This is ridiculous.

Why can't same-sex couples be married?
Seriously. Give me one good answer.
Is your proposed answer that the Bible condemns gay people? Or that marriage is between a man and a woman? Go and read the facts.
As far as I can see, the only problem Christians ought to have with gay people being together is sex before marriage. And isn't the logical step to offer us marriage? Legal and spiritual?
Updated Jan. 13 (which may be slightly out of date, but can't be too far out of whack) the Human Rights Campaign shows us the big picture.
Computer won't read it?
It says:
29 states have "constitutional amendments restricting marriage to one man and one woman" 18 of which are "states where the law or amendment that does, or may, affect other legal relationships, such as civil unions or domestic partnerships".
12 states have "law restricting marriage to one man and one woman".
Wikipedia tells us that "same-sex marriages are currently granted by five of the 50 states, one federal district, and one Indian tribe:

• In Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., marriages for same-sex couples are legal and currently performed.
• The Coquille Indian Tribe in Oregon also grants same-sex marriage."

I'm guessing they mean Native American tribe, not strictly Indian.

Five. As opposed to 41 states that strictly forbid it.

Wikipedia also says that, "In New York, Rhode Island, and Maryland, same-sex marriages are recognized, but not performed",
"As of June 1, 2009, New Jersey has created legal unions that, while not called marriages, are explicitly defined as offering all the rights and responsibilities of marriage under state (though not federal) law to same-sex couples. California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Wisconsin and Washington have created legal unions for same-sex couples that offer varying subsets of the rights and responsibilities of marriage under the laws of those jurisdictions".
Go ahead and check out this article. It has a lot to say on the subject.
Makes me wonder what all these people have to say about New Mexico. The map shows it as not having law or constitutional amendments against same-sex marriage, yet the Wikipedia article doesn't talk about it, despite having been updated today.

And meanwhile, on the Supreme Court...

I received an email from Rick Jacobs and the Courage Campaign just now. It was about GLBT people being potentially banned from serving on the Supreme Court. This is ridiculous. Here are some quotes included in the email.

"[A] gay judge's sexual preference will, without any question whatsoever, 'interfere with their job.' It's not possible for it to be otherwise... We simply should not elevate to the highest court in the land people who are known for engaging in sexually abnormal behavior which would technically make them felons in a quarter of the states over which they will have jurisdiction." -- Bryan Fischer, American Family Association

"We can assure you that we recognize that homosexual behavior is a sin and does not reflect God's created intent and desire for humanity. Further, we at Focus do affirm that character and moral rectitude should be key considerations in appointing members of the judiciary, especially in the case of the highest court in the land." --Focus on the Family
(The email's punctuation and emphasis, my inserted credit to the second quote)

I signed the Courage Campaign's petition to keep sexual orientation from being a consideration in appointees to the Supreme Court. They offered me the chance to send an email urging my family and friends to do the same. And I copied and pasted that email here.

Have you heard that right-wing groups like Focus on the Family and the American Family Association are insisting that gays and lesbians should be disqualified from serving on the Supreme Court?

It's outrageous. With a Supreme Court vacancy opening up after the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, I just signed a letter to President Obama insisting that sexual orientation should NOT be a factor in selecting his Supreme Court nominee.

Will you join me? It only takes a minute to sign:

http://www.couragecampaign.org/NotAFactor

The religious right is firing up their massive lobbying machine and we need as many people to combat their outrageous attacks on LGBT people.

Thanks!

Seriously. Not evil.

A Christian pop star coming out as lesbian...
A man who "earned [his] master's and doctoral degrees at a conservative biblical seminary" telling us that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality...
There is hope for Christian gay people.

Hospital Rights

I couldn't believe it was true that hospitals would ban gay and lesbian couples from visiting their partners in the hospital. It turns out this wasn't exact, but applied to serious illness and incapacitation. But no more.
I remember watching an interview with the Obama party pre-election where they stated that they think we should have the right to visit each other in hospitals. And now it's happened. At every hospital that accepts Medicare and Medicaid, patients have the right to choose who visits them and who "may make their critical health-care decisions". Read the story here.
And read the Human Rights Campaign's take on it here.

Gaydar

What is gaydar? It's actually made its way into the dictionary. Type it into Dictionary.com and you get four results. I like this one.

Main Entry:	gaydar
Part of Speech:	n
Definition:	an intuition about whether someone is homosexual; a homosexual person's ability to identify other homosexuals through intuition or interpretation of signals
Etymology:	1992; gay + radar
Usage:	slang

But according to the Washington Post today, gaydar isn't just for gays anymore.
An article by Rex W. Huppke entitled "Sorry, Ricky Martin. Flying under the gaydar is less frequent than ever." says that straight people too can often discern whether someone is gay. The article cites J. Michael Bailey, a psyche professor, who says that "gay and straight people who viewed the videos correctly identified straight people 87 percent of the time and correctly identified homosexual people 75 percent of the time" (though beware of statistics--notice he doesn't say which percentages gay people guess right and which percentages straight people guess right, but lumps them into one category. Neither does he mention bisexual and in-between people or how random the selection of either the guessers or those they were guessing about was).
I can easily believe that gaydar would work for straight people. I believe that gay people are more likely to look at someone and actually ask themselves whether the person is gay, whereas many straight people don't often even consider the possibility.
Bailey also says that gay stereotypes often (though he specifically says not always) do hold true. I'm not sure I believe this. But take from it what you may.
A different study posted on this blog gives nearly the same results. Cool stuff.
One thing that interests me is how exactly gaydar works. Does it require imagining that person is gay, or specifically wondering, as this study seems to imply? Or is it an automatic thing? I have never experienced it myself, but who knows. Maybe someday.

Gay Prom in Northern VA

A Unitarian Universalist church in Prince William County in Northern Virginia is getting ready to host its second gay prom. Here are the details. I first read about this last year when I read about the first prom in the newspaper. And I think this is wonderful. As it was put to me, at a regular prom, "It's not that the administration's going to look down on them. But they know people are going to be whispering behind their backs." But here, though gay and straight couples alike came from all over Northern VA, nobody cares. I want to go to one of these. Anyone want to invite me?