I’m almost tempted to start a little business here in Texas and refuse to serve a few of my gay brothers and sisters. Like Kim Davis, I can announce that I have recently been born again, set up a crowd funding account and watch the big bucks roll in.
BUT WHO ARE WE TO JUDGE?
I was just about to say nice things about the pope when, hello? He met with that nutcase publicity hound, Kentucky’s own Kim Davis. It felt as if I had come home from a magical five-course dinner in a charming French restaurant only to be hit with a bout of food poisoning. And to think I fell for the line about “please pray for me, and if you don’t pray, then send me good wishes.”
I confess to you FIGHT readers, something I have not told anyone else to date; when he said that from the Capitol balcony, I stopped for a minute and sent my good wishes to the pope! And what did he do with my good wishes? Spat them to the dirt like sour milk.
Here’s what I wrote in another column just a few days ago:
“There’s something endearing about the guy even though he represents a patriarchal and homophobic institution…I like his smile. Is that wrong of me?”
Don’t you hate people who quote themselves. I do (honestly) but I wanted to demonstrate my erstwhile affection for the man. I capitalized “pope” in that column, which I think is stylistically correct, but never again. From now on it’s pope with a small p to match the mindedness that characterized his secretive exchange of hugs with the mean-spirited clerk.
You remember I’m sure that Davis was released from jail after her deputies started issuing marriage licenses to one and all. Ordered not to interfere with that process, she immediately disobeyed, rewriting the marriage paperwork produced by her office to the extent that its validity is now in doubt. This is not about Kim’s own “religious freedom” to opt out of her role in gay weddings. Instead, it’s all about Kim’s “freedom” to make sure that same-sex couples can’t make use of county services at all. Did the pope really want to put his stamp of approval on the ugly shenanigans of this self-serving fanatic? I guess so.
Those oysters were delicious. Loved the steak tartare.
HELLO MUDDAH, HELLO FADDISH
I imagine Kim will stay in the headlines as the ACLU battles for fairness in Rowan County and as her obnoxious lawyers continue to litigate. But we’ve had enough of her for one issue, don’t you think?
I gather one of Hillary Clinton’s emails concerned a move to remove “mother” and “father” from passport applications and replace the terms with “parent one” and “parent two.” Clinton, who read about the change in the Washington Post, dashed off an annoyed message to someone, demanding to know who made the decision and ordering it reversed, which it was. “We need to address this today or we will be facing a huge Fox-driven media storm led by Palin et al,” she wrote.
If it were anybody else, I think I’d be pissed at this story. But you know how it is. When it’s your candidate on the hot seat you tend to see things differently. I’m a big Hillary fan and she has a good record on LGBT issues, particularly at State. So I give her a pass based on the political logic behind her reaction.
At the same time, I recognize that my pro-Clinton bias is at work here, but that’s just the way it is. Speaking of Hillary’s emails, why aren’t we seeing every single email that Jeb Bush wrote while he was governor of Florida, or every single email Rubio has sent from his Senate office?
THE HIGH EXPECTATIONS OF SOFT BIGOTRY
Did you hear that some guy drove 80 miles to buy a couple of pizzas from the Indiana restaurant that announced they would “never cater a gay wedding?” He drove them back to his own wedding, where one hopes he and his groom had some alternative menu items available as well. Nothing says “celebrate!” like cold crust and dry pepperoni.
Oddly, writing that last sentence made me hungry.
The restaurant, Memories Pizza, raised $842,000 in six months on gofundme, explaining to would-be contributors that the backlash from their pious stand would force them to close their doors. Not so apparently. Ignoring the fact that no one, gay or straight, would have a pizza joint cater their wedding to begin with, the restaurant owners capitalized on their fifteen minutes of fame in a big way, wouldn’t you say?
Meanwhile, Sweet Cakes by Melissa, another antigay business, did close due to bad publicity and a losing court case. Unlike Indiana, public accommodations in Oregon are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, so Melissa, who moved her operation to her home, was ordered to pay $135,000 in damages to the lesbians who were denied service.
Now she has refused to pay, which might be understandable if she was a typical member of the middle-class. Not many of us have six figures hanging around in our bank accounts available for settling lawsuits. But like Memories Pizza, Melissa Klein and her husband have also cashed in a half million smackaroos from sympathetic Christian donors, so she can easily afford to write the check.
I know. I’m almost tempted to start a little business here in Texas and refuse to serve a few of my gay brothers and sisters. Like Kim Davis, I can announce that I have recently been born again, set up a crowd funding account and watch the big bucks roll in. I’d have extra cachet with the Kristian Krowd by virtue of being an ex-gay.
INCREASE YOUR WORD POWER
I just stumbled upon a video of straight people trying to figure out the meaning of LGBT slang terms. Sadly, there were several that stumped me, even with my decades of community membership. Am I the only one who has never heard of the expression “platinum gay?” In case there are others equally clueless, it refers to a gay man who was born by Caesarian section and has never seen a vagina. I also failed to define “unicorn,” a bisexual woman who will agree to have sex with a straight guy and his girlfriend, perhaps because that term for a rare breed sounds like a heterosexual slang term to me.
Finally, I’ve never heard of a “side,” an alternative to a “top” or a “bottom” signifying a gay guy who doesn’t like anal sex from either position. In my day, we called those “lesbians in a gay man’s body.”
After I finished watching that I noticed a link to another video called: “Tequila donuts,” but when I went back to check it out it was gone. That’s fine actually. There are some things in life that are not meant to be combined, and I’d put hard alcohol and junk pastry among them.
SPEWING THAT VICIOUS VITRIOL
Mike Huckabee has jumped the shark, moving from jovial rightwing Christian conservative to full on raving lunatic in the space of a year or so.
In addition to his wild-eyed rally for Kim Davis, the man exploded on Frito-Lay the other day, excoriating the Pepsico subsidiary for making some promotional bags of rainbow Dorito chips as part of a fundraising drive for the It Gets Better Project.
It Gets Better, as you know, was conceived by Seattle-based activist Dan Savage as a campaign against youth suicide, compiling thousands of supportive videos from regular people, celebrities and politicians into a YouTube channel. Surely, not even Mike Huckabee could come out against such a humanitarian cause, could he?
“I hope that you will do some honest vetting about Dan Savage and his very hateful and vulgar comments toward Christians and his calls for violence and injury to people he disagrees with,” Huckabee wrote the company. “It is beyond me to understand how a responsible corporation would think that partnering with someone who spews the vicious vitriol that Savage does would be worthy of your corporate contributions.”
Talk about your vicious vitriol! The man’s unhinged.
