The Gay Republican #13 - Put That In Your Pipe And Smoke It!

I promised you three months ago, dear reader, that I would check in with you after Coachella and let you know whether the experience merited another go-round in 2009. I am pleased to report that yes, in fact, it definitely does; the lame hipster greaseball who crashed at our partyhouse and the lack of artist parking at the festival notwithstanding.

I arrived at the house I’d rented for our group at about 3:00 PM on Thursday afternoon, and the party didn’t end until I locked up and headed out 96 hours later. Even scouring the house on Monday to clean out the residue of four days of revelry held its own bit of charm.

I did NOT see Prince. Call me a pop-culture philistine (wouldn’t that be an anti-philistine?) but I have NEVER understood his appeal. He’s an effeminate weirdo with a song called “Pussy Control”. Big fucking deal.

No, like a good Mary, I spent Saturday evening from 9:00 AM to close in the Sahara tent, dancing to Sasha & Digweed and Above & Beyond. Front and center.

I saw Datarock from backstage, which was a great, great show.
Fatboy Slim met expectations.

Tegan and Sara, is abrasive lesbian music; if I’d had the energy to stand up, I would have walked away.

Somebody should shoot M.I.A.

Kraftwerk was a great random find, as were Love & Rockets and Adam Freeland. And I finally understand the appeal of Death Cab for Cutie.

I wish I’d had the energy to stay for Justice, but after a slightly disappointing performance from Chromeo, the only energy I had left on Sunday night was to pause on my walk out of the festival grounds with Leah and listen to Roger Waters perform “Comfortably Numb”. Perfect way to end an awesome weekend.

The “art” on display was stupid, as always; re-hashes from last year’s Burning Man. But one side attraction out of which I got a lot of mileage was the beer garden next to the main stage. Heineken sponsored an air-conditioned, double-dome tent right in the center of it. In the larger dome was a house DJ and people dancing around a projector in the center that shamelessly flashed Heineken-logo’d eye candy across the ceiling. And in the smaller dome were bartenders serving Heineken at 33 degrees. It was an amazing reprieve from the midday heat. I don’t even like Heineken, and I bought two.

Part of what made Coachella so much fun this year (moreso than the first couple of years I went) was that the fun I had was completely on my terms. I woke up every morning to a cigarette and a beer, and then I went to the gym. I came back, took a long shower, ate breakfast, and hung out by the pool with a few more drinks. We rolled in to the festival around 3:00 or 4:00 PM. I saw all the bands I wanted to see (except Justice, the Verve, and Portishead; grrrrrr), and I went to bed when I wanted to; pretty much no later than 3:00 AM.
There was no obnoxious party-until-dawn, BAC-never-below-0.12 current in the house this year. Everybody was calm, relaxed, and happy.

Perhaps we’re all getting more comfortable admitting to ourselves that partying like a rockstar has ill effects that aren’t featured in Aerosmith videos. Or maybe we’re just all feeling our age.
Maybe that’s the same thing.
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Enough navel-gazing.

If you studied the Sunday lineup closely, you saw that Sean Penn was scheduled for fifteen minutes on the main stage. Rumors were flying over what he was doing there. My favorite was that he was going to be introducing Eddie Vedder.

Who comes up with this crap? The same guy who says every year that Röyksopp is going to be added last-minute?

As a Republican, I knew better. “It’s an election year, and we’re in the middle of a throng of big hearts with small heads; he’s going to lecture us for 15 minutes to vote for Barack Obama.”

Well, that wasn’t quite correct, though toward the middle of his inebriated rambling, he cursed all three candidates for supporting “this war” but deftly slipped in a comment that only one of them could give us “hope” for the future.

Slick one, Sean. How will the masses ever break your cryptic cipher?

No, Sean Penn’s repertoire was even more amusing than lame political overtures for empty-headed liberals. It was a “call to volunteerism” for today’s youth.

Sounds innocuous, right? Keep reading.

“There’s a bus,” he slurred (after hurling a Timothy Leary-esque F-bomb at older generations, for “not caring enough” or “not doing enough” or some stock hippy complaint), “powered by clean bio-diesel leaving Monday afternoon at 1:00 PM. We need people who can volunteer for a week to go and get their hands dirty. It’s called the Dirty Hands Campaign, and we know that some of you have jobs or families, but if you can come with us, we need your help.”


Oh God, this is rich. This is just too good.

I’m having flashbacks to the scene from Forrest Gump where Jenny flashes Forrest the peace sign from the back of the bus as it pulls away from Washington D.C.

“Come on, everybody; let’s follow messiah Penn on his bio-bus! We’re gonna make a difference!!”

Leah and I laughed for over an hour back at the house that night before distracting ourselves with some Mickey Avalon and finally falling asleep.

I have a word of advice to the aimless drifters who volunteered for the Dirty Hands Campaign because they “wanted to be a part of something bigger than themselves”: Get a job. With an actual corporation. I hear they get pretty big these days.

And I have a word of advice to the organizers of the Dirty Hands Campaign: Dream though you may, simple human nature dictates the caliber of people you get when you ask them to drop their lives for a week on the spur of the moment and get on a bus. You get the people whose time is immediately available because they have nothing better planned.

God, I can just imagine the long-haired, dope-smoking, maggot-infested peace pansies that will be on that bus. The men in hemp pants and sweaters, with blond dreadlocks piled on their heads in which they hide their doobies. The portly, pungent, hippy-chic pie wagon females. You know the ones I’m talking about. The awkward women’s studies major from your college who had a totally normal middle-class upbringing but proclaimed herself a Wiccan and shunned trimming her armpits.

There are guaranteed to be at least 6 bottom-shelf, pawn-shop-grade guitars on this bus; none of them in tune and half of them missing at least one string, and all of them strumming out sad, botched versions of The Youngbloods’ “Get Together”.

No matter; the guitars will barely be audible over the choking stench of marijuana, patchouli, and body odor.

I picture the driver overdosing on shrooms after the bus breaks down somewhere in New Mexico. I see Sean Penn calling in a helicopter to fly himself out, and the hippies abandoned along a lonely stretch of old Route 66, unraveling their scratchy hemp attire to reclaim enough yarn to weave a new radiator hose.

Where are they even going? Their messiah didn’t say.

If they really wanted to save fuel, they could just get on the bus and not drive anywhere. And stay there in the desert forever.

“Hey hippy, wanna really make a difference? Go live on a parked bus and stop hassling the productive masses.”

God, I need to stop thinking about this. I think of something new every few minutes, and it just gets funnier and funnier.

As it happens, I actually know one of the aimless drifters: my buddy Levi.

I don’t know what got into him. My best guess is that it’s his new girlfriend, Valerie. After moving in with her, he’s started working at a “green” film production company, quit eating meat after seeing the PETA videos on YouTube, and now he and Val are off on a meandering non-mission to save the world with Sean Penn.

I’ve seen straight men emasculate and humiliate themselves to get laid before, but this is ridiculous. This is so far beyond lying to a stupid blonde at a college bar that you spent a year in the Peace Corps, marched in the last NARAL event, and that you love cats.

Every so often I’ll watch the mating rituals of heterosexuals, and I’m always reminded that there are indeed more difficult paths than being a gay Republican.
Levi: you have dedication, sir.

Good luck, buddy. If the creepy cult thing doesn’t work out for you, you have my phone number. I’ll pick you up in 14 months with a bag of In-N-Out and a box of Quick-Flush at the Scientology center.

The Gay Republican #12 - John McCain - I Don't Love Them Hoes

As an eternal optimist (as good conservatives are), I’m resolved not to wallow in despair over John McCain’s looming nomination as the Republican presidential candidate. The fact that he secured the nomination, in large part, by wooing independents and liberals to cross over in the primaries and vote for him; it’s in the past, I’m over it.

There is no conservative in the race. John McCain is not one, and I say that based on pure common sense. Mitt Romney’s conservative credentials were challenged based on a few of the positions that he espoused during his stint as governor of Massachusetts, but the keen political observer ought to understand that the leadership he exhibited there – over a very liberal constituency – exemplifies the left-most sympathies of which he is capable. In other words, as governor of Massachusetts, we’ve seen Romney at his worst.

Inversely, John McCain is the senior senator of Arizona, a reliably red state. So for as long as we’ve been observing McCain’s US Senate career, we’ve seen him at his BEST… which still includes almost switching parties in 2004 to run as John Kerry’s VP.

So, John McCain is out. And since Barack Obama’s strongest demonstrated conviction to date is his loyalty to an angry black nationalist minister, I am left with the distasteful option of voting for Hillary Clinton in November. Hey: better to have ruinous Democrat policies implemented by a president with a (D) after her name than by a pandering media-whore “moderate” who didn’t earn his (R).

I’m not positive I’ll be able to stomach it; I may wimp out and write in Romney’s name on the ballot. But I’ve evaluated the situation and I have my plan. So, with that accomplished, it’s time to get back to the business of optimism.

If you’ve been watching the presidential campaign recently, dear reader, you know why I’m in such a good mood. There’s been almost no media focus recently on the sad state of Republican presidential candidate affairs. Rather, the lion’s share of the coverage has been dedicated to the bitter, bloody infighting among Democrats….

And it’s delicious!

Barack Obama’s preacher, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, made headlines for about a week. Obama’s refusal to disown his pulpit-mounted purveyor of anti-American racial victimology gospel put a nice big crack in his “post-racial” image, and by extension, tarnished the shiny promise of racial-guilt absolution that a vote for Obama subliminally offered to his self-loathing white supporters.

And Hillary Clinton, who seems to have fallen out of favor with the press (Is it any surprise to find out that American journalists suffer from a raging epidemic of white guilt?) is finding herself subjected to the kind of anal exam usually reserved for Republicans. Imagine what a shock it was for her to have the press actually fact-check her story on Bosnia! She’s only one set of fake memos away from finding out what it’s like to sit on the other side of the aisle.

Obviously, I’d like to see this ugliness continue for as long as possible. The longer the Democrat nomination contest stays neck-and-neck, the better.

This is hardly a unique sentiment. With the Republican nomination essentially decided, right-wing talk radio has been broadly encouraging its listeners to cross over and vote in the Democrat primaries. Usually for Hillary, since Obama is leading in pledged delegates.

And they’ve been doing it. States with recent and upcoming primaries, like Ohio and Indiana and Pennsylvania, have experienced record levels of new Democrat registrations. Callers to the Rush Limbaugh program gleefully announce their readiness and intent to cast their primary ballots for Clinton.

It must sting Democrats to know that people with no interest in their party’s well-being are playing an active role in picking their presidential nominee. Worse, in a close contest among actual Democrats, the conservative carpetbaggers are elevated to the powerful position of tie-breakers.

To quote Dave Chappelle’s Samuel Jackson character, “HOW’S IT TASTE, MOTHERFUCKER???????”

Needless to say, Democrat power men are scrambling to thwart the right’s giddy turnabout subversion of their primary process. The Democrat party of Ohio actually went so far as require that new Democrat registrants SIGN SOVIET-STYLE LOYALTY OATHS to the principles of the Democrat party before registering.

Hilariously absurd, both in terms of its ineffectiveness (Hillary won Ohio) and in its presupposition that the Democratic party actually has any principles to start with.

Even more amusing, Indiana Democrat Party Chairman Dan Parker announced a plan last week to combat crossover voters “with malicious intent.”

According to the Northwest Indiana Times, the plan works like this: Voters declare party affiliation in the spring primaries. Party officials stationed at the polling places can then check those voters against lists of past party declarations. Party officials can then CHALLENGE the voter’s party affiliation, at which point the voter can choose either to abstain from voting in the party’s primary, or the voter can sign an affidavit swearing that, in the last election, he voted mostly for the party’s regular nominated candidates.

This is so beautiful. Stalin, anyone?

PARTY OFFICIALS will be at the polling places to sniff out mischievous Republicans.
PROFILING! God, I wonder what they’ll be looking for. A clear-headed, sober expression? Good hygiene, perhaps? Evidence of employment?

Mischievous Indiana Republicans, take note: Go to your polling place on May 6th wearing a “Fuck Bush” T-shirt and some patchouli oil. Don’t wash your hair. Arrive between 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM. Scowl incessantly. Screw up your ballot and request as many replacements as state law allows.

That oughta fool ‘em!

Let’s take a little trip down memory lane.

On October 20th, 2006, the Orange County offices and home of Tan Nguyen, Republican Candidate for California’s 47th Congressional District, were raided by the California Department of Justice. CalDOJ seized computers and documents as evidence to build a case that Nguyen had participated in a scheme to intimidate voters.

The case centered around a letter that had been mailed to recently-registered voters. Mailed primarily to houses with Latino surnames, it stated, in Spanish:

You are being sent this letter because you were recently registered to vote. If you are a citizen of the United States, we ask that you participate in the democratic process of voting. You are advised that, for those in this country illegally or those with green cards, voting in a federal election is a crime that could result in imprisonment, and you will be deported for voting without having the right to do so.

(Several months later, CalDOJ found that there was no evidence to indicate
that Nguyen’s campaign intended to intimidate those legally entitled to vote.
The controversy at the time of the letter’s publication stemmed from the
English-to-Spanish translation of “those with green cards” to the word
“emigrado”, which idiomatically means “immigrants with work permits”, but was
simply translated back into the word “immigrant” in the copy of the letter cited
in press reports.)

SO… judging by history, the left feels that
“disenfranchisement” is such a touchy issue that warning illegal immigrants not
to vote constitutes intimidation so severe as to require a Justice
investigation. But now that the shoe is on the other foot, Democrat brownshirts
in Indiana will be on hand at the polls to challenge your “allegiance to the
party” and keep you from voting.

Just something to consider.

The Gay Republican #11 - Liberals Ban Murder... Wait A Second!

I’d like to apologize to the readers for neglecting the column last week; I had some family obligations that took my attention. Specifically, my grandfather was in the hospital. I’ll spare you the most intimate, gory details of what happened to the old man, but I can’t resist the opportunity to touch on the state of health care in our nation, specifically in southern California.

Grandps was actually released from the hospital on Wednesday, but not because his problem was solved. They drained his bladder (for the first time in three days) and sent him home with a prescription for painkillers and a urine bag, pending surgery that was yet to be scheduled.

A Democrat would look at his predicament and conclude that the way to solve the problem is to expand Medicare or create some new entitlement. The liberal solution would be to legislate some new program or requirement, to address one specific, known problem or set of problems, and then to declare victory. Hooray; prostate patients, you need never worry again, because Medicare has bumped your affliction up on the priority list.

Big-hearted and well-intentioned, as most liberal ideas are, but foolish and counter-productive (as most liberal ideas are).

The real rub with America’s medical system is not a lack of guarantees of care, it’s the opposite. It’s an excess of guarantees, which are made by an organization (the government) that is nowhere near as efficient as fulfilling them as would be the free market.

Even the moderate intrusion of the government into the arena of health care that we have today distorts the market. Example: Medicare. The state takes over responsibility to pay for care for a huge demographic, and in doing so, it mandates that providers perform their services at whatever the state is willing to pay.

How many brains does it take to figure out that when you cap prices, all you do is guarantee that the best level of care that ANYBODY can get is the level of care that EVERYBODY can afford? Result: a shortage of providers.

And my granddad – who is not rich, but could definitely pay free-market rates for the care he needs – gets to sit at home for another three weeks, trying not to die while he waits for his scheduled surgery date.

Here’s another example, one that should speak to everybody in southern California who’s ever been in a car accident or sliced their hand open cutting an onion: Emergency rooms.

If you go to an emergency room, you cannot be denied care, even if you can’t pay. That’s the law. As a result, emergency rooms are the biggest money-losing departments of any hospital. And what happens when things become unprofitable? They go away. Emergency rooms close down. So even people who could afford to pay free-market rates for emergency care end up finding out – usually at the worst possible time – that it’s damn near impossible to get.

For all you “fairness” people out there, chew on this: the crippling distortion of the free market caused by creeping socialism is NOT FAIR to people who are willing and able to pay market prices.

Hey: If you’re some smug, “progressive” pseudo-intellectual driving around in a piece of shit Subaru with a four-footed Darwin fish on the back, think about that for a second. Shouldn’t “survival of the fittest” apply to economic quandaries as well??
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This past Tuesday was April Fool’s day, and I saw an article in the Los Angeles Times that, at first glance, I could have sworn was a joke…

Until I read further.

In the words of David Zahniser, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer:

The Los Angeles City Council dropped plans Tuesday for a symbolic moratorium on
killing, deciding instead to use the upcoming anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.'s assassination to promote peace.

Council members had been
asked by a handful of activists to declare a 40-hour ban on murder and other
violence, a concept one critic quickly derided as "silliness."

“Silliness”? I understand that parliamentary etiquette requires civil language, but I think that a more appropriate descriptor for that idea is “complete fucking idiocy.”

A forty-hour ban on murder.
Call me a cynic, but don’t we already have an ongoing ban on murder? Isn’t that called “the LAW”?

This idea could only make sense to the same small brains who think that tightening gun controls – which only ever results in taking guns away from law-abiding people – will solve gun crime.

If you have a problem enforcing laws, then you need an enforcement solution. More legislation will not help.

"I'm sure that the people who are doing the killing will hear that the council
is calling for a moratorium and then cease and desist," said a sarcastic Joe
Hicks, a former executive director of the city's Human Relations Commission.
"It's more silliness from our wonderful City Council."

Councilman Tony
Cardenas responded angrily, telling his colleagues that a murder moratorium is
not silly at all.

"That's the kind of attitude that Martin Luther King
had to step over and step across to get the job done," he said.

I don’t even know what to say to that. If I were Dr. King, I would be insulted that some LA City Council half-wit had affixed my name and my legacy to such hollow stupidity.

Here’s an idea: how about the LA City Council impose on itself a forty-hour moratorium on demagoguery, meaningless symbolism, and waste?

The Gay Republican #10 - Bitch, I didn't Know This Was A Crack-House

Scratch what I said last time; I’m tired of mowing somebody else’s lawn.

With both interest rates and housing prices falling, I started house-hunting about two weeks ago. Nothing too fancy; and certainly nothing like my dream estates in La Cañada Flintridge, but something manageable, something charming, and something to call my own…

And of course, it has to be in Pasadena.

I actually found one. It is in Pasadena, and it’s totally affordable, but it’s on the northwest side. Which, if you know Pasadena, means that it’s in a less-than-desirable area. However, the actual crossroad that the house is on is reasonably well-maintained. The houses are all bright 1920’s-era cottages that can only be described as “… so cute.” And the roads are lined with mature trees that arch over; filling the air and dusting the streets with buds and leaves. It’s quaint. It’s idyllic. It’s me.

The only catch is that the house that I’m considering is itself an absolute wreck. Seriously; maybe a former crackhouse. It’s a stain.

If the neighborhood is Cindy Crawford’s face, this house would be her mole… if her mole were enormous. And hairy. And had its own mouth from which it shouted expletives at passers-by.

I contacted the realtor, and got pre-approved for financing. My ducks are in a row. But before I made a firm offer, I decided to bring out my uncle Dan, who owns a construction company in Ontario, to see what the house would need, realistically. After spending about 7 minutes on the property, he had a short piece of advice: “They’re still asking way too much for this house. Make a lowball offer, scrape it, and build new.”

The only difficulty with that bit of advice is that a construction loan is a lot harder to get than a conventional mortgage, because you’re asking the bank to finance something that doesn’t exist yet. They want a bigger down payment.

But Dan had another idea: “Go poke around Pasadena City Hall; there’s probably some grant money for first-time buyers or depressed areas or even ‘green’ construction or something.”

I cocked my head, thought for a second, and shot back, “Is it hypocrisy when liberalism benefits ME?”

He just shrugged.

So, feeling like Pat Buchanan signing up for food stamps, I started researching – on the web, at first – what programs might exist to help buy this house. As it turns out, there are indeed several aid programs for homebuyers; some offered by the City of Pasadena, some offered by the State of California, and some even from HUD.

But they’re all for low-income borrowers.

Apparently, the City of Pasadena feels that the way you un-depress a depressed area is to fix it so that the same people who depressed the area in the first place actually own the houses. This makes about as much sense as federalizing all the airport baggage screeners on September 12th, 2001.

“Let’s take the same guy, give him a raise, and put him in a Federal uniform.”
Thanks, George; I feel SO much safer.

Now, while I definitely believe in the “pride of ownership” effect (“People do not destroy that which they own”; a corollary that exposes one of the many fatal flaws of communism), it still doesn’t make sense to me to give houses to people who couldn’t afford to buy even run-down houses sans help, since that probably also means that they won’t be able to afford to maintain them, much less fix them up.

My senior year at SC, I had a macroeconomics class. The professor, of course, was a flaming liberal, so I had gotten used to tolerating an ankle-deep level of bullshit for the sake of a passing grade. But one day, he set out to define an “ideal income tax” structure, and one of the criteria he cited as fact was, “The tax must be progressive.”

(In case you don’t know, “progressive” means that if you have more income, you not only pay more tax, but you pay a greater portion of your income in tax.)

I raised my hand and proceeded to protest.

“How can you just say that, by definition, the ‘flat tax’ idea is bad? That just doesn’t pass the sniff test; plenty of reasonable people think a flat tax is a good idea. How can you, with your piece of chalk, simply dismiss it as a matter of definition?”

(A “flat tax”, by the way, is an arrangement where everybody pays the same percentage of their income in tax.)

I proceeded to argue with him until he changed his “ideal tax” definition from “progressive” to “not regressive” (which would be a tax structure where people with lower income pay a greater percentage of their income in tax).

A partial victory for conservative thought in the hostile territory of academia, perhaps, but nowhere near all that needs to be said on the matter.

Here’s a newsflash: everything priced in dollars and cents is “regressive.” The $8 or whatever that Target charges for a twelve-pack of Charmin Ultra costs you a greater fraction of your income if you make $32,000 per year than if you make $600,000 per year.

Does that mean that Target’s toilet paper pricing unfairly gouges the poor? You could say that, but it would make about as much sense as saying that laws discriminate against criminals.

THAT’S THE POINT.

That may sound cruel, but the free market is tough love. Economic inequality is, in fact, the reason for capitalism’s overall prosperity. It’s a motivator.

If the price of everything were indexed to income, then what would be the incentive to work hard and earn more income? Why not just be unemployed? Then everything would be free!

Or rather, it WOULD be… until everybody realizes that everything is free if you have no money. So everybody stops working, so nothing gets produced, and the “free” stuff dries up. And then everybody’s poor.

*** That’s the promise of socialism: We can all share misery equally. ***

In the opening scenes of the movie “The Skulls”, Joshua Jackson’s character, Lucas McNamara, is being quizzed by a professor on whether America is a class-based society or the meritocracy that we hope it is. He answers, “I believe that it’s both… It’s been my experience that merit is rewarded with wealth, and with wealth comes class.”

Now, I know it’s tough to believe in this era of Paris Hilton, but here’s a fact: wealth correlates with virtue….

Hear me out.

In a very basic sense, if you have a dollar in your pocket, it means that:

1) you worked to earn that dollar, and
2) you had the discipline not to spend it.

And the fact that you don’t have a second dollar means that you either:

1) didn’t work enough to earn that second dollar, or
2) didn’t have the discipline not to spend it.

So it’s not a bad thing that having more money means having more spending power. It’s actually quite good. That’s how the market economy rewards economic virtue.

Ergo, when you create schemes that award money, or goods, or anything to people simply because they don’t have them, you may be acting on the cause of charity, but you have to be careful the extent to which you do it. Because breaking the link between money and purchasing power is a dangerous thing. It perverts the fundamentals of the market economy.

Need an example? How about student financial aid?

Everybody wants an education, right? (It’s almost like health care; we think we all have a “right” to go to college now.) So, for years, the government has been handing out free money to people to go to college largely on the basis that they simply don’t have it and they want it.
Well, if you’ve checked out the nosebleed tuition rates lately, you can see the result of that policy.

Here’s a novel thought: If you’re going to make the liberal argument that the middle class is waning in real terms (which I’m NOT, but if YOU are), look at 40-something middle class American parents, who thought, when their kids were born in 1990, that if they could save a grand or two every year, they could send them to a nice college. Where are they now?

Frantically pouring over thick state and federal student aid documents to see if there’s any way they can get on the same dole that the poor are on.

Lesson: It’s the big-hearted, well-intentioned, check-writing liberalism that wound up putting college outside the reach of those who weren’t:

1) already wealthy, or
2) poor enough to qualify for some government cheese.

This brings me back to my housing situation.

I am NOT bemoaning the lack of some kind of “gay yuppie down payment assistance program” from the City of Pasadena. Because, while it might help me out right now, it would be ill-conceived, undeserved, short-sighted, and unfairly injurious to non-beneficiaries; It would address only one narrow complaint while worsening the broader problem.

In other words, it’s what a liberal would want.


My idea is simply this: Get rid of all these stupid aid programs, and just let the chips fall where they may.

Maybe prices would be more reasonable, and maybe I’d be a homeowner.

Or maybe I still wouldn’t. But if I weren’t, it wouldn’t be because the economically undeserving had been ushered to the front of the line.

The Gay Republican - Grass-Chopping And Textual Slurs

I’m going to lead off this week’s article with an update on my lawn situation: I’ve now mowed it myself three times. In return, I’ve received one “thank you”, but no hint that Alex actually intends to buy a new mower and resume his landlordly groundskeeping duties. I’m not really complaining though. The initial fight with the pull-starter of my neighbor’s rickety old pushmower, the act of pushing it back and forth across the lawn, detaching the bag to empty the clippings, the smell of fresh-cut grass mixed with exhaust; they’re all whimsical reminders of childhood chores.

The only problem with this lawn care arrangement, as I touched on before, is that I think I’ve more or less assumed responsibility for it….

Oops.

That’s the problem with low expectations: if you set them, people will probably meet them. And that’s a lesson whose application is far broader than my small lawn.

I think I’ve begun to apply this lesson to dating. And judging by this past weekend, it’s working out far better than even I expected.

Peter (remember him, from the Abbey on the night I re-acquainted myself with liquor?) called last week and asked if I wanted to go to a birthday party with him. Friend of a friend, Fiesta Cantina, Friday night. Around 11:00 PM, so show up at his place around 10 PM. “And you can stay over if you like.”

I’m not sure whether he was keeping track, but this was to be our third date, which is better than I’ve fared with most boys who live in WeHo. I supposed that that was a vaguely positive sign, so I got dressed and hopped in the car a little after 9 PM to make the trek from Pasadena down to the 90069.

My feelings for him were sort of lukewarm at that point; I’d come to the somewhat disappointing conclusion that while he was a pretty good dude, he was just a little bit crazy. Crazy in a fun way – I’d perversely enjoyed the big gay scene we’d made the prior weekend at Neomeze, in a sausage-fest sea of Drakkar-soaked Persians – but crazy all the same.

He seemed characteristically scatterbrained when I arrived at his place on Friday night. Over a couple glasses of wine, we spent about an hour listening to American Idol’s David Archuleta performing a candy-coated rendition of Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise” and searching for his misplaced crystal champagne bucket that matched the stemware out of which we were drinking.

A little crazy, but about par for the course... Right?

We walked up Robertson to Fiesta Cantina around 11:30. Weaving through the front patio, we bumped into an acquaintance of his who, after exchanging embraces, remarked to Peter, “You look trashed.”

As we continued through the crowd, Peter asked me, “I don’t look trashed, do I?”

“Not that I noticed.”

Oh, but I should have.

One hour and three additional drinks later, he was bordering on passed-out standing.

So THAT’S what it is. You’re not crazy. I’ve just never once seen you sober!

As conversation splintered and kisses got sloppy, I could feel my inner bitch spark to life. At one point he slurred an admission that he’d consumed an entire bottle of wine before I even arrived.

"Uh-HUH. Did you, then?"

So rather than make a scene, attempting to articulate my repulse to a slobbering drunk, I pulled my signature “Worst-Case Scenario Dating Survival Guide” move: I waited until he was distracted and then I walked out.

This is not the first time I’ve employed this tactic. (One more time, and I think it’s considered a hobby). I’ve honed it to a point where I involuntarily plan a clean-break exit strategy for any date that has a remote chance of going disastrously downhill:

*Always keep your phone, wallet, and keys in your pocket.
*Always have cash for a cab.
*Be aware of where you are, where you go, and remember where your car is
parked.

On one previous occasion, I’d even stashed my sunglasses (which didn’t match my evening outfit) in a potted plant on the unsatisfactory suitor’s open-air front porch. It worked out peachy, because my car was parked across the street from his house.

My car was parked in the parking structure for Peter’s building, but only because I’d observed on my arrival there that one garage door was stuck open. As I approached my car, the text messages started.

“Where are you?”

“I left.”

“What?”
…

“Please come back.”
…

“Please come back; where are you??”

…

And then, the phone call.

“What happened? Why’d you leave?”

“Because you’re too drunk to see and it’s 1:15 AM, and I’m tired, and I don’t feel like hanging out anymore. And I definitely don’t feel like spending the night at your house.”

“Wha?? Buh… Um... Why???”

“Listen, Peter; neither of us are in good shape to have this conversation right now. So go back to your party and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Then more text messages.

Then the voicemails.

It was beginning to bear an alarming resemblance to the night of March 1st. Only this time, I just wasn’t drunk enough to be amused.

Saturday morning I did my usual morning-after-West-Hollywood routine: I went to the gym to sweat out any residual alcohol; I did laundry, I tidied up the house, and I ran some errands.

But... when I came home that afternoon, I found a surprise: A big, deliciously fragrant bouquet of flowers on my front porch. And a very sweet note.

As I write this article, I’m digesting a pleasant lunch that we shared this afternoon.

This brings me full-circle to where I started. You have to be true to yourself when you set expectations. It’s not worth it to live down to somebody else’s low standards for the sake of companionship (or anything else, for that matter). If they’re sufficiently interested in you, and they have enough respect for you, they’ll live up to yours.

Maybe if I bleach the lawn and cut down the tree in the front yard, Alex will start handling the gardening again…

I don’t think I’ll try it though.

The Gay Republican #8 - Health Care: Single Payer = Certain Death

A week has gone by and I still haven’t paid my narrative respects to Bill Buckley yet. Were he not such a homophobe (yet so eerily flitty at the same time, with his aristocratic airs), I’d feel bad about that. He did, after all, pave the way for the Reagan revolution, and for that the US owes him a tremendous debt of gratitude.

This week’s column would also be a perfect place to dance on the rapidly-excavating political grave of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, a.k.a. “The Sheriff of Wall Street”, a.k.a. “Client Nine”. But I’d rather deftly abstract from the former AG’s hooker habit by again explaining the difference between liberals and conservatives thus:

“Having principles means that it’s possible to run afoul of them; exposing you to charges of hypocrisy. Having no principles guarantees that you’ll never be a hypocrite. But you’ll always be a scumbag.”

In Spitzer’s current fix, he IS actually open to charges of hypocrisy, having nailed (figuratively speaking) prostitution rings during his tenure as the New York Attorney General. But those amoral social critics who focus only on the hypocrisy aspect completely miss the fact that, juxtaposed with the actual OFFENSE (the misconduct), the hypocrisy angle pales in comparison.

No, this week’s column is one that’s been percolating since seeing an ad for Hillary’s universal health care proposal last month. She seems to be locked in a war with Barack Obama over who can promise more on the matter of health care. And not just AVAILABILITY of care, no; COVERAGE.

Yes, if you are eligible for state-paid health care and you don’t sign up, there will be penalties. Criminal charges. Fines. Wage garnishments.

(Aside: I can’t help but wonder what the Christian Scientists think of this debate. Yes, the whole “no doctors” part of the faith seems a little kooky to me too, but so what? Have we actually reached the point in America where self-determination [i.e. “liberty”] has been subverted by the daddy-knows-best socialism of the vapid knee-jerk do-gooder majority? Isn’t that called “oppression”?)

At the end of the twat’s ad, the narrator says, “If you believe health care is America’s moral obligation, join her on Tuesday.”

And of course, the requisite, “I’m Hillary Clinton, and I approve this message.”

Moral obligation, huh?

There aren’t sufficient expletives, either in number or brutality, to hurl at such twisted, backward thinking.

Nobody’s going to deny that health care is getting more expensive. And when prices spike, people whine; and when people whine in a democracy, blowhard politicians start squawking about fixing their problems for them. In truth, there are innumerable reasons for the increase in health care costs, almost none of which can be precisely targeted by legislation.

Tort abuse, yes. Shysters like John Edwards, who make their livelihoods by convincing 12 ignorant people at a time that the soul of a pitiably handicapped palsy baby is inside of him, asking them to award multi-million dollar damages to his/her onerously burdened parents.

(These millions, by the way, are punitives against a doctor who “failed” to recommend a caesarian section, despite the fact that there’s no scientific evidence that a caesarian section surgery would have lessened the odds of the child having cerebral palsy.)

That money comes from somewhere; a malpractice insurer, probably, which pushes up malpractice insurance rates, which pushes up health care costs.

And then, from tort abuse, springs the subsequent problem of “defensive medicine.” Doctors who are afraid of being sued for malpractice by Democratic presidential candidates are tempted to over-treat the maladies they confront, out of fear of a lawsuit. But health care is already expensive; too much health care is way too expensive.

There’s also the uninsured, of course. By virtue of living in the US – even today, without any federal universal healthcare mandate – you have access to health care on an emergency basis. If you go to an emergency room with an emergency condition, the hospital cannot turn you away. The hospital can send you a bill for $10,000 after your treatment, but in the vast majority of cases, it’s turnip blood. So those losses become built into the price of care for people who actually pay for it.

In addition, a particularly annoying angle to the problem of the uninsured is the VOLUNTARILY uninsured: people who can afford health insurance but choose not to purchase it, knowing that emergency care cannot be denied if needed. I actually mentioned this glaring irresponsibility to my socialist ex-boyfriend, who made a respectable wage as a contract employee, but chose a flashy car and thrice-weekly trips to O-Bar over health care.

He replied, “Well, if I had to go to the emergency room, I’d pay for it.”

“Really? You live check to check, but if you got in a car wreck and the bills totaled to $50,000, you’d have the cash to just fork over?”

(The Romney plan – coverage mandates, with subsidies for the insolvent – would have fixed his little pink wagon… but I digress.)

On top of the uninsured, though, there’s a counterintuitive problem: the insured themselves.

Insurance is a tricky business. Carrying insurance results in a disconnect between the policyholder’s consumption and his responsibility to pay for it. So the temptation is to consume more than he otherwise would.
“I could take the five minute consultation and the prescription, but ‘just to be on the safe side’ I’ll get an MRI. The bill’s getting sent to Aetna anyway.”

(The economic term for this psychological effect of pooling demands and costs is “reciprocal externality”, but I won’t bore you with why.)

Clearly, the reciprocal externality problem (like the defensive medicine problem) results in people receiving more than the “optimal” level of care. Demand is artificially multiplied, which pushes up prices.

“But wait, how can you ever say ‘no,’ to more health care? Aren’t people healthier when they receive more health care? What is this blasphemy about an ‘optimal level of care’? It’s HEALTH CARE! We should have as much as we need, whenever we need it!”

…And THAT sentiment, dear reader, is the real root problem with health care costs. Health care has become an entitlement. We want it, we think we deserve it, so to hell with the cost. And in the economic equation, when cost isn’t a factor, the quantity demanded is as much as people can stuff themselves with.

Health care, however, isn’t really an entitlement. That’s right, I said it: Health care is not a “human right.” And the proof is in the fact that it’s a moving target. If your “human rights” didn’t entitle you to a Polio vaccine or an AZT prescription before they were invented, how do those same rights entitle you to those things just because they now exist?

Do you really think you have an open-ended claim on society that it take care of you by its best possible efforts? You selfish fuck!

(And to you left-wing folk who consider yourselves benevolent for your big-hearted socialism: do you really think that you have the right to use the force of the state to check-jack American taxpayers for the purposes of your hegemonic brand of compulsory charity? You self-congratulatory douchebags!)

The entitlement mentality is a manifestation of the “necessity creep” phenomenon: Polite society frowns on telling people that they don’t actually “need” something that they claim they do. So we used to “need” food, clothing, and shelter. Now, we “need” vacations and hair color and True Religion Jeans.

But, level of necessity notwithstanding, just because you “need” something, does that mean it’s OWED to you?

And before you say, “Yes”, consider this: I’d bet a clear majority of voters in Los Angeles County would say that they “need” a car. And cars are expensive. Does that mean that the government should provide cars to them?

The head-scratcher about the entitlement mentality, though, is that it’s actually a product of our affluence. (So much for the myths of Scrooge and Mr. Potter.) My reference a few weeks back to the middle class of yesteryear being dirt poor compared to the middle class today holds true. As we get richer, we feel entitled to more and better. And health care, at the level we receive it in the US, is a luxury good, which means we want more of it as we get richer.

So, as our incomes increase, not only do we spend more on health care, we spend a greater fraction of those incomes on it. We consume more health care per capita in real terms than ever before.

…Is that actually a problem though?

Honestly, is it?

Certainly the other issues I listed above, and some others I neglected, ought to be addressed. Tort reform legislation, maybe, and new health care options, like the Definity plan I have, which are designed to encourage the procurement of necessary care, and to cover the beneficiary in the case of a catastrophe, but to discourage frivolous overspending.

But, look: if we achieve greater wealth than prior generations, and therefore desire to be healthier than prior generations… It seems to me that we should also expect to have to pay for it.

Plainly, the government can’t afford to be the sole payor for a moving-target expense whose cost is growing at, what, four times the rate of GDP? More?

It doesn’t take a genius to see that, despite the PLURry fantasy of free hospital stays and nobody ever being refused care, if the government takes over health care, it will end up being rationed.

It’ll be an insidious form of rationing, though. Sure, we’ll feel the squeeze when we walk into a DMV-reminiscent “take-a-number” office to get a checkup, but what we won’t see are the IMPROVEMENTS to the field of medicine that we’re foregoing by moving health care out of the private realm.

In realistic terms, it’s relatively cheap to take the existing body of medical knowledge and apply it to a group of beneficiary citizens. What’s expensive is to blaze new trails: building the FIRST C-T scan machine; producing the FIRST antiretroviral pill; performing the FIRST lung transplant. What incentive would the state have to invent new, cutting-edge treatments, if the only result is that the public will have a new claim on the government to pay for them to receive it??

The moving target stops moving.

In a “lite” sense, the rationing of care is already happening, as I learned in my brief stint in health care finance. The company for which I worked performs kidney dialysis, and under federal law, End-Stage Renal Disease qualifies the victim for Medicare (but only after a waiting period of about three years if he/she already has his own private insurance). As a result, something like 75% of the company’s patients were Medicare patients, and Medicare’s set reimbursement rate per treatment was about $200. Unfortunately, that reimbursement rate fell at or below our provider cost (depending on medication levels), which meant that we only broke even, or even LOST MONEY on 75% of our patients. Medicare can’t afford to pay any more though, so with government reimbursement rates not improving, the only way the company could keep the doors open was to SOAK people who carried actual private insurance.

The company actually maintained a VERY important team (of which I was an occasional part) in the corporate office dedicated to figuring out how to stay in business under this scheme. How long does an average patient stay on dialysis? For how much of that time does the patient carry private insurance? And what kind of insurance? We broke down payors by every conceivable variable, looking for ways to make our forecasts more accurate: by state, by metropolitan area, HMOs vs. EPOs vs. PPOs, and on and on.

The company was actually very healthy while I was there, after coming back from the brink of bankruptcy in 2000. But imagine what would happen if a new drug were invented that extended the dialyzed life expectancy from seven years to ten: We’d have to soak private insurers even worse.

And that’s the road to hell. Private insurers grow unprofitable and close down, and then private providers (being reimbursed only at unprofitable government rates) become unprofitable and close down, and the government takes over responsibility for care provision as well.
So now, instead of paying for our own health care (a moving-target luxury good), we demand it from the state, which – in its signature bureaucratic fashion – hemms and haws and rations care; and as an ancillary “fuck-you,” does a lousy, bureaucratic job providing it.

Take away competition, and consumers lose.

We would all love to believe that health care providers are a benevolent group of people; that they do what they do out of a selfless love for humanity, and that if only food and rent and HBO were free, they would practice their arts gratis. (Oh, and that the people who manufacture the syringes and design the CAT Scan machines and develop new medicines are all similarly munificent, too.)

But we would be disastrously wrong. Do you really think that we’d have the same quality of health care in the US if we relied on the “Patch Adams” free clinic model? What kind of absurd thinking does it take to expect doctors to go to school for a decade, and then slave away for a few more sleepless years of gruntwork as interns, if their only reward at the end were to be allowed to do the same tortuous work for the rest of their lives, except with nobody looking over their shoulders?

No, in a capitalist system, the way we encourage people to go about pursuits that benefit us (like medicine) is with money. Which means that health care will cost money to its consumers. “Translating lives into dollars” is an ugly business (who wants to be the prick who does the math on when we can expect dialysis patients to die?) but it’s the bridge that has to be made when lives are on the line in a capitalist system.

Capitalism itself is still a good system; and here’s why: It redirects natural human greed toward a generally positive result: prosperity. This is in stark contrast to socialism, which redirects apocryphal human benevolence toward an elusive positive result: equality.

Don’t get me wrong here; I’m an optimist and I believe that humanity is basically good. I have greater faith, though, in a system that cooperates with self-interest than in one that works against it. Because as big-hearted as humans might be when they’re full, generosity takes a back seat to eating when they’re hungry, and there will always be hungry people.

To quote Winston Churchill, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

Ask yourself this; which system is better: A) one where everybody shares a small pie fairly equally, or B) one where everybody shares a large pie unequally, but 80% of the people have a bigger slice than the people who are sharing the smaller pie?

If you answered A, would your answer change if you knew that the other 20% hadn’t contributed anything to bake the pie, or had possibly even refused a slice when it was offered?

If you still answered A, would your answer change if you knew that the smaller pie also grew more slowly than the large one? (Think of the children!)

Just remember that the next time you hear Hillary or Barack (or John, GODDAMMIT) sing the praises of the single-payor model

The Gay Republican #7 - If Only Ann Coulter Were A Man

My new-year-resolved two-month sabbatical from alcohol ended on Saturday evening.
Hoo, boy, did it ever!

All in all, I’m glad I stuck it out for a full two months; it was a great exercise in self-control. I lost a few pounds without trying, I got almost 9 hours of sleep a night, and I saved a ton of money (which I then blew on clothes and a new surround sound system). But at the same time, I’m quite glad it’s over.

Alcohol is a useful anxiety management tool. You can strike up a conversation with any stranger. And you will be convinced that you came off as a sparkling conversationalist. You can dance without shame in the middle of an empty floor. And your karaoke performance SURELY rivals any of the hacks on American Idol.

Alcohol is a social lubricant on par with WD-40; a couple shots, and everything functions better.
(Except the brakes.)

In addition, drinking is such a social activity that it’s hard to remember just what exactly it was that you did for fun before you had a little Captain in you. Partying with good friends in most situations is still fun, once you adjust to carrying around a bottle of Arrowhead instead of Miller Lite. They understand, and even encourage, your respite from boozing. Dating without drinking, on the other hand, is more challenging.

Dating sober means that “Let’s meet for drinks” is right out (unless it means coffee, which I also don’t drink). It means no glass of cabernet with your filet. But that’s fine, since it probably also means that you won’t be finding any dates in bars anyway.

When it comes to meeting people, alcohol can easily be the difference between a scenario of endless forced smalltalk, and a scenario where the introduction of, “Hi, my name is Peter,” evokes the response, “That’s too much information; come over here now.”

And in fact, that’s exactly what happened on Saturday night.

Peter recognized me somewhere in the mass of boys at the Abbey. It was past midnight when he approached me, by which point I was having difficulty recognizing my shoes, so I was already impressed. He was tall and slender, with an iPhone, and hair whose waxily styled perfection appeared to have taken a lot of effort.

Peter, as it turns out, works at the Target in Pasadena, across the street from my office.

“I see you in the store all the time!! Do you recognize me?”

“Um... You should kiss me again.”

This is not a good sign….

I can’t quite recall his face from the Abbey on Saturday (it was quite an evening), but if I’d made an impression on him but he didn’t make one on me, then he must not be that hot. I’m not saying he’s necessarily unattractive, but I’m phenomenally choosy. To quote Cher Horowitz from Clueless: “You see how picky I am about my shoes, and they only go on my feet.”

Add to that aesthetic revelation the fact that he works at Target, and the odds of this one going far are about as good as the odds of Judy Garland and Truman Capote both spontaneously rising from the grave… and procreating.

For New Year 2007 (see a pattern here?) I made a different life-altering resolution, this one about dating: No Retail. No more waiters, bartenders, personal trainers, or Abercrombie and Fitch employees. Basically, nobody with a public-facing occupation.

I base my elitist dating strategy on my snobby Republican belief that retail jobs are worked by the sorts of people who shun responsibility and commitment. And worse, their occupations expose them to a constant stream of potential usurpers. (In case you’re wondering, the result of my policy is that 2007 was spent dating a stream of men who I found to be unsuitable for reasons far more substantive than usual. An upgrade, I suppose.)

Peter, however, from what I recall, was a satisfactory kisser, and had plenty going on below the belt. So since 2007 is over, I’m willing to temporarily relax that rule for the sake of broadening the applicant pool again. Saturday night was, after all, a special occasion.
But I still plan to be picky.

After my most recent breakup, I spoke with my dear friend Ari about what it takes to find the right person. She suggested, in her classic nonchalance, making two lists:
1) Characteristics I require in a mate
2) Characteristics I won’t tolerate in a mate

“Once you make the list,” she said, “It’s much easier to identify what’s not working quickly and just move on.”

I’ve been thinking about this, with my mercifully clear head, over most of the last two months. It seems to have worked for her, so I might as well give it the good-old college try. I started listing specific things, like “he must have a job” and “he must not be a pot-smoker”. But what I’ve concluded, really, is that “he must not be a liberal!”

I want to date a fellow Republican.

This definitely shrinks the gay male dating pool, but just might be worth it. 2007 actually brought 2 of them; one of whom failed the pot-smoker test (eep! Fake Republican!) and the other of whom I nixed over a general lack of chemistry.

Having now dated what I estimate to be 25% of the gay male Republican population of Los Angeles, I’m anxious to move on to the rest before they find each other.

Liberals annoy me in ways that I can overlook in the context of friendship, but not in the context of romance. My litmus test follows:

* Anthropogenic global warming is a farce. If you believe that humanity is the sole driver of carbon dioxide production, and that an increase in the carbon dioxide component of the atmosphere from 0.032% to 0.038% has more bearing on global temperature than THE SUN, then you ought to have your head checked.

* Guns are an insurance policy on liberty. The second amendment exists as the ultimate balance of power between the government and the governed. It’s not an accident that whenever dictators come to power, the first thing they do is round up the guns.

* Socialism is the death of all the macroeconomic prosperity rooted in the microeconomic nexus between an individual’s work and an individual’s wealth. It baffles me that the group of people who can imagine a causal relationship between organic food and better health cannot wrap their minds around economic necessity as a driver of human behavior.

If you disagree with me on any of those points, we won’t date long.

Beyond mere annoyance with the trendy, blue-state opinion cartel, I have a deep discomfort at one nasty psychological defect that carries a strong anecdotal link to the leftist brain: Liberals have a fundamental aversion to the concept of personal responsibility. They don’t like being told that this is the case (and, if challenged, they’ll usually pay some kind of lip service to “ethics” or “karma”), but it’s still true.

Deep in the liberal mind is a hedonistic belief that bad feelings are the ultimate enemy and ought to be avoided at all costs. Humanity should be protected from having to experience pain, hunger, depression, etc. even when those scourges follow naturally from their own misbehavior. And who better to guarantee the comforts of life to all than the nanny state? Poverty hurts, so we should buoy the poor with transfer payments. Disease hurts, so we should provide free health care. And so on, with every other social safety net.

Liberals are blind, though, to the fact that external assurances of comfort and care make self-reliance much less appealing by comparison. It’s a soft-hearted ideology, but also small-minded. Do I even have to point out that insulating people from the consequences of their bad behavior encourages more bad behavior?

It’s not much of a jump to see how that psychology translates to personal relationships. If you think that you are owed a buffer between your behavior and the consequences of it, you’ll probably do something selfish and irresponsible, and piss me off as a result. You’ll fool around, you’ll spend our savings, you’ll gain weight; something.

Liberalism is on my “cannot tolerate” list because personal responsibility is on my “must have” list.

But how to go about it? It’ll take a ton of patience, but I need to get to the point where I feel comfortable going on a date, experiencing him as a person, ordering dessert, and then saying:

“Listen. I’ve evaluated our potential and I’ve come to a conclusion. If you were Mario Lopez or one of the Ginch Gonch boys, I could entertain the possibility of entering into a fuck-buddy arrangement. But you’re not, which means that I have to weigh your appeal as a potential partner in a long-term relationship. Your sense of humor is keen and your commitment to your fitness regimen is impressive. However, your preoccupation with celebrity gossip, your admiration for Barack Obama, and your apparent lack of professional ambition belief, a discomforting likelihood that you’re actually a shallow flake; which means that whatever relationship we might have would likely be short-lived, end in
disappointment at best or heartache at worst, and drain between one and six
valuable months from my life. And since I have a Fleshlight, I don’t really even
want to have sex with you tonight; yes, even though your apartment is only two
blocks from here and your roommate is gone for the week. (I heard you say it the
first eight times. You can stop repeating it.)

Now, to show you that there are no hard feelings, I’ll pick up the check for dinner. I hope you’ll see that I’ve done us both a favor, and you can feel free to exit gracefully whenever you’re done with that Ghirardelli lava cake.”

We’ll see whether I have to use that speech on Peter tonight.

The Gay Republican #6 - Bad Taste Never Tasted So Great

*** IRRELEVANT PREFACE: My unspoken battle of wills with my landlord ended last night. I wanted him to mow the lawn and he, apparently, did not want to mow it. He won...

His wife told me on Monday night that the lawn mower was broken, which I suppose explains the Amazon growing in my front yard, but doesn’t really excuse it. And after an anonymous benefactor trimmed the hedges this weekend (Is the hedge trimmer broken too, Alex?) I felt compelled to borrow a mower from my neighbor across the street, and spend a cool evening collecting two full yard waste bins of grass clippings from my small front lawn. ***
___________________________________
A few weeks ago, my department at work relocated from the second floor of our building to the fourth. Not exactly an earth-shattering event, but a good excuse to waste a few hours of company time on a Friday packing outdated documents and personal effects into boxes, so that they can be carefully moved by dedicated relocation professionals, and then unpacked the following Monday to be neglected again in a new location.

Discussing the upcoming move a few days prior while waiting for a meeting to start, several co-workers voiced annoyance at the looming inconvenience. I disagreed, citing the better décor on the fourth floor. “Thank God we’re getting away from the ugly pink carpeting in the lobby on 2. I can’t even bring friends into the office; it’s embarrassing.”

A heterosexual associate voiced his agreement: “Absolutely, it’s classic office-tacky. Mauve, mauve, mauve; what is this, 1986?”

A wave of shame came over me.
SHIT. It IS mauve. What the hell is wrong with me? It’s not pink, that gross old carpeting is MAUVE.

*KA-CHUNK*
Another demerit punch in my gay card.

I watched the Oscars this weekend; all the way through, for the first time ever. And because I was watching them with Leah and Annemarie, we also caught some of the red carpet goings-on leading up to the ceremony.

I suppose it was an OK way to blow five otherwise-idle hours, but nothing really exciting happened. There were no outlandish outfits like Björk’s noteworthy swan gown or any of Bob Mackie’s fetish-esque creations for Cher.
Jon Stewart’s humor was pretty tasteful, nobody said anything offensive in their acceptance speeches, no technical glitches or production mishaps marred the broadcast.
I was praying for somebody to fall on the slick patch of stage floor behind the microphone. Nobody did.

The only thing I’m really *pleased* about is that I’m NOT the only one who found Cate Blanchett’s flat (and transgendered) portrayal of the Bob Dylan-ish Jude Quinn in “I’m Not There” uninspiring (and awkward).

*KA-CHUNK*
Those of you who have full cable service may have run across a channel called LOGO. (Since I don’t, the last time I’d heard about it was when some marketing operatives stuck a LOGO sticker on me at Pride two years ago.) I haven’t seen much of it, but judging by the program lineup, I can say this: If you’re queer, and you’re interested in being patronized to death, watch LOGO.

Over Starbucks a few weeks ago, my friend Leah told me about seeing a music video for a song called “Faggoty Attention” on LOGO. She was laughing so hard about it she could barely speak to describe it. But even more hilarious, according to her, was a show called “Rick and Steve”.

Set in the fictional town of West Lahunga Beach, “Rick and Steve” is a satirical portrayal of West Hollywood life. It’s an animated show, and all the characters are Lego people. Rick is a brainy, Pacific Islander bottom and Steve is a rocks-for-brains, white-bread, gym-rat top and together they compose “the happiest gay couple in all the world”. Their friends Dana and Kirsten are the stereotypical mullet-and-lipstick lesbian couple, and Evan and Chuck fill the roles of young twink-plus-old skeeze. More or less, it’s a gay South Park.

We Netflix’d season one and watched it all the way through last Saturday. She was right when she described pieces of it as fall-on-the-floor funny. There was the episode where Steve’s parents spend a night uninvited with him and Rick after his mother had a vaginal rejuvenation procedure in West Lahunga Beach. Searching for a way to convince Steve’s thick-headed southern parents that he and Rick are in fact a couple, they take their guests to a leather bar, where Steve’s mother dances so hard that she rips her stitches.

There was the episode where Dana and Kirsten decide to have a baby, and in order to secure the necessary turkey-baster effluent from Rick, they enter into a labor-for-semen barter arrangement: Dana fixes their kitchen dimmer switch; Rick gives Kirsten a wine glass full of spooge. (It spills out when they hit a bump on the ride home in their Ford Ranger. Yes, the raunch is hilarious.)

But as the episodes played on, I started feeling dirty. Parody though it may be, “Rick and Steve” offers an unnervingly identifiable and bitingly accurate portrayal of gay life. The very first episode has Rick and Steve, “the happiest gay couple in all the world”, having the “open relationship” conversation, and seeking out a third for a three-way to add excitement back into their bedroom.

In order to prepare for motherhood, Dana and Kirsten babysit another lesbian couple’s baby while her/his mothers attend what appears to be a dyke-nazi retreat. Before leaving, they admonish Dana and Kirsten not to derail their mothering methods, which include ridiculously insular and bigoted practices whose heterosexual inverses would shock the conscience of any West Lahunga Beach denizen.

After Chuck (the old HIV-positive, wheelchair-bound skeeze) asks his “partner” Evan (the ephedrine-addicted, 19-year-old Latino boi-toy) to promise that he wouldn’t have sex with anybody else after Chuck died, Evan responds, “But I have sex with other people NOW!”

Watching the show with Leah was just awkward once the character of Condoleezza the Fag-Hag was introduced. Condi is a tragic, corpulent character who goes to ridiculous, self-deprecating, abuse-inviting lengths in order to acquire and keep the attention of any gay man she sees. She is, in short, a fag-hag.

After becoming acquainted with Condi, Leah turned to me and asked, “I’m not a fag hag, am I?”
From the TV, Condi yelled after her new gay Lego friends, “Do you wanna go out, guys? I’ll drive!!!”

“No,” I replied to Leah, “You have a life.” (And she does.)

What I wanted to say next, though, was, “So why are we still watching this demoralizing show?”

Excepting its moments of quirky hilarity, the program itself is downright depressing.
The show may not actually be an animated parallel to life for all gays, or even a majority of us, but it certainly nails an unflattering bulls-eye on the most visible sector.
Granted, that opinion comes from somebody who doesn’t live in West Hollywood.
But after watching “Rick and Steve”, I’ve never been surer that I don’t want to move there.

*KA-CHUNK*
My card is starting to look like a slice of Swiss cheese. I’d better smoke some pink Nat Sherman Fantasias before the Cabal hunts me down and makes me watch “The Birdcage” again.

The Gay Republican #5 - Government? No! Lawyers? Yes!

As a gay republican, the most common retort I receive from those who dismiss me as a backward, self-hating closet case is “what about gay marriage? How can you vote for a party that wants to deny you the right to marry your partner?”

It is true that the federal Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, was passed by overwhelming majorities in a Republican House and a Republican Senate.

The US DOMA stated simply:
No state need recognize a marriage between persons of the same sex, even if the marriage was concluded or recognized in another state.
The Federal Government may not recognize same-sex or polygamous marriages for any purpose, even if concluded or recognized by one of the states.

What you don’t usually hear about DOMA from the left is that it passed by an 85-14 margin in the Senate and a 342-67 margin in the House, meaning that it was supported by clear majorities of both parties. AND that it was signed into law… by President Bill Clinton, on September 21st, 1996.

In 2004, Karl Rove & Company were accused of gay-baiting by introducing state-level statute propositions and constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage in order to get out the narrow-minded bigot (read: Republican) vote. But what those accusers forget is that in the year 2000, California’s own Proposition 22, which simply stated “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California,” passed with a 61% majority.

That’s right; even reliably blue-state California couldn’t muster enough “social progressives” to defeat a new law that plainly and explicitly denied gays the right to marry.


Perhaps 2000 is too far back. Perhaps eight long years have taught the errant Democrat majority of yesteryear to reach down in their hearts, ignore their personal intestinal objection to homosexuality, and vote to grant their gay brothers and sisters the right to wed. Indeed, the current Democrat party platform states that they “support full inclusion of gay and lesbian families in the life of our nation and seek equal responsibilities, benefits, and protections for these families.” Sounds like a gay marriage endorsement, doesn’t it?

Wrong.

The next sentence in the platform states: “In our country, marriage has been defined at the state level for 200 years, and we believe it should continue to be defined there.” Now, technically, that’s a de facto endorsement, since before the platform had been written in 2004, the Massachusetts Supreme Court had already ruled that gays must be allowed to marry there. Plus, the several states are required to recognize each other’s legal proceedings, so if you get married in Massachusetts, then you are married everywhere.

But you’ll notice that the Democrat platform stopped short of actually taking up the sword for the “civil rights” that its constituents claim to hold so dear. Rather, it pays lip service to “inclusion” and “equality” for gay and lesbian families, but then it kicks the actual issue down to the states for somebody else to deal with.

Now, in the interest of equal time, the 2004 Republican platform reads: “We believe, and the social science confirms, that the well-being of children is best accomplished in the environment of the home, nurtured by their mother and father anchored by the bonds of marriage. We further believe that legal recognition and the accompanying benefits afforded couples should be preserved for that unique and special union of one man and one woman which has historically been called marriage.”

OK.

“The social science confirms?” Bullshit. I’m open to any number of studies that suggest that certain family configurations are more likely than others to produce progeny that end up at Harvard (or in the state pen), but let’s be honest about the frequency of the “best” conditions for “the well-being of children”, by any definition: they’re few and far between. Is it also “optimal” for one of the parents to stay at home? If so, should we ban two wage-earner households from procreating? Wait: wouldn’t it be better still for both parents to stay at home; would that be “optimal”? Should American wage-earners without children then be taxed to subsidize all families with children so neither parent has to work?

That’s ridiculous, of course; just as it’s also ridiculous for a government body to determine – let alone enforce – an optimal child-rearing family configuration. Some scenarios may be better than others of course, but there’s plenty more to it than the gender of the parents.
Anecdotally speaking, you can’t tell me that Steve and David’s adopted children would better off living in neglect with their crack-addict mother in Compton than they are living with two caring fathers in Valencia.

I think my party is wrong on this issue. But there’s a difference, more important than the one of gay marriage, between the Republican platform and the Democrat platform; between the Republican Party and the Democrat Party….

It’s the difference between “princpled” and “fickle”.

Watching the gay marriage debate unfold reveals a corollary that you begin to notice as you observe politics: Conservatives are people who make decisions based on principle, while liberals are those who make decisions based on emotion.

The right may be as wrong as it’s ever been on gay marriage…
But the left is as spineless on gay marriage as it is on every issue.

The eternal PR problem of having principles is that it means you have say “no” sometimes, and saying “no” to people hurts their feelings. It’s easy to tar-and-feather a politician who says, “No, I don’t think the federal government should fund a new program to pay for children’s health care.” HE MUST WANT CHILDREN TO BE SICK!!
But it’s tough to make somebody look bad when they hug a crippled fourth-grader and say “I want to help the children” (even if that actually means “I will use the force of the state to rob productive members of society for the purposes of involuntary charity”).

The big-think Republicans who set the party platform may have their principles out of order (“social conservatism” and “tradition” before “individual liberty” and “equal protection”), but at least they have some. The Democrat party’s only principle is “say ‘yes’ to enough people to get 51% of the vote.” Politicians may all be whores, but the Democrat Party itself is an institutional brothel in a way that the Republican Party is not. In 1996 and 2000, I guess Democrats felt they didn’t need the gay vote; at least not enough to proselytize and offend a majority base that still objected to gay marriage. Perhaps today the Democrat Party opinion leaders feel differently, but I still wouldn’t stake my well-being on the loyalty of such a fickle crew.

George W. Bush’s Federal Marriage Amendment is a bad idea all around. It bans gay marriage by setting in stone (the Constitution) the final gasps of a dying social morality. It revokes the doctrine that states must recognize each other’s legal proceedings; an awful, litigious Pandora’s Box that ought not be opened. But the largest problem with it is not pragmatic but principled: it sells out the philosophy of limited government and federalism. (This, by the way, has been the true conservative objection to George W. Bush’s presidency all along: He uses big-government methods to