The Dish

Tart, generous, yet still hostile. Worth a read as Wolcott often is, when his dyspepsia doesn’t make him sound like an even grumpier version of Mickey:

Carrying his clipboard like a discus, Buckley slouched into the studio glare of the Jack Paar show or reposed on the set of David Susskind and uncoiled his cobra act, mesmerizing the audience and his antagonists with a battery of mannerisms, his eyes widening with a gleaming twinkle just before he went for the kill.

This was funny. Does anyone in his magazine reflect his sensibility any more? None that I can think of.

A reader writes:

It surprises me that some commentators see messianism in a phrase that strikes me as deeply anti-messianic.  The line is akin to "there’s no Justice, there’s just us" in that it calls on us to give up our fantasies of some deus ex machina descending to make everything right and just, and urges us to roll up our sleeves and get involved.

In a slightly different context, Reagan could have said it. As someone involved in the gay rights world for a while, it strikes me that this is also a core message we need to convey. The Clinton model – exemplified by the Human Rights Campaign – is: give us some big donor checks, we’ll hire a lobbyist (if you’re lucky), and we’ll work the Democratic party establishment to give you your equality (which somehow never happens). Meanwhile: keep whining (and sending the checks). The Obama model is: you will only get your equality if you stand up for it, risk your job, status, even life for the sake of your own integrity. Stop whining and start explaining and persuading and acting.

So many gay people over the years have asked me where our "leader" is. It’s the wrong question. We are the ones we have been waiting for. Be the change you want to see in the world. And the world changes. In exact proportion to the number of gay people who have abandoned their fear and self-hatred, it already has. No excuses, guys. And no need to wait.

Bainbridge pounces.

Tony Blankley tells the GOP not to under-estimate Obama or believe the politics of Rove can beat him. Maybe the campaign against Clinton is a harbinger: could Obama actually kill off the kind of politics we have had to endure for the past two decades? All by himself? The public is hungry for it. We just haven’t found a politician able to do it.

Yet.

For the more squeamish gay husbands.

Be afraid. But we were warned.

A recent classic. What a giant.

Diebold accidentally releases the result of the 2008 election early.

A reader writes:

I am an American expat in Italy, and I share the perspective of your other reader.  There is a widespread assumption among people in America, and in Italy, that gay couples actually have most legal rights.  My expat situation, thank goodness, has been facilitated by a huge multinational company, so my employer has been very supportive of doing everything possible to keep me and my partner together.

The surprise?  The HR people that have been handling this all assumed that the US Government and the Italian Government would treat us as a couple!  Here you have human resources PROFESSIONALS, on two sides of the Atlantic, who didn’t realize that the laws of two major Western democracies abandon some families to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

In the end, the hard work of my heroic colleagues in HR have given us a modicum of household security.  But they should have known that a bit of heroism would be necessary.

These readers are onto something. Most heterosexuals do not understand that it’s illegal to get married in 49 states in the US for gay couples; they don’t understand that even if you have a legal contract with your spouse, your legal next of kin can and will challenge it, if you die or get sick; most heterosexuals have no idea that America bars gay spouses from immigration, and bars all HIV-positive non-Americans from even entering the country (a policy that the Bush administration, for all its action on AIDS abroad, has not changed in eight long years).

The main reason for this, I think, is not so much homophobia, as the fact that most heterosexuals simply cannot imagine falling in love with someone, and being told by their own government that they cannot marry him or her. The experience of gay couples is simply beyond most straight people’s experience. If it happened to any of them, there would be outrage. Splitting husbands from wives, tearing children apart from their parents, using government to  attack and punish and stigmatize family life: it’s unimaginable. And yet, with gay couples, it’s the law. And it’s government policy. And one political party routinely celebrates attacking and demonizing gay couples and using every legal tool to undermine our families and relationships.

Which means we have much, much more work to do. And only gay people can do it.