Waitin' for the Weekend

Christianists Boo Gay Marine Vet Eric Alva

I am so fucking tired of these ignorant, self-righteous creeps who spew their hate and bigotry in the name of God.  From the Dallas Voice:

Anti-gay protesters reportedly booed a gay Marine veteran who lost his leg in the Iraq War while he was speaking in favor of a nondiscrimination ordinance at a San Antonio City Council meeting on Wednesday night. At a prayer vigil outside City Hall before the meeting, about 300 people protested the proposed addition to San Antonio’s nondiscrimination law that would add protections for sexual orientation, gender identity and veteran status.

“Let them vote ‘no’ to this ordinance, and ‘yes’ to the reign of the kingdom of God,” Pastor Charles Flowers said at the rally. About 200 people signed up to speak at the City Council meeting for and against the ordinance. Alva, a Marine staff sergeant who became the first U.S. soldier injured in Iraq when he stepped on a landmine, was booed by the crowd when he spoke in favor of the ordinance. Alva lives in San Antonio.

“To all you people that preach the word of God, shame on you because God loves me, like the day I laid bleeding on the sands of Iraq and that’s why he saved me,” Alva said before he left the podium.

Alva wrote on his Facebook page later: “Well I just left city council chambers and I feel like crying. I have never seen a city so divided and hateful towards each other. All of man kind should be ashamed. I already spoke and even some of the religious groups even boo’ed me as I spoke. Such disrespect as they preach the word of God.”

The City Council is expected to vote on the ordinance on Sept. 5. A Change.org petition calls on San Antonio city council members to support the ordinance.

Below, Alva talks about losing his leg and coming out, on an episode of the Chris Matthews show in 2010:




Update, 6:15 p.m.: From Gawker via Joe.My.God., San Antonio city councilwoman Elisa Chan and her staffers caught on tape in a major homophobic rant, equating the "disgusting" gays to bestiality, incest, pedophilia, etc., etc. I listened to just the first two minutes, that was enough.

The Good Duck Artist

A short documentary in two parts about the career of the late Carl Barks, a shy, lonely boy who found his life's calling in drawing the Scrooge McDuck comics, which were among my special favorites.  By the time I was 12 or so, I had amassed over 1200 comic books of all kinds, which I kept neatly filed and organized by brand, title, and date - if I had them now, I would be a rich man, but alas, all but a handful were lost to the vicissitudes of life.

Mickey Mouse never interested me much - by the early 1960's, he had become a rather bland, Ward Cleaver kind of character without any charisma, to my way of thinking.  But Donald Duck was always getting into hilarious trouble, usually through his own hubris.  And Uncle Scrooge stories were the most fascinating - partly because of the thought of those uncountable fantasticatillions in his Money Bin, and partly because of the rather ingenious storylines that took the reader from the Lost Cities of the Incas to the Arabian Desert to the center of the earth, and so on.  Somewhere years ago I read that Barks often drew inspiration for his stories from current National Geographic articles, and that certainly gave them an exotic, intriguing atmosphere.

And no, don't even talk to me about Duck Tales - tedious juvenile pabulum.  The Barks stories had an adult sophistication to them that none of his successors ever achieved.

Prop 8: Gone Where the Goblins Go

This just in from the Los Angeles Times via Joe.My.God.:

SAN FRANCISCO -- The California Supreme Court refused Wednesday to revive Proposition 8, ending the last remaining legal challenge to same-sex marriage in the state.

Meeting in closed session, the state high court rejected arguments by ProtectMarriage, Proposition 8’s sponsors, that only an appellate court could overturn a statewide law.

A federal judge in San Francisco declared Proposition 8 unconstitutional in 2010, and state officials refused to appeal. ProtectMarriage did appeal, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that initiative sponsors have no right to defend their measures in federal court. The decision left in place the ruling by retired Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker.

In its challenge before the state’s highest court, ProtectMarriage argued that a single judge lacked the authority to overturn a state constitutional amendment. The group also contended that Walker’s injunction applied to two counties at most and that state officials had overstepped their authority by ordering county clerks throughout California to issue same-sex marriage licenses.

State officials countered that the challenge was a veiled attempt to persuade a state court to interfere with a federal judge’s order in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

I think that's settled it, boys. It was a long, weary road - not paved with yellow bricks - that started with Mayor Gavin Newsom allowing gay weddings in San Francisco, beginning on Valentine's Day in 2004 - and after many, many steps and stages in the state and federal courts, here we are, nine and a half years later, almost to the day, with wedding bells free to keep ringing in California - forever, I hope - for the gays. And that can only encourage other states to do the same.

For the record, here's attorney David Boies recounting the history and outcome of the marriage cases last month:

Isn't It Romantic

USA TODAY reports:

A Navy sailor returning from a six-month deployment emerged from his submarine, dropped to one knee and proposed to his boyfriend during the homecoming celebration in Connecticut for USS New Mexico.

About 200 people were gathered at the dock of the Naval Submarine Base New London where Machinist's Mate Jerrel Revels proposed to Dylan Kirchner. Kirchner said he had thought about getting married but the proposal Monday came as a surprise.

"I didn't really care everybody was around. It felt just like the two of us," Kirchner said.

The couple has not set a wedding date.

Sweet. Of course, your Head Trucker looks forward to the day when this sort of thing will not be at all newsworthy.

Sucked Dry in West Texas

You boys from the frozen Nawth should understand that West Texas is a land unto itself: sort of like the Sahara, only with traffic lights, Dairy Queens, and Baptist churches. My late husband always said, "They call it God's Country because nobody but God wants it."

But now the right-minded, God-fearing, Bush-and-Perry-loving denizens of that dusty wasteland are perhaps encountering for the very first time in their lives a little cloud of doubt as to whether all is well in the world they voted for. It's hard to ignore a sign like running slap out of water - sounds kinda Biblical, don't it?

But hey, you can't argue with free enterprise - can you?  The Guardian reports on the consternation now bubbling up in the little nowhere town of Barnhart:




Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh said yesterday that you cannot believe in God and believe in climate change, too. Why? Because "You must be either agnostic or atheistic to believe that man controls something that he can’t create." 

I wonder if anybody in Barnhart, Texas, agrees with him today.


Honk to Americablog.

Marriage News Watch, 8/12/13

Matt Baume of the American Foundation for Equal Rights reports:

A Daughter's Tale: Mary, Lady Soames

Mary's wartime service was spent in an anti-aircraft unit defending London
and environs from the Nazi bombers.  Here she is shown accompanying
her father as his aide-de-camp at the Potsdam Conference in 1945.

I've spent the morning reading all that I can see on Amazon preview of A Daughter's Tale by Winston Churchill's youngest child, Mary, who is still going strong at age 90 and published this, her seventh book, last year. It's very good reading, and Lady Soames is what my mother and grandmothers would have described as a lovely person, who has led quite a remarkable life.

Here's a clip from an interview by Andrew Marr last year:




If you're into modern British history, I can also recommend an hour-long interview done by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN in 1999, in which she discusses her then-new book Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills.


A related thought: I've also been re-reading a book that's been in my possession for many years now, The Gathering Storm, the first volume of Churchill's memoirs of the Second World War, in which he chronicles the long, inexorable drift towards war - which happened precisely because the Western democracies were so terrified of repeating the horrors of the 1914-18 war, on an even larger scale, that they refused to stand up to the dictators, or maintain their military strength, until it was all too late.

Of course, the dangers of appeasement are all too clearly seen now, in hindsight. And the lesson was misapplied later by those who should have known better, such as in the Suez Crisis, and to some extent in Korea and Vietnam. On the other hand, it seems to me that by maintaining a more than adequate nuclear defense, the West certainly did forestall any aggrandizing ambitions the Soviet Union may have had, and ultimately hastened its downfall.

I thought of all these things the other day when I was reading an article in the Telegraph about the current debate over renewing Britain's Trident nuclear submarine defense - at a cost of many billions of dollars to the British taxpayer, of course. I was struck by one particular comment some reader left on that article, to the effect that, "Well I don't see anybody planning to start another world war, so why should we spend all that money on a system that will never be of any use."

Oh but children, the course of human events takes many strange, unexpected twists. Who foresaw 9/11 or the Crash of 2008, huh? And now the rotten aroma of the 1936 Berlin Olympics wafts across the ocean from the direction of Moscow. There's no exact parallel between Putin and Hitler here, and I'm not implying there is one; but take a look at the map of antigay countries, and you'll find a huge block conveniently extending from Russia through most of Africa and Asia.

Granted, that covers a lot of very different political and religious systems; but history makes strange bedfellows. Nor am I saying anyone would go to war specifically over the the gays - Hitler did not go to war just so he could kill the Jews, there was more to it than that.  And ruthless cruelty is not extinct in this old world. Better to keep one's guard up than to have no power of resistance or deterrence at all, is what I'm saying.

Again, if the subject interests you, read Churchill's magisterial 1955 speech on Britain's decision to develop a hydrogen bomb, and see what parallels you can find with the present time.

Sunday Drive: In My Own Little Corner

From the 1957 live television special, Cinderella, by Rogers and Hammerstein:




Watch the whole unforgettable show here.

If Gay Marriage, Why Not Polygamy?

John Corvino is chair of the Department of Philosophy at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Oprah a Victim of Racism? Not Necessarily

I suppose you boys have heard about the shop clerk in Zurich who refused to let Oprah see a handbag:




Oprah, naturally enough, thinks the clerk was prejudiced against her race, but your Head Trucker (who, by the way, is the same age as La Winfrey) is here to tell you that it ain't necessarily so.

When I was 21, on my one and only visit to Paris in the hot, dry month of August thirty-seven years ago right now, one day on the Boulevard Haussmann I wandered into some fancy store selling ladies' goods, thinking I might pick up a little bottle of parfum to take home to my mother as a gift. There was a long glass counter case full of paints and powders and such, and shelves behind full of every brand and variety of smell-um-good, in all sizes from tiny to enormous.

I saw some small bottle with an intriguing name - perhaps Bal à Versailles - and asked the youngish clerk behind the counter, Pardon, Mademoiselle, combien ce coute? She seemed to be following the conversation between another clerk and customer six feet away, but otherwise she was just standing there, doing nothing. With an admonitory look, she turned to me and said, Oh, c'est très cher. And turned away from me, just like that.

And I thought - you nasty little bitch. I was clean, well groomed, presentably dressed, and even used my best schoolroom French; there was no reason for her to brush me off that way. Granted, I was young, but for all she knew, I might have been J. B. Gotrocks the IVth, and loaded with dough enough to buy the whole goddamn store. Snotty little shit of a girl, being snooty just because she could.

Well, maybe someone else gave her a comeuppance sometime or other - I certainly hope so. The other shop clerks I dealt with in Paris were all perfectly nice, and I did eventually get Mama a little flask of her favorite cologne, at Galeries Lafayette, I think it was. But this is exactly the same thing that happened to Oprah, and there was no racism involved - just sheer snobbery and arrogance.

It occurs to your Head Trucker that the same kind of thing probably happens in New York and Los Angeles too, in the tonier shops, but I've never been to those places - have any of you fellas experienced such a thing in these United States?