DOMA & Prop 8 Struck down

Congratulations - another step forward in the US towards removing injustice.

Remember to the haters - this is a right owed, an injustice corrected and equality denied. Nothing has been given, nothing has been granted - this is taking one more step to gaining what all straight people have every day. Anyone trying to imply unfairness, or - bogglingly - favouritism or injustice from this needs to wake up and see that truth.

As far as I can see it's a first step. Prop 8 only applies in California and DOMA being struck down will grant federal benefits to states (and DC) that acknowledge marriage equality - but not to states that are still bigoted

I don't THINK that bigoted states need to acknowledge marriages made in equality states - but I can't be sure on that

Still, another step forward - keep on fighting!


And to the haters - keep on crying!

Shooting fish in a barrel - more homophobic bullshit

Among the waves of homophobic bullshit that have been bombarding us during the fight for marriage equality, another the group made of concerned Christians and assorted dusty Tories and church people (usual suspects for hatred) have taken out a full page advert in the Times (which will, apparently, take money from anyone) on 10 reasons why treating gay people and gay relationships equally with straight folks is naughtybadwrong and why we should continue to be treated as lesser than the precious straighties and their eternal privilege.

As can be imagined, these 10 points are complete and utter bullshit. Let’s take them one by one.

Intact biological families provide the gold standard for the wellbeing of children

Says who? Families with loving parents are the gold standard for the wellbeing of children. Intact biological families made of two abusive arseholes who hate each other are not the gold standard. One person having eggs and the other having sperm and them completing the not-so-difficult task of bringing that sperm and egg together does not a gold standard parent make.

Children have a human right to be nurtured by both their biological parents.

Nope – adopted children have no right to anything from their biological parents. Biological parents of divorced families can have limited – or no – access to their kids. Your parent(s) could be dead. In fact, at no time and in no place does a child ever get a RIGHT to their biological parents if those biological parents have said “screw this, I don’t want kids”. Or if those parents have been deemed unfit to raise kids. The closest you get is an adoptive “child” having the right to see their birth certificate at 18 – which is stretching the definition of “nurtured”.

Gay parenting by definition denies the child from having one or both biological parents.

You’re assuming that both (or either) biological parent of these kids are alive. Or want to know the kids. In fact, this whole argument is based on the idea of gay parents swooping on happy dappy perfect straight nuclear families and stealing the kids which happens NEVER. Gay parenting happens through sperm donation, surrogacy, adoption, fostering, children from past relationships – or various other ways that are all linked by the fact those children/foetus/sperm/eggs don’t have 2 biological parents setting up a healthy happy dappy family.

But that’s aside from the fact that 1-3 here are all IRRELEVENT because child rearing is NOT linked to marriage. If a straight couple is infertile? They can get married. If a straight couple is utterly unfit to raise a child? They can get married. If a straight couple is avowedly child free? They can get married. We do not have a requirement of parenthood in our marriage laws. Marriage exists completely without babies.

Marriage and parenthood Are. Not. Linked. And that’s aside from the fact all of this bullshit applies equally to straight adoptive parents, step parents and anything other than these bigots oh-so-precious biological nuclear families.

Popular support for the bill is based on the unfounded theory that people are ‘born gay’.

Every reputable psychiatric organisation in the world recognises that being gay is an inerrant part of a person that cannot be changed – and should not be tried. “Unfounded” is a stretch to say the least. And popular support for the bill is based on a strong sense that treating people like shit for who they love is wrong. We call it basic compassion.

All school children will be taught that as adults they can have marriage relationships with either men or women.

And this is a problem? They CAN have marriage relationships with either men or women. Why is teaching children the truth a bad thing? Would you prefer we lied to them? Hah, course you would.

Adolescents commonly experience temporary same-sex attraction: this does not mean they are gay

They do? Speak for yourself. I have only ever experienced attraction to the same sex – it’s permanent. I’ve never had even a temporary tickle for women. Is this part of the facts pulled out of your arse section of the argument again? Besides which – and what does this have to do with the price of tea in china? Why does temporary sexual attractions of adolescents mean a damn thing for marriage?

There is no evidence that SSM (same-sex marriage) strengthens marriage. In Spain marriage rates fell precipitously.

Spain’s marriage rates have been falling constantly for a long time: see this is a common trend throughout the western world. Also, correlation =/= causation. You may have missed it – but Europe’s in something in an economic depression at the moment. And, again, I’m assuming these bigots don’t plug into reality very often so may have missed the fact that Spain is one of the hardest hit of all EU countries. Y’know what makes people put off getting married? Or causes many relationships to break down? Why yes, that would be poverty! Not being able to afford a wedding, or have a stable enough life to contemplate marriage.

It’s also telling that the bigots have focused on Spain and not, say, Netherlands or Belgium (marriage rates going up!).

But let’s scrap all that and add a “so what?” I’m sorry, what do these BIGOTS marriages do to strengthen marriage? What about straight folks who divorce and re-marry so many times they get a bulk discount at the wedding registry? Why is MY marriage subject to some nebulous “does it strengthen marriage” test when straight folks face no such hurdle? Why is my family subject to a general public good reqirement?

Behind this bill is a militant move to deny gender difference.

Tell me more about this gender difference. And then tell me how this bill denies it? Because this sounds an awful lot like wifey being barefoot and pregnant while hubby goes out as the bread winner. This is just a random non-sequiter

‘Equal love’ leads to unequal marriage.

What does this even mean? Can someone translate this into something that resembles sense. What’s an “unequal marriage” and how is it linked to equal love? Is this just a random word game?

Civil partnerships already provide all the legal and financial benefits of marriage for gay people.

Not quite – pension benefits for one. And international recognition.

And separate but equal just leaves the doorway open to apply laws differently. As well as give societal approval to bigotry. You have deliberately created a lesser institution for gay people because you consider us toxic to marriage. You consider us toxic. The law is written to regard us as toxic. This is extremely damaging to our wellbeing and the respect we and our relationships can expect to receive in society in general. This is official state sanction of homophobia – so long as the state decides it’s ok to treat us as less than straight folks, then it sends the message that such treatment is ok. This is one of the foundations on which homophobia is built – a commonplace acceptance of gay people and gay love as lesser.

In theory, I guess I should be happy that those who oppose my humanity use such tired, weak, pathetic arguments – but I am so tired of shooting down this crap.

Coming Out Matters

So another famous person comes out of the closet and there are many reactions. Some of which are great, some of which are awful for obvious reasons, some of which are awful for less obvious reasons – and there’s one that always annoys me: someone who wants to know what the fuss is about

This comes from two sources. Either the homophobe who finds all this GBLT stuff so very icky and would rather we hide it and not be so open and icky everywhere. Or the oh-so-progressive ally who wants to show just how NORMAL being GBLT is to them that they don’t understand why anyone cannot be so totally blasé about the whole GBLT thing, why they’re surrounded by GBLT people, have a full stable of GBLT friends and barely even notice sexuality or gender identity any more, they’re just so enlightened, precious.

I’m sure we’ve seen the lines:

 “Why is everyone making so much of a fuss?” “Why is it relevant?” “It shouldn’t matter whether people are GBLT or not”

No, it shouldn’t. It shouldn’t be a big fuss. We should live in a world where a full range of sexualities and gender identities are fully accepted and integrated into our daily lives. We should live in a world where straightness and cisness isn’t assumed. We should live in a world where we could go into any industry, any element of the media, every place where human beings live anywhere on Earth and be confident in finding a full range of sexualities and gender identities happily part of society as full and equal participants. 

We should also live in a world without people starving to death, people dying from diseases that can easily be cured and one without Tories, Tea Partiers and the alien creature on Donald Trump’s head that’s feeding on his brain. We should also live in a world where I didn’t see a picture yesterday of a gay teen who was starved, beaten, had his arms broken and was forced to eat faeces before he died.

We don’t live in this world, alas. We live in this world. The real world – yes it’s a very unpleasant place but it’s discouraged to take more than brief holidays away from it.


In the real world there are vast swathes of just about every aspects of life where we don’t exist at all. Entire media forms where we’re less common than an honest man in the Houses of Parliament or a decent man in the Vatican. And like seeing a penguin waddling through the Sahara, seeing a GBLT person in these places is noteworthy and unusual.

In the real world there are places that are actively hostile to us. And by that I mean more actively hostile than the rest of the world – so angry sabre tooth tigers as opposed to the angry rotweilers that greet us everywhere else. Seeing one of us enter these spaces is a cause for celebration since it means the Dreaded Gay Agenda is Advancing and we’re one step closer to crushing the straight world under our Fabulous Pink Jackboot! *ahem* I mean, that’s another avenue open to us that was considered closed and forever out of reach.

Happy Birthday Triple J

Happy Birthday Triple J. I know others are going to do stuff that is clever and shiny and impressive. But you worked with me on that voice video thingy and know fully well that the chances of me doing anything technically awesome are doomed to failure and may break the Internet.

Instead I’m going to thank you for listening, learning and speaking and doing it right – and for deploying grizzly bears when needed, which are always appreciated. And, of course Happy Birthday and lots of hope that soon you will escape your co-workers and never seem them again – unless your bears get sick and start vomiting them back up. Or you go into the woods and bears do what we are readily assured they do in said woods, either way they’ll probably be more pleasant than their current incarnation.

And to pimp you youtube vids which are awesome on many levels and usually cause me to lose more time on the internet than both Cracked and TV Tropes: warning us of some real crap out there – but also some gems.

v

It’s also possible that despite coaching from both Dennis and Renee, I’m still posting this in the middle of the night in whatever time zone you foreign type people use (I believe there are 3 time zones in the world: Greenwich Mean Time, British Summer Time and Inferior Foreigner Time That’s Not As Good As Real Time)

On the plus side, I didn’t make one Canadian joke.

Anglican Rats Leaping off a Sinking Ship

The Anglican church has said that they will stop opposing marriage equality in the House of Lords.

And people have celebrated and even praised them for it and seen it even as a sign of softening on homophobia.

Hah! All this means is the rat has left the sinking ship.

See, The Anglican church is, in many ways, far more sensible than the Catholic Church. The Catholic church will cling to their vocal, open hatred to the very end. The weasels in the Anglican church know how to twist. They’ve always been much bigger fans of making pretty speeches of how nice and friendly they are really – while their attack dogs spew hate speech and they put their power, influence and resources into fight every attempt we have ever made to be part of society.

They try to sound nice about it, they try to gild their hatred, try to polish their turds. They’re apologetic bigots – but they’re still bigot.

And having fought viciously against us for the duration of this push for equality, they've finally read the writing on the wall and are jumping ship and trying to clean themselves up again

This is also not a church that has ever stood by anything resembling principles. Welby and his rats said they were going to abstain for the vote – but he and his ilk all voted for Lord Dear’s wrecking amendment. So don’t expect this pretty speech to mean anything – Welby and the Anglican rats do not feel truth is something that matters or ever has. This should come as no surprise, in the run up to the marriage equality battle, lying Anglicans were claiming that the church wasn’t bigots because they supported civil partnerships! Of course that is a ridiculous claim because supporting a half measure doesn’t make you one bit less bigoted; but that’s moot. Because it wasn’t true – it was a complete lie and the Anglicans ferociously fought against civil partnerships as well.

What, you expect honesty from these people? Truth? Morals? Ethics? They’re the Anglican church, the rats don’t have principles, they only pretend to.

Of course the “not opposing” the law means they’re now concerned with… exemptions for bigots. Not bigoted churches – but personal bigots. So that means more attempts to enshrine homophobia in the law and give homophobia a pass in our schools, businesses and public life. So the campaign of hate goes on.

The cruel bigotry of the Anglicans has not gone away, nor has it changed. Justin Welby and his rats and followers remain our dedicated enemies, implacably fighting whenever they can against us – they’re just better at choosing their battles. But now’s the time to watch them – because they’re shifting their PR and ready to re-write history

Northern Cake!

Beloved is trying to claim I had a culinary disaster. I challenge his definition and would deny him cake as punishment except for… issues.

While certainly no disaster, I have, perhaps, just maybe, possibly had a culinary miscalculation.

See, in the grand tradition of English baking, I made a Victoria sandwich cake – with cream (of course with cream). But there’s a problem with my cake tins

I have many many cake tins, but only 2 are round and the same size. They are 11 inch tins. For those not familiar with baking, they are BIG tins. I could use a smaller tin, make one sponge and cut it in half but I hate doing that – inevitably things crack, fall apart, cut unevenly or just turn into a pumpkin

So I resign myself to making Large cakes. No-one complains. I just have to double any conventional recipes I have.

Unfortunately, due to sleep deprivation and distracting husbands, I think I MIGHT have doubled my double. I can only blame Beloved for not realising that 8 eggs were… a trifle excessive for sponge cake.

The resulting cake was… large. 11 inches in diameter, with each sponge proudly rising over the top of his huge tins. So deep were the sponges I was forced to bite the bullet and cut them in half for a 4 layered cake. With whipped cream, jam and butter cream between the layers.

Beloved declared himself slighting afraid of the enormous cake.

We have decided this is Northern Victoria Sponge.

In the south (were delicate, soft people live, of course), Felicity and Cecilia may have a break in their busy day of flower arranging in silly hats to take tea out of delicate china cups with a small slice of elegant Victoria sponge.

In the North, Maggie and Tracy, will knock off wrestling mammoths in the coal mines to have a brew (in big mugs of course) and a nice big chunk of Northern Victoria Sponge.

This is a cake that would eat Delia Smith and possibly traumatise Mary Berry for life (or maybe not, I’ve always thought Mary Berry had a gleam in her eye that suggests she May Cut You if she has to).

We Have Holy Hand Grenades

The horrible freak who keeps leaving nasty notes and, possibly, scratching my car had an escalation today.

Beloved came in from poking the mud in the garden with a little cardboard box. Once opened it contained little round crackers.

Which is a little bemusing. Someone is leaving random wafers in our garden? It’s not like we’re going to eat something left in the garden anyway – who knows what someone’s done to it (even beloved wouldn’t eat that). Maybe someone dropped it on the way home from somewhere? But the box had no brand name or anything and I didn’t even recognise them – nor did Beloved and he’s very experienced with biscuits. Though not these nasty looking crackers.

Nagging away at me I kept poking them – they’re plain, they’re white, they have an X carved into the middle…

..

.

Never having been to any religious service involving communion it took us a while to recognise that it was a box of the freaking host. Yes, communion wafers, at least I think so. 4 little communion wafers in a box.

Beloved went outside and searched diligently but didn’t find anyway wine. We both agree that if you’re going to use holy communion supplies as a passive aggressive holy bomb on someone’s door step, you shouldn’t stint on the wine. You also shouldn’t pay less than £15 a bottle because that would be disrespectful to your lord and saviour, I’m sure. We might place a note with our order next time the decide to leave random holy edibles about.

The wafers are on the bird table now. They ended up there after I pointed out I wasn’t hovering up the crumbs from F and Beloved’s Holy Hand Grenade fight. This possibly means we now have holy sparrows,  blessed starlings and divine blackbirds.

While faintly amusing I have to say it’s still a level of disturbing – and not just in the way that the notes are, frankly I’m getting kind of inured to the notes, the religious tracts etc. It’s so dull. But holy communion paraphernalia? Isn’t that a little… out there? I have to give it points for originality I suppose. but what does this person expect to happen? Us pick one up and suddenly scream "aaaaaaargh the holiness is burning the gay out of me!". It took us the best part of an hour to figure out what they were.

Where do you even get these things anyway? It’s not like Tesco sells them. I kind of always assumed there was, I don’t know, a central catholic warehouse that shipped out communion stuff every month.