We’re pretty sure Vermont’s Republican governor was installed by extraterrestrials in the first place. And in this human v. alien battle, the good guys have won one for civil rights. As Reuters just reported: “Vermont lawmakers on Tuesday overrode a veto from the governor in passing a bill that would allow same-sex marriage, clearing the way for the state to become the fourth in the nation where gay marriage is legal.” [Insert visual: BG high-fiving Ben, Jerry.]
…[G]ays could begin getting married in Iowa in just three weeks.
“If gay and lesbian people must submit to different treatment without an exceedingly persuasive justification,” the Iowa justices wrote, “they are deprived of the benefits of the principle of equal protection upon which the rule of law is founded.”
Whatever the final result may be, it seems to me that the decision reminds us that gay life in America is not confined to certain zip codes of lower Manhattan, West Hollywood, Miami’s South Beach and Chicago’s Lakeview. It is as American as Iowa.
When the going gets tough, the tough get creative!
Irony, which wasn’t killed by 9/11 after all, seemed to finally be on it’s way out of fashion, rendered unnecessary in an Obama-led world of responsible government and new puppies. But Ignorance also had a big win on November 4 — in the form of California’s Proposition 8 (“Prop H8”), banning same-sex marriage — and where there is Ignorance there is the Irony used by satirists to protest it (which generally goes over the head of the ignorant).
Before Thanksgiving the Ivy League gave us a Prop H8 protest that only the 99th percentile could appreciate: In an effort to call out the unfairness of putting a minority’s rights to a public vote in a constitutional democracy, deadpan students at Princeton pushed for their own prop 8 that would keep Freshman from walking on campus sidewalks, in order to “protect our definition of what walking on sidewalks is.”
NOW a star-studded cast — including Jack Black, Maya Rudolph and Dr. Horrible himself — has mounted “Prop 8 – The Musical” at FunnyOrDie.com:
“In marriage, God and family keep us accountable. But government is supposed to provide the rights to help us stay accountable. If we are outside of Washington state, for example, and one of us goes into the hospital, the absence of those rights makes it impossible to be able to take care of each other and to live up to the commitments we have made to one another,†she says.
Keith Olbermann offers one of the most emphatic, stirring, and beautiful smackdowns BG has yet heard of California’s Prop. 8 and the people who love it.
Excerpt:
What is this, to you? Nobody is asking you to embrace their expression of love. But don’t you, as human beings, have to embrace… that love? The world is barren enough.
It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward. Your marriage only stands a 50-50 chance of lasting, no matter how much you feel and how hard you work.
And here are people overjoyed at the prospect of just that chance, and that work, just for the hope of having that feeling. With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?
With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate… this is what your heart tells you to do? You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents? Then Spread happiness — this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness — share it with all those who seek it.
e-mail to a friend in need
LiLo and SaRo to get 
Per 
