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What's interesting about this to me is that you see how unknowledgeable Obama is about so-called LGBT issues, which mirrors I think the American people's state of familiarity with them. It's a strange sort of half knowing that maybe (to them) feels more complete than it is because of the massive influx of gay and lesbian images in pop culture with Will & Grace, The L Word, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and other miscellaneous homosexuals on reality shows and commercials, etc. in the last 10 years. Not to mention everyone's favorite homosexual, the one who started the conversation, Ellen. I think people are much less afraid than they were 10 years ago, but they're still pretty uncomfortable with homosexuality unless it's entertainment.

This Rick Warren thing really throws it into the light. The gay community is all like "But I thought you loved us! I thought you understood," and Obama is like, "I do!" and we're like, "Apparently not."

And maybe I'm gonna be hugely wrong on this in the end, we'll see, but I still think it's the wrong approach to compare the homosexual struggle to the civil rights movement. Of course there are parallels, but I think the argument's persuasive power is too limited. Because gay rights is about sexuality rather than ethnicity, it's a different row to hoe. The conversation requires a comfort with talking about sex that most Americans just don't have. The Rick Warren-type 3rd grade schoolyard arguments against homosexual relationships -- "people aren't made that way," "the parts don't fit," etc., the so-called plumbing argument -- are impossible to refute without having a fairly graphic discussion of body parts and sexual behavior. I think most people feel such intense discomfort with the subject matter, a discomfort that I think a lot of people aren't even aware of or wouldn't acknowledge, that they are literally unable to have that conversation, to learn the stuff you need to learn in order to understand that homosexual desire is just as natural as heterosexual desire. I think what most people want to be assured of is that it's natural. It's a steeper learning curve than the race stuff, and it's unreasonable to expect Obama to be anywhere other than where he is with it.

It's so clear, when you look at a mixed race couple, to see what a simple, glaring injustice it is to deny them the right to be together in the exact same way we allow non-mixed couples to be together. The argument against mixed-race couples falls apart when you look more closely at the idea of race. The argument is based on the idea that the races shouldn't mix, but that's ridiculous because of course they already have. Each of us is already a great mixture. So you can't argue that there's some fundamental biological difference between, for example, a white man and a white woman marrying and a white man and a black woman marrying. But two men together, two women together, does present something biologically different than a heterosexual couple. Not that it's not natural or right or good, not that they necessarily shouldn't be encouraged to emulate heterosexual relationships, but it's a different argument to make.

Am I missing something?

Actually, That's Not True and You Know It. Asshole.

He's either stupendously ignorant or he's lying, and I assume this guy has read the Bible, so that leaves out ignorant. What bothers me more than the meanness or power-hunger or whatever it is that makes people want to control how other people live their lives down to its most intimate details, is the contempt for history, for knowledge, for science, for simple common sense.

It's like they're talking about Sasquatch when they repeat their "definition of marriage that has been in place in every culture and society for 5,000 years" mantra. On some level I can understand the ignorance of science and history, if these crackpots were educated in American schools, where they don't really teach that stuff to kids because it offends their parents and so after generations American science and history curricula are just a big swamp of avoidance, denial, and misinformation. So maybe Warren is a little weak on science and history. But how many wives did Moses have? I assume he knows it was more than one.

I'm still practicing patience about this one, but I have to admit it hurts. Surely there must have been a less appalling choice than Warren to participate in this historic inauguration.

Semester 3.

If you were wondering, I finished the semester on Monday with my last two finals. Here's the breakdown: all A's except one B in my geography class, and I got A's on both papers, the one about Native American homosexuality in Texas and the one about the Mike Nichols films and marriage in the late 1960's.

The geography class ("The Modern American City") was a bit frustrating. Overall, it was one of my favorite classes I've taken at UT. The lectures were fascinating, the professor is very funny and opinionated, the reading was interesting. If you gauge the value of a course by how much it illuminates your view of the world, this one would score very high.

But the exams were insane, not so much hard as loopy. They defied any notion you might have about what is important to remember and what is not. Questions were often along the lines of, "What was the pun I made in my lecture about residual spaces?" The class grade was based completely on 3 exams, and I studied hard and couldn't get much above an 85 on any of them. There just didn't seem to be any way to prepare for them, they were so unpredictable. If you didn't write down that pun and memorize it, you were out of luck. (Yes, I know this is essentially about my ego. Whatever. I'm not a B student!)

Inclusive Means Everybody.

The fact that the griping classes in both the Christianist and gay camps are in full indignation mode about this is probably a sign that Obama calibrated his choice perfectly.

My take on this, and on pretty much anything Obama does that at first doesn't sit right with me, is that Obama is a black man who was just elected president of the United States, which must make him like the smartest person in the world, politically speaking, so why don't we just relax and give him the benefit of the doubt instead of jumping all over him about which preacher he picked to say a prayer at the inauguration. Yeah, he could have picked a lesbian Unitarian, and that would have pissed off about 90% of the population. Rick Warren only pisses off about 3%.

I kind of like the notion of a Evangelical bigot being compelled to bless the presidency of Obama, whose election basically says to Warren and his people, "Your time is up."