Category Archives: Relationships

Fare thee well, Atlantis

By a stroke of luck this morning, I got to watch the launch of the last American manned mission into space for what may well be many years.

The NASA Shuttle Atlantis. Isn't she beautiful?

I quietly cried as I watched the liftoff for mission STS-135; I was saying goodbye to an old friend whom I will never see again.

I remember John Glenn’s first flight, and the heroics of the crew of Apollo 13, and the despair in the deaths of Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee, and Edward White of Apollo 1, and my heart stopping when Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin became the first humans to set foot upon another world. Our manned space program is one of the crown jewels of the accomplishments of the human race.

I’m a little scared that I won’t live long enough for us to take the next few, halting steps toward our last frontier.

UPDATE: Finally found a decent video of the launch:

Cue the best Father’s Day story this year

Jim Brozina is a children’s librarian. He started reading to his daughter Alice Ozma every night when she was in the fourth grade. He promised he’d read to her every night for 100 nights, because she enjoyed it and he liked the way it helped them bond and enjoy each other. When the 100 nights ended, they kept up the ritual.

The streak ended last fall after 3,218 readings, when Ozma started college at Rutgers.

Neither wanted to end the nightly ritual, and when it did end the last thing he read to her was The Wizard of Oz–the first thing he’d read to her 9 years back.

Cue up the tears.

Ozma has written a book about the experience; it’s called The Reading Promise.

“What is it to *you*?”

Thanks so much to The Spouse®, David Badash, and the New York Times (sorry, paywall=no link) for this eye-opening graphic:

There are 25 states that will allow first cousins to marry (along with the consequent genetic and social risks), but won’t allow same-sex couples to marry.

And before the right-wing yanknuts out there start bleeting about how gays are “redefining marriage”, this country has done that so that blacks could marry non-blacks, and blacks could marry blacks. As Keith Olbermann so beautifully expressed:

Gay Divorce?

Same-sex marriage has been legal in the Netherlands for 10 years this week; it was the first country in the world to make it so. In that time:

  • 14,813 same-sex couples have been married (almost evenly split between men and women)
  • the divorce rate among gay couples has been 5% (344 out of 7522)
  • the divorce rate among lesbian couples has been 10% (734 out of 7291)

This reflects against the general Dutch divorce rate of 38% (as of 2002, the latest stats I can find).

At the same time, the U.S. states that have legalized same-sex marriages have some of the lowest divorce rates in the country.

These two data bits should cause some people to rethink the “gay marriage is morally bad and will cause God to end the world and black holes will swallow us all up” party line of Xtians, right-wing wackadoos, and the mentally short-sheeted. It likely won’t, but you can always hope.

The trash gets tossed out in Phoenix

A Phoenix jury found Faleh Hassan Almaleki guilty of second-degree murder for running down his daughter Noor Almaleki with his car in 2009.

Why? She dressed like an American teenager, instead of wearing the burqah her father wanted her to wear. She refused a marriage arranged by her father (for his financial advantage) and instead got herself a boyfriend.

How ungrateful of her.

His reason for killing her? To restore his family’s “honor”. (She dared to be independent.)

His reason for severely injuring her boyfriend’s mother in the same incident? She “jumped in front of his car”. (The mother shielded Noor from the worst of her father’s violence–the man beat the crap out of his daughter regularly–by allowing her stay at her boyfriend’s house.)

You can tell how sure he was of his moral stance in all this. He immediately fled to Mexico and then to Europe, in an effort to return to Iraq so that he could get relatives to hide him.

Welcome to the bigs, you bastard.

One of the few comforts I get from this is how he’ll be treated in prison–child molesters and abusers are the bottom of prison culture. Perhaps he’ll get a taste of what he dealt regularly.

~~~

“Honor killing” continues to be one of the most horrific of the Islamic culture’s parade of horrors.

Beheadings for the “crime” of apostasy, stonings for “inappropriate clothing” and adultery, amputations of hands for simple robbery, subjugation of women as nothing more than chattel–all signs of a sick, twisted world-view that follows the dictates of a former carpet salesman turned brigand, who then turned prophet after he started having epileptic seizures and began to babble “news” from the “Archangel Gabriel” that eventually became the Koran.

“…and now…the rest of the story”

Those famous words from conservative radio commentator Paul Harvey will come back to haunt David Smith, the religious wackadoodle who runs the Illinois Family Institute, yet another hate group recently singled out by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Here are some of his reactions to the recent passage of a bill by the Illinois state legislation allowing civil unions. (My responses are in italics.)

~~~~~

Civil unions are, in reality, legalized same-sex marriage.

Not exactly true. Civil unions are a half-assed, but legal, alternative open to straight and gay couples. Opposite-sex marriage is also a civil union, albeit with religious trappings (sometimes).

Homosexuality is not analogous to race, and bans on same-sex unions are not analogous to bans on interracial marriage.

In terms of the civil right of marriage, homosexuality, race, ethnicity, and national origin should be exactly the same–that is to say, transparent to the process.

Homosexual activists in IL have stated publicly that civil unions are their stepping stone to marriage.

It may well be. So what? What’s it to you, Mr. Smith? What possible difference does it make to you if two men or two women want to marry each other. How could that possibly affect you or your ilk?

Every adult male and female in IL is free to marry.

What a specious argument. So gay people should settle for marrying someone they’re not both emotionally and physically attracted to? Pure bullshit here.

Homosexuals are not pursuing a right they don’t have, but rather they’re seeking to eliminate one of the central defining features of marriage via civil unions.

Marriages used to be defined by who paid the highest price for a woman, whom your parents thought was best for you, whom you were told by the Church to marry, and which race(s) you could or couldn’t marry.

Defining marriage as a sexually complementary institution is ethically legitimate.

This is a meaningless statement. Marriage is not an ethical entity. Proper behavior within a marriage is an ethical matter, but marriage itself is a metaphysical issue–that is, how we observe the value of a close relationship with someone else in terms of our place in the universe.

If homosexuals are permitted to jettison sexual complementarity, there is no rational reason why polyamorists should not be permitted to jettison the criterion of numbers of partners.

If all partners is a proposed polyamorous marriage consent, than yes, that is correct. (The history of polyamorous marriages is rife with spousal abuse; it’s a slope that has not been mastered yet.) So what’s the problem? What possible business is it of Mr. Smith’s, or indeed of anyone, what adults do with their private lives as long as they behave ethically and legally?

The government has no reason to provide affirmation or benefits to relationships that do not serve the public good; and relationships based on same-sex attraction and volitional homosexual acts do not per se serve the public good.

1) Same-sex attraction and volitional homosexual acts serve the public good every bit as much as opposite sex marriages and volitional heterosexual acts–that is to say, little or none. A marriage involving people who act in the public good doesn’t care about the nature of the genitals involved. It sound like “public good” is just wingnut code for “procreation”.

2) The government has an obligation to uphold the U.S. Constitution, and the 14th Amendment of such asserts that no civil rights will be denied to a U.S. citizen without due process of law. That fact alone justifies any marriage between (and possibly among) consenting adults.

The government’s involvement in marriage has nothing whatsoever to do with whether two people love each other.

True. Marriages of conveniences are still marriages, with all the legal obligations entailed within. (I assume we’re not talking about the religious obligations of marriage undertaken by some–but not all–people.) I’m not sure why this item is on Smith’s list.

Once same-sex “marriage’ — which is now a mere stepping stone away — is severed from both procreation and gender, it becomes meaningless as a public institution, and even heterosexuals will become less invested in it.

That statement is pure and utter bullshit. People get married for all sorts of reasons, procreation only being one of them. And even if it did become meaningless as a public institution–so what? The nature of marriage has changed dramatically within the course of human history, but it has never disappeared and isn’t likely to.

Questions to ask anti-gay organizations

1. Just exactly with what mechanism does homosexuality “tear the institution of ‘family’ down“?

2. How does gay marriage threaten religion?

3. Why is it all right to scream “faggot!” in public?

4. Which tradition(s) are we talking about when we say “traditional family”?

5. What possible difference could it make if two gay people want to marry each other?

When you ask these things, ask for specific details and concrete examples.

DOMA declared unconstitutional!

Federal Judge Joseph Tauro ruled today in Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. United States Department of Health and Human Services that section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional in that it violates the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Tauro ruled in Gill vs. Office of Personnel Management that any federal attempt to define marriage violates the rights of an individual state to dictate the conditions necessary to marriage. He also ruled that the equal protection clause of the 5th Amendment was also violated by section 3 of DOMA:

…nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law… [emphasis mine]

Hooray!

Warning: tearjerker ahead

The Spouse® and I got married on 5/18, and she suggested that we do something which really resonated with me:

Together, we bought a wedding rose.

Lady Emma Hamilton is a David Austin rose, and ours is coming up very nicely.

(taken with my iPhone, whose camera can barely be called one)

It has a strong fruity fragrance (we require our roses to look and smell wonderful), and is supposed to be very hardy. It is blooming quite freely, with dark red buds and beautiful coppery-coral blossoms.

May our marriage bloom and thrive like this beautiful flower.