Everett Maroon's Blog, page 27

Who I'd Bite If I Were a Zombie

Look, nobody likes a bitter jackass, although all of us have had run-ins with mean people at one point or other. Some experiences stick with a person, however, and even if one's outlook is generally positive, well, a little rumination on justice is probably okay. In this spirit I take up the idea of zombifying my history's greatest offenders. I invite others to do the same!

Robert B., former landlord during my second year of graduate school: Robert's main problem was that he was a slumlord who just couldn't admit it. He owned a dozen or so dilapidated, once-proud brick apartment buildings in Syracuse, New York and despite not wanting to ever maintain the structures, thought that tenants should pay current luxury apartment rates for the honor of residing there. When I pointed out that my living room ceiling was starting to bow, he asked me not to stand under there any more. And when a 6-foot section of that ceiling, no longer able to hold onto the rotten joist, collapsed seconds after I ran out of the room, he sued me, saying I'd done the damage myself. So yes, I would bite this guy on his dominant hand so he could watch himself turn putrid before he became a blathering zombie.

Wendy B., former college roommate: Wendy was a great friend that I met during my brief stint in the Campus Crusade for Christ. Although she claimed she didn't believe in anything they were preaching, she also wasn't cool with it when I started to come out of the closet. I came home from class one day to find my elderly cat locked in a kitchen cabinet, traumatized and covered in his own excrement. She refused to admit she'd done this to him, but that's the problem with living with only one other person. Two weeks later, she moved out, calling me all manner of homophobic names, and four weeks later, I learned she was in a relationship with another woman. So Wendy, I have a zombie bite with your name on it.

Road Rage Guy in Alexandria, Virginia: All I did was stop at an amber light, and this creep followed me for ten more blocks, ranting at me from the wheel of his Jeep. When I got out of my car in a parking lot (I was headed for a haircut), he parked one row over and then screamed that I was a freak of nature. Geez, I know I needed a haircut, quit it already! His roundhouse punch may have been obvious and easy to stop, but this guy seems better off as a rambling undead than free to roam the suburbs of Washington, DC.

Mitt Romney, current candidate for President: No, he hasn't injured me personally, but honestly, I see this more as a public service to improve his communication skills, because yes, Mitt has all of the panache of a wet bag of dog poop. At least eking out "braiiiiiins" would keep him away from his gaffes about $10,000 bets and how little he pays in taxes.

Actually, four people in 41 years is a pretty non-bitter list, all things considered. That said, I'd love to see other folks' nominees for this little ignoble award. Feel free to add in the comments section!

Obsessed: GOP Men with Women's Reproduction

Rick Santorum sticks around like a sexually transmitted infection. As the Washington Post put it earlier today, while Mitt Romney has trouble connecting with audiences on the stump, Santorum's message is frighteningly clear: he wants a United States of Christ. Or at least, his interpretation of what that would look like. I can see the cows coming home, and Santorum still hasn't mentioned any of the Beatitudes. Apparently he's given up on inheriting the earth.

Santorum's Web site claims that he will "lead us from the front," but in reality it sounds like he wants to lead from the uterus. Not his uterus, since he doesn't have one, but any garden variety uterus from a random woman in America.

Once upon a time, the fight for abortion rights and reproductive health was fought over the terms of when, abstractly, a human life begins. That abstraction is now being pushed into legislative agendas and bills, in the form of "Personhood" laws that would make pregnancy termination by any means—even, horrifyingly enough, miscarriage—a crime on par with homicide. In Georgia and Utah, the criminalization of women's health (by way of a natural miscarriage) made it further in the lawmaking process than many people were comfortable. But these would-be laws met resistance not only from bleeding heart liberals and progressives, they met resistance from law enforcement officials and health care providers, who pointed out that fully 25 percent of initial pregnancies failed. The jails would be full of women who'd done nothing other than lose their pregnancies. And what to make of premature babies who didn't make it out of the NICU? Anti-abortion zealots said they'd add a clause about intention to harm or end the pregnancy. We can't investigate every miscarriage, answered the first-line workers. The personhood idea went away for a little while, until it was revived, most recently in Mississippi.

Next, the so-called pro-life movement went back to the drawing board, picking up their always effective strategy of humiliating women, even women who were once embryos. The State of Virginia's Republican-controlled legislature introduced a bill to mandate that any woman seeking an abortion must submit to a transvaginal ultrasound first. A similar bill was introduced in Iowa that is not expected to pass. As Dr. Jennifer Gunter explains, there is no medical reason why a woman in her first trimester would need a penetrating ultrasound. Already the law in Texas, the consequence of these requirements is tantamount to state-sanctioned sexual assault, as well as putting health practitioners into conflict with the Hippocratic oath's requirement of "First, do no harm." And it bears mentioning that such ultrasounds are expensive, adding to the challenges facing poorer women who seek to terminate their pregnancies.

Even these restrictions haven't been enough for anti-choice leaders. There was the Susan G. Komen defunding of Planned Parenthood. Then the GOP candidates began bloviating about not making any abortion exceptions in cases of rape or incest. Seriously? Republicans are interested in minor children carrying pregnancies to term? How about the evidence that suggests that it's not medically healthy for a 10-year-old to carry a fetus for 40 weeks? Oh wait, now many in the GOP are against aborting fetuses even to save the life of the mother. The life of the mother. Pinch me when it starts making sense.

Leading from what he apparently thinks is the front, Rick Santorum said on the matter:

"Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn't have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life… I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you.

"As you know, we have to, in lots of different aspects of our life. We have horrible things happen. I can't think of anything more horrible. But, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation."

He's also said that having an abortion would be a further trauma to any rape or incest survivor. So of course they should have to raise the children of their relatives. That's sure to go well for them. Here, kid, we all call you the child of a "bad situation," but have a great day!

Now the latest fight is over contraception, who has to pay for contraception (read, not the tax-subsidied Roman Catholic Church), and how against Biblical teachings using contraception is.

Much hay was made over the line of clergy men at the House hearing last week, discussing birth control as a vector against religious freedom. None of these learned scholars brought up the Judeo-Christian belief about free will and self-determination, which supposedly God and Jesus want us desperately to have, followers of themselves or not. Somehow religions have become protected entities, like corporations, with all of the benefits of personhood, while people are losing their rights to live their lives freely. Still following me here?

What the row of men in religious garb shows us, at the end of the day, is that the Republican party is committed to playing to the most extreme evangelical elements who can fund campaigns. The GOP establishment may have had it with the Tea Party—new Tea Party members in the House have not held the traditional lock-step line on votes, because their interpretation of "small government" is somehow more honest than what older House members believe in, earmarks and specialty subsidies for friends's companies what they are. Looking at a potential watershed moment for the Democrats in the 2012 election, some in the Republican Party are thinking back to 2004, when Kerry went down in flames from the voters who showed up to vote for social issues, and from false ideas about his time in Vietnam.

So I want to know how much of the GOP-funded SuperPAC money will be spent on social issues, most notably same-sex marriage and women's reproductive systems. Republicans have been testing, this whole primary cycle, which anti-choice messages will resonate with deep pocketed funders, who now can give as much money as they like to these SuperPACs. It's looking more and more like the GOP strategy is: What Economy, Stupid? Little chance that we'll be talking this summer about the candidates actual positions on domestic and foreign policy. And if women go down over the invectives, we'll call it collateral damage.

All the Details Fit to Print

Prospective or emerging writers place so much emphasis on landing an agent or publisher that we may forget there's a whole lot to do after the contract is signed. Rather than sitting back and waiting for my 5-star reviews to come in and my phone to ring off the hook (not that my phone even has a hook anymore), I'm working hard on getting my literary ducks lined in a row. I've created a press kit, gotten head shots, staged a fake interview so I have a Q&A to give to bloggers and readers, talked to the cover designer, lined up some reading gigs, and asked a few author friends for blurbs or to be part of the blog tour. And there are still more items to consider here.

What's the ISBN? Are there advance reader copies available, because some reviewing organizations have a 3-to-4 month lead time or won't run a review after the publication date. What's the expected price of the hardcover or paperback? Will it be available in Canada? The UK? Which ebook readers is your publisher working with for the title?

I have to decide how long the blog tour runs, or if there's a particular order of reviews that would specifically benefit the book release. Because it's a title with LGBT themes, I want my publicity team to send it to Ellen DeGeneres's publicist, even though I know this is a long shot. Why not send it out as far and wide as possible? Why not use a small press as a spring board to a wider angle of buzz, if I'm willing to do a lot of that legwork?

I've written before that writers help themselves when they realize their labor of love is someone else's sales project. I maintain that this is true-distance as a writer can be a very good thing–but when working on the production side of a book release, it aids me to remember the reason why I wrote the book in the first place, because those goals become a kind of prioritization for me. I was ready, after all, to self-publish this memoir, because I believed so firmly that it needed to be on the market for all of the unsure transgender and gender nonconforming youth out there. I held and still believe that we need to have hopeful, funny stories about transition in the cultural conversation, narratives that show people can succeed through transition. We do come out the other side, and we can be fulfilled, happy people. Having a sex change, as onerous or out of left field as it sounds, is a solid path for some of us. And I want people to know that, and use their sense of humor to make it to their goals as human beings.

My face, in my head shot, singles me out at the precise moment that it takes these general ideas and locates them in my own personhood. Yes, I transitioned in a specific time and place. I had my own individual resources, strengths, and weaknesses. I had my own social position that differs from many other people who are making a similar decision to transition or be more open about their gender identity. I hope that my book becomes one in a sea of voices who describe their own journey, because then we don't need to conflate my story with everybody else's.

In this light–that this is my story and I hope others find it useful and/or entertaining–I set up my release strategy. LGBT bloggers get advance copies, I'm trying to find reading gigs at LGBT youth centers instead of bookstores. I'm open to any phone or online interview, and if someone were to pay me to come to their campus to speak about the memoir and the issues in it, I'd donate any speaking fee after my costs. I promise I'll stick to my approach to life:

Keep laughing so you can keep fighting.

Now then, back to working on making this release go well…

My Kid and His Invisible Chrysalis

The baby has made it clear he's in a new growth spurt. Far from having an amazing lexicon or masterful charades skills, he just screams and eats a lot, and then one of the parents in the room will run to the interwebs and look up the under-12-months milestones for development. Not the sitting up, rolling over, crawling development, but the non-cognitive stuff like tooth appearance and those aforementioned spurts. Emile's week 6 and month 3 spurts came a little early, so it's not surprising we'd see the sixth month dash at 5.5 months. It has me wondering if he'll grow into an impatient pain in the ass, but then I remind myself that it's just too soon to tell.

I picked him up yesterday morning and had the sensation that someone had photoshopped my live child to make him 3 percent larger than the night before. His head, hands, shoulders, all of him seemed to take up more space and weigh more. I remembered that the further we are from the core of the planet, the less gravity pulls on us, so I briefly considered taking him to the top of Mt. McKinley and hoping he'd be easier to hold there. Probably the pool at the local YMCA was an easier way to get to the same outcome, however. He's still about a month away from being allowed into the baby swim class.

I figure he's got a cocoon stashed somewhere in his crib. It's invisible and it folds up for easy storage. Maybe it's one of those infernal objects that adults can't see, like Snuffalupagus or a gateway to a world of talking dogs, I don't know. I have my suspicions. He may sense I'm looking for his secret growth chamber, because he distracts me with a coo or a milk bubble. But in moments like last night or the night before, I'm at a sleep-loss-induced disadvantage; I have to try so hard just to ambulate without tipping over, there's not much else my brain can handle. Those are the moments when I'm sure, upon later reflection, that he has some charm to add more mass and I'm just not finding it.

Sure, he's eating larger meals and yes, we've begun adding pureed food to his diet, but come on. This 5-month-old infant is closing in on 20 pounds. He's like a lineman in miniature. If he could tackle or block, the NFL would be calling. Too bad for them he'd probably roll over and grab onto his feet instead of dive in for the sack.

We bought him a bumble-type seat this week, the pod-like chair that helps a baby sit upright, even if on their own they could only manage such a feat for a couple of seconds. Emile loves it, acting like he can now hold court (as if he needed a chair for such things). He takes stock of his kingdom and looks quite pleased with himself. Yes, there is my activity pad, hello crinkly flower dangling from a padded bar. And there is my bunny swing, thank you for all of those lovely naps. Oh, hello, mother, did you get your cup of tea today? Court jester, I mean father, I would like to be lifted and cuddled now, thank you.

It's only a matter of time before he outgrows that chair and demands an actual throne.

The Terrain of Bumbling

There's a little less than a month now until the release of my memoir, Bumbling into Body Hair: Adventures of an Accident-Prone Transsexual. I'd rather keep it simple and just be excited, but that isn't my DNA. Instead I've got anxiety up the wazoo and I find myself curtailed by disappointing fantasies of weak sales, offended reviews, and a whole lot of ho-hum regarding the writing. It would be one thing to keep my expectations low, but I enjoy flirting with the border of self-torture. Before anyone begins commenting that it's all going to be okay, please know that I understand these are just as implausible outcomes as landing in a soft chair on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. If nothing else, I'm accustomed to my own neuroses. So in an attempt to foil my weaknesses, I'm writing today about the issues brought up in my memoir. Call it a teaser of sorts.

There's no time for shame—It's a whole lot easier to write that several years out from transition than it was when I was in the weeds, for sure. There were whole years where wave after wave of embarrassment and shame rolled over me, seemingly without end. I wasted so much time worrying and not moving forward. Yes, making a gender transition turns one's world upside-down, without question. But if it's something we need to do to survive in this world, then we should consider getting on with it so we can move through the negativity faster. Nobody deserves to sit in such hell for so long. As for people who would tell us not to transition, or harangue us for our feelings—I've learned that life is much better when disrespectful folks are not active in my world.

People respond to the nonverbal messages we send out—There's nothing easy about telling another human being hey, I'm not the gender I was born. Heck, there are all kinds of scenarios in which this statement need not even come up, but when it does, it's anguishing. One lesson I learned through my transition was that when I told someone I was excited about this change, they got behind me much more easily, and when I came to them full of reticence, their response was more often negative. It makes sense if we think about these moments as ones in which people are looking to be there for us. If I grouse to someone about my twisted ankle, I shouldn't expect them to respond, "yay, twisted ankle!" They'll more likely shake their head and tell me they're concerned about me. So too if I begin with saying I'm struggling with some gender stuff and stare forlornly at my shoes, they probably will reply in turn. But there's an important prerequisite in these exchanges, namely that person learning about the trans-ness doesn't have an investment in my gender identity. These are the neutral parties–acquaintances, coworkers, folks I've just met, etc. For that other group…

People invested in the trans person's gender identity need time to get with the program— Sometimes this is a whole lot of time. It's a kind of litmus test, this telling someone "hey, I'm trans." When an individual doesn't have an investment in my identity, they congratulate me or comment that such a realization must have been difficult. But when they need me to be a certain way, I meet resistance. It became fairly simple to negotiate; when a friend or relative was shocked or unsupportive I told them that I too discounted myself initially. I too needed time to adjust and make sure this was how I really felt. When folks told me, "I don't know if I can ever call you by another name," I just told them not to call me by any name for a while. I reassured them that as long as they were genuinely trying, I wouldn't pounce on them for getting my pronoun wrong. I tried to lower their stress level. Changing sex is a big freaking deal, but it's not their big deal. That belongs to the transitioning person. For people who just couldn't come around, I was disappointed, but I let them go. And lo and behold, I discovered just how many truly great people I have around me.

The medical industry is way behind on caring for transgender individuals—If American psychology guidelines describe standards of care for health care practitioners, not many in the medical community have read them. Time and again physicians have shown little to no cultural sensitivity, doled out not just incomplete advice, but also dangerously wrong instructions, or omitted something important I needed to know as a patient. For transgender people, self-advocacy is the only way to navigate through one of the most important facets of our well being—our health care. We need to keep talking to each other, to do our own research on innovations, treatments, products, and best practice. And it would be nice if we could pressure health insurance companies to provide us with proper insurance for our needs. It's beginning to happen in small pockets, but it would be great to move the trend faster.

Hold on to that sense of humor because it comes in handy—There's a lot about being an adult that is stressful and exhausting. Throw transition on top of the pile and yowzers, there's a whole lot more to handle. But at some point all of the expectations we've been told to carry around with us stop making sense. Some guy at work makes a sexist comment about "how women just are," and I stifle a giggle. A stranger makes an assumption about who in my family will have accurate directions, based on our gender presentation. If these are such Truths, why do they seem so fake? Possibly because oh, they're fake. I can take those guffaws with me wherever I go.

Send in the Clowns Who Claim to Protect Marriage

UPDATE: The petition drive in question is now for Referendum 74, not 73. Washington's Office of the Secretary of State sent out a correction this week.

Signed, sealed, and delivered–that is the status of same-sex marriage in Washington State, as of 11:30 this morning. And now that a Republican legislator's impassioned support of marriage equality has gone viral (from Walla Walla's district, no less!), it's time to rest easy, basking in the warm glow of justice…

Oh, wait. There's no time to relax. A mere three hours after Governor Gregoire signed marriage equality into law, the NOM people were filing Referendum 73 in Olympia to revoke the law with a ballot initiative.

Who and what is NOM, you ask? Welcome to the awful new world in carpetbagging. 

They call themselves the National Organization for Marriage, but there's scant evidence that they're working to support marriages in general. Bankrolled by only a few wealthy, extremely conservative people, NOM presents itself as part of an enormous movement against same-sex marriage. This organization from the northeast is now on the ground in Washington State where bigots—I mean, anti-gay activists—will try to trick state residents into signing a petition to repeal the marriage equity law. They have 90 days from yesterday to gather enough signatures (a little more than 120,000 are needed by June 6) to put the repeal referendum on the ballot this fall. When everyone will be sending in their votes for that other election. The one for President.

NOM is backing a newly formed group, Preserve Marriage Washington, to run the petition drive. Back in 2009, a similar-sounding organization, Protect Marriage Washington, worked to remove the domestic partnership law from Washington State through a ballot measure, and lost. They were also resistant to sharing any of the names of people who signed their petition to put the measure on the ballot, citing harassment from pro-gay activists. And in 2009, NOM worked behind the scenes to defend Protect Marriage Washington through that legal process.

Fast forward to spring 2012. To make all of this more complicated and much more murky, the petition for Referendum 73 sounds like it supports same-sex marriage. Washington State, as it turns out, allows deceptive language in campaigns and in things like petition drives and referendum language. It is perfectly legal, according to the Washington State Supreme Court, to walk around with a petition that says something like, "Save Same-Sex Marriage in Washington!" and have it be a petition to remove same-sex marriage from the civil code.

In this light, resisting the calls to share signatures could mean organizations like NOM and Preserve Marriage Washington want to genuinely protect people from being ridiculed as prejudiced people, or it may be that people would then recognize more easily that what they signed is not actually what they intended to sign. That's speculative, of course.

What isn't a guessing game is the state Supreme Court's ruling, nor the GOP-managed attorney general's office's interpretation of their ruling:

The state supreme court has said you can lie in campaign utterances and campaign materials.  We have no jurisdiction over extra words and sales pitches that sponsors choose to put in petitions. —David Ammons, Spokesperson for the Washington State Attorney General's Office, in an interview regarding the 2009 referendum to abolish domestic partner benefits in the state

Because of this ruling, Referendum 73 not only may make whatever claims it likes, it has no motivation to be clear. A person with a petition can swear up and down that signing will help keep same-sex marriage in the state, and the language on the petition could be intentionally confusing so as to obfuscate the actual purpose of the referendum. Meanwhile, opponents of this campaign to overturn marriage equality are faced with limitations under the law. This is from the Washington Secretary of State's office:

What if I'm against an initiative or referendum? Do I have the right to urge people not to sign a petition?

Yes, as a matter of freedom of speech. Opponents of an initiative or referendum can certainly express the opinion that it would not be a good idea for a voter to sign a petition. An opponent, however, does not have the right to interfere with the petition process. In fact, it is a gross misdemeanor to interfere with somebody else's right to sign a petition, and there are also laws against assaulting people. You can certainly express your opinion, but you must remember that other people have rights to their opinions as well, including the right to sign petitions you may not like.

I could not in good conscience (or legally) tell people to disrupt Preserve Marriage Washington's petition drive, but I certainly could request a copy of the petition and circulate it on my own blog as the Petition Which Should Not Be Signed. So I have requested one, muahaha. And I'll post pictures of it and try to get a counter campaign going. I may have bigger priorities in my life than same-sex marriage, but I'll be damned if I'm going to stand by while bigoted, problematic, entitled people try to usurp my representative government and spin their cause as if it's anything more than blatant prejudice.

Meanwhile, send some love to New Jersey, my home state. The state legislature there is about to pass a same-sex marriage law, even though they're facing a veto from their Republican governor. He claims it should be a ballot initiative.

The last time New Jersey looked at civil rights on a ballot initiative it was 1915. Male voters struck down the possibility of women getting the right to vote. Perhaps ballot initiatives are not the way civil rights get supported in the United States.

To help fight the Referendum 73 petition drive, contact the Pride Foundation or Washington United for Marriage.

The Persistence of Lies

I've devolved as a news-watcher over the last 25 years. If I waited until the evening to get the news, during dinner with my parents in the late 1980s, I hardly ever see broadcast news now. The promise of American 24-hour news channels never came to pass, in my opinion; instead of thorough coverage from news desks around the world, it's mind-numbing commentary from uninformed talking heads who seem much more interested in their own product placement contracts than in communicating about our global goings on. Those news syndicates and news desks in other countries have dried up, but what was their other option after years of little funding or support from the channel executives? Now big name news outlets like CNN use amateur video–even solicit it openly–to serve as content providers. So it is that people's backyards were frequent film footage sources during every large snow of the winter last year.

The GOP primary race has put me over the edge, though. On top of the sensationalized headlines, anemic interest stories, vapid policy analysis, and over-reliance on technology gimmicks (I'm looking at you, hologram interview), now there are countless stupid sound bites from what looks like little more than well funded bigots running to disassemble the Office of the President.

What's been hardest is listening to all of the lies–not about President Obama, but about ourselves. Anyone can say whatever they like and those news channels replay the hell out of a statement like they're a payola-receiving radio station with a hot new single from BMI. It's true that these lies are founded on mistaken beliefs we've held for years, or at least beliefs that we allow to rumble around culture and don't exile properly, like say, insistence that the Earth is flat. Here's a sampling of the assumptions, bits of misinformation, stereotypes, and outright falsehoods that have been taking up too much space in our national conversation:

Undocumented immigrants are stealing our jobs–When Alabama installed the most stringent rules against undocumented workers in the county, in hopes that they would "self-deport" rather than live in a hostile environment, many unforeseen consequences hit the fan. Yes, there were photos about crops rotting in fields because there were no migrant farmers to harvest them, but now business owners and police gripe openly about their newly minted problems. Sixteen thousand police needed to be trained in the new enforcement rules, which cost a lot of money; jails have filled up with people who would have once received simple traffic citations, but who now can't even be released on bail (it's not permitted for undocumented workers). Latino children stopped going to school, fearful that they would be bullied or come home to find their parents have been removed by authorities. Businesses are depleted of their cheapest labor force and shockingly, citizens have not stepped up in droves to replace those employees, so industries from hospitality to farming and manufacturing. On two occasions, foreign automobile executives who were in Alabama on business were arrested for not having the proper paperwork to show police, and were jailed because the provision doesn't allow for any other action on the part of law enforcement. State officials came out to explain that foreign businesses are indeed welcome in Alabama, but not before much of the momentum behind the law began evaporating. The effect of H.B. 56–the law in question–was surprising for many precisely because it was founded on erroneous assumptions regarding how much taxpayers were paying to support foreigners in the state and how much those workers contributed back to the system.

People on welfare are using taxpayer money to do drugs–Reagan's creation of the image of the Black welfare queen has become so presumptive that many people don't even know it's only an image that's been around since the 1980s. That characterization has had real staying power as it's marked the working class and the poor with a very broad brush. They're lazy, deficient, addicted, criminal. It's interesting that in context of last week's fight around contraception coverage and how the American Catholic bishops are so very very against birth control, poor people still are mocked for having too many children. Maybe we only worry about birth control when we're focusing on the middle and upper classes. Florida spent $180 million to drug test everyone on its welfare rolls, and 96 percent of those individuals passed. A judge halted more drug testing but the governor, Rick Scott, stands by the law, even in the face of near-perfect Daily Show questioning. And still GOP candidates talk about people who receive food stamps as failures. That means that 45 million Americans are failures, according to folks like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. Actually, 45 million sounds like a voting block to me.

Same-sex marriage is killing American morals–I'm not about to get into the fray on gay marriage (in this post, anyway) and deconstruct religion and the bible. But let's take a look at states that have passed same-sex marriage and see how traditional opposite-sex marriage is doing. Southern states, none of which have same-sex marriage, had the highest divorce rates in the US in recent years, and the Northeast, with same-sex marriage supporting New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Washington, D.C. the lowest divorce rates. Other signs of "moral erosion," like say, abortion, have leveled off across the country, with no correlation to states that have or states that have banned gay marriage. But if increasing funding to curb anti-LGBT bullying in school is a sign of moral decay, then yes, states with same-sex marriage do have that effect on schools and children. Some of us think that's a damn good thing.

We need to cut taxes to save the economy–This is a Republican mantra. Too bad there is no economic evidence to support the claim. Cutting taxes has, however, cut the revenue to the federal government, leading to lots of ideological posturing in Congress in the way of budget cut debates. And in these debates, the three aforementioned lies come trotting out: we have to cut funding to abortion providers, to entitlement programs, to welfare and food stamp recipients. Is it a financially driven cycle of hate? A high stakes game of smoke and mirrors? When three of America's richest men come forward to call for more taxes from the very wealthy (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffet), something is amiss. When Mitt Romney jokes about paying 15 percent tax–lower than the average office worker's tax rate–the face of this lie is exposed. And yet, the tax and budget cutting rhetoric continues. Let's cut the Department of Education. No, the Environmental Protection Agency. No no, let's get rid of all entitlement programs. Seriously, what would happen if Republicans erased the support from Social Security? No more retirement program, no more disability support, no more supplemental security for people with mental illness or profound developmental delays, no more Medicare. Now we're talking about more than 100 million Americans affected, or more than one-third of our entire population. It makes for a nice populist message on the surface, this tax-cutting campaign. But in the end game, will there be a country left?

Let's hope we come to our senses well before then.