History of the Next Big Thing

I stumbled across this chart online, but can't be sure of the source - different sites credit it to different publications.  Still, it's food for thought.

Click to enlarge.

More Churches Okay with the Gay

Results from the 2014 Pew Research Center survey of religious life in America continue to be assessed.  This week, the Pew folks released these charts showing the change in acceptance of homosexuality among various Christian denominations between 2007 and 2014 (click to enlarge):

And here's a chart Pew created last July showing where American religious groups stand on same-sex marriage:

Also of interest from last summer is this chart showing religious affiliations in major U. S. cities:

In case you are wondering, Wikipedia lists the major American metro areas and their populations here.


And of course individuals vary widely in how much time they devote to church activities, as shown in this chart released last month:

Hitched in Taos, and Other Marriage News

Some video of the first same-sex weddings in Taos, New Mexico, last Wednesday the 28th. Dignity may be somewhat lacking in these impromptu ceremonies, but the emotions are all that they should be.




While we're on the topic of marriage, Chicago Cardinal Francis George, while ranting against how "irrational" gay marriage is, admits that "the Church did not invent marriage"; but "nature gives us marriage," so that's why we do it.  Say what?

It's also worth taking another look at this rather amazing chart of Biblical Marriage that I posted on the Blue Truck a year or two ago - at the link, you can download it yourself or share it on Facebook or Twitter.

And Mary Cheney, lesbian daughter of the former Vice-President who married her wife, Heather Poe, last year in D. C.,  today slammed her sister's announcement earlier this week that she is "not pro-gay marriage."  Mary said:

For the record, I love my sister, but she is dead wrong on the issue of marriage. Freedom means freedom for everyone. That means that all families — regardless of how they look or how they are made — all families are entitled to the same rights, privileges and protections as every other. It’s not something to be decided by a show of hands.

Finally, in the atrium of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D. C., tonight Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will officiate at the wedding of her good friend and Kennedy Center Director Michael Kaiser and government economist John Roberts (no relation to Chief Justice John G. Roberts). On the guest list are stars of opera and Broadway, as well as the cream of Washington society. Ginsburg is already scheduled to celebrate another same-sex wedding next month.

My God, fellas - can you believe?? A GAY WEDDING presided over by a SUPREME COURT JUSTICE?!! Holy fuck, we're sure not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

And I have lived to see this day.

Marriage News Watch, 3/11/13

Matt Baume of the American Foundation for Equal Rights reports:




Read Clinton's complete statement here.


Also, here's a chart of states currently working on marriage equality from Policy Mic, via Joe.My.God.:

Click to enlarge.

The Homo Sin Flowchart

Click to enlarge.

Via Joe.My.God.

How Far We've Come

There's still a lot of work to be done, a lot more changes that need to be made. But OMG fellas, just look at this chart Sullivan posted:

I just wonder if any of you guys under 40 can really understand the enormous difference between 1973 and now. Back then, nobody was out - not anywhere in Texas or across the Deep South. You never saw any other gay people - not on TV, very rarely in the movies (and they were always villains, or came to a bad end), and most certainly not in daily life at school, at work, anywhere.

Once in a great while you might see someone you thought was a little "swishy," but never anyone who admitted being gay.

A very short true story from May of 1974: I was 18, en route back to Texas where my nanaw was dying. Had a layover in the Birmingham airport for a couple hours. Went in the men's room to use the john. There in one of the stalls, somebody had written a typical vulgarity (why is there rarely any grafitti in restrooms nowadays? the walls used to be covered with it, everyplace) - probably "I want to suck your dick," or something like that.

And there beneath it, very untypically, somebody else had written: I wish I knew you, or someone like you.

Man, that hit me like a shot. Somebody else is gay, somebody else feels as lonely as I do, I thought.

In a way, that was a kind of comfort or reassurance at least, knowing I wasn't the only guy in the world who felt these things. But in 1974, how could you ever hope to meet another gay man? Especially if, like your Head Trucker, you had no gaydar and no idea of "cruising." There was just no way to ever meet anyone else; you were just stuck, all alone in your gay soul.

Yes, by that point in time I knew there were gay people in places like New York and SF; but that was all so far away and so alien to anything I could imagine, they might as well have been living on the moon.

And yes, I knew there were gay bars somewhere; in fact, there was reputed to be one in the city where I lived. But at 18, I would have been terrified to death of walking into a place like that all alone. And besides, that particular place had been raided by the cops a year or so before this story took place; it made the front page of the local paper, several guys were arrested for "lewd and lascivious conduct." So who in his right mind wanted to take a chance on getting arrested and being identified in the paper like that? Just unthinkable.

I wish I knew you. Those words scrawled on a restroom wall have haunted me all these years. If you were gay back then, you were invisible to the rest of the world - and even worse, invisible to each other. No hope, it seemed then, of ever knowing anyone else like yourself, ever.

And look at the chart again: all you ever heard about gays, if they were mentioned at all, which was rarely, was that they were sick, perverted, wicked, and horribly unhappy. There was a huge bestseller came out about 1972 that everybody read and talked about, written by a medical doctor: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, but Were Afraid to Ask.

Somewhere I got hold of a copy and of course the first thing I turned to was the chapter about homosexuals. The doctor had nothing but witty good things to say about all kinds of hetero sex; but when it came to the homos, it was nothing but bad news. They're miserable, lonely, often alcoholics and drug addicts, most are depressed, and they often kill themselves, he wrote. And nothing will change that, he added, not even "gay lib" and pretending they are normal.

Well of course, after reading that kind of supposedly expert advice, all you really wanted to do was go kill yourself for sure, then. No hope of happiness: a lifetime of loneliness and misery was all the world offered you, isolated and afraid and hating yourself.

I wish I knew you. So many times over the years, I've thought of that plaintive wish in the depths of Alabama, from the depths of someone's heart. I hope he did live to come out, make friends, have lovers, be happy and gay and free. I did too, eventually - but it was a long road ahead from that point in time, and I have to tell ya guys, it took some guts and grit to reach a better place.

And yes, it still takes some gumption and a truckload of bravado to be out in a little Texas town, even in 2009. My husband and I were effectively out where we lived, though we didn't talk about it; but the simple fact of two men living together and going and doing everything together - even the church potluck dinners - was a pretty loud advertisement. And so we pretty well "integrated" that town.

Where I am now, though, quite alone and - irony of fate - pretty well isolated again, I keep a low profile. I suppose my closest work associates have it figured out, me living alone and never any talk of a lady friend. But all that big-city activist talk aside, there's no good reason for me to "come out" here; there is simply no point making yourself a victim, when it would not serve any useful purpose.

Still, my little doings aside, the world has changed profoundly in its attitudes towards gays in these last forty years; a wonderful change. But that's just our corner of the world; our brothers and sisters in Africa, for example, are still going through what we experienced all those years ago, and worse.

So as we look forward now to a new decade and more progress on winning our full civil rights, it's good to recall how far we've come already, in less than one lifetime - and be glad, very glad. I hope before too many more years pass, that red line will be way above the black one.

And about damn time, too.

How We've Been Screwed

You have to see this full size and let the implications sink in; please click to enlarge.

From National Geographic via Andrew Sullivan, who remarks:

If anyone can look at this and not see a simply insane way to distribute health care, a system so inefficient no socialist country could ever replicate it, then they have stronger rationalization skills than I possess.

Americans are being ripped off. The current reform will only move this line marginally, but it will begin that vital process - because it will almost certainly improve the health outcomes of the 30 million or so people who will soon have access for the first time to insurance. And its cost-control measures, pushing back ever so slightly against fee-for service medicine at a time of limitless healthcare potential, might help too.

What this this graph does do is show why the current system, while providing excellent care for many, nonetheless does so at crippling expense to everyone. Without the kind of reform Obama has initiated, there's no way this will get better. We should think of this health insurance reform as the beginning, not the end, of some public policy sanity. And conservatives would do better to help add more cost-controls than run around screaming socialism when the current system has failed so dramatically in any collective or economic sense.

A further thought.  Notice the chart includes "all public and private spending on care . . . [including] hospital infrastructure." Hmm. Well I would like to see the figures without that last bit included. Because hospital construction in this country is no doubt a lot more expensive than in some other countries: just stop and think about the real estate values in urban areas of the U.S., for one thing. So that distorts what we are really interested in, the amount people and insurers and government pay for health services and supplies, you know?

The Healthcare Plan, as of Now

From the Wonk Room, via Andrew Sullivan:

What I Say:  Sigh.  Don't take anything in this chart as gospel truth, guys.  That high-level economics and accounting is infinitely convoluted, who knows what the real fall-out will be when and if all this gets enacted and trickled down to us peons.

What I do know is that the vast majority of people in this country cannot afford to pay $10,133 a year for health insurance, if that's what's required by law.  There is no fucking way.  That's nearly $850 a month!  Who the hell thinks this shit up?  That might be what some fine folks on the East Coast making over 100K a year could pay, but I can tell you for a certain fact that the single mom down the street raising two kids on 30K a year or less - and millions and millions of other people, single or married, with or without kids - flat cannot pay that kind of money.

Anybody wants to encourage the shitheads who are drooling at the mouth to start Civil War II, well you just keep on with stupid stuff like this.

Where I work, an employee with a spouse and kids gets Blue Cross for about $350 a month, I believe.  Which is a big chunk of money, more than it ought to be; but people manage to pay it somehow.  I lucked out - because I'm single, I don't have to pay out of pocket, the employer covers it, which I think is worth about $150 a month.

Still, your Head Trucker has to shake his head at these ridiculous figures coming out of Washington.  I say the only fair and responsible way to do it - not that anybody will listen to me - is to impose a flat healthcare tax of 5 percent on Adjusted Gross Income for everybody* making between $20K and $100K a year; zero if you make less, double that if you make more, triple if you're a millionaire.  And then you get all your healthcare free.

Which, according to my reading, is basically how it works in France and some other places.  You might have to pay ten bucks for a doctor visit, and fifty for an ER visit, something like that, but otherwise except for some nominal charges here and there, it's all free.  Which gives the government a great incentive to keep everybody employed AND to keep healthcare costs down.

That includes drug costs.  If Wal-Mart can give out generic prescription drugs for 4 bucks a pop, the government can too.  It's a sin to be making a profit out of people's illness.  Do y'all agree with me on that?

----------

* - I went and did some figurin' off the tables at the Wikipedia article on U.S. personal income.  Here's what I came up with (figures are for 2005).  Of the 211,832,000 individuals aged 15 or above, the breakdown is this:

• 82,611,000 make less than $20K a year.
• 116,006,000 make between $20K and $100K a year.
• 13,215,000 make more than $100K a year.

• Median income of the 155 million persons over the age of 15 who worked with earnings in 2005 was $28,567
• Of those individuals older than 25 with income, over 42% have incomes below $25,000. 
• Median personal income for the population 25 and older is $32,140. 

• Median household income for the whole country is $46,326. 
• 92.5 percent of all households (some have more than one employed member) have a total income of < $92,000.

Now you can play with those numbers yourself and see what kind of figures you come up with to finance healthcare reform.

Why Your Medical Bills Bite

Ezra Klein in the WaPo reports on his illuminating talk with the CEO of a major health insurance company:

Halvorson handed me an astonishing packet of charts. The material was put together by the International Federation of Health Plans, which is pretty much what it sounds like: an association of insurance plans in different countries. But it showed something I've never seen before, at least not at this level of detail: prices. . . .

There is a simple explanation for why American health care costs so much more than health care in any other country: because we pay so much more for each unit of care. As Halvorson explained, and academics and consultancies have repeatedly confirmed, if you leave everything else the same -- the volume of procedures, the days we spend in the hospital, the number of surgeries we need -- but plug in the prices Canadians pay, our health-care spending falls by about 50 percent.

In other countries, governments set the rates that will be paid for different treatments and drugs, even when private insurers are doing the actual purchasing. In our country, the government doesn't set those rates for private insurers, which is why the prices paid by Medicare, as you'll see on some of these graphs, are much lower than those paid by private insurers.