She has no substance and is dangerous. John McCain could drop dead any moment and she would be a sorrier president than the one we have had for the past eight years. Comparing her with the other past and present heads of state who happen to be women show how empty she is. She is no Golda Meir, Corazon Aquino, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Violeta Chamorro, Benizir Bhutto,
Indira Gandhi, or Gro Harlem Brundtland.

And she sure is no Hillary Clinton. Women, don’t be fooled. Sarah Palin is for outlawing all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest, and agrees with McCain that his Supreme Court nominees will be selected on the basis of their willingness to overturn Rowe v. Wade and take away your right to choose what to do with your own body. In her speech she spoke for drilling in Alaska but didn’t mention that the last time we opened Alaska for drilling was in response to the early 1970’s oil crisis, when our imports were a much smaller percentage than they are today. She has spoken out against full equality for gays and lesbians, agreeing with her presidential running mate that a consitutional amendment is fine. She believes that schools should teach creationism, in defiance of the courts. She is dangerous.

The Obama camp has been gracious enough to lay off her until now. I hope they have learned their lesson. This candidate it the least experienced of any in the history of the United States. If ever there was a reason to vote Democratic this year, Sarah Palin is it.

John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Rowe v. Wade, Obama

Stopped at the top, she kept saying “white chicken,” which Russ and I assumed was two-year-old speak for something weird, but we couldn’t figure it out. Finally she pointed across the midway to the carousel to one of the animals going up and down: a white chicken. Grandpa Mike got to do the white chicken honors and Syd seems to have enjoyed it even more.

Grandkids are so much more fun than their parents.

Utah County Fair

An outpouring of love and support for the family has resulted in a stunning group of auctions today, with more than 275 items—and many are truly amazing. Like a signed Maroon5 guitar and concert tickets, weekends at resorts, custom quilt, custom painting, a beautiful chandelier, jewelry, chocolate (!), and much more. Please support the family by bidding today. You can see the list and link to the auctions at http://www.designmom.com/.

Ongoing, please consider donating to help them by clicking below:

Proposition 8 seeks to overturn the court ruling and amend the state constitution. It is a voter initiative designed specifically to take away legal rights that already exist. That’s huge.

Since California is the most populous state in the country, outside parties are bombarding the state with their non-California agendas. Most notably, a religious coalition calling itself Protect Marriage has vowed to get the proposal passed at any cost. The costs are staggering and, I’m sad to report, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) is in the forefront of the effort.

As a gay Mormon, I’m disappointed that the Church has chosen to spend its resources fighting a political issue. (I understand they consider it a moral issue, not a political one, but they also opposed civil rights equality, women’s rights, and placement of MX missiles in Utah as moral issues, yet capital punishment is a political issue, so I’m not buying the cafeteria approach to what is moral and what is political.) On the “urging” of the President of the Church, leaders of California congregations have told their members to donate money and canvas door-to-door for Proposition 8. Leaders are visiting with congregants in their homes to obtain pledges, usually based on what the leaders know about the family’s wealth by their tithing donation history.

Anyone who knows Mormons well knows that a call from the Prophet mobilizes the masses. There is no discussion of the issue, no pro and con, no opposition, and no alternative views are tolerated. There is no reason to study the issue, pray about it, and come to a personal conclusion because the decision is already made. Blind obedience is easy. Study and discussion are difficult, so most people take the easy path.

I continue being a gay Mormon, though I’m sad the Church has chosen this battle to disenfranchise millions of people. It is tearing families apart. Other families (like mine) simply cannot talk about it for fear more damage will be done. Some of the best and brightest Mormons are resigning their memberships. Others have just stopped attending because they can’t take the hateful rhetoric. Everyone knows at least one gay person, so the rhetoric is personal. These people also know that what they are hearing and asked to support is simply false and wrong. So they just leave.

There is also the matter of fear. Several people have told me that they are donating out of fear of religious repercussions but that in the safety of the ballot booth they will vote against Prop. 8. How sad is that? People feel safer in the ballot booth than they do in church.

The discussion is available to anyone who cares enough to listen. I recommend the following web sites, which are rich in resources:

Mormons for Marriage (http://mormonsformarriage.com). Thoughtful reasoning on many points from an LDS perspective, including videos and other resources.

Signing for Something (http://signingforsomething.org/blog). Besides offering good resources and personal stories, this site allows people to send a message that will go to LDS Church headquarters.

Understanding LDS Homosexuality (http://ldshomosexuality.com). Personal stories and videos designed to promote understanding between the LDS Church and its gay members.

Family Fellowship (ldsfamilyfellowship.org). This organization is composed of LDS families dealing with homosexual members.

Affirmation (www.affirmation.org/media/2008_07_27.shtml). Affirmation is the largest organization of gay people with Mormon backgrounds. This particular link is devoted to Affirmation’s views and efforts to address Prop. 8.

LDS Resources for LDS Saints Dealing With Homosexual Attraction (www.ldsresources.info). Excellent resources gathered and written by a group of active LDS therapists, scientists, and academicians.

LDS Reconciliation (www.ldsreconciliation.org).This organization is primarily for gay LDS people and their families to seek spiritual understanding and knowledge. It meets regularly in Utah and has Family Home Evening-style discussions.

LDS Church view: The Divine Institution of Marriage. A thorough justification for the Church’s participation in the California Prop. 8 effort. The Church’s web site, www.lds.org, has other statements about same-sex issues.

Proposition 8, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormons, Mormons for Marriage, Signing for Something, Understanding LDS Homosexuality, Family Fellowship, Affirmation, LDS Resources for LDS Saints Dealing With Homosexual Attraction, LDS Reconciliation

My first introduction to Solzhenitsyn was in 1971 when I saw One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich a fabulous film adapted from his 1962 novel of the same title. I was so intrigued I went back and read the novel. Simple in form, it follows the daily routine of an ordinary guy, a Gulag prisoner during Stalin’s repressive regime. It was revolutionary in that it was the first time a writer had exposed the brutality of those times.

Prior to that time, the only Russian novel I had read was Boris Pasternack’s sprawling Dr. Zhivago. The tight focus and comparatively lean prose of Solzhenitsyn impressed me immensely.

As reading material on a trip around Europe in the summer of 1974 I took Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914(1971), a historical novel about the beginnings of the Soviet Union. It maddenly chronicles the inequalties between officers and foot soldiers and the horrible consequences of stupidity of those officers during the Battle of Tannenberg during the first days of World War I. It was the first time I felt I really understood the suffering that eventually caused the uprising that resulted in the fall of the Tsar.

I read late into the night as our overnight trains went from country to country (a good way for poor students like us to avoid paying for hotels). Although we did not visit the site of the battle, Solzhenitsyn’s words brought it to life with such force I felt I was in the midst of it all.

Solzhenitzyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 but was afraid to travel to Sweden to accept it because he had been told he would not be allowed back into the USSS. He was deported from the Soviet Union in 1974 and accepted his award then. He eventually settled in Cavendish, Vermont, but never fit in. He lived for 20 years in the United States but could hardly speak English. He frequently criticized Western cuture, especially television and rock music. He remained mostly isolated, though he continued writing. In 1990 his Soviet citizenship was restored and he returned to Russia in 1994. He continued to write and remained a polarizing figure in his interpretation of Soviet and Russian history until his death today.

Solzhenitzyn is a hero to me because of his bravery in defense of his version of the truth, his willingness to suffer for the truth of his art, and for his passionate love of his country and his culture. I don’t agree with many of his views and find him to be rather narrow minded in his view of the rest of the world, but he remains a giant influence in my quest to understand the world.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Gulag, Boris Pasternack, August 1914, Battle of Tannenberg, World War I

I know that the federal government does not recognize full marriage equality. But the world has changed. Equality in civil marriage is available to the entire U.S. population now because it is available in California to residents and non-residents alike (and soon in Massacusetts, which already extends it to its own residents). Not to mention the thousands of civil marriages performed in Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, South Africa, and Norway. New York, New Mexico, and Rhode Island now recognize all these marriages.

This is especially disturbing because government agencies as well as the private sector use census figures to determine the types of families that exist, where they live, and what their potential needs are. This should not be a Bush Administration-driven political decision.

I usually am skeptical of online petitions, as mass e-mailings are routinely ignored by members of Congress. However, People for the American Way are providing a petition that they will present directly to the Census Bureau. Their’s is a voice that will be heard.

Please sign the petition. Our families thank you.

Census Bureau, Bureau of the Census, marriage equality, People for the American Way

Note: While I don’t totally agree with the tone of Mark Morford’s following opinion piece, I think his view of the demise of the radical Christian Right is accurate, so I’m sharing it here. –Buck

It is the end of the nutball Christian right. Here is your proof. To go

By Mark Morford,
SF Gate (San Francisco Chronicle)
Friday, July 11, 2008

Hey, remember the angry evangelicals? The quivering clan of militant Christoholics who propelled Bush into office and seized the national narrative for a few terrifying moments about five years back, ran deep into the woods with it and rubbed it all over their naughty bits in a frenzy of fear and confusion and lust for all things homophobic and saccharine and spiritually denigrating?

Dying. Nearly dead. Gasping their last. Very soon to be a footnote, a caricature, a gag, a punch line, blasted to the dustbin of history like dried housefly limbs after a sneeze. You should know this now.

Yes, you are right; they already were a caricature, a cultural pothole, a nasty rash in the armpit of society. But it wasn’t all that long ago that they were, through a bizarre series of sociopolitical machinations still being parsed by baffled historians, a powerful rash, hugely newsworthy, as dangerous and unstoppable as they were wrongheaded and sad. Remember?

You were not much younger than you are right now. As the Bush era crested, as the neocons’ power reached nuclear levels, when female nipples and f-words and evil gay agendas ruled the news, the evangelical Right–led by the most virulent, spittle-flecked gaggle of mental throwbacks to ever stain the American newswires, Focus on the Family (Dr. James Dobson’s clan) and the American Family Association and its nefarious leader, the Rev. Donald Wildmon–these groups controlled, for a brief, awful moment, the national dialogue. They were the temporary arbiters of taste, the warped conscience of a freaked-out culture. And lo, it was ugly.

Rejoice, won’t you? For their time is over.

Did you know the AFA recently boycotted McDonald’s?

That’s right, this once semi-powerful tub of right-wing brain-caulk recently declared a comestible fatwa against America’s foremost purveyor of toxic foodstuffs because, apparently, some high-ranking McD’s VP just joined the board of directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, which, to the AFA, somehow translates directly into free pink condoms and mind-controlling rainbow flags in every toxic God-fearing Happy Meal.

Did you read about that? No? Of course you didn’t. Here is why: No one cared. Well, that’s not quite true. McDonald’s sort of cared, just enough to write up a nice letter of response to Wildmon stating, in essence, that the AFA is a bunch of troglodytic knuckle-draggers with the sociosexual awareness of a fungal spore, and they should crawl away right now before God spanks them even harder with the 2×4 of total irrelevance.

I might be exaggerating. What they actually said was: Thank you, AFA, for your hateful consideration, but we support our employees’ right to join whichever socially responsible and positive groups they like. And thusly did McD’s flick the AFA away like a tick from a dog. Isn’t that amazing?

Now, you may argue that McDonald’s and the other megacorps that the AFA has tried to boycott in the past, including Wal-Mart (for selling “Brokeback Mountain” DVDs to unsuspecting toddlers), the Disney Corporation (for its overall corporate support of the evil gay agenda) and the Ford Motor Company (for advertising in gay magazines), aren’t shrugging off Wildmon’s wide-eyed cult out of the goodness of their gay-loving hearts. It’s not like the majority of McD’s honchos actually give a damn about gay rights, or gay marriage, or social justice, or the deeper aspects of love.

Nossir, they do so purely for economic reasons, because it’s just good PR, because they are safe in the knowledge that the AFA’s rantings have exactly zero effect on their bottom line and lots of their own employees are gay–and by the way discrimination based on sexual orientation is thoroughly illegal–and therefore it simply makes more business sense to support tolerance than it does to endorse homophobia and general spiritual stupidity. Isn’t that right, Boy Scouts of America? You bet it is.

But wait just a second: Is it still not fascinating in this day and age that our most powerful capitalist companies, those most associated with mainstream, dumbed-down, unhealthy, rather uninformed Republican Americana, even these megacorps are now openly and rather shamelessly supporting gay rights and tolerance?

Is it not, concomitantly, interesting that no one at all cares a whit for what the hell the AFA has to say anymore? Is this not a sign of something interesting and sea-changing and good? I think it is. McD’s, Wal-Mart, Ford and Disney utterly ignore the Christian Right? What’s next, an articulate black intellectual president? Oh wait.

It is made all the more amusing, more comical and cute, by another recent tidbit, the final evidence you will need that the evangelical Right has returned to its original state of inbred silliness, and therefore it is very likely indeed that you will never have to read anything more about them ever again until Wildmon and Dobson join Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms in the Great Gay Bath House in the sky.

It is this: The AFA’s Web site apparently has (or rather, had, until just recently) an auto-filter installed. So utterly terrified of anything remotely gay are these kindly folk that whenever the word “gay” appeared in any news story on their site, their autobot automatically changed it to “homosexual.”

True. Thus did it come to pass that many fine stories about American Olympic track and fieldster Tyson Gay become a whole lotta wacky stories about the epic struggles of some unlucky runner named “Tyson Homosexual” to post some good numbers in the 100-meter dash. Poor guy.

And that about does it. Your final proof that God laughs and snorts and doesn’t give a flying McRib sandwich about any particular gaggle of humans, particularly those who profess that they know and love and worship him more violently and blindly than anyone else.

Somewhere in all this, a moral, a lesson. Perhaps a curious anecdote about how, in this country, it seems like every agenda, every stupid idea, every rancid fireball of ignorant religious fanaticism nevertheless gets its moment, its 15 minutes, its desperate shot at guiding the culture, just to see if it can, if there’s something of value, if there’s something to be learned.

And when it comes to the sad Christian nutballs, well, the lesson appears to be wildly obvious indeed: Avoid the sad Christian nutballs, now and forevermore. Hell, even God could’ve told you that.

Christian right, Mark Morford, Focus on the Family, American Family Association, McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Ford, Disney

But what would you do if you were Christopher Harmon, who has a rare degenerative neurological disease that has left him deaf, blind, speechless, quadraplegic, unable to feed himself, and on a respirator? Obviously, write four children’s books and a screenplay. http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2008/07/05/deaf.blind.writer.kare

He’s my Hero of the Week.

Christopher Harmon