worldwide pablo

At last

Here’s something refreshing: a gay/lesbian organization that looks beyond the black-tie fundraising circuit and dares to accomplish something.

[h/t Joe.My.God]

Myth of the day

One of the more aggravating ideas to arise during the debate over same-sex marriage is the canard that religious leaders will be told whom they should be performing marriages for.

It's not so. In Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage has been available for nearly five years, the wall of separation between church and state is still quite intact, thankyouverymuch.

Paging Queen Gertrude

Over the weekend, gay bloggers were quick to blast Amazon for appearing to blacklist gay/lesbian authors by removing the popular (and sales-inducing) ratings for GLBT titles on its site. Turns out the "glitch" was the work of a hacker. Makes all the misplaced and premature gay outrage seem a little silly now, thinks WWP.

Overheard in a gay bar

"I'll have a Sam Adams ... hold the foam."

[Joq's, at 5:30 p.m. today.]

The "fag bomb"

We've all seen it. Somewhere, usually somewhere after the 10th or 20th entry in the comments section of a blog post, comes the point where the discourse turns ugly. And out comes the F word. [No, not that one.] It's the devastating, mind-blowing power of "Your a fag." [Nevermind the bad punctuation.]

It could be worse. There's always this opprobrium.

[Via Andrew Sullivan, via the Advocate.]

Don't let the door hit you on the way out

In the Methodist circles WWP participates in, there's nothing more awkward than acknowledging that the current occupant of the White House shares the same Protestant brand. To be sure, Methodists are an eclectic lot: liberal to conservative, urban to rural, middle class and not, literal to figurative, and, sad to say, mostly older. One of the interesting factoids about the United Methodist Church is that in the United States there are roughly the same number of local congregations as there are post offices -- a parish in every neighborhood! [John Wesley would have liked that.]

What drives many Methodists nuts, however, is the president's politics, more particularly, his disregard for the denomination's essential, longstanding tradition for social justice. Pick a topic -- any topic -- and you'll find that the Great Uniter has pretty much isolated himself within a weirdly un-Wesleyan bubble. [Say what you will about Hillary Clinton, but at least she lives as though she's actually attended a Methodist church, and paid attention.]

So, imagine WWP's surprise yesterday when blog and lunch amigo Cliffdweller sent this along. Says he: "I say, let him go. We don't want him."

To which the people can only say, "Amen."

[Perhaps he'll take this obscenity with him on the way out.]

"When we could, we couldn't..."

So, gay marriage is finally off and running in California, an historic turn of events that combines unequal parts of extraordinary exhilaration, a small degree of melancholy and a dose of "I told you so" smugness. The occasion has WWP amigo Lin Thompson over at Waldo Lydecker's Journal reminiscing about how gay marriage came to pass, and he muses about how he and WWP completely missed the boat:

[In 2004] Mayor Newsom in San Francisco, and a claque of nitwits in Portland, Oregon who'd never read that state's constitution, started issuing marriage licenses. More of my friends got on the road and got hitched. A friend and I joked about how things had changed -- both of us were then single --- he by death, me by email -- but had been happily settled when marriage didn't exist. "When we could, we couldn't; now we can, we can't," we joked.

Read the whole thing here.

When winning isn't

An article in the Los Angeles Times today about gay marriage illustrates a point that WWP has been making for some years now:

"Bad rulings will make it much more difficult for us to win marriage, and will certainly make it take much longer."

That's right. In the interest of civil rights for all, it just might be more prudent to take a few time-outs, to plot the strategy, and to unfurl the necessary lawsuits, initiatives and legislation in a timely way designed for maximum effect so that in the end the desired result will happen faster -- much, much faster.

Who says so? Nine major gay rights groups, that's who.

Although it makes him somewhat of a pariah in the so-called gay community, WWP has long maintained that the "slow as you go" approach to gay marriage will yield results far sooner than the approach favored by the all too ubiquitous in-your-face absolutists who tend to dominate local gay politics. "Appeasement," they decry. "Sellout," they say to WWP. "Civil rights delayed are civil rights denied." Yada, yada.

Well, here's a simple truth: In politics, timing is everything. And it's all about laying the groundwork. Don't be fooled: Those who are so deluded as to believe that civil rights exist in a political and practical vacuum are uselessly lost, probably captives of their own self-imposed victimhood, and almost certainly flunkees of both political science and history. Ignore them.

With any luck, gay marriage might just happen, and soon. And when it does, it will occur despite the best intentions of our erstwhile "allies." Eyes on the prize, friends. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Yes, we can do this.

[On a related topic, Chuck Currie has a radical idea: The central message of the Gospels just might be love.]

My, how the world has changed

They didn't make museums like this when WWP was growing up.

[From Berlin's new monument to gay victims of the Holocaust, which opened this week. An explanation, here.]

Why the word 'tragic' was invented

It seems doubtful that we'll ever be able to watch again "Brokeback Mountain" without crying as much as, if not more than, we did before.

Awful , awful news.