Gay Marriage II ( or why Orson Scott Card is such a prick)

I hadn’t planned on writing so soon about gay marriage after my previous post, but then I ran across this diatribe thanks to Australian blogger Daniel Midgley and I just couldn’t say no.

As an aspiring science fiction writer, I feel personally insulted by this. As a practicing homosexual, I am simply livid. Okay, Orson, let’s suppose you’re right for a moment, and homosexuality is a horrible stain upon our nation. Then what shall I tell my children? Sorry, kids, but I am setting a very bad example for you. Please don’t do as I do. Please be straight.

In actuality, what I told them was “I’m gay, and it’s fine with me if you are, too. But if you’re straight, that’s also okay. I love you unconditionally.” Well, what do you suppose happened? They both turned out straight.

Now, this doesn’t seem right to me. I mean, they have been raised in a homosexual household since the ages of 5 and 8. My partner and I have been very demonstrative of our affection. Why haven’t we been able to turn these kids gay? I guess it’s for the same reason that our straight parents couldn’t turn us straight. I guess it’s not just a choice but something inborn.

So I guess I’ll just continue my life as a gay married woman with none of the legal rights that heterosexual married couples enjoy, because really what the fuck else can I do? I mean, how fucking stupid do you have to be to think that I would choose this? I mean, just what sort of idiot are you, Orson, to think that the way I raise my kids has any relevance on the way you raise yours. I mean, so what if the elementary school teachers should happen to mention that some kids have two mommies? Because the fact is that some of them do, and they mix in the public schools with the straight children of straight parents, and, uh, frankly, it’s really not that much of a problem.

All Hail the Raptor Jesus

A few weeks ago, I asked my daughter to draw me a picture of a cartoon dinosaur. This is the same daughter that drew the picture of the sad, little robot for me as shown in a previous post. She asked me what kind, and I said a brontosaurus or a stegosaurus would be nice. Unfortunately, she got her first job soon after I asked her, plus she’s a procrastinator by nature, so she never got around to making the drawing.

The other day she apologized to me for not doing it. I said, “Oh, that’s okay. I know you’re busy. But look at this thing I found while travelling the web.”

velocirapture jesus

Now I happen to think this is a very well done drawing. I’ve linked it to the owner’s Cafepress shop. But when I showed it to my daughter she said “Oh, that reminds me of the Raptor Jesus.”

“”The what?” I said.

Apparently, she’s known about the Raptor Jesus for at least two years, but she never told me about it. I typed Raptor Jesus into google and the first hit was on the Encyclopedia Dramatica. This is some seriously funny stuff. To truly qualify as a Raptor Jesus, it has to be badly photoshopped. So the drawing above is much too polished, although it still makes a nice t-shirt. Here’s a picture of the true Raptor Jesus.

True Raptor Jesus

There’s even a prayer that goes along with this. , based on the Lord’s Prayer. It’s filled with inside jokes that I don’t understand, but I love the first three lines.

Our raptor,

Who art in /h/eaven,

shopped be thy face.

So Raptor Jesus is part of a meme spread by a website called 4chan. And 4chan was started by a 15-year-old five years ago. I haven’t been able to get into the 4chan website as it is currrently down, but I did find this article in The Guardian which talks about the founder and some of the pranks he’s played.

Just when you think you’ve lost faith in the younger generation, something like this comes along and restores it all.

What’s All This Fuss I Hear About Gay Marriage?

I saw this over at The Lavender Newswire about the Census Bureau editing out data on same-sex couples. I’m certainly not surprised and I’m not sure just how much I care. Before the GLBT community in hip places like Massachusetts and California started demanding their marriage rights, I figured it would be about 20 years until we had gay marriage in this country. That was 4 years ago so I now estimate it will be another 16 years. Fine with me. I expect to live just long enough to see it, so I can die happy.

What happened, of course, after we achieved our “victories” on the far-flung coasts is that the bigoted folks where I live were so scared and yes, disgusted, that they had no choice but to do the righteous thing and vote for a gay marriage ban. Some 78% of Oklahomans voted for that ban, compared with 56% who voted for Bush. So I guess a lot of Oklahoma Democrats are homophobes. Again, I’m not surprised, but somehow seeing those numbers on the TV screen the day after the election filled me with a mindless rage.

Since then, I’ve made a killing. No, not homicide. About 8 months after the ban, my company forced me to attend a Diversity training. I won’t tell you the company name, but the initials are BCBS. I told my boss that I was gay and if I went to that training session, I would be fired because I would say things that the people there would not take kindly. The diversity training was as lame as I expected it to be, talking mostly about people’s different hobbies and a bit about skin color. I pointed out that even though there was a gay marriage ban, I was still gay and I was still married. The next day I was asked to resign.

I guess I did the wrong thing. I cut a deal and resigned instead of letting them fire me. I really hated that job and I was afraid if I got fired, it would be hard to find another one. As it turned out, I still couldn’t find another one. I knew I could never return to office work, so it took me five months until I found a part-time job repairing vacuum cleaners. In the meantime I was burning through all my IRA savings which I’d been forced to withdraw. Six months later the repair center shut down and I was laid off. I decided to declare bankruptcy, thus writing off $20,000 in credit card debt. It was a great deal of fun!

It took another five months to find a job through a temp agency wiring electrical control systems. I thought I was going to make a fresh start, maybe go back to school and get an Associates Degree in Electronics Technology and work my way back up to my old pay scale. Target sued me for fraud, but there was one little problem. For the last two years, I had a lump growing in my breast. It was actually there before I left my job at the health insurance company, and I had a mammogram and was told it was nothing. I checked Web MD which said most breast lumps are benign and so I didn’t worry about it. But still, it kept growing.

Now, America being what it is, it’s quite possible to work full-time and not have any health insurance. I was working in the factory for two months when one day I discovered a small bump under my armpit. I figured it would take at least another 1-3 months to get hired on permanently, and three more months after that to get health insurance, but now I could no longer wait. I was able to schedule a free mammogram and a $25 biopsy through a local charitable organization. And that’s how I found out I had stage III cancer. This is the best thing that ever happened to me!

Due to my wage of $8.00/hour, poverty level for a family of three, I qualified for Medicaid. It was a simple matter to get Target off my back after that. Plus I got eight rounds of chemo, a bilateral mastectomy, a bunch of pain and sleeping pills, and six weeks of radiation practically for free.

Compare this with what would have happened if I still worked at BCBS. I would have still had all my credit card debt plus I would have been hit with $10,000 in copays, plus I wouldn’t have been able to work very much to pay all this off. I would have been forced to declare bankruptcy anyway.

As it is, I was able to qualify for disability which ended up paying as much as I would have earned working 50 hours a week at the temp job. Plus, I still work there, only about 10 hours a week, but that’s all I want to work right now.

Oh, did I mention that my 15-year-old daughter wanted to spend her junior year in Beijing? We found out she was accepted about a month after I received my cancer diagnosis. The program cost $38,000. She received $37,000 in financial aid. She’s already gone and come back now, and she had a great 9 months.

The trip to Beijing and all the medical care I’ve received would not be possible if I was actually married to my partner. But as long as the possiblity for us to be legally tied together does not exist, I certainly don’t feel any need to declare her income.

Even if they made gay marriage legal in Oklahoma tomorrow, I would not tie the knot. My kids are both bright and get good grades, and I’m planning on sending them to expensive private colleges, tuition-free, of course.

In the meantime, I do feel bad about some of the stress I’ve put my partner through these last few years. We’ve been together over eight years now, and our relationship has only grown stronger. So it’s fine with me if the Census Bureau wants to edit out same-sex data. I’m still gay and I’m still married, and I know we’ll get ours in time.

Where Have All the Honey Bees Gone?

When my youngest daughter was still a toddler, I trained her to answer the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with the word ‘entomologist’. This was purely for my own amusement. I know you can’t live out your dreams through your children. (The older daughter was trained to say ‘astronaut’). Besides, people don’t usually ask that question of toddlers.

But somehow, my daughter managed to regurgitate that word when her kindergarten teacher asked her that question. I saw the teacher at back-to-school night, and she very excitedly told me of my progeny’s entomological leanings. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’d taught her to parrot this. The teacher thought she had a little genius on her hands. As it turns out, my daughter is quite smart, but she’s 13 now and wants to be a baker, mostly of cakes. I’ve no doubt she’ll succeed.

Still, I’ve always been fascinated with insects. Bees, ants, mosquitoes and cockroaches are my favorites. So I was quite disturbed back in October of 2007 when I saw a show on Nature about the disappearance of the honeybees. Colony Collapse Disorder made lots of headlines after that show aired. But then, of course, it kind of disappeared from the news.

I’ve been trying to keep an eye on it, but while there are lots of theories, there don’t seem to be many answers yet. When the clover patch in my yard turned green in the spring, I actively looked for bees and only saw a few. There should have been more.

So today I came across an article called The Bees’ Needs on the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) website. It offers tips on what individuals can do to help such as planting local vegetation rather than exotic imports. The last tip on building nests for wood-nesting bees looks simple enough. I’m going to give it a try.

Passing through Pottawatomie

My kids, my partner and I recently took a trip to Kansas City. On the way home, we drove down highway 169, passing through Pottawatomie, Kansas. There’s a brown road sign, very official-looking, that informs you of the John Brown Museum located right there in Pottawatomie. We already knew about that, though, because we’d passed through a few years ago and didn’t have time to stop. Now, we were all excited. The kids were sleeping in the backseat, but the John Brown Museum would be worth waking up for.

We pulled off the highway and then we realized it was early on a Sunday afternoon, and the museum would probably not be open. How right we were. Except for the Sonic drive-in, which was the only place to eat, the town was completely dead. We finally passed a rickety old store front with a hand-lettered sign in the window saying “Do You Know Who John Brown Is?” I don’t know what I was expecting, certainly not the Nelson-Atkins, but this was a bit disappointing. We drove a little further along Main Street, wondering what the hell people did for fun in Pottawatomie, and then we left.

Still, it was fun, driving through Kansas and trying to picture John Brown with his sons and followers riding through the area on horseback. Everything I know about John Brown comes from reading Russell Banks excellent novel “Cloudsplitter”. Here’s a link to a great review if you don’t mind finding out what happens in the end. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98may/brown.htm.

I’ts not a spoiler because the real story is inside of the character’s minds. Russell Banks tells you right from the outset that he changes some historical facts to improve the flow of the story. And that’s okay. Except that when reading it you’re always wondering what is true and what isn’t. The important thing is that it brings history alive in the way that dry textbooks can’t.

Before reading Cloudsplitter., I’d never thought much about the civil war. Now I’m thinking about things like the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. What divided times the 1850’s were. It almost reminds me of now. The main difference was that the earth was still whole then and the weather wasn’t so weird. There’s a strange optimism in the works of Russell Banks, an optimism I’m not sure I can fully share in.