Calhouns Can(n)ons

Happy “Day Without a Gay” Day

A grassroots group has planned to make today a “Day Without a Gay” day, taking the idea from a satirical (sort of) movie a few years ago, “A Day Without a Mexican,” to point up the fact that Gays are actually a vital part of our community. So the idea (like the missing “Mexicans”) is to have gay people stay home, no work, no shopping, zip, a boycott, as it were, of society. The organizers are “asking gay rights supporters to avoid going to work by ‘calling in gay’ and spending the day volunteering with in the [grass roots ] movement instead, as organizers get ready for the next move in this particular civil rights movement – depending on what the Calif. Supreme Court does on the Measure 8 issue.

Also, interestingly, in New Jersey, reports the L.A. Times (heading into bankruptcy) “A commission has concluded that legislators should allow gay couples to marry, setting up what could be a spirited debate over whether the sate should be the first to allow gay marriage by passing a law, rather than by court mandate.” . . . . “The commission found that the rights afforded to those in civil unions were not always well understood, and that allowing gay couples to marry would alleviate the problem.”

Last night on Comedy Central’s “Daily Show,” Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who believes that being gay is a “lifestyle choice” was asked by host Jon Stewart when he “chose” to be a heterosexual. Huckabee, like so many people who claim that sexual orientation is a “choice” skated past the question. Didn’t answer it. Which always speaks volumes to me, since people who believe that gay people “choose” to be gay never believe that they “chose” to be straight, which means that they must think that gay people somehow aren’t just as human as they are, but must operate on an entirely different system. After all, if you didn't "chose" to be straight, why didn't the same thing happen to another person who also didn't "chose" to be gay?

Of course, if you believe that you are somehow different from your fellow citizens, that allows you to believe that others are, well The Other, and as everyone knows, The Other can then be relegated to a less than human status. You know, there’s Us and then there's . . . . THEM . . . eeeuuuuuuu.

Stewart also had a couple of telling observations: Choosing one’s religion is truly a matter of “choice,” not choosing ones’ sexual orientation, and that history will show that opposing gay marriage will turn out to be as shameful a position as opposition to integration, interracial marriage, equal pay for equal work, even votes for women – all now considered shameful and embarrassing episodes along our bumpy march towards equality and justice for all Americans.