MsGuy

Greg, thanks for your answer. I have a better feel for where you're coming from now. If that opinion gets you labeled traitor in Seattle I can see why you want to move to Chicago. You might want to think about what happened in Japan when an outraged public prevented the government from adequately recapitalizing a crippled banking system. 11 years of zero growth followed. Letting our zombie banks rot on their own is not a good option. Doesn't matter who's at fault. Why not consider the Swedish model? In the early 90's all of Sweden's big banks collapsed. The gaovernment stepped in, took over the banks, fired existing management and reconstituted the banks on a sound basis. A couple years later it sold the banks with a minimun of loss both to the taxpayer and to the economy. Frankly, what's happening at a couple of our big banks looks a lot like a slow roll nationalization anyway. Why not just bite the bullet and do what the Swedes did?

If the out gay nominee in question had written judicial opinions that spoke highly of the criminalization of homosexual behavior and denied that the equal protection clause applied to gays, then no I would not support him. See Scalia's dissents in Romer v. Evans & the Texas sodomy case. "Strict construction" is used as a code phrase by the religious right much as "state rights" was used by segragationists. It's an acceptable way of saying something in public that in plain words sounds kind of harsh.

Greg, I have my share of questions about Obama too but it isn't clear to me exactly what about him gets your spittle flying. Usually you don't get so worked up over a politician. Not criticizing, just asking.

Maybe his own trial by fire before the Senate Judiciary Committee has made for a kinder gentler Sessions. And maybe he's been well coached not to start swinging before there's an actual nominee. Let's not forget that this guy's own senator cast the deciding vote to deny him a seat on the Federal bench.

Someone (Huffington Post?) did some digging and discovered that Obama's proposed budget for the Pentagon made no provision for funds to implement a repeal of NANT. On the other hand the funding for expelling gays is still there. I expect that tells us all we need to know, at least for this fiscal year.

By the time a pol reaches the U.S. Senate, he or she will have developed a remarkable tolerance for disgusting behavior by constituents. Like Spector, Snowe and Collins will bail only if they foresee the Republican label preventing their re-election and not before.

Totally cool.

A really bloody minded thing to do with Mrs. Shepard in the gallery listening. She later issued a PR statement (claiming her "facts" came from a TV documentary on Mathew Shepard) that amounted to a claim her remarks had been unfairly distorted. Apparently the public's reaction in her district was not quite what she had anticipated.

She sounds like a Mom who hasn't really thought through all those confusing abstract issues but knows that sure as Hell she is going to stand up for her daughter. And what else do we really need from our parents?

I can't name a single openly gay appeals judge, period. I was wondering if Clinton had nominated one that I had forgotten. As a FYI to all the laymen here, the Circuit Courts of Appeals are the heavy lifters of the Federal judiciary. They function as deputy Supreme Courts for their respective regions of the country. SCOTUS allows most serious questions of Federal judicial policy to be thrashed out for years in the Circuits before SCOTUS takes them up. The conservatives caught on to this years ago and made a concerted effort to pack the Courts of Appeals during the Bush II administration. It was right wing nominations to these courts, not SCOTUS, that occasioned the cat fight in the Senate a few years back. There are over 170 slots authorized for these courts. Every year numerous vacancies come up for appointment. Obama may not be willing to commit political capital to a gay nominee to SCOTUS, but Appeals Court nominees tend to fly under the public's radar. IMO gay organizations should cash in some markers and secure a few appointments to this critically important bench.

My invite must have been lost in the mail. Is there a chance in hell that a gay/lez candidate will be be considered for SCOTUS? Are there any out sitting judges on the Federal appellate bench? We are talking of scores of slots on the Courts of Appeals; did Clinton appoint someone I have forgotten? Even one?

My friend doesn't know MedVillage but says the neighborhood runs O.K. to good. He also says that tweekers and the mentally unstable are not exactly scarce anywhere in WeHo.

TownsendPLocke: Whatever it took to survive SF in the 80's, I'm glad you made it. I lived about as far from ground zero as you could get and still found it difficult handle emotionally. Lucky: The best fuck buddy I ever had was 55 when I met him nine years ago. X-mas before last I drove all the way to Wisconsin just to spend a week with him. Still... "To be young is all there is in the world. [We extoll the delights of maturity but] Old people are such frauds."

How mean! The whole complicate damned thing isn't online. Now I have a choice between excluding this thing from my mind and trudging my wheezing old self down to the local Carnegie. If I hadn't read that he named university poets "kept men" I might not bother.

A friend of mind who lived in Hollywood off & on for 15 years thinks he may know the place, but needs the blvd. and cross street to bring it clearly to mind.

Should I take all this to mean that plain vanilla aint ever gonna be the new black?

It's more a shift in the cultural mindset of younger evangelicals than a case of specific new worries pushing gay marriage down in their priorities. Older evangelicals were conditioned to react to homosexuality as a particularly depraved bit of nastiness. Their energetic opposition to gay marriage is an expression of their fear of homosexuality generally. Younger evangelicals are often more relaxed around gays, so gay marriage drops down in their list of concerns. These guys are no less believers than their parents and they don't support gay marriage. It's just that they tend to lack the underlying emotional driver that gets the old folks all worked up.

LOL! Now are we talking Bill or AdamSmith here? He might be clutching more than his Blackberry.

Or maybe a go slow faction within the administration was testing the waters. Good posts on a important matter.

When the Pentagon started prohibiting the discharge of even an openly gay soldier if his unit was due for a tour in Iraq, it pretty much made our case for us. It's still mandatory to drum the same guy out after the unit returns from combat. Only in America.

Fear of the virus put me permanently off anal sex, which probably saved my life. For a while it seemed like every gay man I knew was dead or dying or waiting to get sick. Bad memories. For some reason I wasn't afraid of guys with AIDS. The virus itself scared the hell out of me, but not the guys who were sick. As you say, everyone's different.

While I was trying (and failing) to use the edit button to put a 'my bad' p.s. to Lucky on my first post, the next 4 posts magically appeared. Oz, since you're already in revision mode, please do something about "...it's not good to look pozitive." It's just a little too flippant. Lucky: My bad. I should have treated your post as an alert that I had missed something. Oz: Seeing that I promised Lucky I would do it, please consider yourself blasted.

One factor Oz didn't discuss is the of viral load problem. Healthy looking guys don't necessarily have a low viral count (viral count rises before symptoms appear) but 'sick' looking men almost always have a heavy viral load. Current medical research (and common sense) indicates that a high viral load correlates with high infectivity. In plain English, a broken condom or minor cut puts you in a much more problematic situtation if your partner looks sick. And anyone who lived through the 80's knows exactly what we gays mean when we say someone looks 'sick.' Lucky, before you go and fire off the big cannons, be advised that, like Oz, I have acted as a caregiver. I have had sex with guys I knew to be positive. For the past five years I've acted as a one man support group for a bi-polar friend who periodically gets depressed and goes off his meds. Oz didn't advocate abandoning POZ friends. He recommended politely bowing out of an especially high risk business transaction. For younger guys, he gave some tips on how to recognise a person who might be sick. Just common sense advice. I didn't see anything in his post that was callous or disrespectful toward PLWAs. If I had I would already be blasting him myself.

You might want to hold off a few months on Mexico.

That certainly works better as a cheery board-appropriate tag line, but I confess that 'fiery boys' would never have fired me up to google up Steven's poem, nor gotten me past that cutesy French title. 'Striped warty gourds' got me to actually read the thing, so I gotta concede your first choice of excerpt was best.