A Conservative Lesbian
The nutroots know the value of keeping control of the language used to frame any issue and update the definition of teabaggers and teabagging here.
One of the sayings in my family as I grew up was, “Never argue with a crazy person!” We had one, and those who did got no pity.
I don’t know why that sprang to mind just now.
Left Blogistan is gloating about how to interview persons attending the Tea Party protests on April 15 to make them look like fools and bigots. I was a reporter for two years of my well-spent youth for the Harford Democrat in Maryland. I have some advice.
Here’s how to give an interview at your Tea Party:
That how YOU control the interview.
Here are my three reasons for attending my local Tea Party protest:
For more information about the Tea Parties, I recommend:
Michelle Malkin: “An Army of Tax Revolters and a warning to fair-weather Republicans,” “Tracking the Tea Party Crashers” and “Where Will You Be for Tax Day Tea Party?”
Little Miss Attila, “Tea Parties Are Racist”
The Other McCain, “Alabama Here I Come!”
Legal Insurrection, Law professor William Jacobson on “Liberal Doughboys afraid of Tea Parties”
Protein Wisdom, “Tax Day Tea Parties” and “Another Developing Situation”
Gateway Pundit, “Rush Limbaugh Says Report on ‘Ring Wing Radicals’ Timed for Tea Parties”
My dear little Grace was diagnosed with lymphoma in December 2007. I thought she had only a few days to live and got her veterinarian’s permission to titrate the prednisone he had prescribed to twice the dose he had initially ordered. It worked and she put on weight again, but he said that this typically would only get the cat another 18 months. That was over 16 months ago. My beloved is wasting and her little body is shutting down. She helped to save my life and I will tell how in a day or two. But for now, here are some photos. BTW, Grace is Beauregard’s girlfriend. She just turned 12 and is only a couple of months younger than he is. They are both sleeping with me tonight.
On my daily rounds I came across one or two blogs denouncing Meghan McCain, which is not unusual, but somehow my curiosity was piqued. Anyway, I clicked through on the links and found — you are shocked, I’m sure — that I am delighted with Ms. McCain’s explanation of why she supports gay marriage and why she is speaking at the annual convention of the gay and lesbian organization, Log Cabin Republicans here.
Her piece has a startling fact about Ronald Reagan’s role in the founding of the Log Cabin Republicans and is worth reading. I think I am going to like this strong-willed young woman, who — wisely and properly, in my opinion — admonishes her elders thusly:
If you think certain rights should not apply to certain people, then you are saying those people are not equal. People may always have a difference of opinion on certain lifestyles, but championing a position that wants to treat people unequally isn’t just un-Republican. At its fundamental core, it’s un-American.
At the end of the day, speaking at the Log Cabin Republicans’ convention isn’t just about reaching out to the gay community-although I believe doing so is vital to the future success of the party. It’s also about reaching a wider base and redefining what it means to be Republican, and leaving labels, stereotypes, and negativity by the wayside. That more and more people are discussing gay rights speaks positively for the millions of young and progressive Republicans waiting for our party to return to its roots. Personal freedoms are what makes this country the greatest country in the world. And just like the civil-rights and feminist movements before this, the movement toward gay equality and gay marriage is one I have absolute faith will triumph over prejudices. Moreover, I believe the Republican Party has, at this moment, the opportunity to come forward and play an instrumental role in securing gay rights. That’s why I’m speaking at the Log Cabin convention and couldn’t be prouder to be doing so. And yes, I’m still a Republican. Get used to it.
I added the bold-facing.
Tammy Bruce points out that it is Republican and fiscal conservative lesbians, gays and blacks who can go to these — our — victim identity groups and have the credibility to break the chains liberals have put on them and empower them to freedom. I plan on doing my part to help with lesbians and gays. I know Zo is doing his part to reach African-Americans.
As the Tea Parties attest, we are fighting for the economic life of the United States. Lesbians and gays are a highly entrepreneurial community and therefore are the natural constituency of fiscal conservatism and belong in the Republican party. For heaven’s sakes, gays are fighting for marriage — a conservative value — to adopt children — a conservative value — and to serve our country — a conservative value.
Out of respect for my Christian readers and the seriousness of the holidays of Good Friday and Easter, I held back a couple of LOLcelebs photos I found on Friday, but I can’t resist including them here:
see more Lol Celebs
see more Lol Celebs
… and calls for photos here.
I hate wind turbines and the entire wind power gestalt with the fusion-powered hatred of a thousand suns. They are eyesores, expensive and unreliable. And I don’t think anyone has studied the impact they will have on bird and insect populations. This is especially important when bees are affected. They pollinate our food. If they get sucked into the vortices created by the wind turbines, this is going to affect our food supply and not in a good way.
I take the plight of the poor bees to heart for an unusual reason. My father loves wilderness paddling — he is certified by the Explorers Club of New York and the Canoe-Kayak Federation of Canada as the first person to lead an expedition the entire length of the Whale River in Quebec. I only got to go on one of his wilderness river trips, which was on the Missinaibi River in Ontario. There’s a rapids about five miles south of Mattice with a little island that divides the river. My father tried to take me through the right side of the island, which was class IV water — above my ability, but he thought he could get us through. However, I wasn’t strong enough to paddle upstream far enough to be able to turn the decked C-2 (two-person canoe) to the chute we had targeted. The Missinaibi grabbed us and we almost broached on a rock. I will never forget what it was like to be powerless against that current. That’s why I identify with the bees getting overwhelmed by the wind vortices from the turbines.
So I am delighted to point my readers to a great article on the objections to wind power at American Thinker here.
And while I was perusing Little Miss Attila, as is my daily habit, her post here attracted me to Blue Crab Boulevard, who might very well live in my neck of the woods — we revere the blue crab in these parts and hold regular feasts in its honor every summer — and now resides in my Blogroll. As it happens, the Crabman is an engineer and he has an excellent post about wind energy here. Also, make sure to read his brief and lucid explanation of power generation here, which gives your understanding of why wind power is unacceptable as an alternative energy source a solid foundation.
For the record, I favor nuclear power. Fission, baby, fission!
P.S.
I can’t leave out Stacy and Smitty.
P.P.S.
Or Michelle Malkin, who blasts Obama’s current climate nitwittedness here and here.
When I wrote last week about my joy over the court decision that allows lesbians and gays to have same-sex marriages in Iowa, near the end of the post I pointed out that our healthcare system is a far bigger threat to marrriage right now than gay marriage, which is totally not a threat to marriage no matter what.
To my delight, my very dear friend, Little Miss Attila (go there, look right for the “Quote of the Month,” sent over an estate attorney named Hans Carlson who agrees — at least about my point that our healthcare system is the biggest threat to marriage in the U.S. right now.
Mr. Carlson wrote his comment to “Now it’s safe for me to move to Iowa” in my”About me” post and I am giving it its own unique post because of an idea that popped into my head as I wrote my reply, which I have helpfully emphasized for your reading convenience by putting my proposal in red, bold-faced type:
Dear Ms. Yockey,
Directed to your blog from Little Miss Attila, and read your entry regarding the imperative need for estate planning under the looming specter of nursing home costs, as a possible downside of marriage, whether gay or straight. Excellent, excellent point! I am a (nearly) 60-year old estate planning attorney. Regardless of orientation, marriage might not be the best option for middle-age or older folks who aren’t very well-t0-do. Don’t run to Iowa or Vermont and get married without seeing a lawyer. Totally lacks romance, I know, but you still gave GREAT advice.— Hans Carlson, Jackson, Minnesota
Hans,
Thank you! It’s wonderful to have an expert validate that point!
I am planning to write more about this in the future to teach people what the issues are, how to educate themselves about the regulations and how to work with their doctors and lawyer to plan for their senior years and end-of-life care. Who knows? “Gay marriage” may become the popular name for the collection of legal documents lesbians and gays now have to use to approximate the rights of legal marriage.
When very pious, religious couples have to divorce for financial reasons so that the community spouse (i.e., the one who doesn’t need long-term nursing home care) will be financially able to stay in his or her home and live independently, it breaks their hearts and shatters their sense of morality. If they can divorce and call their new legal arrangement a “gay marriage,” I wonder if that would feel a little bit better. After all, as lesbians and gays we are fighting for “marriage,” not “gay marriage.” If you ask your clients who are forced into this choice whether calling their new status a “gay marriage” would make them feel better — and help people understand instantly what they had to do — I hope you come back and comment and let me know.
Cynthia
Really, people, the first wave of baby boomers are in their sixties now and this tidal wave is on the horizon. Estate and tax attorneys and CPAs already are telling couples over 60 that it is — not “may be,” but IS — in their financial best interest to divorce so that the healthier spouse is not destroyed by the longterm healthcare required by the other spouse.
It’s got to be heartbreaking and embarrassing for a couple to have to give the long explanation of why they divorced despite still being devoted to one another and totally married emotionally. Let’s use the term “gay marriage” to mean the conglomeration of legal agreements that lesbians and gays now have to use as a substitute for being married legally. THEN all the couple has to say is, “Now we have a gay marriage,” and everybody knows what they had to do and why and that they are still in their hearts married. Lesbians and gays get to have “marriage.” Everybody wins.
You’re welcome.
P.S.
What say you, dear esteemed law professor and Blogospheric Neologian?
After I wrote my post on Lindsay Lohan’s agonized response to the break-up of her two-year lesbian relationship, I realized there is something else I need to point out.
You can only mature emotionally and psychologically when you are living in your true sexual orientation. You cannot mature — or heal — when you are faking being straight. And I’m totally leaving out the damage living a lie does to the people around you.
This lesson was one of the very first insights I had after coming out in 1972 when I was 18 and a freshman at the University of Michigan. This was three years after the Stonewall riots in New York City, which marked a new era in gays and lesbians refusing to live closeted, false lives and claiming their true identities.
The common trait of being lesbians brought together a remarkably heterogeneous group of women in terms of ages, education, professions and social class. So I was in a community of women most of whom were five to 30 or more years old than I was. What surprised me was that when apparently mature women, even those middle-aged and older, left straight marriages and came out, they invariably seemed to turn into teenagers.
My theory is that these women’s emotional and psychological growth stopped at puberty when they were forced into suppressing their lesbian sexual orientation and began to fake heterosexuality. However old they were when they came out, they still had to go back to the time when their real growth and maturation had stopped and begin again from there.
This thought came up from my Google search on Lindsay Lohan — one site included a slide-show of all her exes, all men except Samantha Ronson (I think — I didn’t check all umpteen photos). If Lohan is a lesbian and Ronson was her first relationship, emotionally she’s in her mid-to-late teens, not her 20’s.
I’m counting the fact that people can only mature emotionally and psychologically in their true sexual orientation as another reason to support equal rights for gays.
I am vaguely aware that there is a young celebrity named Lindsay Lohan. Our dear Stacy is gloating over her break-up with her lesbian lover of two years, Samantha Ronson (whom the prudes at Us magazine called “Sam,” which strikes me as intentionally deceitful), in hopes that her next lover will be male — and to work in photos of lesbians in bikinis in accord with one of his rules for generating traffic — so I went on a little Google look-see.
I didn’t find any stories about Lohan now dating a man. But the Detroit Free Press had this:
Earlier this week, [singer and former member of Fleetwood Mac] Stevie Nicks had a strong reaction to the rumor that Lohan wants to buy the rights to her life story. “Over my dead body,” Nicks told the New York Times. “She needs to stop doing drugs and get a grip. Then maybe we’ll talk.” Nicks has been drug-free for 15 years, after 20 years of cocaine, alcohol and prescription drug addiction.
And then I found the big shocka at Us magazine, which obviously contacted comedian Kathy Griffin of “My Life on the D-List” on Bravo for a funny smackdown of Lohan and got this instead:
“[I made fun of Lohan last year but] now it seems like she’s in the throes of real trouble …. It feels like kicking her when she’s down. Believe it or not, I might kind of take her out for the time being. That’s a little hard to find the comedy in.”
Us noted that Lohan had given the magazine extended interviews by phone and e-mail on her break-up in which she was crying and “seemed agitated” and that sources had told them they feared Lohan is suicidal.
Kathy Griffin is the only celebrity I can think of who is not dead to me for voting for Obama.
When Margaret was dying in the fall of 2004 — it was about three months from her diagnosis as terminal until she died — we watched Kathy Griffin’s stand-up comedy show, “My Life on the D-List,” which became the basis for her Bravo reality show of the same name. Kathy Griffin made Margaret laugh out loud, as hard as she’d ever laughed in her life.
I will forgive Kathy Griffin for anything. I will love her forever and ever.
Plus, she does love her gays and lesbians.
But since Kathy Griffin is the celebrity other celebrities fear and flee in hopes of staying out of her act — like that will help — when Kathy Griffin says she’s laying off Lindsay Lohan and doesn’t want to kick the poor kid when she’s down, then really, everyone else should, too. Lohan is teetering on the brink even more than most of us do when our hearts are broken. Certainly Easter is the time of year to root for her, to stretch out a friendly hand and remind her that she can resurrect her life, get clean and sober, and come through this experience a better and wiser woman.
Bonus video — Kathy Griffin didn’t think Prop 8 was funny, either, and now I love her even more:
In the late 1960’s, before I met her, one of my lesbian lovers — who looked almost exactly like the character of Shane in “The ‘L’ Word,” played by Katherine Moennig — was expelled from Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan, for being a lesbian. (This relationship was while I was at the University of Michigan, 11 years before I met Margaret.)
Now the Creative Minority Report is hyperventilating and complaining that EMU has committed another injustice, this time against a student who was in a graduate program training to become a counselor (or therapist). The Ann Arbor News story describes the case as follows:
The Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom says student Julea Ward was dismissed from her graduate program in March after refusing to affirm a client’s homosexual behavior prior to a counseling session, according to a press release from the group.
David French, ADF senior counsel, said the school initiated a disciplinary process against Ward despite the fact that she followed her supervising professor’s advice and referred the client to a counselor who did not have a conscience issue with homosexuality.
Ward then allegedly was informed that the only way to stay in her program would be to undergo a remediation process to change her beliefs as they relate to counseling about homosexual relationships, the Defense Fund Center said. When she refused, she was given a formal review hearing, after which she was dismissed from the program. The dismissal was upheld March 26 by the dean of EMU’s College of Education, the press release said.
The American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders and the American Psychological Association followed suit in 1975 sayng that, “”Homosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, stability, reliability, or general social or vocational capabilities” (Conger, 1975, p. 633).” The American Psychological Association’s guidelines on homosexuality are here.
That means Ward’s position of the supremacy of her conscience over the guidelines of the counseling professions is comparable to a medical student asserting her right to refute the existence of bacteria and treat bacterial infections only with prayer. In other words, she is practicing her religion while violating the guidelines of her profession. She already is free to practice her religion, but she is not free to cloak her religion in the mantle of authority of the counseling profession. The fact that she does not understand why THAT is wrong is what should shock the conscience.
And, no, Ward’s offer to refer gay and lesbian clients to other counselors is not acceptable because this is what the vulnerable gay or lesbian client hears, “I think you are immoral and should burn in hell, but I have a colleague who also is evil and has no standards, so I am referring you.”
If that client was YOUR child, family member, friend, co-worker, or neighbor teetering on the brink of suicide, is THAT the message you think they should hear?
Because suicide is what the EMU big meanies are trying to prevent.
Speaking of which, if you are very, very religious, AND especially if you also are extremely strict, IF your child is gay or lesbian, the ONLY clue you may ever get about that is the very neutral-sounding question, “What do you think about homosexuality?” Your child’s decision on whether or not to commit suicide is riding on your answer. If you answer harshly … well, even if your child doesn’t commit suicide, that’s the moment where emotionally and spiritually they will leave you.
What your child is usually really asking you is, “Will you still love me if I tell you I’m gay?”
Now watch “Dead Poets Society” enough times to figure out what making someone feel trapped by harshness and strictness and cut off from their autonomy by another person’s values can do (and that character wasn’t even gay). Here is the scene:
And really, Stacy and Smitty — I saw the headline from the Creative Minority Report at The Other McCain — this is NOT a conscience issue, it is a professional standards issue and as a professional standards issue it truly IS a matter of life-and-death. If Ward wants to denounce homosexuality AND be a counselor, certainly she can find a program where she can become a minister and be within the guidelines of her profession to do both.
It is beyond reprehensible that social conservatives are positioning their desire to enforce their religions on other people as a matter of conscience and are trying to pass off this violation of their victims’ autonomy as something they are entitled to do — AND that THEY are the victims when their violations are thwarted. NO, that is NOT the way it works — imposing your religion and conscience on someone else, especially without their permission or knowledge, breaks their connection with their dharma and is about the most evil thing you can do.
(Note: Individual “dharma” is the most evolutionary behavior and profession for each individual, but everyone is different and can only progress from where they are so each person’s dharma is different. If they scorn their own situation and try to be someone else, they break their connection with their own dharma and fall into confusion. Someone who forces another person to be someone they aren’t also breaks that person’s connection with their dharma and pushes them into confusion on their evolutionary path.)