter tasting. His review is what has kept me from trying them – bitter is one of my fave flavs.
Amir Khalid
@O. Felix Culpa:
There’s an episode of The X-Files where Scully is offered a live insect as a snack, and accepts. Gillian Anderson ate the insect for real on camera, no faking, no cutting away to something else. Now that’s acting.
Betty Cracker
@Villago Delenda Est: So sorry about your brother. The heartache and waste of those terrible years scarred those of us who lived through it forever. And of course Republicans were all about ignoring the crisis at best and repudiating the victims at worst. A good reminder that their recent monstrousness is nothing new.
Mart
I worked with one of the first gay man ever diagnosed with AIDS when he was working in France. His rate of decline from healthy to dead was frightening. There were few drugs to slow his death. From another era we knew so little – an aisle meeting started at work and someone asked us to quiet down. We moved into the stricken mans empty office as he was in his last stage. As soon as the door closed one of the folks said do we want to be in here? And we all ran out of the room, obnoxious gay bashers and those accepting. Weird times. I have since paid careful attention to science. A few years ago I told several customers to relax about the Ebola virus (to the chagrin of sales); and that travel bans were not the answer. Guess with Trump in charge we will have to rely on France’s scientists again.
Omnes Omnibus
@gene108: Before DADT, you could be quietly gay and get a bad conduct/dishonorable discharge if someone found out. After, no one could ask, even if you played Judy Garland and Smiths songs all the time. And if they did ask, you had no obligation to answer. One could serve quietly – without penalty.
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: Forgot the word not.
FlipYrWhig
@Omnes Omnibus: I’ve never seen the stats on this but my hunch would be that the hullabaloo over “gays in the military” was one of the last straws in the collapse of the Solid South as Democratic stronghold. The Senate deliberating DADT had as D’s in good standing Richard Shelby (AL, swung from D to R in 1994), Howell Heflin (AL), Sam Nunn (GA, vigorously opposed to gays in the military), Dale Bumpers (AR), David Pryor (AR), Wendell Ford (KY), Bennett Johnston (LA), John Breaux (LA), Jim Sasser (TN), Ernest Hollings (SC), David Boren (OK), and Harlan Matthews (TN, Gore’s temporary replacement).
The partisan map is SO different now…
(That roster is also relevant to people who like to claim that the contemporary Democratic Party is to the right of where it used to be.)
Omnes Omnibus
@FlipYrWhig: My Government major was completed back when political philosophy courses were all we really needed. And then I got a law degree. I cannot answer that question.
Anne Laurie
@efgoldman: Ryan White, poor kid. Yeah, it was young hemophiliacs and somewhat-less-young celebrity athletes (I remember tshirts that said “Wear a condom, no matter how MAGIC you think your JOHNSON is”) who made HIV+ status ‘sympathetic’… but that was the second wave, behind the one where ‘ordinary people’ learned to walk cautiously around the neighbor / coworker / parishioner who’d lost a loved one “after a lingering illness”, or just no-cause-mentioned.
joel hanes
@condorcet runner-up:
It’s more than a little sobering that decades later this is literally still happening.
Yes. And sobering again to realize that, given what happens today —
how incalculably, unimaginably much worse must it have been from 1880 to 1950.
hitchhiker
Two films on Netflix get so much of this right. One is Milk, in which Harvey Milk starts a revolution in the ’70s that involves refusing to be ashamed of being gay. The other is How to Survive a Plague, which is about the struggle against the “gay plague.”
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus: I can chart out a multichannel path under pressure. Not the same as a firing solution under pressure, of course (I did that in general training, and I was a “3rd Lieutenant” in an FA battalion) in that if you screw up a multichannel path, rounds do not land outside of the impact area…
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: I get you.
eclare
@Villago Delenda Est: Oh I am so sorry
Villago Delenda Est
Thanks to all for your kind words about my brother. I miss him, for first, the fashion advice, and second, because after YEARS of being part of a tag team against me (along with my sister…I’m the oldest) he switched sides. The mother hen stuff got to him.
NoraLenderbee
@gene108:
It’s the classic libertarian POV. Everything worked perfectly and the lion lay down with the lamb until the darned government interfered with those stupid regulations.
Cathie from Canada
Great post. Our daughter married a year ago last Sunday surrounded by friends and family, and we were all so very happy.
Sometime in the early 2000s, I remember calling into a local radio station when the somewhat-rightwing host was nattering on about how unimaginable it was that Canada should allow gay people to marry. I told him that as the mother of a gay person, OF COURSE I wanted her to be able to get married someday and why shouldn’t she be able to do this? He was actually somewhat shocked — it had never occurred to him before, I guess, that gay people actually had parents just like straights do, and that gay people’s parents loved them and wanted them to be happy too.
Canada had a Catholic prime minister at that time, Paul Martin — he said that originally he had been opposed to gay marriage. But when the Canadian supreme court called it a matter of civil rights rather than a religious issue, he found he could agree and support gay marriage on those grounds. I thought it was a fine example of how a political leader could frame an issue to lead people toward acceptance.
TenguPhule
@O. Felix Culpa: Salt and Chili pepper flavored?
TenguPhule
@NR:
So we can expect Trump to reinstate it by Labor Day.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
On the ship I was on we had a gay sailor. In 1971. I’d bet that out of 300 people there were more but no body was talking. He made no attempt to hide it but he also made no attempt to come out. IOW an early DADT. The only reason I know this fellow was gay was I saw him out and about one afternoon in Charleston, SC making out with a friend. Nice guy, good sailor. A couple of guys wanted to turn him in but surprisingly more than a few people talked them out of doing so. And they weren’t people that I expected to be so reasonable. At all. I seem to recall the comments were along the line of “Mind your own fucking business.”
RandomMonster
We are so fortunate to have Betty to express such lovely thoughts. I’m of her age group and like her I never thought I’d see such progress on gay rights for the many gay friends who made such a difference in my life. It’s an amazement that should be cherished in dark times.
Major Major Major Major
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
Too upbeat, but I see what you mean…
NotMax
Wouldn’t elevate it to the status of a special mention save for the (emphasis added) bolded bit.
Mike J
@FlipYrWhig:
In the same era that DADT went into effect, public approval of Loving v Virginia, the supreme court ruling that legalized interracial marriage, broke 50% approval. 1997 was the first time. All of a sudden most people thought it was ok for black people to marry white people. At the same time, the commander in chief said gays could serve in the military.
Amir Khalid
@Villago Delenda Est:
I felt something when I saw your brother’s age. I’ll be 56 myself in a few weeks, almost exactly the same age. It was easier then not to care about people with AIDS, because they were seen as The Other. It’s embarrassing now to look back on how some people didn’t just look away from the suffering, but trivialised or even mocked it.
Jeffg166
instagram.com/the_aids_memorial/
Elizabelle
@Cathie from Canada:
Excellent path to take. I am sick of the ugly-hearted “Christianists” in our country. And I agree, they are in their last throes, but they’re taking way too long to exit the stage.
TriassicSands
Progress has been made, and in some states it may continue over the next 3-1/2 years. Nationally, with Sessions as Attorney General and Reverend Justice Gorsuch and Cardinal Justice Alito leading the charge on the Court, we may see some serious regression. Kennedy – may he live long – may be the only thing standing in the way. The tide of history is running inexorably against those bigots, but progress is always in fits and starts, two steps forward, one step back. The problem with Sessions, et al. is they want to take us back several hundred steps.
I just watched the film “Loving” tonight about the SCOTUS case that ultimately struck down the anti-miscegenation laws in the US. (The film itself was a disappointment to me — I would prefer to have seen the 2012 Peabody Award winning documentary “The Loving Story.”) It made me think of what would have happened if Gorsuch, the religious zealot, had been on the Court in 1967. Would the decision have been 8-1? When Gorsuch was lying his way through his hearings, what bothered me most about him was his religious extremism. We’ll see more of it if and when someone manages to challenge a “death with dignity” law somewhere. I have little doubt Gorsuch would vote to strike down any such law that came within the grasp of his legal reach. He’s definitely strikes me as the kind of Christian who is willing to force his own religious beliefs on others. Not just willing, but obligated. Since he was confirmed to the Court, I’ve felt that Alito was the most dangerous justice. Thomas is crazy, but everyone knows that, so his influence is limited. But Alito is one of those walk softly and (legally) bludgeon your opponents to death wingers. Gorsuch may be worse. Time will tell.
TriassicSands
@Elizabelle:
I wish I had your optimism about that. I think it is going to get worse. If Trump gets another SCOTUS appointment, and the moderating vote of Kennedy is gone, things may get much, much worse. As in the disappearance of the separation of Church and State. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch strike me as nearly certain “Yea” votes to dismantle the wall. And I worry about Roberts.
Elizabelle
@TriassicSands: Not that much we can do about that right now, and it saps energy to worry about it. Maybe the universe has a surprise in store for TrumpWorld.
I wanna see a LOT more information about the election hacking. And I don’t think “Deep State” has gone quiet.
Tomorrow is Friday. The Friday before the July 4th holiday. Hmmmm.
TriassicSands
@Elizabelle:
I never let worrying sap my energy. I tend to be concerned and concern energizes me.
You’re right, it’s almost the 4th of July weekend. One of the three biggies that define summer. Memorial Day, the 4th, and Labor Day. When all the crazies come out.
It’s almost time for me to don my Kevlar-lined Styrofoam suit and seek refuge in the back of my deepest closet until the 5th. If only I had a bomb shelter.
O. Felix Culpa
@TenguPhule: Piri piri. It’s the best.
Aleta
Thank you Betty C.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
One of the biggest reasons I have such contempt for Colin Powell is that he led the charge in this – which puts his complete failure to speak up about My Lai, Iran-contra, or the Iraq War in sobering perspective. Normally, you might be able to rationalize that as the behavior of a Good Soldier who Follows Orders and Doesn’t Get Mixed Up In Politics (although that still wouldn’t be an excuse for obvious reasons). But the fact that he was willing to take on his own commander-in-chief in a highly public media fight over gay rights shows that he wasn’t even that kind of guy. He was willing to buck the trend; he just didn’t think the other things were a big enough deal to justify it.
Whether that’s because he was a political hack just performing his loyalty to Team Republican, or just an asshole operating on the standard conservative morality of “war crimes, crimes against the constitution, and lying the nation into war are just boys being boys, but having same-gender sex, THAT’S just too serious an issue to ignore!” is left as an exercise to the reader. Neither really makes him look any better.
J R in WV
@efgoldman:
I’m sure the motorcycle cop had a good laugh back at the cop house after work. You despicable lawbreaking jaywalker!!!
I didn’t know what jaywalking was until I saw signs in one big city or another telling people “no jaywalking this block”, etc. Had to watch to see what people weren’t doing right there that was going on other places. Maybe Philly, back in the late 1960s? I’m a small town boy, I could ride my bike downtown WITH my dogs.
-ly Ballou
@Amir Khalid:
Divine and Choi Min-sik say “Hold my beer.”
J R in WV
@Chris:
The Good General ended any chance at a positive historical review when he lied about “weapons of mass destruction” at the UN General Assembly. But he laid a good foundation for being regarded as just another republican military hack much earlier in his career when he took on the “duty” to cover up the horrible My Lai massacre.
A Despicable walking monster camoed up in a uniform with sparkly bits on his chest.
Anastasio Beaverhausen
Happy Pride, indeed. As a fifty-something white man I have an unusual familiarity with the progress that has been made in the fight for gay rights. I am a physician who treated patients with AIDS before HART, and I was active duty even before DADT. Then I went and fell in love with an undocumented immigrant. Things were very bleak for many years, but slowly things began to change. First, we were able to get married in our state, and later “justice arrived like a lightning bolt” in the form of Obergefell. We suddenly had full federal rights and protections. I actually invited Obama to our wedding and months later, received a very personalized letter of congratulations and support for us as a couple. Fast forward, and now the mister has his green card, passed his citizenship interview and will be naturalized within weeks. And we were able to adopt two beautiful children, one from Florida, one from Texas. But lest any of you think the fight is over, let me tell you about Texas. Even though we have a court order from Virginia naming us as our son’s parents, the state of Texas has still not re-issued his birth certificate with our names. It is 5 months now, and waiting. Trump and his ilk are giving cover for homophobic officials across this country to slow walk the exercise of their offices. Just look at the recent Supreme Court ruling forcing Arkansas to comply with Obergefell. What should have been a 9-0 decision actually had 3 dissenters. Don’t let down your guard folks.
AxelFoley
@hitchhiker:
It’s a good fucking thing President Obama didn’t listen to the likes of Rachel Maddow or that dumbass Lt. Choi, of which Maddow said Obama could end DADT with an Executive Order if he really wanted to end it, and Choi constantly attcked Obama as a homophobe.
Anyone hear from that dumbass since his photo op with Harry Reid after DADT was ended? I think the last I saw of him, he was getting his ass beat in Russia after a protest.
AxelFoley
@jl:
That’s lowballing the shit outta President Obama. Name 5 presidents better than him.