An Epigraph for the New Year

The world is in a sorry state, and does not seem likely to improve itself anytime soon. The American government is shut down, and the British government is tearing itself apart. This does not bode well for the peace or security of the human race, but what can anyone do about it? The population in both countries seems hopelessly polarized, and the center cannot hold, it seems, for much longer. The dawn of the new year is clouded with uncertainty, and who knows what sort of future will come lurching out of the mists and gloom?

I have no answers. All I know is that as long as we have strength and hope, we should do what we can to make our own corner of the world sane and safe, and that begins with loving our neighbors - or if that is too much to ask, then loving our nearest and dearest - whom we are most likely to take for granted. It is good sometimes to stop and consider the true meaning of the much-parodied, much-derided phrase "Charity begins at home."

While we cannot choose our families, we can choose our friends - and regardless of how many or few of either there are in our life at any given time, the thing that really matters, beyond all social and political questions, is how we treat one another. Life is a passing thing - but love endures and propagates itself in countless untold ways down the years, from heart to heart and from soul to soul, parent to child and friend to friend.

So in this uncertain world, let us love while we can and whom we can, for we are all of us merely creatures of a day.  We all know what we would like to get from this transitory life - but what do we have to give?

The dear old Queen, God bless her, said something in one of her recent Christmas messages that I keep reflecting upon. I offer it here to my truckbuddies as an epigraph for the new year before us:

Not all of us can do great things; but we can do small things with great love.

"Why Does That Woman Live with You?"

Andrew Sullivan, responding to a reader's description of growing up - more or less happily, it seems - with gay parents, but not having a word to explain their relationship to her friends:

Let me add something that I experienced as well. My in-laws have always been supportive and loving and tolerant. They accepted me at Christmas and other occasions and were glad their son had found a partner. But it was not until we told them that we were "engaged" that something suddenly clicked. They finally had a way to understand us and our love because they had the linguistic architecture to make sense of it. I was going to be their son-in-law! With those words. I became family - not Aaron's friend, or roommate or boyfriend or lover or what-have-you. But his husband. And thereby their family as well.

There was and is something about these words - engaged, married, husband - even though they may contain a mountain of different experiences, that made us a family. I think conservatives should favor the unification and mutual love and support of families. And that means they must by definition favor the mutual love and support of the gay people in them.

This is not about creating something new. It is about making a home for people who have been here all the time for centuries. It is about making the human family whole.

Jonathan Rauch: Letting Go of My Father

In this month's Atlantic, a very poignant essay by gay scholar and author Jonathan Rauch about the overwhelming task of caring for a helpless, elderly parent - a subject I suppose many of us can relate to, or have faced, or will face.  An excerpt:

Broaching the subject and confessing desperation was like uttering the password to a secret brotherhood of beleaguered, overwhelmed, weary, or sometimes just resigned adult caregivers. But the sect seemed ashamed to be seen.

As I reached my own breaking point, two things happened. First, my father caught sight of my distress. He would not accept assisted living on his own account, but when I told him that he was already in assisted living but that I was the assistance; that I was overwhelmed, underqualified, and barely hanging on emotionally; that I wanted to be his son again, not a nurse and nag and adversary—when I told him all that, and when his sister and the social worker chimed in, he acceded. He was still, after all, my father, and it was still his job, he understood, to care for me. Second, the inevitable happened. As his disease overtook him, not even he could deny his incapacity. And so he moved, reluctantly, to a nearby assisted-living place, which gave me the help I needed and, to no one’s surprise but his own, gave my father more rather than less independence. Another phase of the story then unfolded, ending with his death in December. His last gesture to me, so very characteristic, was to wave me away. He wanted me to go on with my life rather than hover by his bedside.

I did go on, but I emerged from the whole experience not a little indignant. The medical infrastructure for elder care in America is good, very good. But the cultural infrastructure is all but nonexistent. How can it be that so many people like me are so completely unprepared for what is, after all, one of life’s near certainties?

I would only add, the "medical infrastructure for elder care" might be "very good" in Washington, D.C. - but that, too, is all but nonexistent in smaller cities and rural communities across this country. Unless you have lots of money, of course. I cared for my dear mother for her last ten years of declining health, and it was just hell on wheels, boys, the crappy, indifferent care from doctors and hospitals - and no way to get her any home health care at all. Just me, and nobody else to help.

Pretty damn rough, let me tell you.

Straights Destroying the American Family

Unmarried breeders shamelessly flaunt their

immoral lifestyle on a public beach

Oh my. What would Ward and June Cleaver have said?

According to a report today in the New York Times, millions of straight guys are catching a free ride, and the straight girls are, apparently, loving it. (You see how those people are? No respect for traditional values, religion, or morality.)

Unmarried mothers gave birth to 4 out of every 10 babies born in the United States in 2007, a share that is increasing rapidly both here and abroad, according to government figures released Wednesday.

Before 1970, most unmarried mothers were teenagers. But in recent years the birthrate among unmarried women in their 20s and 30s has soared — rising 34 percent since 2002, for example, in women ages 30 to 34. In 2007, women in their 20s had 60 percent of all babies born out of wedlock, teenagers had 23 percent and women 30 and older had 17 percent.

Much of the increase in unmarried births has occurred among parents who are living together but are not married, cohabitation arrangements that tend to be less stable than marriages, studies show.

The pattern has been particularly pronounced among Hispanic women, climbing 20 percent from 2002 to 2006, the most recent year for which racial breakdowns are available. Eleven percent of unmarried Hispanic women had a baby in 2006, compared with 7 percent of unmarried black women and 3 percent of unmarried white women, according to government data drawn from birth certificates.

Titled “Changing Patterns of Nonmarital Childbearing in the United States,” the report was released by the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Out-of-wedlock births are also rising in much of the industrialized world: in Iceland, 66 percent of children are born to unmarried mothers; in Sweden, the share is 55 percent. (In other societies, though, the phenomenon remains rare — just 2 percent in Japan, for example.)

But experts say the increases in the United States are of greater concern because couples in many other countries tend to be more stable and government support for children is often higher.

“In Sweden, you see very little variation in the outcome of children based on marital status. Everybody does fairly well,” said Wendy Manning, a professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. “In the U.S., there’s much more disparity.” . . .

The District of Columbia and Mississippi had the highest rates of out-of-wedlock births in 2007: 59 percent and 54 percent, respectively. The lowest rate, 20 percent, was in Utah. In New York, the rate was 41 percent; in New Jersey, 34 percent; and in Connecticut, 35 percent. Sarah S. Brown, chief executive of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a nonprofit advocacy group, said sex and pregnancy were handled far too cavalierly in the United States, where rates of unplanned pregnancies, births and abortions are far higher than those of other industrialized nations.

“These trends may meet the needs of young adults,” she said, “but it’s far from clear that it’s helpful for children.”

Conservatives, please note: none of the above has anything whatsoever to do with gay people or same-sex marriage.

It's all your doing, straight people. So leave us gays out of the conversation, please - you want a scapegoat, he's right there in the mirror, looking at you. Just zip it up buddy - your mouth and your pants.

In fact, a statistic often overlooked by conservatives is that gay sex actually promotes family values by reducing the chance of unplanned preganancy to zero.

And aren't you glad, fellas?

Freedom Alert: Why Marriage Matters

A video essay from the ACLU on why the right to marry matters so very much: it's really not about romance or religion, it's about the equal protection of the laws.

And if that's not what this country is all about, I say the hell with it; for the glory of America is not its wealth, its size, its power and might. It's the enduringly radical idea that all men and women are created equal; and that ours is a government of, by, and for the people--all the people, not just the chosen few.

And just in my lifetime, gay people have gone from being scary, shadowy nonentities to visible, flesh-and-blood neighbors. We are people too; and our families are families too. We belong right here: we're not leaving, and we're certainly not going back in the hellhole closet that millions of us grew up in.

At the moment, the chances of defeating the anti-gay Proposition 8 in California are doubtful; I read on other blogs that the No on 8 ads they are running out there are pretty insipid and mealymouthed. They need to be running videos like this one.

Please share with any friends and family you have out there; this is the big turning point for us, and a setback in California would cripple the rights and happiness of millions of gay couples and families for years to come, all across the nation.

In the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

--That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.