Random Thoughts

The author would like to apologize for the fact that this article was not posted a month ago when he wrote it. I don’t actually want to care all that much about gay marriage, but the whole idea that it is 2009 and a big percentage of the population zealously wants to class an entire segment of the population as subhuman and undeserving of the same rights as the rest of us creeps me the hell out. I’m getting married in a few months, and it really bugs me that there’s a huge movement that wants to cheapen *my* marriage by turning into an instrument with which to spread hate and oppression.

• During some bitching about the President, the conservative “expert” on The Situation Room today said that he was very disappointed in President Obama’s “stimulus pakistan”. At least, that’s what the closed captions said. Methinks the captioner needs a fresh pot of coffee.
• After a week of teabagging, the moral right went on to produce an advertisement through an organization called “NOM” denouncing gay marriage and claiming that they wanted to form a “rainbow coalition” to protect their “freedoms”. NOM’s other big project is called “2M4M”. “Teabagging”. “NOM”, “Rainbow coalition”, “2M4M”. Has the right just decided to stop trying and write The Daily Show‘s material for them?
• One of the fine folks who comments on Slacktivist hit the nail on the head about how gay marriage hurts the “freedoms” of heterosexuals: If you’re a homophobe, and homosexuality stops being socially stigmatized, suddenly you are no longer “normal” — you’re the weirdo who’s got an irrational beef with gay people. You’re the slightly shameful elderly relative no one likes to be seen with in public because she might forget that it’s no longer 1950 and she isn’t allowed to make a darker-skinned person give up their seat for her. The “threat” to their way of life is that their bigotry will suddenly make them what they most fear to be: atypical.
• And speaking of that NOM commercial, in it a doctor actress playing a doctor claims that if gay people can marry, she’ll be forced to choose between her profession and her religion, because the state will force her to (vague). Leaving aside for the moment that I can’t even imagine how her religious freedom could conflict with her duties as a doctor in regards to gay marriage (I mean, there is exactly one big obvious thing that a doctor’s religious conviction might stand in the way of them doing that comes up on a regular basis, and I suspect that married homosexuals have a remarkably low demand for abortions and contraceptives), I just want to point out: if your religious convictions are so strong as to prevent you from doing your job, perhaps you should have considered a profession which you do not enter by swearing an oath to Apollo!