The Republic of T.

I don’t remember where I heard it, but it’s something a core belief of mine: Freedom and liberty are meaningless concepts without two things—knowledge of them and the ability to act on them. To my mind, the former is basically education, and the latter means health care. I’ve come to believe that a country that can’t provide those two basic things to its citizens can’t have more than a tenuous grasp on the two concepts above.

I’ve wanted to write about health care for some time, but until recently hadn’t taken the opportunity. I ventured down that road with an earlier post. Now I have a post up on the blog at the day-job, about a health care plan the organization is promoting, that would—if everything adds up as it’s supposed to—guarantee coverage to almost every American.

Given what I said about that core belief of mine, the idea of universal or near-universal health care is something I’m passionate about for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that believe it’s criminal that—in a country as wealthy as ours—there are millions of children without health insurance. But lately I’ve become passionate about for another reason, and one raises a question for me.

Is health care a gay issue? I don’t know that it’s a priority for any of our political organizations, but I’m starting to believe that it should be.

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I like to think of myself as a nice guy. I hold doors open for people, even for other guys. I actually feel bad if I forget or accidentally let go of a door and it closes on somebody. If someone opens a door for me on my way into the office or somewhere else, I usually hold the next door open for them. It’s what I do.

I agonize about whether to give up my seat on the bus or the train. If the person standing is elderly, handicapped, infirm, carrying packages, traveling with a small child, or with child, I stand up and offer my seat. (Note: I finally decided not to make that decision based on gender but on factors, with the exception of pregnancy, that can apply to men and women.)

Sometimes they happy accept the offer and take the seat. Sometimes they decline, saying they are getting off after one or two stops. Then I usually ask one more time (“Are you sure?”), and if they decline again then I go back to whatever I was reading, satisfied that I at least made the offer.

Now, apparently, I need to memorize Ken Hutcherson’s face, because Ken Hutcherson will kill me if I open a door for him. (more…)

First of all, this post is not what you think it’s about. (Though I could write style-crampin’ aspects of having an infant who doesn’t sleep through the night yet. Suffice it to say that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.) No, it’s about the French.

Or rather, it’s about what they French have done now. It’s something that would never be done here. At least not without a whole lot of whooping and hollering. Forget Maplethorpe for a minute. Can you imagine the public reaction if an American museum featured a new exhibit that’s basically a children’s guide to sex?
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Let’s return to our metaphorical street corner from the previous post, because to understand the current economic crisis it might help to consider how many have been run down at that economic intersection, as conservatism stands by and watches. There’s another lending crisis that’s gone on for a while now, making far fewer headlines than the subprime crisis, the credit crunch, or the housing slump—because of the people it affected. But as those crises intensify and affect more and more people, this one may become even bigger news than it has been so far.

Back in December 2006, when the subprime crisis was just getting started, The New York Times ran a story about short-term “payday” loans and their devastating impact on the poor, who get caught in a never ending cycle of debt.

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Unfortunately, PZ, this kind of thing—from this administration—is all to believable.

Every year, overdoses of heroin and opiates, such as Oxycontin, kill more drug users than AIDS, hepatitis or homicide.

And the number of overdoses has gone up dramatically over the past decade.

But now, public health workers from New York to Los Angeles, North Carolina to New Mexico, are preventing thousands of deaths by giving $9.50 rescue kits to drug users. The kits turn drug users into first responders by giving them the tools to save a life.

Sounds good so far, right? After all, before you can get someone into recovery or treatment, you’ve got to keep them alive. I’ve never yet heard of a dead junkie graduating from rehab. So fewer overdoses is a good thing, even if it’s only the first step towards maybe getting some people the help they need.

You’d think so. Right? Well, if you do, you’re likely not a part of the Bush administration. Keep reading.
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Consider this scenario. You’re standing at a busy street corner when you see someone about to step off the curb right into the path of an oncoming bus. You have just enough time and you’re close enough to reach out and stop them before it’s too late. Do you? Conservatism says, no.

Now consider this scenario. You’re standing at a busy street corner when you see someone about to step in front of a speeding bus. Someone else beside you is about to reach out and stop the other person from becoming roadkill. Even if you don’t attempt to stop the person from stepping in front of the bus, would you actually stop the would-be rescuer from stopping them? Even if the driver was deliberately aiming for the would-be victim? Conservatism says, yes.

Conservatism apparently holds that some people should end up under the bus, or at the very least no one should try to keep them from ending up there.

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Does anyone else grind their teeth at night? How about during the day?

It started sometime last year, around the end of the summer, but I didn’t notice it until September. I’d started waking up with inexplicable headaches that didn’t dissipate during the day. I’d take pain medications, sinus medications, thinking one or the other would fix it.

Then I realized that not only did I have a headache, but my face hurt too, especially my cheeks and my jaw muscles. I realized I was probably clenching or grinding my teeth at night, something called bruxism.

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I can count on one hand the times that an Oscar win caused me to jump up and down in the middle of my living room, out of excitement. And there are even fewer that have brought a tear to my eye. Tonight was one of them, when Freeheld won for Best Documentary Short Subject. (I only hope the reason the server was down when I wrote this is because so many people were visiting it as a result of the Oscar win.

When I first read the story of Laurel Hester, and her dual battles against cancer and discrimination, I blogged it, and blogged it, and blogged it, because I wanted to do whatever I could to make sure her story was told. So did so many others. I only hope this win will mean that more people will hear this story, and more people will ask themselves whether stories like this one ought to happen. And if the answer is no, I hope they ask themselves what they’re going to do about it.

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It’s almost Oscar time again. I have to admit, when Oscar night rolls around again, it makes me nostalgic for some aspects of my pre-parenting life. (Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t take anything in the world for stuff like Parker handing me a birthday card me made himself yesterday, or playing on the floor with Dylan and hearing him laugh.) Time was, by the time the awards rolled around, I would usually have seem most or all of the nominated performances and films. If I went to an Oscar party and joined the Oscar pool, I’d make a decent score and even win on occasion.

Now, if I’ve seen one or two nominated films or performances, I count myself lucky. That’s because getting to a movie nowadays requires slightly less planning than the Normandy invasion. Maybe more. If it isn’t available on Netflix, chances are I won’t see it.

But I have seen lots of movies over the years. And after seeing this list of the 10 best Oscar Best Pictures of all time, I thought it might be fun to compile a list of my own.
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That I turned 19. I’m celebrating the anniversary of that birthday. Do the math and you’ll figure out that today I inch ever closer to aging out of yet another demographic. No special plans today, other than doing some writing, treating myself to lunch, and maybe getting to bed early and squeezing in a little extra sleep.

I did fire up the iPod on the way to work today and try to find something that spoke to where I find myself on this, my thirty-ninth, birthday.

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I’m sometimes amazed at the search queries that lead people to this blog. I don’t know that this will do anything for my Google ranking, but apparently this blog is among the top results if you Google “gay vegetarian mac user.”

Hey, I’ll take what I can get.

I didn’t mean to go off, really. But I had just had enough. It was one of those moments when you mutter to yourself, “That’s all I can stand. I can’t stand no more.”

We were out grocery shopping yesterday. It’s not unusual for one group or another to have a table set up outside the grocery store. Sometimes it’s the Girl Scouts, selling cookies. Sometimes it’s people raising money for charity. Sometimes It’s people protesting property taxes in Montgomery County (Usually people who don’t have children in public schools, because they’re retired or just don’t have kids. So it doesn’t matter to them that we have some of the best schools in the area, and even in the country.)

Someone was setting up a table when we went in, but I didn’t look to see what it was. We were too busy getting the kids situated and getting into the store. But on the way out I saw this guy sitting at the table, with a sign asking for signatures to repeal a law that would “allow men in women’s restrooms.”

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Dwight asked a question on a post two weeks ago, that I’m only just now getting around to answering.

I never really thought of ADD being something that lasted over a life, beyond childhood and yet I’ve had the experience of lacking direction, getting burried in life. Some of this time was marked by depression (I imagine poverty, not moving ahead, etc.) added to this

But I never thought of ADD as being very relevant until your posts. And as someone who spent many years in the foster care system, I admit I get almost Tom Cruise -ish when I think of things like medication, being part of the mental health system.

So my question was..how does ADD plug into your experience and what sort of actions did you take to change direction?

How does ADD plug into my experience? I think it’s colored my experience from day one, long before I knew anything about it.

How does it does it plug into my experience? Well, let me put it this way. For more than a week now, I’ve had four pieces of writing I wanted to do, including this one. So far, I’ve had time to write exactly none of them. That is, except for this one. And this one may yet take me more than a day or two before I’m done writing it.

Writing is an activity that I find immensely rewarding and enjoyable, but it isn’t my job and it doesn’t have to do with taking care of my family, so there is always something else that takes priority. That includes sleep, since I often find myself nodding off at the computer at night, when I finally do have the opportunity to write something

That’s partly because of ADD-related problems with time management, but it’s also partly because I’ve arrived at two entirely different places in my life all at once, and at a time in my life when there doesn’t seem to be room for both.

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It’s been a while since I’ve joined in on a book meme, or even blogged about what I’m reading. (Not that I haven’t been reading. I still have my commute to and from work to get in a bit of reading, and I manage to get in a few pages before passing out at night.) So, now that Philip Barron of Waveflux has tagged me with a familiar-sounding book meme, I guess this as good a time as any to hit the books again.

It goes a little something like this.

Instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.

So, here goes.

Would you believe right now I’m reading Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynast? I have to confess a kind of morbid fascination at just what kind of family spawned Dubya. (Basically, I’ve been reduced to asking over and over again “How does someone get that way?”) After Bush on the Couch, I decided I wanted to know more, so I picked up the Kelley book and David Corn’s The Lies of George W. Bush via Bookmooch.

I just picked up The Family yesterday.  On page 123, the next three sentences after the 5th sentence are:

Dotty spoke up from the front seat: “You’re in a jam with Abraham.” Ryan laughed, and the next day Prescott used the phrase, “Don’t believe that sign that says you’re better off with Ribicoff,” he said in a speech. “The fact is, you’ll be in a jam with Abraham.”

Not terribly juicy, I’m afraid.

Now I have to tag people. So, here goes: Katharine, Kip, JW,  Chris, and Rachel.

Let’s leave politics aside for the moment. It’s been a long time since I’ve written about things that really matter, and asked really important questions like “When did you know you were heterosexual?”, “What made you fall in love?”, and “What turns you on?” Too long, in fact.

So, allow me to make up for it now with an equally important question. Do you like to kiss? Before you answer, though, you might want to take a look at the latest research on kissing, and see if it matches your experience.

Here’s a hint, apparently as with the questions above, men and women tend to give different answers. And after reading the Washington Post article I find myself once again having to read between the lines when science doesn’t include or acknowledge another experience. Which is a shame. Because gay people kiss, and gay people have brainsÑwhich is apparently where the real action takes place anyway.

Fisher believes kissing is all about choosing the right mate.

“There’s so much information exchanged when you kiss someone that I just thought it must play a vital role in mate choice, and this paper is elegantly showing that,” Fisher said.

A disproportionate amount of the brain, she noted, is geared toward interpreting signals from the mouth.

“When you look at the brain regions associated with picking up data from the body, a huge amount of the brain is devoted to picking up information from the lips and tongue,” she said. “Very little of the brain is built to pick up what happens to, say, your back. There have been case reports of people being stabbed in the back without even knowing it. But even the lightest brush of a feather on your lips and you feel it intensely.”

This isn’t exactly breaking news. According to a press release, the research was done and the report published last year. I haven’t read the full report (available in PDF format) yet, but what’s in the WaPo article holds true for me, at least for the most part.

For example, I can relate to the three hypotheses that were pretty much confirmed by the research: that kissing is a way to assess a potential mate, promote bonding, and a way of inducing sexual arousal. Those all make sense to me, but at some points in the article it felt like I was looking at the world from the other side of a looking glass. If men and women kiss differently, and for different reasons, then I have to admit: I kiss like a girl.

Sort of.

But let me back up and answer the initial question: Do you like to kiss?

Oh. My. Good. Good-ness. If by “like” you mean that I can be perfectly happy doing that and nothing but that for hours at a time, with the right person, then my answer is yes.

It wasn’t always that way, though. See, I’ve kissed girls before. Yes, it’s true. It was just a few times when I was fooling around, just before I came out around the age of 12 or 13. I tried it, for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what the big hairy deal was that made it such a popular pass time with so many people.

Then I went off to college and kissed a guy for the first time. Not to put too fine a point on it, but all of a sudden, there it was. Big. Hairy. Deal. My brain exploded, something that never happened the times I kissed girls (during which I was thinking I must not be doing something right). In fact, an awful lot of time passed before I even thought about the fact that there was even more stuff we could do.

And I think part of what turned me on about that kiss is part of what seems to turn heterosexual women on; something I’ve written about before.

I have a confession to make. I love how men, some of them anyway, smell. Not a big surprise, I guess. After all, IÕm gay. ItÕs not unusual for me to take a deep breath, when a good looking guy happens to pass by me, stand in my general vicinity, or sit next to me on the train. In fact, itÕs almost instinctive, and Ñ depending on the guy Ñ could make me a little lightheaded and more than a little interested. The last time it happened on the train, an attractive young (20-something) got on the train Ñ hot and sweaty, fresh from an evening jog Ñ and ended up standing right next to me. If it hadnÕt been for the pole I was holding on to, I would have swooned. When I hold my husband, I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

ItÕs something that goes back at least as far as middle school, around the time puberty hit. (Which, incidentally, was around the time I came out.) It was also around the my male classmates got an extra ingredient added to their sweat. Something that drove the girls wild. And me too, of course, though I had to be a quieter about it then.

It’s similar to the way heterosexual women respond to male pheromones, and more than a little related to their motivation for kissing, too.

Women place more emphasis on the taste and smell of the person they kiss than men do, the researchers found.

“That clues us in that females may be using it more to make mate assessments than men,” she said.

Women were also more likely to refuse to have sex with a partner unless they kissed first. More than half of the men said they would have sex without kissing first, but fewer than 15 percent of the women said the same.

That’s also where I dismissed any doubts that the study was limited to heterosexuals.

As a single gay man, kissing was a part of sex for me, in part because it gave me some important information. There’s a whole category of men who have sex with men but identify as heterosexual, and kissing is one thing they don’t do in situations with other men. (Actually, there’s a whole list of things they don’t do, in order to protect their apparently precarious position as “straight” men.)

So, a guy who said “I don’t do kissing,” was likely to get “Then I don’t do you,” as a response. That’s partly because some of those guys have a nasty habit of panicking after having sex with another man who does identify as gay, and the gay guys end up dead. (See the “panic room” posts from the LGBT Hate Crimes Project here, here, and here for more.) And it’s partly because half the time those guys have girlfriends, wives, and even children—none of whom know what they’re up to. That’s something I just wouldn’t do.

But my real question is this. Why does research into why human beings kiss seem to miss entirely the reality that some human beings are same-sex oriented and kiss members of their own gender for a lot of the same reasons? I don’t know, but I’m willing to give the researchers the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t actively seek to exclude same-sex couples. Maybe they just couldn’t find any who were willing to participate. (Though I doubt that, because in most  college towns you’ll find at least a small gay community.)

But I do which researchers would think about this and take some actions to include gays & lesbians in this kind of research. Maybe they can’t go out and recruit gays specifically, because it would undermine the credibility of the research because the sample wasn’t entirely random. Still, something important is being missed when this aspect of human experience is left out.

There have been scientific studies suggesting that gay men respond similarly to heterosexual women and lesbians respond similarly to heterosexual men where pheromones are concerned. What would have been discovered if same-sex couples had been included in this research? What might have been discovered about why lesbians kiss? What might have been discovered about why gay men kiss (or why heterosexual men who have sex with men don’t kiss men)?

Nothing in the article suggests that such inclusion was the case, and that’s a damn shame, because we might have learned a lot more; like a kiss ain’t just a kiss most of the time, no matter who’s locking lips.

So, per yesterday’s post and despite what I said earlier, I did vote in the Maryland primary this morning. It turns out Kucinich was still on the ballot, so I voted for him on the presidential slate. When it came time to vote for delegates, I voted for the “uncommitted” ones rather than the ones who were already committed to one candidate or the other. (I threw in a couple of Edward’s delegates too.)

But one big reason I went to the polls this morning was Montgomery County’s school board election. You can get the whole story at Vigilance, the blog Teach the Facts. Basically it came down to whether I want the fundamentalist theocrats at the Thomas Moore Law Center dictating the curriculum in my kids’ school district. You can guess my answer.

It started back when Montgomery county launched a gay-friendly sex-ed curriculum for 8th and 10th graders. PFOX got involved, and somehow managed to slip flyers into student’s backpacks in 2006, and later a local group of fundies funded by the Thomas Moore Law Center threatened to sue the county into oblivion because everyone knows that hearing anything about gay people—let alone the notion that maybe LGBT kids shouldn’t be picked on an harassed, but treated with the same respect as anyone else—will turn kids gay. (Because everyone knows that you’re heterosexual from birth, but gay people are apparently asexual until adolesence, and then only if someone gives them the idea.

Well, only four percent of students opted out of the sex-ed pilot. (Shows you how many parents in Montgomery County objected to it in the first place.) Nonetheless, the Moore-funded fundies took the school district to court, and ultimately lost.

But they don’t give up easily. I have to give them that. They’ve vowed to sue again, and the candidate they supported for the school board last year ran again this year.

I don’t want anyone backed by these folks (the same ones who defeated in Dover, PA) making any decisions concerning my kids’ education. Period.

So, to the polls I went.

Technorati Tags: maryland, montgomery county, sex education, sex ed, thomas moore law center

When George W. Bush first spoke of “the ownership society,” he led most Americans to believe, and many did believe, that he was talking about them. Now, four years later, it’s easy to conclude that the president, his party and conservatism itself has failed to deliver the ownership society.

But the very crises now described and decried in both the new media and the old can actually be taken as signs of conservatism’s success, depending on one thing: identifying who really belongs to the ownership society. Conservatism, depending on how you look at it, has successfully built the ownership society — a very small, narrowly defined one — and strengthened it by building or expanding its essential support: the society of the owned.

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It was one of those moments any new parent treasures. The baby has finished a bottle, burped, and finally drifted off into what would be a couple hours worth of naptime. You’re not sure what do with that time—do you finally load the dishwasher or take that nap that you’ve been dreaming of since dawn?—but that moment is probably more peaceful than any you’ve had all day.

And it was for me. The hubby had just taken Parker off to his swimming lesson. I’d finished feeding Dylan, burped him, he’d just drifted off to sleep on my shoulder. I was thinking about going to sleep myself, and then the doorbell rang.

It was someone from the Obama campaign, out canvassing with his kids. He saw me with a sleeping baby and didn’t keep me long, just long enough to make sure I was voting in the Maryland primary, and whether I was voting for Obama. I assured him that I would vote in the primary. But I demurred when it came to who I’m voting for.

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Ed Note: This was so much fun, I decided to update the post with a few more casting choices and bump it back up to the top of the blog.

I admit it. I’m one of those people who reads the tabloids while I’m standing in line at the grocery store. (I figure I still have some time before Parker figures out what I’m reading.) I already knew that Oliver Stone is planning a Bush biopic. What I didn’t know was that Josh Brolin will portray Dubya. At least not until I noticed a tabloid headline blaring that Brolin’s stepmom, La Streisand, is furious that he’s doing the part, (and Brolin is allegedly furious that she’s furious) because she’s worried that Dubya might get a sympathetic portrayal. (Meanwhile the folks at Fox & Friends are worried that Streisand’s stepson in the lead role means it’ll be a “hit piece.”)

The tabloid piece got me thinking: who else would I cast in the picture? Brolin is the only cast member listed right now, so the rest of the cast is anybody’s guess. The folks at Radar have already taken a stab at guessing. And while they’ve made some interesting choices, including a few I would have also made, I think there’s still room to make some suggestions of my own. (And, Oliver, if you’re reading this, all I ask is a brief walk-on and/or casting credits.)

So, here goes.

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There are natural disasters and man-made disasters. There are those who look upon the aftermath of disaster and see things as they should be. We call them conservatives.

As I write this, the seeds of disaster and an aftermath of Katrina-like proportions have been and are being sown in the shadow of the nation’s capitol, by a conservative philosophy that—as a matter of principle and policy—neither prepares for or prevents disaster, nor provides relief in its aftermath And when disaster befalls those most vulnerable to its ravages, conservative philosophy declares disaster the fault of and its consequences deserved by those least able to defend themselves against either.

When disaster strikes Washington, D.C.—whether in the form of a disease outbreak, a dirty bomb, or another terrorist attack—it will be the fault of those who cannot get themselves out of harm’s way, and not the fault of conservative philosophy that makes disaster all but inevitable. (more…)