Fearless on my breath...

Hey if you've got a minute the Courage Campaign is trying to get 100,000 signatures on a petition to request that Judge Walker televise the Proposition 8 trial. What better way could there be to show just how petty, backward and assinine the arguments against gay marriage actually are than to televise them for everyone to see.

You can sign the petition here!

It's a good news, bad news kind of day for me. The good news is that my sisters and I have had a wonderful time during their visit, but the bad news is that it's wrapping up bright and early tomorrow morning. I won't be the only one who'll miss them, Pye's gotten to adore his long distance aunts since they've been staying here. I'm not sure the feeling is entirely mutual though :)

The next bit of good news is that it looks like we're moving ahead quickly with the purchase of the house. The process has been surprisingly easy, though I keep waiting for some shoe to drop and send everything to a screeching halt. The bad news is I'm going to have to start packing like this weekend. Ye gods I don't look forward to that.

Ok this time the bad news first, it appears that the California Supreme Court has upheld Proposition 8 and the ban on same sex marriage. It's a hideous decision, an unfair one, and one every inhabitant of this state is going to end up regretting as one state after another passes us by on the road to civil rights. The good news is it's reinvigorated those of us who have been fighting Prop 8 from the start. We're not giving up on this, not by a long shot.

On the same subject Sadly, No! links to a truly off the rails wingnut babble on the "worst thing about gay marriage" which includes (and neither I nor Sadly, No! are making this up) the following:

Few men would ever bother to enter into a romantic heterosexual marriage–much less three, as I have done–were it not for the iron grip of necessity that falls upon us when we are unwise enough to fall in love with a woman other than our mom.

The very first commenter replies:

Rarely do you encounter so many issues compressed into so few words. Masterful.

It's almost Colbert-ian in its absurdity, isn't it? It does rather make me want to find his ex-wives and give them each a big hug. Those poor, poor women.

Just a few more words on why you should be voting no on Prop 8 if you live in California:
via Another Green World

we have a few more details to iron out before we finally become the best version of what we always should have been--the country of inclusion, the country that draws strength from our difference as long as we all accept those things that those men wrote 233 years ago that bind us together. we are here. the time is now. our gay brothers and sisters need us to extend that franchise, to embrace them with both arms, and they need us to do so today and tomorrow and every day until november 5th, when that embrace can turn into the most joyful hug imaginable.

my sister is gay, and she has no interest in getting married, despite being in a long term relationship with a wonderful woman, and despite living in massachusetts where she to marry is her right. that is her choice, and she can make it freely. what could possibly be more beautiful than that? let's give our gay friends, gay colleagues, gay relatives and fuck it, while we're up, our gay enemies that exact same right: the right to say "I do", or, for that matter, "I don't" just like those of us who are straight get to do. let's extend that franchise until we can't extend it anymore, and then let's go about making the idea of america as perfect as we possibly can. all of those americans who are gay are just as american as those who aren't, and they cannot and must not face the kind of discrimination that has been their lot for far too long. i look forward to those hugs on november 5th--i think i will head down to santa monica blvd. and san vicente and throw a few around myself.

And one more thing from me, can you imagine the kind of world we'd live in if the religious zealots who are mobilized in droves to support this constitutional amendment actually turned all that energy and rabid enthusiasm to something good? Imagine, just for a minute, that they used it instead to help the poor or to fight for universal health care or any other number of great works. You know, the sorts of things their supposed messiah was kind of big on.

I'd love to think that world was possible, one where people were motivated by empathy and compassion rather than hate and fear, wouldn't you?