pogoism

You’ve got to hand it to Lady Gaga – she knows how to make money from the gays.

1. Catchy chorus that’s barely audible? Check.
2. Some words spoken in badly pronounced French? Check.
3. Hideous costumes? Check.
4. Drag queen look? Check.
5. A dance routined that easily perfected by baby-gays on YouTube? Check.
6. Claps? Yep.
7. Risque part with fireworks bra and dead body? Check.

It’s quite a good song though, isn’t it…

Btw, did I mention she’s releasing a new “album”, even though it’s essentially her old album with some new tracks tacked on?

1. Florence and the Machine’s album. I heard it at a friend’s house a few weeks ago. Go listen to it on Spotify. I dare you not to fall in love with the track “Rabbit Heart (Raise it Up)”.

2. The Thick of It on BBC Two. I’ve never watched this show before. It’s Armando Iannucci’s satirical political comedy. Sort of like The Office, only less difficult to watch, and funnier. It follows the Department for Social Affairs and Citizenship, and it’s head Nicola Murray. Currently trying to get my hand on the first 2 series…

3. Lincoln by David Herbert Donald. Great biography of Abraham Lincoln. Wanted to find out more about him, as Obama has styled himself as a modern day Lincoln. Still plowing through it (it’s long), but it’s a great and easy read.

And what I didn’t like…

Voter’s repealing the gay marriage law in Maine. One day, hopefully, the bigots will disappear and realise that to deny happiness and equality to people is, frankly, sickening.

(via Queerty)

It’s from 1992, but it’s still relevant.

When you hear from anti-gay folks that your sexuality is a choice… When you hear from these folks that your civil rights struggle is after “special” rights… When you hear that you are less than, second-class, undeserving… Imagine a world where the opposite is true. But this video isn’t for you. It’s for the naive, ignorant set of folks still clinging to their Bibles to rationalize their hatred and intolerance to you. And it is excellent. Share it.

I promised y’all a post about San Francisco Pride, and here it is! Albeit a week late…

I went with Emily, Alonso, Jaime and Camron on Friday night and we arrived at the hostel. Whenever I go to SF I normally stay downtown or city center, but this time I wanted to stay somewhere different, so we stayed in the Mission District. That’s somewhere I’ve never been before, and there’s not much of SF I haven’t been to on one trip or another. It’s like the multicultural area of the city, like the East End of London, I guess. Anyway, it’s really nice, loads of great places to eat, a buzzing atmosphere and it seems very distinct from the rest of the city.

Saturday consisted of going to Civic Center for the party there (dance music for the first time in 10 months!), doing some shopping and then in the evening we headed to the Castro for the Pink Party. It was phenomenal – they blocked off the Castro at both ends, and the place was filled with gays. It ended at midnight though, so we ended up wandering around finding somewhere to eat and battling through the crowds…

After an unwelcome early start on Sunday, we headed to somewhere near Fisherman’s Wharf to see the parade. It started with some people I mentioned in a previous post, people who have been together for 30-ish years. I always get a little emotional at these things, particularly when I see so many straight people standing around in support, who have made the effort to come down. SF Pride isn’t quite the freak show I had expected, and I get the impression they’ve been told to tone it down. In Belfast and London, and I’m sure most other cities, Pride parades are dominated by drag queens and almost naked men. Which is fine, I don’t mind. But that’s what the media latches onto, and it gives the hideous right-wing idiots something to put in their pathetic email propaganda. Even some of the gays I’ve spoken to who are against the idea of Pride cite this as the main reason. So it was refreshing to see a genuine diversity of people represented in SF.

Here’s some photos! (And there’s loads more over at my Flickr page)

I often find myself getting very involved with politics, despite the country I’m in. When I was in Northern Ireland, I get really into it all, despite it not really have that much to do with me. I don’t align with either side, I live in South Belfast, an area more-or-less unaffected by it all, and I don’t intend on living in Northern Ireland for much of my life. All I want is to see some kind of progress towards a lasting peace.

But for the last 10 months, I’ve been in the US. Obama was elected in November, and on the very same day, Proposition 8 was passed in California. I shouldn’t care – after all, the UK has had civil partnerships since December 2005. Looking back, no-one cared. Not even the right-wing. Yet it seems to be such a big deal here. I think that part of the problem is the insistence on calling it gay “marriage”, rather than civil unions. Obama has repeatedly expressed his support for civil unions, but rarely, if ever, calls them “marriages”. Personally, I agree. I don’t like the idea of gay unions being called “marriage”. Marriage to me implies religion, and the notion that gays would want to join into an institution that fundamentally disagrees with who they are baffles me. I’m not saying all Christians hate gays, but the Bible makes it’s position clear.

Anyway, back to my original point: Why does Prop 8, and the whole gay marriage debate, matter to me? Well, the chances are high that I’ll be coming back to the US to do a PhD, which will take me 5 years. After that, I’ll probably look at staying in the US, and settling down – but if being able to get married, and have the same rights as straight people isn’t an option, it certainly makes it more unlikely that I’ll come back. That means that America is loosing potential science talent, something it can ill afford to do. With less and less students choosing to study science, and ludicrous legislation such as the recently overturned ban on stem cell research, America is falling behind. It’s time for the US to get on board with the continuing trend in the Western world of allowing gays to legally partner.

I just don’t get it. I don’t get the opposition to gay marriage. Why does it matter to people so much? Apparently it’s going to devalue their marriages? Rubbish! How would it? As Keith Olbermann so brilliantly put it:

In a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option. They don’t want to deny you yours. They don’t want to take anything away from you. They want what you want — a chance to be a little less alone in the world.

Only now you are saying to them — no. You can’t have it on these terms. Maybe something similar. If they behave. If they don’t cause too much trouble. You’ll even give them all the same legal rights — even as you’re taking away the legal right, which they already had. A world around them, still anchored in love and marriage, and you are saying, no, you can’t marry. What if somebody passed a law that said you couldn’t marry?

…

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?

It took years and years for the first state in the US to recognize sames-sex marriage, but this week both Iowa (yes, Iowa) and Vermont both did it. Iowa made the decision as other states have done, and legalized it through the courts, but Vermont approved it through the legislature. This is significant, as it’s the first time sames-sex marriage has been approved by elected officials rather than a court, making it much more difficult to overturn (as Prop 8 did in California back in November). Also this week, the District of Columbia said it would give same-sex couples married in other states the same rights as straight couples, which brings the number of states that recognize same-sex marriage up to 5, three of those just this week. It’s looking good for the future of gay marriage here in the US.

Nate Silver did some magic with numbers which produced the following map that predicts when the other states will reach the point where ballot measures that ban same-sex marriage would fail.

And look! 2009 is the year for Nevada! Which is pretty exciting, I’m sure you’ll agree. UPDATE: The Senate bill has just been approved by the Nevada Senate committee, and now just has to pass the Senate floor where Democrats hold a 12-9 majority.

So, that’s all good news, right? Right. Except then the National Organization for Marriage put out this horrendous anti-gay marriage ad.

“Bring the issue into my life”?

“My freedom will be taken away”?

Churches punished by the federal government for not supporting bigotry?

Seriously?

After the jump, watch the HRC President Joe Solmonese and NOM’s Maggie Gallagher battle it out on Hardball…

Read the rest of this entry »

via CauseCast

via Towleroad

Courage Campaign, the campaign to overturn Prop 8 in California have released a new video. It’s good, you should watch it. Then click here to sign the letter :)

I’ve refrained from doing political posts on my blog, but today marks the first day of Inauguration Week, and also the first online march for LGBT equality in the US. 

If you’d asked me a few weeks ago what I thought of gay “marriage”, I’d have told you that I don’t agree with it. In the UK, we have civil partnerships, which give same-sex couples exactly the same benefits as straight couples, but in the US, that’s not true. Because the law is written with the word “marriage”, if civil unions are approved here (and the evidence shows that they overwhelmingly would be), then same-sex couples will still not necessarily enjoy all the same benefits of being “married”. Given the passage of Prop 8 in California in November, and all the fall-out from that, an online campaign has launched to educate Americans about what is being denied to committed LGBT Americans. They trawled through Federal law, and identified 1138 laws in which marital status is a factor. 

1138.

That’s a pretty big number. And they range from joint taxes, to hospital visitation, to immigration, to domestic violence, and the main one for me – medical decisions.

Imagine someone you’ve had a domestic relationship with for 20 years has an accident, and because you’re not married, you’re unable to make medical decisions for that person, despite probably being the most qualified person to make those decisions for that person.

Imagine not being able to even visit your partner in hospital.

Imagine being fired from your job, just because you’re gay.

These things happen, it’s not just us whiney gays going on again about equality – they affect peoples lives in a very real way.

I know it seems weird that someone from the UK should care so much, but my plan is to ultimately move here, so I may as well get behind it now so that when I do live here, that chance is open to me. And besides, if arguably the most influential country in the world can’t give LGBT couples equal rights, what chance have other countries got?

So, if you support gay marriage in the US, I’d strongly urge you to go to the EqualityMatters.org website, and donate your profile picture to this cause.

“We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” – Thomas Jefferson