Updated: 05/29/2009 09:09:52 PM MDT
There is no denying that the decision of the California Supreme Court to uphold Proposition 8 is a setback for gay families and anyone who supports marriage equality. But the reversal is temporary.
One day in the not-too-distant future — years maybe, but not decades — Prop. 8 will be seen as the swan song of the old order. California’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage garnered 52 percent of the vote in November, but it was the last gasp of an atavistic and deeply negative conception of homosexuality whose grip on the American psyche will soon be broken for good (and good riddance).
Gay marriage is coming to America.
The speed at which gay marriage went from a wedge issue that Republicans used during the 2004 election to roust religiously conservative voters to the polls, to its wide acceptance today, is nothing short of a political tsunami. Five states have now legalized same-sex marriage either by statute or court order: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and Maine. The last three did so in the few months since California’s Prop. 8 case was argued. With the momentum building throughout the Northeast, measures legalizing gay marriage are considered viable in New York, New Jersey and New Hampshire.
The polls are reflecting this rapid shift in the cultural landscape.
See Blumner: Gay marriage will come Salt Lake Tribune
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Holy Week ended with a big bang in the conservative Catholic community. Robyn Moore, Mel Gibson’s wife of 28 years and mother of their seven children, filed for divorce in Los Angeles. With no prenuptial agreement, she is likely to get a settlement worth somewhere around half a billion dollars. Seems like a small price for 28 years of living with Mad Max and his homophobia, anti-Semitism and ultra-orthodox Catholicism.
In a joint statement, the couple acknowledge that they separated in August 2006 shortly after Gibson was arrested for drunk driving. When he was arrested Gibson publicly humiliated his family by engaging in a drunken tirade claiming that the Jews started all the wars in the world and asking a female police sergeant who was filming the event, “What are you looking at, sugar tits.”
But the tipping point that led Moore to seek a divorce seems to have been the publication of photos and stories about Gibson cavorting on a Costa Rican beach with an unidentified young woman. A Russian pop idol named Oksana says she’s the one and Gibson has asked her to marry him. Others claim the woman on the beach was a different Oksana, 39-year-old Ukrainian singer Oksana Grigorieva, who lives in a house owned by the CFO of Gibson’s production company Icon and is the former girlfriend of Timothy Dalton.
Why is it that these right-wing family-values guys are always the worst sinners? Newt Gingrich, Ted Hagee, Larry Craig and now Mel Gibson. Gibson was quoted in the Observer in 2000 as having said, “There is nothing more important than your family. If you ruin that part of your life, what’s left? Work? Money? Screwing around?
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Crowds attending the concert at the Lincoln Memorial
(AFP/Robyn Beck)
Late last night AfterElton.com reported that HBO, which had broadcast The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial Sunday afternoon — a
concert organized by the Presidential Inauguration Committee to start the inauguration festivities — said they were not to blame for …
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