The Coming Year: Same Old Same Old

In Florida, where gay marriage is already banned, the Legislature wants to do the other 27 states that ban same-sex marriage one better: They want to put a "no marriage for queers" clause into the state Constitution.

Sigh.

That's what the Sunshine State has to look forward to in the coming year. And it's typical of where the country has been headed under the Deal-with-the- Devil coalition that emerged when the Radical Religious Right cornholed the Conservatives who controlled Congress during the first six years of the George W. Bush era.

First of all, I feel it is important for me at this point to get it off my chest and say, "I told you so." I recall Internet discussions, back during the presidential campaign of 2000, in which otherwise perfectly sane gay and gay supportive people, fed up with the personal piccadellos of Bill Clinton, hinted they were considering voting for Bush over Al Gore, as a way of protesting the corruption of the Clinton administration.

Nowadays, I hear a lot of these same people saying they wish that Gore, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, was elected president back then and that they are seriously considering voting for Bill Clinton's surrogate --- his wife Hillary, who stood by him through his presidency and his infidelity like, well, Tammy Wynette standin' by her man (Sorry, Hill, but you set yourself up for that years ago).

But back to "I told you so ..."

I predicted, in 2000 --- and I come from a long line of political prognosticators; somewhere in the family archives, there is a letter from my maternal great-uncle, Marce Harder, an Ozark journalist, predicting that JFK would defeat Nixon in the 1960 election and then would be assassinated a few years later --- that Dubya, if elected, would lead the country in one big homophobic hoedown, trying to undo many of the civil rights gains made by gays and lesbians since the Stonewall Inn riots kicked off the modern gay rights movement in 1969. I foresaw that he would do his best to stack the courts with gay-unfriendly, conservative judicial mediocrities, and by golly, he's done just that. Extremist homo-hating religions have received aid and comfort from our dim-witted president and the cynical sycophants who surround him, just as I said they would. (Of course, I didn't even consider how awful Bush would be on foreign affairs and that the rest of the world would end up hating the U.S. because of who we put in the White House.)

It's grimly satisfying, I suppose, to have been proved right, although I would much rather have bit the bullet and admitted I was wrong if the dumbass from Crawford, Texas, hadn't so consistently proved me right. So, sadly, folks, I told you so.

In 2008, we've got a mess to clean up when it comes to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered issues. I've mentioned Florida, where the extremist religions, led by the president's smarter (well, comparatively smarter) brother, Jeb, want to not only ban gay rights, but knock them in the gutter and set fire to them.

There's my own state of Kentucky, where, one would think, after the voters elected Democrat Steve Beshear as a repudiation to the incompetent conservatism and homophobia of incumbent Republican Governor Ernie Fletcher, it would be a time of moderation, at the very least, on the subject of same-sex civil rights issues. But NOOO --- a couple of no-account Democrat state representatives, looking for 2008 campaign donations from conservatives, have reintroduced previously discredited legislation that would take away the state universities' rights to provide health care benefits for domestic partners, straight OR gay.

In California, a mega-diocese wants to join those conservatives who are breaking away from the increasingly gay-friendly Episcopal Church, and a group in Savannah, Ga., wants to do the same thing. So much for Christian brotherhood.

On the liberal front, some branches of the United Church of Christ are refusing to perform ANY marriage ceremonies until the states get their acts together and offer equal marriage rights to everyone, regardless of sexual orientation. I guess that's a good thing, although it reminds me of an old Eartha Kitt song:

Somebody Bad Stole De Wedding Bell

Somebody Bad Stole De Wedding Bell

Somebody Bad Stole De Wedding Bell

Now nobody can get married ...

So, as we approach 2008, we who work on behalf of gay civil rights have a lot of the same old stuff to look forward to: Putting out fires, circling the wagons, and dealing with the same old jackasses who operated Auschwitz, turned on the hoses at Selma, asked people to name names before HUAC and murdered Matthew Shepard and ruined his funeral for his family. Not all of these villains are as blatant as Hitler, as the Ku Klux Klan, as Joe McCarthy, as Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson or Fred Phelps. Sometimes, they're as smooth and honeyed as Anita Bryant and Pat Boone or the Big Haired Little Fat Woman who purged the Middlesboro (Kentucky) Daily News of its three gay reporters in the past year.

The causes are the same: People with same-sex orientations need protections under the law so they can have equal access to health care, to adoption, to protection from hate crimes, to form families, to job security and to general peace of mind. The gay agenda isn't about painting the world in pastels and rainbows:

It's about more nitty-gritty things like getting on with one's life and being able to live in a society where it's no big deal if Adam lives with Steve or Eve lives with Madam.

We need to continue to work to create a society where it's considered bad manners to speculate, in any way, about a person's sexual orientation; where the word "pedophile" is not automatically associated with the word "homosexual; " and where images of lesbians are not automatically associated with Ace Hardware and gay men with fabulous window dressings.

That is what it's going to be about in 2008 --- the same old stuff, the same old shitheads trying to prevent the rest of us from being as unique and as ordinary as everyone else.