Darkside Rainbow

Normally, when I think of conspiracy theorists, I think of complete mental cases with overdeveloped technical skills and underdeveloped senses of personal hygiene, crafting tinfoil hats in their mothers’ basements and swearing that the truth is out there because their X-files posters say so. What I don’t think of is Catholic bishops, although I will admit that Catholicism does have a strong track record of nutjobs - from psychotic evangelical leaders to monks raving in the belfries. So maybe it’s not so out of place when the Right Reverend Joseph Devine sounds like he’s just about ready to shave his head and start tilting at windmills when he claims that there’s a “huge and well-orchestrated conspiracy against Christian values”:

Catholic bishop hits out at ‘gay conspiracy’ to destroy Christianity - News.Scotsman.com

One of Scotland’s most senior Catholics has launched an attack on the “gay lobby” in Scotland, claiming there is a “huge and well-orchestrated conspiracy” against Christian values. The Rt Rev Joseph Devine, Bishop of Motherwell and president of the Catholic Education Commission, said gay rights organisations aligned themselves with minority groups, such as Holocaust survivors, to project an “image of a group of people under persecution”.

He warned that the gay lobby – which he labelled “the opposition” – had mounted “a giant conspiracy” to shape public policy.

[...]In the fourth of the Gonzaga Lectures held at St Aloysius’ College in Glasgow on Tuesday, Bishop Devine said: “The homosexual lobby has been extremely effective in aligning itself with minority groups.

“It is ever-present at the service each year for the Holocaust memorial, as if to create for themselves the image of a group of people under persecution. We neglect the gay movement at our peril.

“I want to ask you if you are able to see the giant conspiracy that’s taking place before our eyes, even if we didn’t see it at the time. I take it you’re beginning to see that there is a huge and well-orchestrated conspiracy taking place, which the Catholic community missed.”

He went on: “In this New Year’s honours list, I saw actor Ian McKellen being honoured for his work on behalf of homosexuals, when a century ago Oscar Wilde was locked up and put in jail. “It’s a very small group of people, but very active and organised – and extremely indulgent. The opposition know exactly what they’re doing. We don’t.”

Oh, yes. We’re quite organized. Little do you know that the conspiracy isn’t just in the UK; it’s worldwide. We have secret global bunkers where we hoard glitter, condoms, and Tori Amos albums. Fire Island is actually a militant training camp where we’re drilled in conversion techniques, subversion strategies, and the fifty ways to kill a man with a cardboard nail file. Not only that, but we have secret decoder rings that get us discounts on spiky, gelled androgynous haircuts (you know the cut - depending on the gender of the wearer, it’s either trendyfag or sportylez, but it’s the exact same cut) in every hair salon across the planet…and our uniforms are absolutely fabulous.

Done laughing yet?

Seriously, I’ll never understand conspiracy theorists. Yes, there have been some grand conspiracies throughout history, but for the most part they were only uncovered after the fact because part of what made them such successfully complex conspiracies was that they were almost entirely covert. Gay rights movements are quite out in the open, thank you, and aren’t even remotely organized enough to begin to shield a conspiracy - unless you want to believe that the disorganization and the multiple dismal failures that we’ve suffered are a deliberate attempt to hide what’s really going on.

Er. No. Frankly, I think the gay community overall is too self-centered (myself included) to mount a massive conspiracy to threaten anything, let alone Christian values. This is just one nutjob’s persecution complex (isn’t he accusing us of the same thing?); he needs to be right so much that he has to create a massive and faceless entity acting as a collective whole to actively and deliberately cause harm to his own personal beliefs. It’s rather like when people condemn “the liberal media’. There is no single-minded machine called “the liberal media”; there are multiple media entities made up of millions of people with varying motivations and directives, all bound by nationally mandated regulations that are constantly battled over by liberal and conservative entities.

The same goes for the gay rights movement; the label is just that, a label to collectively identify the one motive unifying diverse groups and individuals who cannot be collectively labeled as good or evil, and most certainly can’t be defined as promoting a conspiracy. Each person involved in the gay rights movement is concerned with their lives, their jobs, their homes, their families, just like anyone concerned with Christian values. Each person has their own individual problems, their individual successes, and their major motivating factors in life. The fact that they all happen to believe in gay equality isn’t a conspiracy. It is, as I’ve said a million times before, a basic human desire to be treated fairly.

Perhaps a few people are actively trying to undermine Christianity - but if they’re going to judge us by a minor percentage, then perhaps we should judge all Christians by Devine.

No?

I got yer tin foil right here, biotch.

I’m a little amazed that so many readers came back so quickly after the end of my hiatus, if yesterday’s comments are any indication. It’s nice to see you guys again. What isn’t nice, however, is the following headline:

Gay Iranian Fights For Asylum In Europe - CBS News

(AP) The Netherlands’ highest court rejected a gay Iranian asylum seeker’s last-ditch bid to avoid deportation to Britain, where he fears authorities will send him back to Tehran and possible execution.

In a ruling published on its Web site Tuesday, the Council of State said Britain is responsible for Mehdi Kazemi’s case, because it was there that the 19-year-old first applied for asylum.

Gay rights campaigner Rene van Soeren said Kazemi’s Dutch lawyer was considering an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. The lawyer, Borg Palm, did not immediately return calls seeking comment. Boris van der Ham, a lawmaker who has taken up Kazemi’s cause, has tabled questions in Parliament asking the junior minister for immigration, Nebahat Albayrak, to lobby British authorities on Kazemi’s behalf. Albayrak should either urge Britain not to send Kazemi back to Iran or offer him asylum in the Netherlands, Van der Ham said in a telephone interview.

“There should be some political leadership,” he said. “I hope in Britain they will do it and otherwise we should take the boy.”

Kazemi is not expected to be deported before Albayrak has answered Van der Ham’s questions.

[...]The Netherlands relaxes its tough asylum laws for Iranian gays - virtually guaranteeing asylum to any who apply here - because of persecution they face at home. Britain, on the other hand, rejected Kazemi’s original asylum request.

Kazemi, 19, says he traveled to London to study English in 2005 and applied for asylum in Britain after learning that his lover in Iran had been executed for sodomy.

After British authorities rejected Kazemi’s application, he fled to mainland Europe and applied for asylum in the Netherlands.

However, because Kazemi had already applied for asylum and been rejected in Britain, the Dutch government is refusing to consider his case and insists he must be sent back to Britain. It cites the European Union’s 2003 Dublin Regulation, which declares that the member state where an asylum seeker first enters the EU is responsible for processing that person’s claim.

Tuesday’s court ruling upheld the Dutch position.

Palm said last week that Kazemi was in such despair he was on suicide watch in a center for rejected asylum seekers in the port city of Rotterdam.

Can the bureaucracy; this is someone’s life on the line. I feel like I’m watching a teenager say “Dad, can I go to the movies?” “Didn’t your mother already tell you no?” Or at least, that seems to be just how lightly courts are treating this case. I don’t care if Britain already rejected Kazemi’s asylum plea; they’re notorious for that, because the Home Office “doesn’t believe there’s a serious problem of persecution in Iran” (paraphrasing another article I read earlier today, can’t for the life of me find it now).

Right. They must be reading the same book as Iran’s president, who is still convinced that they don’t even have gays in Iran.

So because Britain’s Home Office has a stick lodged up their arses and don’t appear to be enjoying it (not enough lube, maybe?), the Netherlands - normally so tolerant, offering shelter to almost anyone who applies for asylum - won’t even bother with Kazemi’s case.

I hate politics.

How can people so blandly dismiss a person’s life on the basis of technicalities? How can so many people say “sorry, my hands are tied because of this document here, so sorry about that death thing”? I don’t even understand how lawmakers could sleep at night if they ever stopped to consider the number of lives needlessly ended by snarls of red tape and ridiculous policies.

The only hope right now, unless someone pulls some major strings, lies in one vague statement by Britain’s Border and Immigration Agency: “We examine with great care each individual case before removal and we will not remove anyone who we believe is at risk on their return.”

We’ll see where that gets Kazemi. Hopefully farther than it got Hassan Parhizkar.

screw your stinking tags.

You’ll have to excuse me if I have a little trouble managing “righteous outrage” this morning. I just turned in my resignation letter, ending my three-year prison term at Crappy Old Job, and I’m so euphoric I could float through the roof. If anything deserves righteous outrage, though, it’s this:

Man, I’m glad I don’t live in Oklahoma.

“The homosexual agenda is destroying this nation, okay? It’s just a fact.”

I would really love to find the laws of reality as written by right-wing nutjobs, because they continuously pull “facts” out of their red-spanked little arses that continuously conflict with reality as we know it. If they keep this up, they’re going to cause the implosion of the universe when their reality collides with standard reality and causes a temporospatial claudication to just swallow the whole shebang.

We are not destroying the nation. Not by a long shot. If there are any financial analysts out there, I’d love it if you could draw up a table of figures showing the increased contributions to the economy made by homosexuals who, even when living together, pay full taxes for two individuals (since we don’t get tax cuts for marriage or children, hm, maybe that’s why they protest so much), contributing larger amounts than your standard White Picket Fence family. Not only that, but because we aren’t spending the leavings from our nonexistent tax cuts on our children, we’re free to engage in more spending to support the economy through purchase of nicer vehicles, nicer homes, and other expenses that directly support market growth. All we ask in exchange is to be treated like equals. That’s not an agenda. That’s the animal need to live within a safe environment.

Do you know why we have more suicides? Because living in society with the kind of fear and prejudice that we deal with is depressing. Some people who live in constant isolation and fear end up with serious complexes that negatively affect their physical, mental, and emotional health. As dramatic as it sounds, we live in a traumatic environment of constant assault and emotional abuse.

The entire thing is absolutely ridiculous. She accuses us of “infiltrating” government and organizations, trying to “indoctrinate” people - how is that any different from the Christian right’s efforts to remove evolution from school curriculae, and take key positions in which they can influence legislature in the direction that they want? It’s only infiltration and indoctrination when it’s coming from people that you don’t like - people that you consider a “cancer”. People that you think are more dangerous than terrorists, more dangerous than Jihadists - who are, by the way, religious fundamentalists. Religious fundamentalists who speak of their god’s desires and their god’s hatreds in a way quite similar to this.

We are not a cancer, and you cannot excise us from the body of the nation, for in the aftermath this nation would bleed to death of its own self-inflicted wounds. We are as much a part of America as anyone else, and we are just as necessary.

We are not a threat.

And we are not the terrorists.

I can’t believe these people get elected.

Bad puns aside, while “separate but equal” doesn’t work in cases of gay society vs. hetero society, a New York judge has nonetheless established equality in the separation of married gay couples:

In First, N.Y. Judge Allows Gay Divorce
Trial Court Ruling Appears to Be State’s First Allowing Divorce From Same-Sex Marriage

In what appears to be the first ruling of its kind, a New York judge will allow a lesbian couple who married in Canada to sue for divorce.

Though New York does not allow same-sex marriages, a state trial court judge refused to dismiss a divorce and child custody suit brought by a woman, identified only as Beth R., against her former partner Donna M.

Donna M. had argued that her 2004 marriage should be invalid in New York because the state doesn’t allow same-sex marriage, but Supreme Court Justice Laura Drager found that the out-of-state marriage could still be recognized under New York law. Her ruling appears to be the first divorce case in New York from a same-sex marriage.

“What we’re seeing now is a judicial battle that’s going to be waged in [the] next few months,” said Arthur Leonard, who teaches a class on sexual orientation and the law at New York Law School. “People sometimes forget that divorce is part of marriage. People need a judicial process to untangle a relationship.”

The cynical part of me says that of course they’d grant a divorce; anything to get around allowing a gay marriage to be legally recognized in the United States. It doesn’t have to be recognized if it no longer exists, right? So hey, let’s eradicate it any way we can!

Hello, paranoid-cynical hogwash. While the thought is amusing to entertain…I don’t think so.

Back on planet earth, the reality is that while it may seem to place a negative spotlight on gay marriage to make a gay divorce so public, the ruling is actually a positive sign. Sometimes the avalanche towards equality starts with a single pebble, and often begins where we’d least expect it. Maybe we’ve got to reverse engineer this one: work backwards, starting with equality in ending a marriage instituted elsewhere, before working our way back towards finally finding equality in beginning that marriage to start with.

I don’t really have a way to close this, other than to make an announcement: I’m on hiatus until March 10th. I know that’s going to lose me some readers; some people will lose interest and never come back. That’s okay. It’s still something I need to do; I’m still dealing with balancing the job issues, and until I get rid of the Old, Horrible, Pain-in-the-Arse job and I’m no longer working full-time double duty with several part-time contracts on the side, I just can’t handle the time and effort involved in DR. It’s the one contract job I have that takes up the most of my time for the least returns, so when I start getting stressed from the workload, it’s the one that has to fall by the wayside temporarily.

In case you can’t tell, my heart hasn’t really been in it lately anyway. Too busy, distracted, and tired. I will try to do a comic for this coming Monday (March 3rd, why did I put the 7th before?), so that will continue to update as usual - and I’ll ask around the network to see if anyone wants to guest blog in my absence. Other than that, though…March 10th, once old-crappy-job is gone and I’m just handling new-shiny-writing-job and the side contracts. I’ll be back. I hope you will be, too.

~Adri

…stop looking at me like that. I’m going grey, I tell you, grey!

Am I the only one sick of Americans with stupid, frivolous lawsuits trying to choke as much money out of people as they can?

Dad Seeks $4M After Daughter Sees Gay Porn

(Knoxville, Tennessee) A Tennessee man who once was a Big Brother contestant is seeking $4-million in damages after his young daughter opened a mailing containing gay pornography.

Kent Blackwelder, who appeared in Big Brother 2″ in 2001 and now runs a sandwich shop, has filed a federal lawsuit against Delaware-based Specialty Publications which promotes adult gay material.

The lawsuit claims that the mailing was “unsolicited” and that his 12-year old daughter opened the envelope that said on the outside “free DVD” thinking it was from the Disney Corp.

Instead, the envelope contained the DVD “Titan Men’s Farm Fresh,” and promotional material for a gay adult magazine. “[His daughter], being a curious child and thinking the free DVD offer was for a Disney movie, opened the envelope at which time she was horribly shocked to see numerous sexually explicit photographs of completely nude males,” the lawsuit claims.

“She ran to her father to show him what she had found, and he likewise was shocked, disgusted and enraged.”

The lawsuit accuses Specialty Publications of inflicting extreme emotional distress on both the 12-year old and Blackwelder.

The suit alleges the company flagrantly violated federal law governing the mailing of sexually oriented advertisements.

“As a result of the negligence of Specialty Publications, the [Blackwelders] have sustained great pain of body and mind and emotional stress, including shock, horror, humiliation and embarrassment as well as anxiety,” according to the lawsuit.

Oh, please. Pain of body and mind? Emotional distress?

I’ve got a news flash for you, buddy. Your daughter has probably already seen gay porn. Your daughter, if she’s anything like most of the pre-teen girls I know (admittedly few at this point, would be a little odd for a man my age…), avidly hunts for gay porn, discusses it with her friends, maybe even writes or draws a little of it herself. In fact, young girls of this generation seem to be practically obsessed with gay porn, to levels I don’t quite understand. They imagine pairings in every TV show they watch, get starry-eyed over the cute gay boys at their schools, and could probably teach you a few words in Japanese whose meanings would absolutely horrify you.

You apparently haven’t learned something about kids: Kids are horny little monsters, and even when they’re too young for that, they’re horribly curious about the birds and the bees just because you deny them knowledge and treat them as if they’ll be sullied by simple biological facts regarding Tab A, Slot B, and alternate insertions in Slot C. The more taboo you make sex of any kind, gay or straight, seem…the more they’re going to want to know about it, and the more they’ll giggle about it behind their hands.

So trust me, I doubt your daughter suffered $4,000,000 worth of trauma. She was probably surprised, maybe even a little curious, but a startled reaction of “oh my god, Daddy, those men are boinking!” doesn’t constitute emotional distress. Stop misusing terms like emotional distress, shock, or horror just to make yourself or your kid sound like a delicate, special little flower, wilting and fragile. Emotional distress is what Vietnam vets suffer. Shock is what ensues after severe injury causes temporary cognitive shutdown while the body deals with the pain. Horror is what happens when a pissed-off fag sick of idiotic lawsuits comes after you with a chainsaw and you narrowly escape with four of your fingers intact - and not the collective four you’ll need to wank off to your own glorious pity party, either. You want emotional distress? I’ve got your emotional distress right here, buddy.

Or maybe you’re suing not for your daughter’s emotional distress, but your own wounded ego. Maybe you’re a typical insecure straight man who flips the second anyone questions his sexuality. Oh dear; now the neighbors might think you’re gay. Now your daughter might think you’re gay! Swing those balls around like a sledgehammer, Mr. Man, and assert your heterosexuality! How much is enough to make people believe you’re straight? Not nearly as much as it would cost to literally make you straight, I think. You know what Hooper X said; “Deny, deny, deny…”

Maybe you ordered that little sampler for yourself. Wouldn’t that be amusing. Either way, it’s pretty obvious that this is the story of a washed-up starlet wannabe hoping to make another grab for the limelight, and pocket a little cash while he’s at it.

Jesus flippin’ Christ doing the Charleston on a trampoline.

I hate people.

what the sh*t is this?

Gather now, unbelievers, for I shall tell you a tale of a power older than the deepest roots of human culture, a force of nature born of the beasts that we claim to have risen above - an instinct so primal, so raw, that it overpowers all else and summons the very earth to quiver before its almighty and terrifying grace.

Homosexuality.

You think you know divinity? You think you know truth? Blasphemers. Weak pawns following a false god. Hearken, then to the truth that even heathens feel burning in the very core of their damned souls: the truth subscribed to by men of all faith, men of Christian and Muslim roots and more, men of all walks of life united, despite their differences, in this belief.

It is these men who grant us this power, these men who believe that we can move mountains - nay, bring about a flood of Biblical proportions! If belief is power, is faith is strength, then it is these believers, these true followers, who have given us our godhood. For in their eyes we can destroy cultures, corrupt families and children, move the foundations of the earth and crumble the underpinnings of man’s constructions, summon the seas to swallow cities, bring down entire military forces with a single glance, and destroy what little peace this world has until it lies in the same ruins that we brought to Sodom!

We are gods, in their eyes. We have such power that their deities pale before us. Turn not from our glory, for we are the All and the One.

We are mighty.

We are a dervish, a dynamo, an unstoppable force of nature.

Tremble, sinners - for we are gay, and God ain’t got nothin’ on us.

Damn, it feels good to be a gangst–er, smartass, if according to homophobes I’m so powerful, why can’t I wish myself up a shiny new Pontiac Solstice, please take this as entirely tongue in cheek since I don’t feel like getting shivved by gay Christians, these bloody effin’ tags could be a post on their own

NJ State Commission: Civil Unions Fail Gay Couples - 365gay.com

(Mount Laurel, New Jersey) A commission established to study same-sex civil unions in New Jersey has found in its first report that civil unions create a “second-class status” for gay couples, rather than giving them equality.

The report stops short of recommending that the state allow gay marriage. But it does find that gay couples in Massachusetts, the only state that now allows same-sex marriage, do not experience some of the legal complications that those in New Jersey do.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the initial report, which was scheduled to be made public Tuesday, the first anniversary of the state’s first civil unions.

State lawmakers made New Jersey the third state to offer civil unions with a law adopted in 2006 in reaction to a state Supreme Court ruling that year that found gay couples were entitled to the same legal protections as married couples.

The civil union law sought to give gay couples those benefits, but not the title of marriage. As a part of the same law, the review commission was created to look into whether it was working.

Let’s see. Create a hastily-patched together substitute law that is supposed to act as a panacea - or at least a pacifier - so that you can try to look proactive, all the while waving in front of gay couples, “Nah-nah, we still found away around letting you get married, so even if we’ve given you almost everything you want, we’re still better!”…

…and then you’re surprised that it fails?

Next, you’re going to tell me that water is wet.

No, really?

One, any legislation made in such haste, especially one meant to affect so many areas of life, is going to have a few little problems…and some major screwups. Complications? In the United States legal system? Why, fiddle-dee-dee, said Scarlett!

Two, separate-but-equal does not work. It has never worked. It didn’t work in the days of segregation, and it doesn’t work now. Creating a separation based on human characteristics then and there invalidates the idea of equality, because if things were truly equal then the distinction would be unnecessary.

Either drop the farce and make separation of church and state a reality by making marriage a solely religious institution - and a matter of choice - while enforcing civil unions for all, or allow fully legalized gay marriage and recognize the equality of gay citizens. Don’t try to pull that “separate but equal” BS. You’re not fooling anyone, not even yourselves. So stop wasting taxpayer money to pat yourselves on the back for being “proactive”. You’re not.

Oh, and here’s a cluebat: if you need a commission in order to tell you if something is working or not, it’s not working.

Jesus.

Flippin’ idiots.

Who elected these people again?

New Jersey, gay marriage, civil unions, and water is not, in fact, truly wet; you are, when soaked in it.

Stereotypes, prejudices, and assumptions are a dime a dozen - but in cases like that of Lawrence King, they can be quite costly. King, aged 15, was shot Tuesday by one of his classmates while at school in Southern California. His shooter, aged 14, has been charged with a hate crime for undisclosed reasons - but other students say that King was rumored to be gay, and there was bad blood between the two students.

Murder, Hate Crime Charges Filed in Southern California School Shooting - Advocate.com

Prosecutors on Thursday charged a 14-year-old boy with attempted murder and said he committed a hate crime in the classroom shooting of an eighth-grader who was declared brain dead.

Prosecutors would not say why they filed a hate-crime enhancement with the attempted murder count, but [...] ”It is inevitable that this is going to become a murder case,” Ventura County prosecutor Maeve Fox said.

King was shot in the head Tuesday morning during a class at E.O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, police said. More than 20 other students were in the room at the time. [...] Oxnard police have not specified a motive but said there appeared to be a personal dispute between the two.

King sometimes came to school wearing makeup and high heels, eighth-grader Nicholas Cortez, 14, told The Associated Press.

Another eighth-grader, Michael Sweeney, said King’s appearance was ”freaking the guys out,” the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.

”He would come to school in high-heeled boots, makeup, jewelry and painted nails — the whole thing,” Sweeney told the Times.

King was pronounced brain dead at St. John’s Regional Medical Center on Wednesday, said Craig Stevens, senior deputy medical examiner in Ventura County. Doctors planned to remove some of his organs for donation Thursday, Stevens said.

[...]Lawrence King had been under the care of the county foster care system and lived at Casa Pacifica, a nearby center for abused and neglected children, said Steve Elson, the facility’s chief executive.

What I see, when I look beyond the obvious issue implied by the hate crime and the students’ accounts of King’s behavior, is a troubled young boy whose cry for attention got him the wrong kind of attention. Even if his family is in charge of the disposition of his vegetative body…they obviously weren’t providing the home environment he needed, if he was living in a foster care center for abused and neglected children. King’s extravagant behavior likely wasn’t a sign of gay pride, but a desperate need to make someone pay attention to him, realize something was wrong, and offer the nurturing he needed and wasn’t getting. He may not even have been gay, though I won’t rule out the possibility that he was; if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be the first child to claim to be gay just to feel as if they were somehow special, set apart, and different from the people who made their lives miserable.

One can’t expect other children to possess the insight or maturity to recognize such behavior for what it is - but children are among the cruelest perpetrators of stereotypes at all, and claims that King was “freaking the guys out” likely led to this tragic event. Children see only that someone is behaving in a way different from the status quo, and don’t possess the impulse control to restrain their reactions.

However, fourteen is definitely old enough to know that violence, especially fatal violence, is not the appropriate way to express one’s prejudices. Prejudices may be a dime a dozen, but lives aren’t. There are over six billion lives on this planet, and yet every last one has invaluable worth to at least one person, even if it’s only the person in possession of it. King’s assailant can never repay the life that was lost; a young life wasted serving a sentence in jail for murder will not bring back the dead.

It’s a shame that we don’t seem to teach that well enough in schools.

(Insert appropriately irreverent and humorous tag here, because Adri isn’t in the mood to be silly after reading that.)

First they call us a threat to peace. Then they call us plague rats. Now we have devolved into something more simple, and yet so much more evocative; now we are the most base and vile thing of all, an essence, an embodiment, a raw and filthy thing that resides at humanity’s core.

We are evil, and so is any gay couple who wishes to raise a child.

Supporter of amendment to ban gay marriage says same-sex unions “evil” - Radio Iowa News

A proponent of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in Iowa says legalizing same-sex unions here would be “evil.” Iowa Family Policy Center president Chuck Hurley says children will suffer if gay couples are allowed to marry.

“From our perspective, it is evil to intentionally create a home where a child would be deprived of a mother or of a father. That is an evil act,” Hurley says. “That is a self-centered act that we already know…on average that child is going to do worse than if he or she had a mom and a dad.”

Hurley points to a study published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1993 that found children from broken homes fare far worse in life than those who came from a two-parent home. “I think it’s evil to experiment on children and intentionally…by law create households that don’t have a father or that don’t have a mother,” Hurley says. “Yes, I do believe this is a battle between good and evil.”

So now we are evil and a home without a binary-gender parental system is now a broken one - even if there are two nurturing parents, even if the opposite-sex parent would have been unfit, abusive, and/or dismissive. I don’t think this idiot quite understands the definition of a broken home. I come from a broken home, one that was never whole to begin with. My life began broken, and I bloody well fixed it with little to no help from dysfunctional and somewhat mental parents. A home with two loving, stable parents, regardless of their gender, is not broken - and it is certainly not evil.

I’m going to tell you a story. I’m going to tell you the story of a little boy, and the young man that he called “Daddy” long before he called him “big brother.”

In late 2002, I walked out of my mother’s house and out of her life, after a stormy altercation that had been building in the brief two months after college while I looked for a job in Louisiana’s sinkhole of a job market. Just as well, since she kicked me out. It was like a bad breakup; we both claim that we dumped the other. Either way, I said the most satisfying words of my life to her for the first time ever, packed up as many of my things as I could, and stood out in the driveway until well after dark until my father could find a free moment to drive the forty-odd miles between my mother’s house and his.

That day began the only period in my life when I’ve ever lived with my father, or even spent more than twenty-four hours under the same roof as him. I wasn’t looking forward to it. My stepmother and I don’t get along; I think she’s a batty, brain-dead twat with a mean streak that makes me look as sugary-sweet as Strawberry frickin’ Shortcake. But there was one bright point: I’d get to spend more than a day or two at a time with my little brother.

That was the only thing that made the next six months worth it.

Our father was constantly busy, struggling to support his family while my stepmother sat on her ever-widening arse and surfed the home shopping channel while making cooing, syrupy baby-talk that made me want to rip my hair out. She didn’t look after my little brother, and our father couldn’t when he was worn ragged and barely able to manage the time needed after work to show my brother some affection and a little discipline. The boy ran wild, wouldn’t do a thing his mother said, talked back to both his parents, and lived like a little Bohemian monkey. He was four years old when I moved in, and he couldn’t even say his alphabet - something that utterly appalled me, especially since I’d taught myself to read by age two and a half. The Pokey Little Puppy; I still know the words by heart.

So that’s where we started.

And for six months, I became my brother’s other parent. Not his mother; not the woman in the traditional relationship of husband and wife. Me. A man. A gay man.

For six months, my little brother had two fathers.

And in that six months, he learned to mind his manners. He learned, after long conversations with me about responsibility and the value of the things our father bought for him, why he needed to clean his room and take care of his video games and toys. He learned his alphabet and his numbers, and soon he was reading The Pokey Little Puppy to me. He said please, and thank you. If I asked him to do something, he did it - and if he did something wrong, he apologized for it. Never once did I have to yell at him, nor did I tolerate his mother’s screaming fits or the hand she occasionally raised to hit him. Never once did I have to do anything other than express disappointment and calmly, quietly explain to him why what he did was wrong; he quickly scrambled to mend his ways and do whatever it took to please me.

Every night I’d put him to bed and read him a story; every night I’d leave my bedroom door unlatched, because I knew within thirty minutes he’d come creeping in to snuggle up next to me, twine his fingers in the long braid of my hair, and fall asleep. He’d murmur “goodnight, Daddy.” Our father was Papa, to both of us. I was Daddy, for a very long time.

His mother he called by name, and never with an ounce of respect. She’d done nothing to earn it, not when it took an interloper in the household to undo the damage that her negligence had done to that child.

Was I a perfect parent to my little brother? No. Not even close. There were times when he frustrated me; there were times when I just had to tell him to go away and leave me alone for a little while. I don’t like children; I do like my alone time. There were days when I couldn’t stand always having him clinging to me; there were also days when he just couldn’t grasp something and it made me snarl in irritation before I bit my tongue and calmed down. I even cursed in front of him a few times; I have a foul mouth, and things slip out in casual conversation without the slightest hint of venom behind them. But was anything that I did evil?

No. And I refuse to listen to anyone who says that it was.

You can’t call a child raised by two men or two women a child from a broken home. You can’t call any nurturing environment a broken home, and you cannot automatically assign labels of “good” and “evil” simply by making them synonymous with “traditional” and “nontraditional”.

And you cannot use children to support your bigotry.

Call me evil. Tell me that I bear the mark of the devil, and then praise that woman who would dare to lay a hand on my flesh and blood in anger. Tell me that I am filthy, unclean and corrupt, for protecting and nurturing that child, for balancing my father’s workload and assisting as a second parent, for filling the role that my stepmother would not. Tell me that hell will open its gates before me and welcome me with relish for those quiet, stolen moments in which that boy felt happiness and peace, curled trustingly in his brother’s arms.

Tell me that the devil will take me for teaching a boy to behave like a human being, and offering him shelter that otherwise would have been denied.

I’ll only smile. Let hell take me. Even if I seem to have misplaced my 666, let the devil have his way with me, and let your god condemn me as evil. Call down your angels, and speak your verses from your sacred book. Exorcise me. Banish me. Damn me, in your ignorance.

It won’t change that for those six months when I was known as “Daddy”, I gave a child the love and care that he needed, and helped build the foundations for him to grow.

If that is evil…then forgive me not, my Father, for proudly have I sinned.

Kom op konijntje doe maar wiebele, wiebele! …what? It’s a tag. Shut up.

Last night, while finishing out a shift on Old!Job, my friend and coworker Tere (she of the vulgar humor and strange euphemisms for the vahooter) sent me a pretty nifty link running on Colorado’s Channel 9 News. The story is about a 3rd-grader who just may be the youngest known transgender that…well, that I can think of off the top of my head. The boy has recently announced that he - now she - will be returning her home school not as a boy, but as a girl. She will wear dresses rather than pants, and ask to be called by a female name and use female pronouns.

Tere was a little concerned, which is understandable; she has a newborn and a two-year-old, and was looking at it from the perspective of a mother trying to explain to her children why one of their classmates might choose to follow such a path at an age when they may be too young to comprehend it. She even said she was worried that her own children might be prompted to follow their classmate’s example, were they old enough to attend school with her.

I found it hard to share her concerns, because I think it’s fuckin’ awesome.

In all truth, I think the child’s decision is a phase. He/she is too young to really be sure and it’s hard to make a decision like that until the hormones start to froth, seethe, and do all those other nifty little things that turn you into a sea of sex-driven stupidity for the rest of your life. What I think is fuckin’ awesome is the reaction of the school district, teachers, the child’s parents, and the parents of the other students. For them to be so openly accepting, accommodating, and willing to educate themselves and each other is absolutely amazing, and it ended my night with a smile.

It’s about damned time we saw something a little uplifting on the GBLTQ front.

ring around the rosie, pockets full of posies, upstairs, downstairs, we all fall TAG!

It’s been a while since newsmongers have knocked on the Matos-McGreevey doorstep, but it looks like Dinah’s at it again; she’s now demanding that the gay partner of former husband (and former New Jersey governor) disclose his assets as well, as part of their divorce settlement. I suppose now she expects a man who’s wholly unrelated to her to help her “live a lifestyle closer to that of New Jersey’s first lady”. (…I still can’t believe the pretentious snit said that.) Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, indeed. It seems she’s determined to drag down everyone she can in connection to this, and make sure that both men pay for one man’s mistake.

The last time I caught them in the news, I actually ended up in a rather long phone conversation with my mother about this; I was still outraged that Matos-McGreevey was more interested in attaining revenge through a smear campaign while using the judicial system to take McGreevey for all he was worth than she was in safeguarding the health and well-being of their daughter, Josephine. What McGreevey did was hurtful, yes, and if he knew he was gay he never should have married her. There’s no question that he was in the wrong there, but it was an unfortunate situation for both of them (and I can’t blame McGreevey for the fact that social stigma made him feel as if he couldn’t be openly gay while running for office) and in the end she could have handled the situation with more class, kept their private business private , and done her best to look after their daughter rather than vindicate herself.

My mother surprised me after that spiel by saying that in that situation, she would do the exact same thing.

She then went on a scornful tirade about men in general before starting on gay men in specific; I’m not going to detail it, as my mother is of the erroneous camp who think “feminist” equates with “ball-crusher” and the only thing more offensive to her than a chauvinistic straight man is a gay man who dares not to validate her through attraction to her overwhelming aura of femininity. Suffice to say apparently McGreevey threatened Matos-McGreevey’s womanhood, and that is a crime deserving of any punishment that woman, the state, and the gods may mete out.

Am I just not getting this? I don’t think I’m particularly more civilized than either Matos-McGreevey or my mother; in fact, I’m a rude, caustic, shameless, utterly Bohemian savage, and yet I’m still better-behaved in such situations than they seem to be.

If I had a long-term partner or husband who suddenly announced that he was straight and was leaving me for a woman, I’d be upset, yes. I’d be angry. I’d likely throw things at his head. But I’d do it all in private, and if there was a divorce, I’d just want to make sure that our individual assets were properly separated before letting him go on his merry way while I focused not on destroying his life, but on putting mine back together and making sure it continued smoothly in his absence. No man should ever be so crucial to your life that his departure shatters it to the point where you have to gouge him mercilessly to try to fill in the gaps.

Had we adopted a child (me? As a father? I’d scar the poor thing for life) and the judge granted me custody, you can be damned sure I’d make sure that my former partner had at least partial custody; he signed the adoption papers, too, and would have just as much of a right to see our child. Yes, I would want child support - but only equal to half the amount required to look after the child, and not the amount required to look after me. That would mean half the child’s food, clothing, medical expenses, crucial necessities, college tuition - and only a quarter the monthly rent/mortgage/whatever. Half the living space would be for me, and therefore my responsibility. Half would be for the child, and split between the two parents.

To me that’s just a sensible approach. Relationships combust all the time, whether there’s a wedding ring involved or not. One partner’s confessed sexuality is just another of a long list of reasons that cause explosive separations: infidelity, drug abuse, spousal abuse, alcoholism, the list goes on. Whatever damage was done in that time, whether emotional or physical…money won’t heal it; revenge will only leave the wounds to fester without closing. All of the ugliness that goes into that does more harm to the bitter party than to their target, and when it’s over, will leave them distinctly unsatisfied.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: have a little class, Dinah. Choose to be the better person and behave that way, rather than loudly proclaiming why your ex-husband is worse.

governor james mcgreevey, james mcgreevey, dinah matos, dinah matos mcgreevey, mcgreevey, matos, gay nj governor, gay new jersey governor, jacqueline mcgreevey, coming out, silent partner, cipel, golan cipel, omfg!copypastaTAG!

This morning I read an article in the Windy City Times that starts off asking: why not a gay president? Rather than explore the issue further, though, it only uses the question to segue into a “been there, done that” discussion of the many theories that President Lincoln was gay, as well as mentioning possibilities of a few other prominent political figures who buried their sexuality under the Oval Office’s horridly-patterned rug.

What’s past is past, though, and I’d like to ask: why not an openly gay president, right here, right now?

It may surprise you to find out that I’m not exactly in favor of a gay president. I might be in twenty years, depending on the political and social climate of the United States, but at this point in time it would be a complete and total disaster. Assuming the man or woman even managed to make it through the election, the very fact of their sexuality would divide the country more thoroughly than the nastiness that followed the Bush/Gore fiasco in Florida. Angry anti-gay proponents would erupt into a violent uproar - and that violent uproar might even translate into real violence towards local gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders. The scrutiny that we already receive for trying to live as equals would redouble, along with the hostility involved. Even if he (or she) never focused on gay rights, there would be constant accusations from conservatives of “pushing the gay agenda”.

And, unfortunately, they might be right. Depending on if they were fair and balanced or not, a gay president might just ignore other, more pressing issues to try to force gay rights issues through Congress. We need a good bootheel shoving some things in there, but there are problems in this country more pressing than whether or not we get our tax breaks for being married. Drugs, gang violence, political corruption, that pesky little war over across the sea… I would honestly worry that those issues would be ignored in favor of granting sweeping protections to the GBLTQ community. If I had to choose being able to marry and ending the war in Iraq…which do you think I’d pick?

The problem is that a gay president wouldn’t be able to please anyone, no matter what he/she did. (Not that that’s much different from a straight president, but still…) Focus on gay rights, and the conservative half of the country will accuse him/her of ignoring crucial issues to push an “immoral” homosexual agenda. Ignore gay rights for the sake of diplomacy, and the GBLTQ community and our supporters will accuse him/her of being a traitor or worse. Try to find a fair and even balance between both, and everyone will call the improbable gay president a floundering buffoon who can’t focus on a single issue.

The truth is that we as a nation aren’t ready for a gay president, although at some point in the near future we need one. We are and always will be a nation divided; that’s part of the foundation of this country, that people of such diverse beliefs can coexist under a single unified government. But our government is losing its ability to act in coalition with itself, our politics foster prejudice, and our policies are self-destructive. Right now anything that further fosters the divisions between the various factions of our populace would be disastrous.

The very fact that it would never happen in this day and age is proof enough that we aren’t ready. For a gay candidate to win, he or she would have to be so stunningly perfect in every way that people would adore him or her, sexuality notwithstanding. I’d like to see that happen, but it won’t. We aren’t a people who will let a politician’s personal life rest while considering their politics.

The day that an openly gay candidate actually has a chance at winning is the day that we know we’ve progressed.

gay president, lesbian president, abraham lincoln, gay rights, it’s like The Birdcage in a three-piece suit

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I’m not even sure why I’m trying to post this when the site’s tanked and has been for almost two days now. If this ever shows up (since my admin console on WordPress is working but the rest of the site is redirecting to the main 451 Press site), sorry the site’s been down. Some sites on the network are suffering from huge scraper attacks and our head honcho is swamped trying to block them as they come and keep things running, and a few sites are suffering as a result.

On the topic of the film: seriously, forget the worst effin’ pies in London. That was the worst bloody film in London or anywhere else, and after sitting through it last night, I’d like to be reimbursed for those lost hours of my life that I can never regain.

I love theatre, musicals (well, to an extent; they have to be good musicals, but if I can enjoy Ewan MacGregor in Moulin Rouge I should have loved this), Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and grim, grimy, gory scenarios. Sweeney Todd had all of those, with a dark psychological edge and fun flips of the macabre counterpointed by the whimsical…and it fell completely flat. I don’t understand how it gained such widespread critical review, or made it into the IMDB top 250.

Though I’m pretty sure the singing had nothing to do with it.

I was shocked that Johnny Depp could sing at all, especially in such a clear, angelic voice…but that doesn’t change that most of the singing was pretty lackluster, random, and seemed to be done just for the sake of singing. It wasn’t music; it was just singing one’s lines rather flatly, and not a single melody stuck with me after the film. Don’t get me started on the leading lady, who was likely only the leading lady because she’s boning the director. Good gods, I thought my eardrums were going to pop when she hit a few high notes. The entire thing was listless, washed-out, and even the actors seemed bored by their parts. If they can’t be bothered to take interest, why should I?

no style, gay comics, webcomics, humor, gay comic strip, johnny depp, tim burton, sweeney todd, the worst tags in london

With everyone and their grandmothers getting their panties in a wad over whether or not gay marriage (or even civil unions) should be allowed, it’s always interesting to survey the gay community to determine levels of interest. While for some it’s a crucial issue that demands daily recognition and daily efforts to force the gay rights movement forward, for others it’s just a passing point of interest, sometimes degenerating into downright apathy.

The problem is that the importance of gay marriage doesn’t sink home for many people because we tend to think “I can’t, so why bother worrying about whether or not I would?” So rather than ask whether one is interested in fighting for gay marriage rights, instead ask: if you could legally marry, would you?

If gay marriage suddenly became legal in your state/province/country/incorporated territory/that freaky monkey shack where you live, would you get married?

       (a) In a heartbeat. My partner and were already thinking about it.
       (b) Yes, if I had someone I wanted to marry.
       (c) Yes, but only to spite people who were against it.
       (d) Maybe. I’m not sure, or I’m at a stage in my life where I can’t
       really think of things like that.
       (e) Not in a million years. Marriage freaks me out.
       (f) No, although I’d support others who did.
       (g) God, Adri, your default answers always suck so much. I have
       another response and I’ll elaborate in the comments.
       (h) I’m not gay or bi, so this doesn’t really apply to me since I’m
       allowed to marry whom I please (although that’s not going to stop
       me from sharing my opinion on it in any way at all).

I think I’ve already made my answer quite obvious: somewhere between e and f. I’m happy for anyone else who wants to get married, but me? Never going to happen. My knuckles are too thick to get a properly-sized ring on and off anyway. (Yeah, yeah, I know, men always have an excuse, no matter how lame. I think fear of marriage is hardwired into our DNA.)

What about you? Got the itch to get hitched?

gay marriage, civil unions, ball and chain, two balls and a rather short lead line, tying the knot…with your tongue, I’m just making up tags

3am. I have a horrible habit of being awake at this hour; it’s the magic hour for me, that hovering moment of breathless pause teetering just on the cusp between morning and night, that time when the sky is darkest and that deep, soft blanket of blue threatens to turn so black that you feel as if you can reach right beyond that seething envelope of atmosphere to touch the cold and endless reaches of space. The stars are always brightest at 3am, those nebulous balls of burning gas reaching thousands upon millions of light years through the void so that we, mere mortals, can see their churning and awesome vastness as nothing more than bright, merry dots against a yawning sky, eternal yet ephemeral.

Perhaps such a moment was a little too momentous for something as mundane as a craving for Dilettante’s chocolate-covered espresso beans, but then irreverence is one of my hallmarks - so I suppose it’s not so surprising that when faced with such a tableau of inspiring tranquility, I was hunched inside my jacket and swearing in six different languages about the wind crawling down the collar of my coat to where even the heavy layers of my hair couldn’t protect me, lapping its cold and stinging tongue against my neck and making me shiver for the entire walk across the street to the 24/hour Wal-Mart. It wasn’t an uncommon trip, and among the regular night employees there I’m not an uncommon sight. They know I’m a night owl, an insomniac, and a bit of a kook. They smile when they see me, ask how I’ve been, how the book’s going, man is my hair getting long - while I laugh and ask how are the kids, how is school, tease the night stockers stuck working the register when they’d rather be in the back doing their regular work.

A trip to Wal-Mart is nothing special, so I don’t feel as if I have to get particularly dressed up for it. I wouldn’t be caught dead in public in sweats and a stained t-shirt, but I didn’t think there was anything out of the ordinary about what I wore that night: faded and frayed boot-cut jeans, a black System of a Down t-shirt, my heavy black arse-whomping boots, and my new leather jacket (…which I apparently could have gotten on sale if I’d waited a little bit). Hair loose around my shoulders, reading glasses on, no jewelry save for a watch, the two tiny silver hoops piercing my right ear, and my usual black leather cord necklace. I didn’t look strange. I didn’t look bad, or good. I just looked absolutely, perfectly ordinary.

Ordinary is never good enough for Miss Priss.

Who is Miss Priss? Miss Priss is this young man of particularly diva-ish persuasion who works the night shift at Wal-Mart. Miss Priss and I have been circling each other like feral wolves vying for territory since day one, as apparently we set each others’ gaydar pinging and neither of us is particularly fond of the genus of Homosexualus Bitchinus that the other represents. I’m a scruffy, laid-back writer with a sharp tongue and oft-used deadpan look; he’s a fashion whore with a pissily-twisted mouth and a superiority complex (or an inferiority complex that he’s trying desperately to mask).

We don’t speak to each other, save for the frigid-but-required “Thank you, and have a nice day” when he’s stuck on the register and ringing up my groceries. We avoid eye contact. If I pass a group of people on the night crew that I’m familiar with and either stop to chat or just wave in passing, he gives me an evil look and will actually stalk off until I’m gone. In the same vein, if he’s working to stock an aisle that has something I need, I will detour around that aisle and come back later when he’s no longer in it. The virulent loathing seething in the air between us is so apparent that one of the greeters at the front door actually asked if Miss Priss and I had gotten into a fight at some point.

We don’t even know each others’ names.

It’s ridiculous, honestly. We have no reason to be so hostile towards one another beyond assumptions made about each other based on appearances, demeanor, and interpretation of the intent behind those quick, veiled little glances we keep shooting each other. We have no reason to dislike each other.

Or, should I say…we didn’t.

That night I snagged my espresso beans and a few other things I’d just remembered I was running low on (because foaming hand soap by the bathroom sink is such a necessity), and headed up to the only register open so late at night. #19 - all night, every night, never changes. Usually it’s covered by the sweet-faced girl who just gave birth to an adorable daughter and really should be on maternity leave, or the slender old woman with the eyeglasses too large for her face who would keep me there telling her about my novels all night, if she could. Sometimes it’s the girl with the unnaturally red hair who pegged me as an atheist on first glance and has made it her personal mission to convert me, down to humming gospel music when she sees me coming and just smiling the brightest, most engaging smile when I catch on to her and crack up laughing before asking how her day was. Miss Priss only works the register if all of them are off, or on break, or my luck is just particularly bad.

My luck was particularly bad that night.

I took my place in line behind a few others, glanced up to see who was working the register, and caught his eye just as he caught mine. Our expressions were likely identical: oh, no, not him. We both looked away sharply; he went back to ringing up the people in front of me, and I affixed a stony look on the rack of tabloids and ignored him. Even when my turn came, we cold-shouldered each other - not even the ritual greeting mandated by Wal-Mart customer service standards. He rang up my purchases, I swiped my debit card, and almost walked out without mishap. Almost.

As I snagged my bag from the little turntable (he’ll never take it off and hand it to me, and practically throws my receipt at me) and turned to leave, I heard, “…what are you supposed to be, some throwback to the eighties?”

Pause.

Blink.

Wait, what?

Excuse the @#!$ out of me?

That’s right, he went there. That silent hostility had just taken a lovely leap into the vocal, and I turned around and just looked at him, one brow practically vanishing into my hairline. I’m not normally particularly vituperative with strangers; it’s friends that I save the barbs for, as that’s my odd way of showing affection. I told myself not to say anything; I told myself to turn the other cheek and walk away. Instead I threw back flatly, “Mn. And how’s that blue vest working for you? Let me know when that look hits the runway.”

He snarled at me.

Feral wolves, indeed. I bared my teeth in a hiss, growl building in my throat; we might have gone at it right there in the store if the woman next in line hadn’t snapped her fingers impatiently and barked at him, “If you’re done flirting, a little help over here?” He glared at me, then turned back to work. I flicked my fingers at him dismissively and turned to walk out, absolutely seething.

I shouldn’t have said anything. It wasn’t worth it, and now any time we see each other there’ll likely be another verbal altercation - but I wasn’t about to take shit for wearing casual attire to Wal-Mart, especially not from an uptight little bitch sporting a cheap blue vest whose yellow smiley face constantly exhorted me to check out their Rollback prices. The fact that he came perfectly groomed to work every night, with a $100 fade in his hair and jeans and T-shirts that rather obviously came from The GAP and Banana Republic, probably contributed to the reasons why I loathed him on sight - but they sure as hell didn’t give him just cause to judge me on my fashion choices because I didn’t feel like digging my sexy International Male European suit out of the closet just to go pick up some frickin’ chocolate espresso beans.

I will never understand this fashion-obsessed culture we’ve fostered among the gay community, in which your clothing and the body you wear them on is more important than the person inside that clothing and underneath flawlessly waxed and tanned skin sheathing tight-packed muscles. There’s more to a person than that. There’s more to me than that. I am scruffy, I am scarred, I am flawed, I am utterly and unrepentantly wild and Bohemian - both inside and out. I dream in slowtime, speak in molasses and brown sugar, destroy worlds with the click of a key and rebuild them again in a myriad tumble of words like glissandos of falling glass. I love the feel of sandpaper and wood varnish under my fingers, I long to be a revolutionary, I crochet, I breathe to the deep-throbbing pulse of music, I sing atrociously, I love the sound of a V8 engine and can spend hours telling you how they work, I’m a stellar cook who still manages to nearly set the kitchen on fire any time he tries to bake something, and I melt like a purring kitten when someone touches my hair.

You can’t look at my clothing and tell that. You can’t judge the cut of my hair and know the breathless, obsessive-compulsive high that drives me to go days without sleeping while wrestling with a knotty bit of code on a new web design; you can’t look for ironed-in creases in my jeans to know that sometimes, even at age twenty-seven, I still wake up in the middle of the night terrified and sweating from the horrors that my sleeping imagination concocts. You can’t know that I love theoretical astrophysics and I’m frightened to death of spiders. You can’t know me, just because I don’t wear the brands you approve.

And you can’t define yourself by them, either.

I don’t give a damn what brand of clothing you wear. I don’t give a damn if you dare to have three hairs on your chest; I don’t give a damn if you have perfect teeth, if you drive a hot car, how often you work out, what trendy upscale restaurants you eat at. I don’t give a damn about your fashion sense. I don’t give a damn about you, if you can’t show me who you are without using your clothing and accouterments of a materialistic life to define yourself.

And I sure as hell don’t give a damn what you think of me.

#@!$ your tags right in the ear.