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.

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point: Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo: Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1. Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...

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