“My wife and I just watched the gay Christmas movie, ‘Single All The Way,’ which managed to tick every smarmy box the genre has to offer. As for a realistic portrait of your typical thirty-something gay men, I hate to stereotype but I just wasn’t convinced.”
A FANFARE OF BREAKING POLITICAL NEWS
I write as the year comes to a close in a fanfare of breaking political news mixed in with the pleasant slow-motion tedium of the holiday season. The January 6 commission recommends indicting Trump! I spend days searching for the winter gloves I wear once every two years. The Democrats pass the Respect for Marriage Act! I make an alcoholic cocoa concoction using all the bottles of booze in the house that contain one-inch or less in order to be able to throw them out. The High Court hears arguments in the case of the antigay Colorado web designer! Our Christmas Day flight out of St. Louis to DC gets cancelled and we lie around on the floor of the airport for hours.
How about with this quote from Donald Trump, addressing the Log Cabin (gay) Republicans at a Mar-A-Lago gala on December 22?
“We are fighting for the gay community, and we are fighting and fighting hard. With the help of many of the people here tonight in recent years, our movement has taken incredible strides, the strides you’ve made here is incredible.”
Our movement? Really? This is from the man who allowed antigay conservatives to rewrite cabinet department policies and ignore Supreme Court precedent to nullify the progress from the Obama years. On December 9, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled that the anti-discrimination regulations in Obama care that protect gays and transgenders from bias in health care could not be enforced against Catholic medical groups in North Dakota that prefer to give transgendered patients the middle finger rather than let them access treatment. The religious groups also want employers to be allowed to blow off workplace civil rights laws under Title VII rather than insure their staff for transgender related medical services.
The three-judge panel, all Republican appointed, allowed the discrimination to continue for the duration of the underlying case, even though the Trumpy policies it favors were all subsequently supplanted by Biden policies. Because, because, it’s complicated! For one thing, there’s a dispute over whether the legal interpretations of cabinet agencies are binding on judges.
Second, these agency policies fluctuate depending on the political stance of the executive branch. It’s true that the Biden administration has reversed the antigay Trump interpretations, but have they? The bureaucracy is such that changing their policies is like turning around giant ship, with months of preliminary steps and final revisions and this and that, during which time it seems as if everyone gets to operate under whichever policy they prefer based on the fact that the policy is in transition.
I could go on, but I won’t. The High Court has ruled (in 2020) that gay and trans discrimination is the same as sex discrimination, clearly illegal throughout federal law. Yet conservative judges and lawmakers have simply screwed around with technicalities to render that decision unenforceable. That’s the bottom line.
THE SUGAR-SWEET COUNTRY BOYS
Wouldn’t it be nice to just stick with useless GLBT gossip, with maybe a few sports items and humorous observations about TV commercials? In this vein, my wife and I just watched the gay Christmas movie, “Single All The Way,” which managed to tick every smarmy box the genre has to offer. As for a realistic portrait of your typical thirty-something gay men, I hate to stereotype but I just wasn’t convinced.
First of all, how many of you would meet a really cute guy and immediately suggest a coffee date at a great new cafe that serves yummy pumpkin lattes, followed by a trip to the Christmas tree lot? I thought not. At least the guy eventually asked the other guy if he wanted to come up to his apartment. But that wasn’t until the end of date three, which consisted of an evening at the children’s Christmas pageant. Maybe that was date four. Anyway, they decided they weren’t “a match” even though they were both hot as hell and could have easily made that determination after a few rolls in the hay.
That left our hero free to realize that he was really in love with his best friend, and they both decided to leave the LA rat race and move to his remote hometown in rural New Hampshire to open a plant store and be close to his fun and attractive extended family.
I don’t which is worse, the grotesquely nasty lesbian vicar or the sugar-sweet country boys. Can we not settle on something in the middle?
A TISSUE OF FALSEHOODS
By rights I should end this column by reviewing the High Court’s oral arguments in that Colorado web designer case, which will determine whether or not some nitwit woman has the Free Speech “right” to ignore the state’s civil rights law and offer wedding web sites to heterosexual couples only. Bear in mind that this character hasn’t even started offering any wedding web sites, so it’s not as if she is being restrained from continuing her business. She just wants to be able to post the equivalent of “no gays allowed” on her future services. And of course, thanks to Sam Alito and his rabid partners on the conservative side of the Court, she’ll probably be given the green light for this some time in the spring or early summer.
But let’s not ruin the holiday spirit. Instead, I ask you how the hell that lying “openly gay” madman, George Santos, acquired over $750,000 to contribute to his campaign for Congress despite the fact that a few years ago he was making $15 an hour as a customer service person in some call center and was evicted several times for nonpayment of rents.
Presumably he amassed far more than $750,000 since that was the sum he spent on his run for office, which as I’m sure you read somewhere else, was based on a tissue of falsehoods. His college degrees, work experience at major banks, ownership of various properties in the U.S. and Brazil and background as the grandson of holocaust survivors is all bull, yet he is now an elected member of Congress with the little pin and everything. I think he will also automatically get some nice pension and lifetime perks.
Infuriating!
