The Republic of T.

The discussion of the blogroll purge has gone on much longer and spread much further than I expected. (And my original post has been describes on one hand as "dispassionate" and on the other as "whining." I can only hope it falls somewhere in between the two.) As I read through the posts, this one from Creek Running North caught my eye. Partly because it relates to some of my recent thinking about this blog, and party because it linked to a post from Atrios entitled "Why Your Blog Sucks." (The things you miss when you remove the "heavy hitters" from your RSS reader.)

Duncan need not shoot me in my face, because I'm apparently shooting myself in the blog, because of how I blog.

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A little over a week ago, Larry Kramer raised eyebrows and objections when he wrote the following in the Los Angeles Times.

Gays do not realize that the more we become visible, the more we come out of the closet, the more we are hated. Don’t those of you straights who claim not to hate us have a responsibility to denounce the hate? Why is it socially acceptable to joke about “girlie men” or to discriminate against us legally with “constitutional” amendments banning gay marriage? Because we cannot marry, we can pass on only a fraction of our estates, we do not have equal parenting rights and we cannot live with a foreigner we love who does not have government permission to stay in this country. These are the equal protections that the Bill of Rights proclaims for all?

Why do you hate us so much that you will not permit us to legally love? I am almost 72, and I have been hated all my life, and I don’t see much change coming.

I think your hate is evil.

What do we do to you that is so awful? Why do you feel compelled to come after us with such frightful energy? Does this somehow make you feel safer and legitimate? What possible harm comes to you if we marry, or are taxed just like you, or are protected from assault by laws that say it is morally wrong to assault people out of hatred? The reasons always offered are religious ones, but certainly they are not based on the love all religions proclaim.

And even if your objections to gays are religious, why do you have to legislate them so hatefully? Make no mistake: Forbidding gay people to love or marry is based on hate, pure and simple.

I’d go one step further and say that punishing gays & lesbians for loving. Is based on nothing more than hatred. For an example, and a fresh one at that, I don’t have to look much further than Minnesota, where the Minnesota Family Council is opposing hospital visitation rights for gay couples. [Via Box Turtle Bulletin.]

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That’d be me I guess. In the first link I think I’ve ever got from him, Atrios wants to shoot me in the face. Or I make him want to shoot someone else in the face. I’m not sure which.

Things Which Make Me Want To Shoot People In The Face

People who bitch about other peoples’ blogrolls who don’t even have a blogroll on their main page, but just a link to one.

The thing is, I do have a blogroll on my front page. It’s the dropdown list right under the ad-strip, labeled “Blogs Linking Here,” but I’m guessing Duncan didn’t hand around long enough to notice it. It needs to be updated, mind you — some blogs need to be added, and some that no longer exist need to be removed — but it’s there. Always has been. Then again, maybe he did notice it, and I just have the wrong kind of blogroll.

The funny thing is that I put it there as a compromise. Because of an advertising network I’m on, I need to have a front page blogroll of progressive blogs. However, My blogroll (blogrolls, actually, since I broke it out into categories) had gotten so long that readers complained that the blog was taking too long to load, and asked me to move it to a separate page. (Plus my host was recommending I do something about the amount of server requests it was generating.)

So, as a compromise, I moved all but one blogroll, to another page, and put up a reciprocal blogroll, of progressive blogs that link back to this one. That means you won’t find many of the “usual suspects” on it.

Anyway, it’s good for a laugh if nothing else. The worst he can do is send loads of traffic my way for a day or so, and those visitors will probably hang around about as long as he did and never return. Which is fine by me. Really.