GENDA is looking mighty fabulous today

Finally, we see some progress in one of the most neglected areas of the LGBT rights movement: transgendered rights.

New York is slated to become the fourteenth state to enact laws protecting the transgendered from discrimination in employment, housing, public accomodations, and credit. A renewed call for the New York legislation to act has come in the wake of a public opinion survey showing that only 13% of those polled would not support the legislation.

While the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act may face a slight challenge in being passed now that Governor Spitzer, who had previously promised to sign the bill into law if it reached his desk, has resigned in the wake of a public scandal about his alleged ties to a prostitution ring, I'm optimistic that our transgendered brethen in New York will finally get the reprieve they deserve:

"'Transgender New Yorkers routinely face discrimination in ways that impact our lives, big and small, and we deserve the opportunity to have a job and a home and provide for ourselves and our families just like anybody else,' said Debra Oppenheimer, a transgender woman and a Board Member of the Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley in Rochester."

...so long as we don't get another Sally Kern growing a big mouth in New York before the bill makes it through the legislature.

Could I get paid to do really obvious studies too?

Unlike my post from a few days ago, I'm being facetious when I say that this is a news item no one saw coming. This should have actually been quite an obvious connection to most people with a halfway-functioning brain stem.

A newly-released study has brought us the shocking revelation that there is a link between childhood spanking and adult interest in hot, kinky sex.

"Straus, co-director of UNH's Family Research Laboratory, conducted a study in the mid-1990s in which he asked 207 students at three colleges whether they'd ever been aroused by masochistic sex. He also asked them if they'd been spanked as children. He found that students who were spanked were nearly twice as likely to like masochistic sex."

Maybe this is just me, but, to get a bit Oedipal, it makes sense that childhood experiences will become imprinted on the adult psyche--in this case, in terms of sexual behavior. Getting spanked as a child with a paddle by Daddy Dearest would logically lead to being spanked with a slightly different paddle as an adult.

Of course, part of what I don't like about the study aside from the fact that its conclusion was already glaringly obvious is the fact that it lumps BDSM in with other risky sexual behavior. As someone who owns a lot of leather, a collar, a leash, ropes, and chains, it really makes me angry to be treated like my sexual interests are the result of "damage" done from corporal punishment in childhood. There are plenty of precautions that can be taken to ensure that BDSM between two rational, consenting partners is perfectly safe.

For the record, I was spanked as a kid, and I do have a good interest in BDSM. However, I really don't enjoy being smacked on the ass with anything. I much prefer being tied up, or being the one to tie someone else up, so that either makes me the exception to the rule or proves that spanking isn't really as damaging as Straus would have people (U.S. lawmakers especially) believe.

The argument for gay marriage we all should have seen coming

Well, well, well. It looks like all of those naysayers who said legalizing gay marriage would destroy society as we know it and encourage chaos and bestiality and the collapse of the economy are eating crow for dinner. Especially on that economy thing.

As those of us stateside (and, most likely, everywhere else) know, Massachusetts is the only state in the United States which regularly grants gay marriage (though at least New York recognizes Canadian same-sex marriages). Massachusetts has (almost) always been kind of progressive like that.

For some reason, even I didn't see this coming, though.

"Massachusetts is reaping huge financial gains as a result of same-sex marriage."

You mean gay marriage actually has positive effects aside from giving human beings equality and happiness? Who knew?!

Apparently, the New England state has been seeing gradual loss of population for decades. Since 2004, though, after the first same-sex couples began to wed, the state has (unsurprisingly) seen an influx of gay and lesbian couples coming into the state to marry. Apparently, they're staying there. Most of these couples are in fact skilled professionals--lawyers, and such.

"Attorney Jeffrey Webb and his partner Mark Schuster moved from Los Angeles to Massachusetts in December in order to marry.

'That was something that was really important to us,' Webb told the Journal.

He is now a partner and practices trial law with a well known Boston-area firm. Schuster is now the chief of general pediatrics and vice chair for health policy research at Children's Hospital Boston."

Now, if America were run by halfway rational people, this would mean that other states would soon be tapping the appeal of gay marriage to stimulate their economies. Hint, hint, Michigan. Wink, wink.

Obama's trick of making gay marriage disappear

Well isn't that just typical, ladies and gents? With it being an election year, and with a few primaries still left to go, the politicians will do just about anything to court votes and curry favor with the general public. Here's something they haven't often attempted, though: trying to win over the LGBT vote!

Illinois Senator and Presidental hopeful Barack Obama is currently courting the gay vote in his run for nomination. As you can imagine, this includes promises such as the enactment of the Matthew Shepard Act, a fully inclusive Employment Non-Descrimination Act, the complete repeal of the Defence of Marriage Act, and legalized gay marriage...whoops, my bad!

According to Barack Obama, marriage is too good a method of granting gays equality.

"I personally believe that civil unions represent the best way to secure that equal treatment."

You heard it, folks. Barack Obama, who is attempting to win gays who, by and large, want to have the option of getting married someday, says that they can't get married! Instead, we should all choose the less-controversial civil unions route and make it equal. A black man of all people should know that separate but equal just doesn't work.

Civil unions are a step on the road to equality, not the final destination. Still, you've got to give Obama some credit. At least he's taking that step and promising provisions to ensure that the journey continues even after he leaves office if he becomes President, right?

I mean, that is what happens in a political campaign. They smile at your face and stab you in the back.

It could be worse. Mike Huckabee could be the frontrunner on the Republican side. I shudder to think of it.

Show me a holy text condoning genocide, and I'll show you a screwed up religion.

At the risk of sounding like a too-young cynic hardened to the horror of news, allow me to say this: after only two weeks, this has become old news.

I refer, of course, to the tragic news item from two days before Valentine's Day which rocked the gay communities that watch the news here in the States (and our brothers and sisters across our northern border in Canada). To the three uninformed gay people out there, and any straight people who, for some reason, are reading a gay-themed blog, that news item would be the murder of Lawrence King.

Lawrence King, a fifteen-year-old boy in the eighth grade, was shot in the head for being gay. Horrible and sickening as anti-gay bullying in schools is without making the situation more miserable, though, it does get worse. It turns out, as Barbara Coloroso tells us in Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide, that there is a link between bullying and genocide itself.

"Coloroso draws parallels between behaviour exhibited in child bullying [...] and that exhibited in a genocide. She suggests that both share common characteristics: the dehumanization of the victims, an unquestioning obedience to authority, and a routinization of cruelty. “The premise I take on bullying is that it’s not about conflict or anger – it’s about contempt for another human being,” she says."

Terrifying, right? To think that the same kids who are shooting classmates in the head in the middle of English could grow up to be the Hitlers, Envers, and Hutus of tomorrow. When they're not being served charges of attempted murder, anyway.

In a way, I'm almost angry that they've put Lawrence King's killer away in custody pending a trial, and the media has just washed its hands of the matter. While I want to see a murderer punished, anti-gay bullying is not something that's going to go away by putting one fourteen-year-old behind bars. The Oxnard shooting may have been an extreme case, but anti-gay bullying is not an isolated phenomenon, and neither is the murder of gays.

It's not just crazy, misunderstood people who were never hugged as kids who are the problem. The problem runs much deeper, down in the societal attitudes about gays that continue to run rampant through society. Only when people can stop subtly programming their children to believe that gays are abominations before God, only when people like Mike Huckabee can be recognized as the crazed bigots they are when they spout their anti-gay drivel, can we truly see a decline in these kinds of tragedies.

"Our true strength doesn't come from our military or our gross national product, it comes from our families. What's the point of keeping the terrorists at bay in the Middle East if we can't keep decline and decadence at bay here at home?"

Seriously, Mike Huckabee?

I'm not just talking about within the United States, either. I'm talking worldwide.Why isn't more being done yet? Are we really THAT concerned with blowing each other's faces off with nuclear weapons that we can't recognize a global civil rights train wreck and attempt to fix it? Americans especially should be ashamed of ourselves. A first-world nation with a statue dedicated to "huddled masses" that won't even protect those huddled masses it has at home makes me sick.