Month: March 2013

I’ll just never stop finding it funny listening to Rush Limbaugh lament the loss of traditional marriage as he sits next to his 4th wife

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 29, 2013

As we mark Good Friday, a meditation on prayer in the depth of pain:

I pray today for my friend, David Kuo, whose long battle against a brain tumor is in its final days. And for all those enduring war or plague or illness or despair. Especially despair. In one Gospel, Jesus himself seems to feel the loneliness of that despair on the cross. He had to go there to show how deeply he is still with us – perhaps especially in the valleys of our life when the sky itself recedes from view.

Jon Hamm is tired of commentary about the size of his dick. Alyssa sympathizes:

The questions that Hamm faces, from whether he should just invest in some Calvins to whether he should be flattered by the attention, are ones actresses have fielded forever. It’s a framing that acts as if the problem were the kind of underwear starlets and their stylists were picking out, rather than the photographers who zoom telephoto lenses in on their crotches. It says that if people get a glimpse of your body once, they’re entitled to speculate it about it forever, and you’re a prude for reminding people that you’re more than the sum of your junk.

What makes Hamm different from, say, Anne Hathaway, who had to weather discussion about the appearance of her nipples in her Academy Awards dress, is that Hamm isn’t used to being objectified. He has outrage left to burn, rather than being exhausted by endless appearance-based prying and insane body standards.

This is surely connected to a shift in the public’s understanding of male sexiness. This began in the 1990s, as Calvin Klein recruited Marky Mark’s abs, as Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber changed the presentation of the male body in photography (influenced by Robert Mapplethorpe), and as women became more empowered and gay men became more public. I wrote a cover-story on this for TNR in, er, 1988. This is male objectification turned back on the male. Alyssa is kind to empathize. But after all that women have had to endure over the centuries, a little payback isn’t so terrible a thing. And Jon Hamm simply cannot look bad. But I miss the beard.

(Photo: Actor Jon Hamm arrives at the Premiere of AMC’s ‘Mad Men’ Season 6 at DGA Theater on March 20, 2013 in Los Angeles, California. By Jason Merritt/Getty Images)

A question has often occurred to me as opponents of marriage equality cite gay people’s biological inability to procreate as a reason to bar us from marriage. What are they implicitly saying about infertile couples who adopt children? Tom Junod takes it personally, as well he should:

I have been married for 28 years. I met my wife in my freshman year of college. We started dating in my second semester, and have been so exclusive that we celebrate the anniversary of our first kiss rather than our wedding day… We have never thought of our marriage as anything but pleasing to anyone who cared to judge it, and have never imagined that the sanctity of our marriage might threaten the sanctity of other marriages, not to mention the institution of marriage itself.

Until now.

What has changed our understanding of the way some people see our marriage is, of course, the general debate unleashed by the last two days of argument before the Supreme Court on the subject of same-sex marriage. No, my wife and I are not of the same sex; I am a man and she is a woman. But we are infertile. We did not procreate. For the past nine years, we have been the adoptive parents of our daughter; we are legally her mother and father, but not biologically, and since Tuesday have been surprised and saddened to be reminded that for a sizable minority of the American public our lack of biological capacity makes all the difference — and dooms our marriage and our family to second-class status.

Read the whole thing, especially the arguments of NOM that uphold biological parenting as the only truly moral option. The logical contortions opponents of marriage equality have gotten themselves into just to justify excluding gays from their own families has led to this. I doubt whether any anti-equality campaigner wants to stigmatize adoption. But their arguments inevitably do – and are becoming a growing liability across American society.

(Photo: Jamie Lieberman (L) of New York City, cries as she holds her adopted son Theo, 2, an orphan originally from Ethiopia, after he received American citizenship November 18, 2010 at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services offices in New York City. Eighteen children, originally from Haiti, Ethiopia, China, and others countries, were sworn in as citizens with their American adopted parents standing by in a ceremony at the New York headquarters from USCIS. By Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

“This issue is lost.  I don’t care what the Supreme Court does, this is now inevitable,” – Rush Limbaugh, yesterday, on marriage equality.