Remembering Reggie

It's not polite to speak ill of the dead.

I mean, hell, most people didn't even speak ill of Richard Nixon after he died, which extends beyond politeness to the kind of delusional, overwrought, complex system of manners and etiquette you read about in books that get turned into Merchant-Ivory movies. You know, the stuff with the calling cards and such. The kind of thing that makes you wonder if Emily Post had OCD and managed to inflict it on an entire nation.

In the spirit of that tradition, I offer the following quotes without comment, in the interests of remembering NFL star Reggie White. YAD and Reggie only co-existed for a short time, which I think is a damn shame.

THE LATE REGGIE WHITE ON HOMOSEXUALITY:

"As America has permitted homosexuality to establish itself as an alternate lifestyle, it is also reeling from the frightening spread of sexually transmitted disease. Sin begets its own consequence, both on individuals and nations."

"I've often had people ask me, would you allow a homosexual to be your friend. Yes, I will. And the reason I will is because I know that that person has problems, and if I can minister to those problems, I will."

"I'm offended that homosexuals will say that homosexuals deserve rights. Any man in America deserves rights, but homosexuals are trying to compare their plight with the plight of black men or black people. In the process of history, homosexuals have never been castrated, millions of them never died. Homosexuality is a decision. It's not a race. And when you look at it, people from all different ethnic backgrounds are living this lifestyle, but people from all different ethnic backgrounds are also liars and cheaters and malicious and backstabbers."

THE LATE REGGIE WHITE ON WHY GOD MADE THE RACES DIFFERENT:

"Hispanics are gifted in family structure. You can see a Hispanic person and they can put 20 or 30 people in one home. They were gifted in the family structure."

"When you look at the Asians, the Asian is very gifted in creation, creativity and inventions. If you go to Japan or any Asian country, they can turn a television into a watch. They're very creative. And you look at the Indians, they have been very gifted in the spirituality."

THE LATE REGGIE WHITE ON WHY ROME KICKED ASS:

"Rome had strong families when they first started out. It was founded on high moral standards. Each father was respected as the head of the family. In the early republic, the father had legal authority to discipline rebellious members of his family.

THE LATE REGGIE WHITE ON WHY ROME STOPPED KICKING ASS:

"Number five, there was an infiltration of a lie. As Roman families prospered, it became fashionable to hire educated Greeks to care for the children. Greek philosophies, with its humanistic and garish base, was soon passed on to the Roman families.

Reggie White. Packer* Sacker**. Minister. Amateur historian. He will be missed, both by football fans and the millions of homosexuals he never got the chance to save from themselves.

---

Here's a fun little game we can play. The media helped spread two interesting ideas in the week or two before Christmas. This would be the liberal media, of course, chock full of leftists and Communists seeking to impose their ideology on Mainstream America. As a result, one of these fact should be common knowledge by know, and the other will have been almost completely ignored by the general population. Can you tell which one is which?

1 - The American Civil Liberties Union is part of an orchestrated campaign to destroy Christmas and oppress Christians by completely removing Christianity from the public sphere.

2 - The American Civil LIberties Union has, through exhaustive Freedom of Information Act requests, uncovered FBI e-mails that refer to an executive order, from the President, authorizing the use of harsh interrogation tactics (a.k.a. abuse and torture) for detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

I have to say, it's funny the way the right-wing keeps lucking out like that. I mean, a bunch of them just happened to start making the ACLU look bad over the Christmas thing, which they coincidentally happened to mostly invent in the same exact way, right before the ACLU gets ahold of documents implicating Bush in prisoner abuse. You almost can't MAKE a break that good.

---

*Strictly in a football sense.
*Also strictly in a football sense.

Peace On Straight Earth, Good Will Toward Straight Men

At this joyous time of year, as you spend time with your friends, loved ones, and family, it's important to spend a few minutes, at least, thinking about your fellow man, and why, for a completely different reason than yesterday, they suck so very much.

Let's check in with our friends at Team Selfish Hedonism, shall we? The gay marriage debate has not gone swimmingly of late in the United States, with eleven state constitutions gone homophobic on Election Day. As, supposedly, the only nation on Earth capable of exporting freedom, you would think we would be ahead of the curve on this issue. You would at least think we would be ahead of South Africa, which recently legally recognized its first lesbian marriage, or Canada, whose courts just paved the way for same-sex marriage laws.

Somehow, "America: Less Progressive than South Africa!" doesn't have that patriotic ring to it, you know? But we have Massachussets, where gays can still, even as we speak, legally "destroy traditional marriage" whenever they want. And we have a number of individual communities that bucked the system, albeit briefly, this year in an attempt to take a stand on injustice.

But every silver lining comes with bureaucratic, bigoted tarnish. In Massachussets, you can be legallyi married until the cows come home but that doesn't mean your employer has to consider you're married if it doesn't want to. Meanwhile, the federal government is inexplicably screwing over HETEROSEXUAL couples who had the bad fortune to get married in communities that married gays last year.

Let's start in Massachussetts. General Dynamics, striving to become the number one most moral manufacturer of SHIT THAT KILLS YOU DEAD, has said it determines its benefits policy on a national basis, and defines "dependent spouse" in accordance with the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Also denying health benefits is Caritas Christi, an affiliate of the Catholic Church that runs some hospitals in Boston.

And let's face it, if we can't turn to the Boston Archdiocese of the Catholic Church for our moral guidance, who CAN we turn to?

These companies can get away with it because they "self-insure", meaning that health benefits aren't handled through an outside insurer. Since self-insurance is covered by federal law, they can claim DOMA applies. But many companies, including Gillette (great for when you finally decide to get rid of your beard!), have treated their married gay employees as if they were actually married. Which they are. The only real holdouts are the bomb-makers, the child-fuckers, and strangely, FedEx.

You would think FedEx, which recently bought out KINKOS, would be a bit more open-minded, but the only way they'll consider two of the same thing joined is if their copier-jockeys staple them together. If you want your health benefits, then you absolutely, positively, have to be straight overnight.

Not that being straight helps you if you live in New Paltz, NY; Asbury Park, NJ; Multnomah County, OR; or Sandoval County, NM. All four of those communities bucked legal restrictions and issued marriage licenses to gay couples. And when you buck the system, the system bucks you, and your neighbors, and anybody within the city limits.

The Social Security Administration, in what is most likely a desperate plea to suck up to Bush so they don't get privatized into oblivion, has, without comment or explanation, refused to honor ANY marriage licenses, gay OR straight, from those four communities during the time gay marriages were being certified. They dusted off and nuked the site from orbit, as it were.

So if you're gay, and you're legally married, an organization can decide arbitrarily that you're not legally married, and get away with it. And if you're straight, and legally married, and got married near gays who got illegally married, an organization can decide arbitrarily that you're not married either.

The model for "protecting traditional marriage" from gays in the 21st century seems to be the strategy for "protecting traditional country clubs" from blacks in the 20th. Better hope you're the right kind of people, and associate with the right kind of people, if you want your marriage to be recognized. I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know a few folks over there are free.

Come For The Racism, Stay For The Gay-Bashing

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Prepare To Say "Ew" At Least Twice

Memo to Congress: STOP LISTENING TO IDIOTS, IDIOTS.

When they came for the gays and bisexuals, I said nothing, because I'm straight. When they came for the smokers, I said nothing, because I don't smoke. When they came for the fast food, I said nothing, because, well, I really should stop eating that shit anyway. But when they came for the porn, nobody was left to speak for me except all the other skinny straight folks with good lungs, but none of them would say anything 'cause they were too busy spanking it.

In case you thought that perhaps the replacing of John Ashcroft with Alberto "I Heart Torture" Gonzalez might see the drapes covering Blind Justice's titty removed and replaced with a bit of leather bondage gear or a black hood, you will be sorely disappointed. Ashcroft's career's corpse (which he also lost an election to - funny story) was barely cold when, two Thursdays ago, Congress was learning that porn was worse than crack.

When I heard this, at first, I wanted to think this was the result of confusion. Perhaps they meant that porn contained a lot of crack, ass and otherwise, and also contained other, non-crack stuff. But no, the crazy people advising YOUR lawmakers meant that porn caused an addiction far worse than crack cocaine.

Who were these medical geniuses, bringing their carefully researched findings to our contemplative legislative body? Well, we do have Mary Anne Layden, from the University of Pennsylvania sexual trauma and psychopathology program. That sounds reasonably legitimate, plus, her name has "lay" in it, allowing for puerile comedy opportunities. But then it gets, as the kids say, freaky-deaky.

There's Jeffery Satinover, who works to CURE HOMOSEXUALITY. Much like creationists and people who use the word "islamofascist" seriously, anyone who claims to work in the field of curing our friends from Team Selfish Hedonism immediately forfeits their right to be taken seriously about anything ever. All they do is create a bunch more frustrated, pissed-off, closeted faux-straights, which we have a generous surpus of already, thanks.

And then there's Judith Reisman of the California Protective Parents Association, a group that's long been at odds with the California Just Leave The Little Bastards In The Car Foundation. Actually, the CPPA's agenda is preventing incest and rape, which is tough to argue with, but anyone who uses the word "erototoxins" to describe porn does not strike me as the kind of reasoned, sane face you want to use to represent your organization. "Erototoxins"? It sounds like the kind of thing you'd see in a Trek slashfic where Kirk fucks some kind of plant-woman. And then Spock has to suck the erototoxins out of Kirk to save his life.

Reisman also suggested that pornography be countered by advertisements on buses that say fucking children is wrong. Great idea, but if the bus ads we have NOW worked at all, I'd be so busy trying to listen to every different radio station in the Twin Cities metro that I wouldn't have the TIME to fuck children.

But it's Satinover who really takes the cake. We're all healthy, rational adults here, so without revealing any personal information, quietly compare your own personal experience with the following quote, and see how close they match up. It's ACTUAL WANKER QUOTE TIME!

"Pornography really does, unlike other addictions, biologically cause direct release of the most perfect addictive substance. That is, it causes masturbation, which causes release of the naturally occurring opioids. It does what heroin can't do, in effect.

First of all, he said "most perfect", which is stupid, and is a construction that drives me up the fucking wall semantically, but besides that - masturbation releases the PERFECT addictive substance? Please. Most people hooked on heroin can't hold down steady jobs, and slowly decline into Requiem for a Dream territory. I guarantee there are a LOT more masturbators out there than there are heroin addicts, and if masturbation were that addictive, we wouldn't have the energy to produce the porn that would be entirely superfluous ANYWAY. We'd have died out as a species centuries ago, either from starvation or mass drowning.

But fear not! Your government is hard at work attempting to wipe the scourge of porn out with the hand towel of justice. Those pesky 9/11 recommendations can wait, there's MASTURBATING to stop!

With Whom Shall I Not Mess, Again?

Memo to Texas: MAN, YOU DON'T FUCK AROUND WHEN IT COMES TO DUMB.

Dumb in the morning. Dumb in the evening. Dumb from Oklahoma to Mexico, and dumb from the deserts of New Mexico to the sweet sweet pig vaginas of Louisiana. So dumb they wouldn't be able to remember the Alamo if its name had a few more letters in it. So dumb that the residents of Austin must feel like a domed, time-traveling city of the future, stranded amidst the barbarous wasteland that lies just outside their borders. So dumb that making fun of Texas actually releases endorphins into my brain, resulting in at the very least a mild psychological addiction. So dumb they're ALMOST as dumb as Tennessee.

So, what's the latest word out of Texas, the unofficial capital of Jesusland?* Well, you know the Classic Red-State Trifecta of God, guns, and gays? How does two out of three strike ya?

In East Texas, in the Spurger school district, a longstanding Homecoming Week tradition is being cancelled because one redneck mom was convinced it would turn her nine-year old son into a homosexual.

The event, TWIRP Day, stands for "The Woman Is Requested to Pay". It apparently involves reversing the traditional gender roles most of us pretty much abandoned 20 years ago, like girls paying for sodas, and asking boys out on dates. As part of the admittedly quaint tradition, girls and boys also dress like their opposite gender for the day. Having been informed about the perfidious Homosexual Agenda, Delana Davies took a stand.

"It's like experimenting with drugs. You just keep playing with it and it becomes customary. ... If it's OK to dress like a girl today, then why is it not OK in the future?" Davies, being an idiot, is incapable of discerning the difference between "wearing a frilly dress" and "hot anal sex". In a completely unrelated note, Mrs. Davies' husband stops at Laura Ashley about once every three weeks to get a present for his wife.

The school has replaced TWIRP day with "Camo Day", in which students are encouraged to dress like overweight armchair mercenary wannabes who subscribe to "Guns And Ammo" and play their paintball "for keeps". Mrs. Davies is fine with that, as it will let her son look like a brave American soldier and play "shoot the wounded Iraqi" with the other kids, and will make her four-year-old daughter look like a huge dyke.

In Texas' defense, this same issue has come up in two other schools - one in rural Illinois, which is like Texas except you can go into the city for deep dish pizza, and one in New York, where they felt it was offensive to the transgender community.

One hundred and fifty miles west of Spurger, where the pernicious agenda of Team Selfish Hedonism is being painstakingly eradicated, one elementary school student at a time, lies Houston, TX, the Bizarro to Austin's Superman. Like Austin, Houston has a burgeoning technology industry. Unlike Austin, where much of the tech industry is devoted to helping gamers pretend to shoot each other over the Internet, Houston's tech industry is working on letting people ACTUALLY shoot things over the Internet.

It's a heady idea, a surefire contender for the Worst Fucking Idea Ever award, and it's the asschild** of John Underwood, who by day works in an auto body shop, but is an idiot in his free time. The idea is to place a remote-controlled camera and gun on a ranch, and allow people to connect to that camera and gun over the Internet and shoot whatever deer, antelopes, moose, pets, children, airplanes, or space aliens appear on-screen. To give you an idea of the kind of mentality we are dealing with here, I'll allow Underwood to relate the tale of where his inspiration came from.

He and a friend were looking at a webcam set up in some woodlanda area that allowed you to take pictures of animals."We were looking at a beautiful white-tail buck and my friend said 'If you just had a gun for that.' A little light bulb went off in my head." Unfortunately, it wasn't a stroke. "Man, that's gorgeous. If only there were some way to KILL IT FROM MILES AWAY WITHOUT IT EVEN KNOWING."

Underwood was quick to conceal his bloodlust behind a veneer of charity, noting that his technology could be a boon to disabled hunters no longer able to hold a gun. In addition, once the animals are killed, they could be cut up and their meat could be donated to animal orphanages. I am not fucking kidding you here. A human attendant will retrieve any animal corpses, and Underwood would arrange for the taxidermy of the trophy and the dispensation of the flesh. That service will be offered as soon as they find someone who's tired of their dull job at the slaughterhouse and want to combine the fun of handling dead animals with the adrenaline rush of walking around in front of a remote controlled Internet gun. So, basically, as soon as Ted Nugent finishes his latest tour.

Ah, Texas. Don't ever change. And don't ever visit, either, now that I think of it. You're incredibly useful to me right where you are.

* If you don't know what I'm referring to here, then you need to turn in your Card-Carrying Internet Liberal card, and become, um, a non-card-carrying Internet Liberal.

** Normally, this sentence would call for the word "brainchild", but my fingers refused to type it, for obvious reasons.

Why Ya Buggin'?

First, a bit of important business. If you have not seen Jon Stewart on Crossfire, I can't recommend strongly enough that you go and watch it. It continues to support what I've suspected for the past year - Jon Stewart is Very Important, and on his way to becoming Very, Very, Very Important.

Memo to everyone still discussing the Mary Cheney thing: YOU ARE DUMB.

It's been five days. Let it go. Stop examining it. Stop yelling about it. She's here, she's queer, her last name's Cheney, and she is inevitably going to be used as a ticking time-bomb volleyball in high-stakes politics. So get used to it.

TO THE LEFT: I know we have to stridently repeat our own talking-point defenses in today's world, but come on. Ofcourse Kerry name-dropping Mary The Lesbian Cheney in the last debate was a political maneuver. Just like Edwards mentioning it in the VP debate was. It was a cheap ploy to associate Dick Cheney with all the uncomfortable feelings Bush supporters have about homosexuals in general, and lesbians in particular.

It wasn't done by accident. It wasn't done to praise the Cheneys' childrearing abilities. It was a blatant political maneuver. And you should be INCREDIBLY FUCKING HAPPY for it, because it means that, at least every once in a while, Kerry and Edwards aren't trying to win this election on their merits as leaders of the free world. Thank fuck. Because only about 5% of the people pulling the lever on 11/2 are going to vote based on who they think will be the most effective leader of the free world.

The rest are going to go with blind party loyalty, the incompetence of the incumbent, who looks better in a short-sleeve shirt, who they think has a nicer bulge, whatever. Maybe a couple of dozen people stay home that day 'cause they're not voting for nobody who made their daughter queer. I'll take that. Hell, it's even true that she IS a lesbian, so the best part is, it's all still completely defensible.

Hell, the ploy wouldn't even have a chance in the first place if the right hasn't spent a big chunk of its entire history, and especially the past year, specifically courting people who think lesbians are "icky". Most of whom probably have "Girl On Girl IV" under their mattress anyway.

If it were up to me, we'd take full advantage of the Ashcroft Justice Department's steamrolling of civil rights and privacy, and have a national vote on gay marriage. And while everyone's out at the polls, we have law enforcement search their homes under the Patriot Act. And if we find anything in your home that features two women getting it on, and you voted "no" on gay marriage, your vote gets shredded by Voters Outreach of America*. The gay marriage issue would then pass overwhelmingly by a ten to one margin.

TO THE RIGHT: You can stop pretending now. You know as well as we do that all the Official Outrage over Kerry's comment is just as calculated and fake as Kerry's own comment. Sure, when it's time to appear all compassionate and moderate, you love to drop Mary Cheney's name. Plus she's on your frigging campaign payroll, which means that she's not some strange, closeted lesbian hermit who spends her days poking around a damp cave. She's in the thick of this, and using loaded, inaccurate words like "outing" just make you sound shrill.

It ALSO means there's some good, old-fashioned nepotism going in in the Bush-Cheney campaign, but hell, these days, nepotism seems like a quaint reminder of days long past, like bow ties, or Quaker Oats. Like meatloaf and mashed potatoes, nepotisim is Comfort Corruption. No more of that messy "deferred compensation from Halliburton", "no-bid contract" crap. "He hired his daughter to a high-profile paid position in his re-election campaign" is the kind of thing we can settle snugly into on a cold autumn evening.

Cheney and the rest of the right has settled on a new talking point, that Kerry "will say anything to get elected". Hooray! Finally, we have confirmation that we have a complete set of four for the election. I'd hate for Kerry to be the only one left out of that club, wouldn't you? You know what happenes to politicians who refuse to say anything in order to get elected? They lose.

*If you don't know, Google it up. It's fraudtacular!

That's Our Keyes!

Memo to Alan Keyes: STILL BUGFUCK.

I'm sorry. I honestly can't resist. It's like giving candy to a diabetic baby. Keyes says something completely bugfuck, and in the course of researching it, I stumble across other stuff, and my fingers just move of their own free will. B-U-G-F-U-C-K.

So what's everyone's favorite homophobic, ultraconservative, unelectable Senate candidate up to these days? Giving interviews to gay-themed satellite radio. It's amazing anyone even HEARD it, much less that the guy with the XM receiver bothered mentioning it to a reporter. I'll say this about Keyes, the man has the bugfuck courage of his batshit convictions, and didn't pull any punches when speaking to an audience composed primarily of people he despises.

"If we embrace homosexuality as a proper basis for marriage, we are saying that it's possible to have a marriage state that in principle excludes procreation and is based simply on the premise of selfish hedonism."

That is so incredibly selfish of the gays, wanting to form relationships with people they're attracted to. Don't you homosexuals know that every time you have gay sex, Alan Keyes cries? And not "one lonely tear" Iron Eyes Cody crying, either. Full-on heart-wrenching sobs. STOP MAKING ALAN KEYES CRY.

Obviously, the homosexuals need to be stopped at any cost. But luckily, if we've learned anything from the Republican National Convention this week, it's that the Republicans are the party of openness. Of tolerance. Of the "big tent" where people are free to disagree with party policy all they want, and even futilely dream of changing it. And in the spirit of the Big Tent GOP, Alan Keyes was very kind and deferential to Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter, Mary.

Asked if Cheney's daughter was a selfish hedonist, Keyes, thinking "Big Tent" all the way, said "Of course she is. That goes by definition. Of course she is... Dick Cheney may or may not like to hear the truth, but it can be spoken."

Oops. Well, the next day, at the RNC, after attending a "Big Tent" orientation meeting, with Powerpoint slides and everything, Keyes came around.

"I have said that if you are actively engaging in homosexual relations, those relations are about selfish hedonism. If my daughter were a lesbian, I'd look at her and say, `That is a relationship that is based on selfish hedonism.' I would also tell my daughter that it's a sin, and she needs to pray to the Lord God to help her to deal with that sin."

You know, if it were up to me, and one of the central premises of this whole website is that, dammit, it SHOULD BE UP TO ME, Keyes would have his own sitcom modeled after The Cosby Show this fall. Call it "That's Our Keyes!" The exclamation point is vital. He could play a wacky dad, running for Senate, trying to deal with his gay daughter and his sassy 8-year-old son and his barefoot, pregnant wife. RATINGS GOLD.

That is, as long as no reporters ask him any questions. Apparently, that form of journalism, where reporters ask public figures questions, doesn't go over kindly with Alan Keyes. But then, very little seems to go over well for him. The man's Rolaids budget must be massive. If he doesn't have a pneumatic tube straight from Merck to his living room for hourly deliveries of Pepcid and lithium, we should see about getting that installed. Here's what happened at the RNC yesterday when he was asked why he wasn't addressing the delegates.

"You are acting as a media surrogate for the Democratic Party! And when you ask questions that are aimed at achieving their purposes in the political battle, I have the right to ask who you speak for and who you represent. The reason you're asking that question is because the media wants to attack the Republican Party! You take approaches that are trying to sow the seed and impression of divisions within the party, to serve the purposes of the Democrats!"

The reporter in question is John Kass, a columist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Kass... is a Republican. Such a Republican that his columns attacking the left are reprinted on the Illinois GOP web site. What's next? Accusing Rush Limbaugh of being a welfare queen? He's already accused Barack Obama of being a slaveholder, so the man is no stranger to cognitive dissonance.

That's Our Keyes!

The Wolf Ate The Straw Cabin Republicans

Memo to the Log Cabin Republicans: YOU ARE DUMB.

Haven't you figured it out yet? You will never, EVER be truly welcome. Oh, they'll take your votes. They'll take your money. And then, surprise surprise, they'll stab you in the back, fuck you over, and burn you in effigy to appease the "God Hates Fags" crowd that makes up so much of their base. I don't care how concerned you are about "small government" or tax cuts or your own bank account. Every single one of you is voting for your own oppression. You will not change the party from the inside, because the inside of the party is made up entirely of Falwellians who either hate you outright, or think that the way to power is acting like they hate you.

Don't be heartened by Dick Cheney. I can't believe I even have to type that sentence, but don't be heartened by Dick Cheney. Over the weekend, he grudgingly admitted that gays deserve equal rights, and that he wasn't all that fond of the constitutional amendment idea. Dick Cheney now has the same stated position on gay marriage as John Kerry, which is deeply sad for both of them - sad for Cheney because of the sheer effort required to reach a position that's even borderline moderate, and sad for Kerry because, well, he's agreeing with Cheney. This is why people voted for Nader in 2000, John.

Obviously, something got to Cheney, but I can't figure out what it is. Maybe his gay daughter, Mary, finally tore him a new one at a family dinner. Maybe, in some improbable Ted Geisel Moment, his shrunken, black heart started to beat again, he discovered the real meaning of Christmas, and had a happy song about how homos are people too. Maybe his conscience picked the locks on the secret underground bunker and travelled across the country, like a dog in a Disney movie, to finally reunite with its owner.

Still, you don't need to worry about Cheney ripping up his own personal loyalty oath to Bush. In the same breath as his almost-reasonable statements on gay rights, he essentially said that whatever Dubya wants, Dubya gets, and that's just fine by him. So not only is he betraying his daughter, he's betraying her to support a cause he doesn't actually agree with. What a Dick.

Now a CYNIC might look at Cheney's statement and, rather than hearing a concerned father or a reformed neo-con zealot, the cynic may hear the faint whispering of ulterior motives in the background. The cynic may suspect that Dick Cheney's role as the only high-ranking potential member of P-FLAG* in the administration is being exploited to make a big noise in the news while the Republican platform gets written entirely by the rabid "pro-family" retards.

And lo and behold, the draft platform not only calls for the constitutional ban on gay marriage, but turns the knife another 270 degrees by wanting to also put a stop to civil unions, domestic partnership benefits, and any even remotely marriage-esque thing not firmly established between a penis and a vagina.

The Log Cabin Republicans are, of course, pissed. They should be. They all probably thought the religious right would at least let them have the tax breaks as long as they didn't scare all the Jesus-freaks by using the "M-word". Not in this platform, folks. Not in this administration. Not in the Republican Party. In the GOP, you only get to crawl in bed with, and hug, another man if you're an alleged "maverick" and "independent" who needs to keep sucking on the party teat if he wants to keep his job.

I like to think that this platform will shake them up and make them realize what they've been voting for all these years. On the other hand. they're GAY REPUBLICANS. I don't know if even this latest pro-family supernova can make them see the light through the blinders required to actually be a gay Republican. Maybe the party platform deliberately and systematically depriving them of any possible legal rights to form partnerships will do it, but I wouldn't bet my tiny liberal bank account on it.

The Republican Party, as they are fond to say, is a big tent. It has to be. They need plenty of room to keep all the icky homos in one corner. The corner that leaks. Where all the garbage and bugs are. Where there would be a light, but we need all the lights over here for the dramatic reading of "Left Behind" and to make sure all your campaign donation checks are properly endorsed. Yep, this sure is a great time to be gay and Republican!

* Assuming they'd even have him, which I'd advise against, if they ever asked me

Fired By The Arkansas Chamber Of Commerce

Memo to Arkansas - YOU ARE ARKANSAS.

But first, I'd like to share a headline with you for those of you who read yesterday's column. If you haven't read yesterday's column, go read it, then come back. From today's Minneapolis Star-Tribune web site: Three Marines killed in first fatal post-sovereignty attack. See? If it hadn't been for a super-secret signing of a piece of paper on Monday, those three guys would have just been the "latest". But now, they're the "first"! Yay sovereignty!

Anyway, Arkansas. You don't hear much about Arkansas these days. What with Clinton out of office and all the book talk focusing on Monica, it's off the radar. There's a good reason for that. Today's top ten results, by relevance, in Google News covering the great state of Arkansas deal with the following topics:

• Federal money for a dam
• College sports
• Methamphetamines
• Libraries getting compact discs with music on them
• Methamphetamines
• Presidential election polling
• Homophobic redneck vandalism
• Insolvent campgrounds
• Best Corporation doing OK
• College sports

In case you're taking notes, today we will be making fun of the seventh item on that list. In Conway, Arkansas, for Gay Pride Day, the planned parade was almost interrupted. Luckily, town officials were able to clean up the dump truck full of manure that the fine, worldly, modern people of Arkansas spread all over the parade route early in the morning.

Yes, a dump truck full of manure. Which, looking at it, seems almost redundant. Any truck, once filled full of shit, becomes by definition a "dump" truck. As protests go, this has got to be about the single saddest, most pathetic thing I've read in weeks. I mean, how much more fucking Hee Haw can you get?

First of all, apart from a bit of shouting in St. Petersburg, this was the only incident I could even find reported of people making a fuss about Gay Pride Parades. In the entire country. I'm sure there were others, of course, but within the limits of my patience and research tools, the shit-spreaders were the ne plus ultra of right-wing idiocy. Congratulations, Conway.

And, of course, there's the whole shit thing. Homophobes are the most fecally obsessed people on the planet. They'll be the first to shout about the "filthy" homosexual behavior, going on and on about the whole anal sex thing. And when it comes time to send a message to those filthy homosexuals, well, they get up first thing in the morning, fill a dump truck full of shit, and spend all morning flinging it around their town like monkeys with tools. That'll show 'em.

And, of course, there's the fact that they could lay hands on a dump truck full of shit on relatively short notice. Now, I'm a pretty smart, resourceful guy, but I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a truck of dump before this weekend. Which means either the people of Conway, Arkansas are either brilliant procurers, of they have a whole bunch of extra poo lying around. I know where I'd place my bets.

But the topper, the best part of the whole thing, is that they went to all that trouble, and rolled around in all that dung, for hours, and thanks to the magical technology of SHOVELS AND HOSES that the town was able to marshal, the parade went off as scheduled. Nothing worse than waking up early, spending the morning covered in shit, and at the end of the day, not having it be worth a damn thing. But I suppose, after years of living in rural Arkansas, they're used to that.

More Crackers, More Crackers

Memo to David Pence: YOU ARE DEVOUTLY DUMB.

The Cracker Police are at it again. And I'm not talknig about Mississippi cops. No, it's Whack-A-Catholic time again, as the debate over who gets to munch the Godbiscuit heats up yet again. And this time, in my own backyard.

David Pence is rounding up a Pastry Posse, you see. He's not actually calling it a Pastry Posse, of course. Catholics are less fond of wacky alliteration than I am, which is probably for the best. Pence's Pastry Posse, like some rogue group of Atkins vigilantes, will be doing everything it can this Sunday to make sure no stinking sash-wearers get any of that sweet, sweet Mock Jesus in St. Paul, MN.

The sash, specifically a rainbow sash, is a new thing. In the past couple of years, on Pentecost Sunday *, gay Catholics wear a rainbow sash to Mass. It's intended to send an important message, a message of tolerance, a message of changing the church from the inside. The rainbow sash proudly states, "Even though most of you hate gay people and oppose everything we stand for, we still want to come by on Sundays and bring a hot dish to the potluck because our parents taught us to believe in this one specific iteration of Mr. Invisible Sky Buddy."

To which David Pence proudly responds, in essence, "If any of those freaky homos tries, to paraphrase one Macho Man Randy Savage, to 'Snap Into A Savior', I'll be up there with my big burly manbuddies to run interference, and possibly a pick of some kind, because even though pretty much every other Sunday they've been showing up without incident, this week I can figure out which ones are the fruits."

That was not an actual quote. That was merely a comedy device. In the event of an actual quote, there will be a short siren, a flashing light, and a representative from You Are Dumb Dot Net will appear on-screen to inform you that it is ACTUAL QUOTE TIME.

"At Catholic Charities, anybody who is hungry gets fed. But the Eucharist isn't like that. The Eucharist is a restricted meal. The Church has always said you don't come to Communion unless you believe in Christianity the way the Catholic Church has transmitted the tradition.'' - David Pence, who, upon uttering the phrase "restricted meal", makes me almost regret having made the one alotted Atkins joke up in paragraph three.

The actual methods by which Pence's Posse's Pastry Prevention will take place are unclear. Pence himself has ruled out tackling, presumbably because of the risk of gay cooties. He's also claimed to be committed to nonviolence. But there will be some form of "disruption". Perhaps there will be some sort of loud noise and visual distraction, or a kind of "Hands Across Three Pews" human chain. Or possibly we can glean some tactical information from the name of the group.

See, I've been calling them Pence's Pastry Posse because the actual name of the group is so astonishingly, hilariously bad that it needs to be presented in the proper context. The official name of Pence's Pastry Posse is.... The Ushers Of The Eucharist.

Done laughing yet? No? OK. I'll wait.

Feels good to get that out, doesn't it? Ushers of the Eucharist. I hope they have the little hats. And the flashlights. "Can I show you to your wafer, ma'am?" "I'm sorry, this section has been booked by an entire group of intolerant heterosexuals. We've got a few seats here in the back, if you promise to be quiet and not make a nuisance of yourselves." "Bride's party or groom's party? I'm sorry, but only one of each is allowed. This isn't Massachussets."

Unless, of course, they meant it as a reference to top-selling recording artist Usher, whose single "Burn" currently sits atop the... nah. That'd be DUMB.

* I have no idea what Pentecost Sunday is, as my first guess, involving the celebration of the price of tiny stones, is apparently not correct.

Emile Goguen: Massachussetts Prick

I'd like to apologize in advance if this column seems a bit rushed or "off" today. You see, ever since the gays started getting married in Massachussetts, my sister has been having sex with my dog, and it's VERY disconcerting. So I may be a bit off my game. I guess it's just the collapse of society as we know it. I'd invited her over for dinner, the news was on, and when she saw the couples leaving the Massachussetts courthouse, she just up and said "Well, if they're going to allow that, I'm going to go fuck your dog. C'mere, Adama!"

It's especially disconcerting, actually, because before the gays started getting married in Massachussetts, I didn't have a sister. Or a dog. And I thought Battlestar Galactica was shit, so even if I'd had a dog, I wouldn't have named him after the late Lorne Greene's patriarchal commander. Even with the built-in joke tie-in to Lorne Greene, dog food salesman.

I guess that's what they meant by the "breakdown of the traditional family", because before Monday, my traditional family had no sister, had no dog named after Apollo's dad, and the two certainly weren't humping like crazed weasels in my living room.

You know, I'd have more sympathy for the pricks opposing gay marriage if they weren't being such DUMB pricks about it. Such screaming, raving, maniacal, hateful pricks. You know, like Rev. Fred Phelps. You don't need me to tell you Fred Phelps is a prick. If you're reading this column and this is your first time being exposed to the idea that Fred Phelps is a prick, you need to do some elementary research on that prick Fred Phelps so you can realize that Fred Phelps is a prick and why. On the other hand, as this paragraph amply demonstrates, it is impossible to mention too many times that Fred Phelps is a prick.

But in at least one significant way, You Are Dumb Dot Net is like a gay porn website. My mission is to make you aware of brand new pricks you've never seen or heard of before. And with that mission firmly in my grasp, I bring you Emile Goguen, a Democrat from Fitchburg, MA. Fitchburg, MA was not named after a deviant sex practice, but it kinda sounds like it does, and that's good enough for me. Goguen is attacking gay marriage in a big way. I'm sure he would stridently deny that he is doing so to overcompensate for his secret hidden shame of "representing Fitchburg", or as it's known to insiders, "fitching".

But lest you thing Goguen is some nutjob, he is opposing gay marriage in two time-honored American traditional ways: associating homosexual men with paedophilia, and trying to fire the judges who voted in favor of the ruling that found the law that prohibited gay marriage unconstitutional, thus leading to this week's actions after a six month waiting period in which the state Legislature was asked to come up with a solution that solved the equal protection issues the court was concerned with, only instead they farted around and tried to change the Constitution but that takes years so in the meantime all the gay people can get married. That second one is somewhat of an obscure tradition, I'll admit.

So this prick Goguen wants to get the judges fired because he doesn't like the way they judged, which from a separation-of-powers standpoint is at best iffy. But separation of powers isn't what's on Goguen's mind. ""When it comes to the floor, they'll vote for it. I want a debate on it. I want to separate the men and the boys." Notice the subtle paedophilia reference? See how he slipped that in there, as it were? That is because he is a prick.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go. Gotta get the garden hose and deal with the neighbors. They're having a huge incestuous polygamous orgy on their front lawn, complete with two elk, a raccoon with a strap-on, and a very embarrassed-looking ostrich. And they're all waving Massachussetts state flags.

Catholics

Memo to the Catholic Church: YOU ARE DUMB.

The Catholics are getting uppity again. I don't know what it is. Maybe John Paul's gotten his 90th wind. Maybe he just feels like he has to keep his pope hand strong. Or maybe, since it's been six months or so since any priests have gotten caught having sex with children, covering up having sex with children, or paying large sums of money for having sex with children, they think they get to throw some moral weight around again.

And when Catholics need to throw their moral weight around, but don't have the time to write an entire catechism, they turn to their favorite afterschool snack, the withholding of which is, for reasons that are inexplicable to me, a weapon of great power. I can think of dozens of places even rural Catholics could get saltines and cheap wine if they wanted to. It all gets transubstantiated in the end, anyway.

So, in their ceaseless effort to crush science, progress, and the pursuit of any knowledge not contained in their 2,000-year-old moral primer slash list of begattings, the Catholics have been seriously discussing telling politicians that support legal abortion or gay marriage that no, they cannot have their cracker, and no, they cannot have their wine, and no, you cannot pretend to eat Jesus because we're right and you're wrong. Nyah nyah.

And that's... problematic, but, you know, these politicians are out in public, with public views, and if they want to let their church influence them, we can all see that, and we can decide at voting time if we want the Pope's hand up the ass of our elected official or not.

But now, one Colorado diocese has decided that anybody who VOTES for a pro-choice candidate shouldn't get their cracker and Jesus juice either. Which should be very interesting in a country with a supposedly secret ballot. In all the coverage of this, nobody has bothered to ask how they're supposed to know who gets the cracker and who gets the shaft. Seems to me they're basically exchanging giving Communion to a whole bunch of unavowed pro-choice advocates for giving Communion to a giant pile of stinking filthy liars. But that's just me.

You may be saying to yourself... "Colorado? Vanguard of religious extremism? But aren't those lovely, mannered South Park boys from there?" Yes. Colorado is not traditionally the first state that comes to mind when you think of rampant religious extremism. But to help you with the cognitive dissonance, I've prepared a visual aid to show you where Colorado stands amidst the various idiocies of the U.S.:

As you can see, Colorado is a virtual epicenter of moronitude. You've got the crazy Mormons to the west, the entire Midwest to the northeast, Jim Inhofe just over the border in Oklahoma, and do I even need to mention Texas? No mitigating influences to the north or south, so you can see where poor Colorado, adrift in a sea of national idiocy, may find itself turning to rabid Catholocism in a kind of Lord of the Flies moment.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Not giving specific descriptions of the dumbness inherent in certain coastal areas does not mean the Tan Lands are magical enclaves where reason and intelligence thrive They are just not relevant to the current discussion. They'll get theirs in due course.

Still, the great things about Catholics is that, being students of the Bible, they don't have a problem with blatant self-contradiction, as Colorado bishop Michael Sheridan so aptly demonstrates in his directive. What starts with "A" and ends with "E" and makes the crowds all scream with glee? ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"As in the matter of abortion, any Catholic politician who would promote so-called same-sex marriage and any Catholic who would vote for that political candidate place themselves outside the full communion of the church and may not receive Holy Communion until they have recanted their positions and been reconciled by the Sacrament of Penance... the church never directs citizens to vote for any specific candidate." 

Which is technically true. Using your supposed spiritual authority to intimidate and threaten people into not voting for unnamed people who just happen to have been in the news a lot lately for being Catholic and liberal is not the same as coming out and saying "JOHN KERRY IS THE ANTICHRIST!". However, in the great Venn diagram of life, those two sets are enclosed by a much larger superset, the superset we like to call DUMB.

Hatelets

Today, in the grand You Are Dumb Dot Net tradition of features you'll never see again, or renaming features you've seen before (but only once), we bring you HATELETS. Little tiny packets of hate that can course through your bloodstream and form a callous scab of cynicism over your soul.

For example, our first Hatelet has Yahoo's name stamped on it. You know why? Because nobody knows what a "Life Engine" is, nobody needs a "Life Engine" even if they could figure out what it is, and going around calling yourself a "Life Engine" when you're the second-place search engine is just asinine. People do not use Yahoo to live things, they use it to find stuff. Yahoo is just bitter because Google got to be the verb. Get the fuck over it. Lots of sites wanted to be PORTALS a few years ago, it didn't work out, move on.

A mini-Hatelet goes out to STOP, also known as "Simply Truths Our Priority", but only a small one, because they've already made giant asses of themselves, and we should all point and laugh at them. These people oughta become the official You Are Dumb Dot Net poster children, because first, they're anti-gay, second, they're overly concerned with protecting the children, and third, they believed the Internet when it lied to them. But it's better than that. They believed THE ONION.

STOP is trying to, well, stop, the expansion of a "safe schools" program. Presumably, the program would now try to teach kids that beating the living hell out of the gay kids would be a bad thing, which, of course, is promoting the filthy gay lifestyle in our schools. So STOP spent seven weeks, "researched in-depth", and put out a pamphlet and a 300-page computer document that featured a photo from the Onion showing a "gay recruitment drive" in a classroom. If only they were from Tennessee. They're from London, Ontario, Canada, which just goes to show you that the South doesn't have a monopoly on idiots, they're just the leaders in market share.

Ten million Hatelets, one to each one of you soulless fuckers who watched The Swan. And then another ten million extra Hatelets to Lisa Wright, morning DJ at WXPT, The Mix. Every week, like a champ, Wright pimps American Idol. Whether it's out of corporate mandate or just due to being mediocre, I don't know. But lately, she's started to pimp The Swan, which led to an astonishing exchange this morning. Wright started talking about the show, playing the clip where that week's winner sees herself for the first time. Her compatriot, Kevin McLaughlin, who's a fairly conservative asshole, admitted that the show creeped him out and sent an awful message to society. Wright's response: "Yeah, an awful message to society... still, other than American Idol, Fox really doesn't have any hits, and The Swan is a BIG HIT!" Again, someone has said something so obscenely wrong that I have to invent a new term to describe it. How about... coprolalic inverecrania. Talking shit with your head rammed up your own ass.

"Hey, I've got a great idea! Let's go see 'The Passion' on Good Friday!" "I've got an even better idea! Let's go see it on Easter, too!" "Brilliant! Now if we can only figure out when to watch 'Halloween' and 'The Santa Clause 2', we'll have our whole moviegoing year planned out!" Another 17 million and another #1 spot for the Jesus, and all because you people think you're CLEVER. At least when I went to see Hellboy on Easter, it was just because the schedules worked out that way. It doesn't make me some kind of MASTER OF IRONY. I've got Hatelet stigmata on my palms, and I'm itching to slap you with them. And curse you out. In Aramaic.

Hatelets. Bite-size hate for a world that bites. Yet another quality product from You Are Dumb Enterprises.

Details

Memo to Details Magazine: YOU ARE DUMB.

Today's article requires a visual aid, in the form of a whopping big JPG of a page scanned from the most recent issue of Details, one of those mens' magazines for insecure fuckheads. So click on the link below and have it open for reference.

Gay or Asian?

Ah, where to begin. There's so very much to hate, so very much that is stupid on this page that it's difficult know how to start. So we'll have to rely on standard conventions - top to bottom, left to right.

"Anthropology". That's precisely the kind of faux-ironic dressing up of your comedy as science that gives dressing up your comedy as science a bad name. Right off the bat, they're ruining it for the rest of us who use the power for good. Assholes. This also gives us our first hint of the "OH GOD AREN'T WE CLEVER" attitude that will become more important as we move down the page.

Since we're dealing with an Asian dude, the first stereotype out of the box is... yes, Chinese food. And the second stereotype out of the box is... YES, CHINESE FOOD. This page commits many crimes and sins as it is. Was it really a good idea to compound it with repetition right out of the gate? I think not.

The men's magazine then takes its first shot at the scary homosexuals with "shaved balls". It's funny, but every time I've seen an article this year about the increasing trend of male pube-trimming, it's always been straight guys hopping on the bandwagon. I guess I'm not nearly as in touch with the culture as Details.

"...entering the dragon requires imperial tastes." I don't even get this. I mean, OK, vague connection between Bruce Lee movie (Martial Arts! A totally unexpected turn!) title and some form of penetration, but the whole thing doesn't actually match up to any standards of comedy (or, really English) logic.

"Choke up on your chopsticks, and make sure your labels are showing." So we have a baseball term for gripping a long, hard shaft, a THIRD reference to Chinese food, and some kind of dig at designer-fetishism. Obviously, Ms. Mcnally feels she's on a roll, and decides to hit for the bleachers with...

YES! The fortune cookie sage aphorism, complete with David Carradine overtones, ending with a dick joke! To use my own sports analogy here, this is the comedy equivalent of Greg Louganis hitting his head on the diving board on the way down. Complete with the horrified splash as the joke makes its final impact with the pool.

Now we turn to the poor model, who probably had no idea he'd be used for something like this, and whose clothes are then made fun of by Whitmey. One would assume, being in the magazine business, Whitney would be aware that models never actually pick out their own clothes, but whatever.

Let's just run down the offense tallies on both sides of the aisle to save time.

Asian: Inscrutable. Check. Obsession with American stars. Check. Accent-mocking. Check. Asian food references four and five. Karate Kid, Last Samurai, Pink Lady namedrops - check, check, and check. And don't forget the bonsai!

Gay: Reference to fringe sexual practice - check. Fashion references two through seven inclusive - check. Dick joke #2. Check. Mentioning the ass at least once... almost didn't get that in there, but YES. Checklist complete.

Sweet fuck, that's trite. I mean, essentially, there are FOUR jokes on the entire page: "Asians make Asian food.", "Asians know kung fu.", "Gay guys like clothes.", and "Gay guys like dick." That's what the whole thing boils down to. I mean, if you're going to incur the wrath of two entire communities, and they did, wouldn't you at least want it to be from something daring? Something bold? Something even remotely... funny?

Here, by the way, is apparently how they plan to "apologize".

"The "Gay or Asian?" item in our April issue was part of a continuing feature that is intended as a humorous swipe at social stereotypes. Details has a wide readership?male, female, straight, gay?from all cultures, and we value all of them. We appreciate the substantial feedback on this item that we have received, and we will certainly keep those concerns in mind as we move forward. We regret that anyone was offended by the article, as that was not our intention."

TRANSLATION: Um, we were making fun OF stereotypes, really, not making fun USING them. We love everyone who gives us money! It wasn't our fault, and why are you so damn sensitive, anyway? Oh, and we're gonna keep doing it.

Dumb or smart? You make the call. Oh, wait. That's my job. DUMB.

The South

Memo to the South: YOU ARE DUMB.

We've covered some of this ground before, but it keeps cropping back up. The South needs to clean up its shit if it wants to be seen as smart, sophisticated, modern, and non-sister-fucking by the rest of civilization.

Start in Tennessee, a state already ON THE LIST. Specifically, Rhea County. You may remember Rhea County as the home of the Scopes Monkey Trial, an event they commemorate each year with a festival. Apparently, an annual celebration of anti-evolution hysteria didn't make them seem backwards enough. Like Avis, they try harder in Rhea County, TN.

So the county commission voted, unanimously, to ask the state legislature if they could kindly* change the laws so that Rhea County could charge homosexuals with "crimes against nature". Oh, and they checked with their attorney general to see if there was a way to keep gays from living in the county.

Essentially, Rhea County is hoist on their own petard. By denying the idea of natural selection, they've failed to realize that all they need to do is keep being an entire county of backward, inbred gaybashers, and, with the possible exception of a few Log Cabin Republicans, all the gays would NATURALLY SELECT to stay the hell away from there.

And what's worse, they're pussies. A day later, after their leader was quoted in publications saying "We've got to keep them out of here", some of the commissioners are now claiming that they need a "clarification" of the measure. That they voted unanimously for. Seems they thought they were just endorsing the commonly accepted bigotry about gay MARRAIGE, not the less palatable bigotry against gays in general. Unfortunately for these commissioners, the state's recently enacted "No takebacks" law means they're stuck looking like jackasses.

And here's where we get to the crux of the matter. Remember, back after 9/11, when pretty much every single Muslim or Muslim-looking person was expected to individually and publically denounce what happened, under pain of being sympathetic to the terrorists? Well, I think the same standard needs to be applied south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Every time a county wants to kick out all the gays, or Miami police are found to be following and photographing rappers who visit "just in case", or anyone in Texas does... anything, really, everyone in the South, and everyone living in the North but with a twangy accent, has to publicly denounce their actions.

It's really the only way for the South to escape their horrible, unfair, stigma of deep-seated DUMB. Get crackin'.

*I do not know for a fact that the measure they voted on included the word "kindly". However, I have it on the highest authority (Andy Griffith as "Matlock", Andy Griffith as "Andy Griffith") that Southerners use "kindly" like I use "motherfucker", i.e., as punctuation.