I (heart) Lesbians, and other thoughts in the K-Mart parking lot ...

... while completing a "honey-do" shopping trip for laundry detergent yesterday.

I pulled our battered mini-van into the space beside a slightly battered Mitsubishi Eclipse (red; two doors; if such demographics matter to you), and notice something hanging from the mirror as I got out.

Usually, other people's fuzzy dice don't attract my attention.

But this time I happened to catch the angle just right to read (in red letters on a rectangular blue card):

I (heart) Lesbians

Which caused a variety of seemingly disconnected thoughts to go prancing through my mind....

The first one (got to admit it for truth in advertising sake) resulted from my upbringing in rural Virginia where every fourteen year-old Good Ole Boy in training has a copy of Penthouse stashed under his bed was: Me, too!

Then, remembered adolescent hormonal rush out of the way, I became more contemplative.

The only additional glance I allowed myself showed that the car had Delaware plates. Making the (perhaps unwarranted) assumption that the driver would be a woman, I wondered about the nature of the public claim she is making.

I'm a lesbian and proud of it!

One of my best friends or relatives is a lesbian and I'm proud of them!

In your face, white trash homophobes!

Wow, whoever thought they had such neat danglies at the discount store!"

We live in a world of branding and slogans writ large across our chests, our butts, our bumpers, and in some cases tattooed right above our ass cheeks. My youngest daughter is twelve and just beginning to have an inkling (hormones, again) about here sexuality; call me a neanderthal, but we don't let her wear Abercrombie & Fitch slogans across her butt. (It would just increase the number of boys I had to threaten, anyway.)

Maybe the driver of the car is trying to make a statement about the kind of society that she wants to live in, as opposed to the one she actually inhabits--a society wherein its pretty much OK to be yourself.

It ain't necessarily so in this one. I teach Gay & Lesbian history, and I post here pretty often and pretty aggressively for civil rights for Americans of all sexual orientations. I got over having to say, "I'm not gay, but...." a long time ago. Still, you'd never believe how many people contact me to tell me that they're glad I'm posting, and someday maybe they will be able to come out of the closet. They see the progress we've made in society over the past two decades as only baby steps, and they're pretty damn sure that they will become instant targets the moment they reveal themselves.

They're right, of course.

In my last seminar on Gay & Lesbian history I had students keep a journal of their reactions. In the last week they were supposed to sum up what they'd learned. One young man wrote, "Before I took this course I had no ideas how many faggots there were all around me, despite the fact that there are so many fine women out there."

Yeah, we're in the Aquarian age of peace, love, and tolerance, OK.

Maybe I (heart) Lesbians means that she's gotten so tired of having to explain herself that she's just hung the card to avoid dealing with unwelcome questions.

I thought that this is somebody I'd really like to meet and ask, "Just what's the message here?" It would be an interesting conversation.

But then I thought about it from her perspective: middle-aged unshaven white guy in a ratty T-shirt that says (I swear) "Just Do It" approaches a woman in the parking lot of K-Mart and strikes up a conversation: "Hey darlin', just noticed you like poon-tang, too." At least that's what part of me thinks she'd hear as she fished into her purse for the pepper spray or the snub-nose .38.

So I sighed, went into K-Mart and bought four bottles of laundry detergent, surreptitiously trying to figure out whose car it was. (Don't kid me, you'd all be doing that whether you admitted it or not.)

By the time I finished buying Purex and got back to my van, the car was gone, and any chance for me even to express wonder and admiration to another human being had vanished with it. Such is the world in which we live today. Even our stated identity signs interfere with communication rather than facilitating it.

And I had this final thought: maybe she borrowed the car.

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?

New Warfare: I started my posts with a discussion.....

.....on Unrestricted warfare . The US Air force Institute for National Security Studies have developed a reasonable systems approach to deter non-state violent actors who they label as NSVA's. It is an exceptionally important report if we want to deter violent extremism and other potential violent actors that could threaten this nation and its security. It is THE report our political officials should be listening to to shape policy so that we do not become excessive in using force against those who do not agree with policy and dispute it with reason and normal non-violent civil disobedience. This report, should be carefully read by everyone really concerned with protecting civil liberties while deterring violent terrorism and I recommend if you are a professional you send your recommendations via e-mail at the link above so that either 1.) additional safeguards to civil liberties are included, or 2.) additional viable strategies can be used. Finally, one can only hope that politici

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