Skip to main content

Storms are Gathering

After the disappointment that was the voting of Proposition 8 last November in California, gay marriage has made important progress in the last week. Vermont and Iowa now both allow gay marriage despite legal opposition from religious haters. And Washington DC will recognise the marriages that have taken place in other states.

People who claim to be opposed to gay marriage for religious reasons are getting fearful that they are loosing battle after battle and are more and more looking like they are going to lose the war. On 9 April, the "National Organization for Marriage" (NOM; NOM!?) launched a $1.5m (yes, $1.5m!) campaign with a 60 sec video featuring actors (the audition rushes were shortly made available on Youtube but have now been deleted) making unsubstantiated and irrelevant assertions about what gay people want to do to their lives and liberty by fighting for their own (the clip can be viewed on Youtube here).

Two interesting point about the rhetoric they use in the spot is the reference to a Rainbow Coalition (isn't that our lot, normally?) and the title of the spot, “A Gathering Storm”, which very close to the title of the first volume of Winston Churchill’s chronicle of World War II, thus (more or less sublety) likening gay people to Nazis. Nice.

Already reactions have been strong (including through parodies on YouTube) and the Human Rights Campaign has launched the End the Lies website. Below is one of such responses that debunks the NOM advert thoroughly:



updated on 15 April

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Short History of the Elephant and Castle and Its Name

Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at...

Welcome to Towleroad Readers

On Wednesday, Towleroad , the top gay blog, who win all the awards, were kind enough to link to and quote from my post on Football and Homophobia . This has generated quite a bit a traffic in this otherwise desolate region of the blogosphere. So much so that Wednesday was my highest day ever with 132 hits (previous one was 97), this week is already my highest ever with 317 hits so far (previous one was 287) and this month is the highest month ever with already 865 hits (previous one, last month, was 739, thanks to the posts on the Danish cartoons). So thank you again to Towleroad and welcome to their readers. I hope they like what they see and will be back from time to time.

For the Living Left Behind - Frieda Hughes

No one dead who loved you  Would wish your future years dismembered  Against the rocks of their departure.  They would not sentence you to the guilt of betrayal  For any moment they weren’t uppermost in your mind  Nor would they wish you whittled down like a stick  To pick the stony teeth in the open mouth of abject misery,  Daily, until you are nothing left.  No one dead who loved you  Would want your still-breathing carcass  To be lost in the wilderness  That spans the two worlds of the living and the dead,  Where you are neither dead nor living.  They would not applaud your misery,  But would weep to watch their loss  Made pointless by the waste of you.  The dead become a part of us; our skin, our bones, our thinking;  Their existence is continuous in us  And the best we do in everything  As we move on from the moment of their passing.  Step back from the graveside where nothing flower...