BuggBlog

A slightly counterintuitive argument on the antigay Republican politics of Virginia

Just to be clear about this before I start: I was appalled that Republican Bob McDonnell could be elected governor of Virginia and absolutely horrified that Ken Cuccinelli was elected attorney general.  In fact, I can’t even remember who else ran for attorney general -- all I know is that I voted for the candidate that was NOT Ken Cuccinelli. As a current Virginia resident who also happened to go to college in the state lo these many years ago, I’m mortified that Cuccinelli has wasted little time exercising his anti-gay bias by asking to Virginia’s public colleges and universities to end their anti-discrimination policies for LGBT staff and students.

So, I’m horrified, most reasonable people are at least perplexed, and Virginia is once again looking foolish on the national stage. On one level, I’m outraged and, like Equality Virginia, want Gov. McDonnell to step in and support an employment discrimination bill (the lack of which he claims makes Cuccinelli’s “request” appropriate).

Then again, I’m not so sure I want him to.

Don’t forget, McDonnell went out of his way to run a smiling-face, moderate-middle campaign -- despite his long ties to Pat Robertson and not-so-long-ago writings about the evils of homosexuality and other social conservative hobby horses. That impression helped get him elected (as did, to be sure, an inept Democratic campaign). Cuccinelli seems to have been crazed from day one, but apparently those middle-of-the-road voters were willing to take a chance.

Long point short, on some level we should want Cuccinelli and McDonnell to show the full crazy on gay issues that we know they have. We’ve certainly spent time warning everyone that McDonnell was not moderate, that he was beholden to the Pat Robertson school of religion that believes natural disasters are the result of God’s fits of pique. Given that we’ve warned everyone what would happen if they elected this dynamic duo, don’t we kind of want/need them to do exactly what we said they were going to do?

I say that not because I want LGBT Virginians to suffer. I say it because I want the old guard, homophobic Republican guard of Virginia to suffer. These guys are political maniacs who, to a large extent, are confined to state legislative districts. Having some of their own boys in charge as the governor and attorney general is a chance to highlight exactly how retrograde their attitudes are.

If you want to get rid of them, you have to encourage them.

I really do believe that most people -- particularly those in the every-growing Northern Virginia area, but people in the state beyond as well -- are not hard core bigots and homophobes. Of those people who are willing to vote either Democrat or Republican depending on issues and context, I believe most don’t care much for the aggressive anti-gay tactics of the far right (hence McDonnell’s carefully centrist, “I’m from NoVa” campaign”).

I also believe that McDonnell and, especially, Cuccinelli, have deep-rooted animus towards LGBT people -- towards me, my husband and my family. We should all protest and campaign and lobby to combat them. But, in the end, I don’t want them to hide it -- I want them to own it, and pursue it. Sooner, rather than later, it will make it easier to hold them, and their party, accountable.

All that said, looking back on the debacle that was the Democratic primary and general campaign for the governorship, I still wouldn’t have voted for effin’ Terry McAuliffe. Note to Democrats: Better candidates next time, please.

The chair up there

I wanted to do something romantic with Cavin on Sunday afternoon, given that we had made such progress cleaning the house the day before. So I asked him to go out with me to shop for a new office chair.

Such is the life of gay, married* suburbia.

Although it did have it's romantic moments -- I suppose that's what you would call Cavin spinning me like office-supply dervish in a faux-leather executive chair -- the trip ended up more of an odyssey. To start, I trekked over to the local Office Depot, where I spent about 40 minutes or so carefully perusing the selection, comparing prices and determining exactly how comfortable my ass would be if ensconced in one for hours on end. I ultimately chose one of the most expensive models that, while ugly as a deformed pig, offered some seriously superior comfort. The plastic-envelope that contained the price tag bristled with tickets to be taken to the register for purchase. Satisfied, I snatched one and headed to the front.

Where after some confusing back-and-forth on the store radio, the cashier informed me that the chair I desired was not in stock. And how was I, a simple-minded customer, supposed to determine that the chair was not in stock when it was essentially plastered with "buy this chair!" tickets?

"Um, we don't have that chair in stock."

Okey dokey. Time to go to Staples, where I found a near perfect replica of the brown leather Jean Luc Picard chair that I used at the magazine office. Was it in stock? Of course not.

So, off to a different Staples where the Picard chairs were in stock. At least, that's what the computer said. How could that be wrong? Was the chair in stock? The nice Staples employee -- I mean nice in the non-ironic sense, given that this guy was the friendliest person I'd met all day, Cavin included -- couldn't find the boxed chair in the store room.

"What about the four of them sitting up front?" I asked about the floor models I'd seen when entering the store.

"Oh, those are for sale pre-assembled."

Finally, a breakthrough. Plus a challenge: Getting a pre-assembled, high-back office chair into the back seat of a 3-Series BMW is akin to one of those challenges on The Amazing Race that often augur the end of a relationship. But we persevered, and now I sit in my home office, occasionally spinning around and declaring "Make it so!"

I may even get some work done soon.

*Cavin and I aren't married in the legal sense, as we live in Virginia. However, we had our own Buddhist/agnostic ceremony with our families out here in Falls Church, and that's good enough for me to say I'm married. It's not like the Virginia police can send a SWAT team to break us up. Yet.

"You'll take my gun away over my cold, dead prawns"

Some Virginia gun-rights activists are going to protest an alleged grievance -- that some gun owners in "urban" Virginia areas have been asked to leave restaurants for bringing their firearms into the establishment -- by having a night out in Fairfax County restaurants while packing heat.

So, to recap the situation in Virginia: Mixing liquor and wine to make sangria -- illegal. Carrying your favorite handgun into a restaurant or bar full of drunken idjits -- legal.

Dave Vann of Falls Church wouldn't tell the Post what restaurants the activists would be patronizing because they don't want anyone to warn the restaurant owners. Boy, that instills some confidence in their goals. Honestly, I just want to know where they're going to be so I can make sure to be somewhere else.

Without getting too deep into it, I actually think the second amendment guarantees gun rights to citizens. But just as the first amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press comes with rational limits such as slander and libel, there are limits to gun rights. And, frankly, this whole issue is stupid -- which is frankly a given when it comes to much of the Virginia legislature.

Even if you have the right to carry, I don't see why you should have the right to carry into a private business that doesn't want guns present. It's by no means irrational as a restaurant or bar owner to decide that firearms aren't welcome in an establishment -- not everyone believes that gun toting and family dining go together. Or drink slinging and gun slinging, for that matter.

And honestly, if you think that Denny's or IHOP is so dangerous that you dare not venture in unarmed, maybe you need to take your meal in another restaurant.

Why Clinton, Obama and McCain don't really matter

I wouldn't want to say that who gets to be the next president is totally inconsequential -- a quick look at Iraq is all it takes. But when it comes to our day to day lives as citizens, we have just as much -- if not more -- to fear from incompetents and miscreants in our state and local governments. And nothing really highlights the assault on our civil liberties like the war on drugs.

Of course, the war on drugs is equally pernicious on both the federal and local level, and a lot of shit flows downhill from the feds at the Drug Enforcement Agency, where the agency head is actually a defender of our nation's historic (and disastrous) attempt at alcohol prohibition. How bad is it? Well, if the government wants to seize your personal property they just have to say "marijuana" and you'll likely never see it again. Naturally, local police departments have taken advantage of such current legal realities and begun using so-called drug-related property seizures as a fundraising tool for their departments. And what do they buy with that money they've taken?

SWAT gear. Because everyone knows that what a freedom-loving, liberal democracy like the United States needs is militarized local police departments.

But not enough people seem to care, at least until the local SWAT teams comes crashing through your door at 2 a.m because some shifty "informer" ratted out your neighbor for having a couple of joints and the officers in charge got the address wrong. And still not enough people seem to care, even when police are stomping on 80-something grandmothers.

Because drugs are bad, mmm-kay.

I've been fretting

Judging from the uneven output on my part, you'd have to think that the most common topic 'round the parts would be "Why I haven't been posting in, like, forever." Short answer is, I've been overwhelmed by tossing a wedding into the annual spring work rush at the magazine, plus a couple of other projects I've been working on. Oh, all right. I've also gotten sucked into playing Guitar Hero II. But now that I've reached the limits of dexterity in my digits, I can get back to more important things, like intense navel-gazing on the web.

But really, other than work and noodling around on a toy guitar -- on which I rawk, by the way -- my focus really is on trying to get my wedding planned and implemented. I have to reiterate that I've been really taken aback by the attitude of people I've dealt with in Virginia, from cake makers to store clerks to bankers. After picking up my new suit at Nordstrom's this weekend, one of the sales guys was showing ties and shirts to me and Cavin. The sales guy asked me at one point, while Cavin was off searching for a better blue tie, what the bride would be wearing, so he could find something that would match.

Perplexed, because I was honestly not paying enough attention, I said something like, "We're not going to match. He's wearing a pinstripe suit."

"Your friend said it was your wedding," said the sales guy, confused.

"It is," I said. "It's his wedding, too."

Blank look.

"We're marrying each other."

Light bulb!

"Are you both wearing boutonnieres, or do you need pocket squares?"

I've said it before and I'll say it again, capitalism and self-interest make commissioned sales people so much easier to deal with.

Anyway, I'm now at T-minus 11 days until the big ceremony. I have a handful of family coming in -- possibly including one of my grandmothers. If she does come, I just find it fascinating to consider that in all her life, she probably never entertained the idea that one day she would be traveling to D.C. for the gay, Buddhist wedding ceremony of her first grandson. It's a big, strange world. And thank god for that.

Virginia really is for lovers

Well, Northern Virginia, at least.

In the ongoing saga of planning our wedding, Cavin and I finally hit a number of stores over the past weekend to register. Obviously, we're extraordinarily late in doing it -- long story, tell ya later -- but after prowling a number of stores, we settled on Williams-Sonoma.

In store after store, not one employee batted an eye or stuttered a word when confronted with a non-traditional couple. Not one said, "I'll have to check if we can do that." Not one asked, "Where's your fiance?"  When shopping for our rings, not one store balked at bringing out all the men's rings for us. Compare this with a trip to, say, a government office to ask for recognition of our relationship. At the risk of going all Cato Institute, that's why I'm a big free-market fan -- the places that have to convince me to part with my money (instead of just taking it in taxes) treat me so much better.

That's a lesson learned

Telling God to "bring it on"? Bad idea. A snow day is a blessing for those of us who love the chance to spend a weekday sprawled on the couch leveling up our Phantasy Star Universe characters or tackling some Gears of War on "Insane" difficulty. In my case, a snow day on a Wednesday means leaving behind my oh-so-comfy couch to brave the snowy to meet an unchangeable Wednesday printer deadline. Poor, poor me. Well, at least I don't have a journalism job that requires me to brave the snow to listen to nonsensical presidential press conferences.

I'm jesting, naturally. Well, except for the Bush part. But my commute this morning was actually a little faster than usual, given that there were only about 20 other people on the road. That would be 20 other people who can't drive worth a good goddamn in the snow, but I managed to steer around them. After the hour-plus commute home last night, I was irrevocably convinced of the fallacy of the whole "wisdom of crowds" thing (not the actual book, per se, but at least the popular culture interpretation of it as "everybody's doing it so it must be good!"). Nothing brings out the stupidity in humanity like taking a little spin on a snowy road, which is amazing, given that everyone I know considers themselves to be the world's best snow driver. Myself included.

Anyway, here's hoping for a quick end to the day. Those aliens aren't going to kill themselves, and my couch is getting lonely.

The winter of our discontent

Life in the suburbs is supposed to be either a bucolic, upwardly-mobile American fantasy or a simmering cesspool of repressed sexual frustration and emotional warfare. Your view can probably be predicted by whether you enjoyed American Beauty.*

The truth, of course, is that's its neither, even if you are a homosexual such as myself playing happy household in an anti-gay state like Virginia. Some neighbors are friendly, some are distant -- same as the neighbors in my last D.C. apartment. Although, I have to point out that in Falls Church I no longer have any Tina-dealing neighbors upstairs setting things on fire and causing hordes of firemen to burst through my door at 6:00 a.m.

Not that I harbor any resentment.

No, these days the primary impediment to enjoying my happy home comes from Nature herself. Last year it was a frantic effort at bailing water when God decided that he needed to punish our cellar with a Flood of biblical proportions -- I'm surprised I didn't find a little ant Ark tossing atop the waves. Then, cast from their subterranean abode by divine retribution, the six-legged creatures decided to make their new home upstairs with us, setting off a massive ant influx the likes of which have not been seen since the 1970s.

Then this past weekend, at about 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, I woke up when I realized Cavin was no longer in the bed. When I got up to check, I stuporously realized the bedroom felt like a walk-in freezer. Naturally, our furnace chose to conk out during a record-breaking cold spell on the hardest day of the week to find a repairman. Cavin had been warming himself by the open oven -- obviously, they didn't have all the Saturday morning cartoons and safety PSAs in 1970s Saigon.

There are times that I enjoy entertaining the idea of condo living, where such fiascoes are taken care of by a competent and eager staff. Then I remember that condo living with Cavin would never allow me to continue my pack-rat, book-buying, audio-visual equipment hoarding existence. So God can throw whatever plagues he chooses at us -- frogs, locust, insanely anti-gay constitutional amendments -- but it makes no difference to us. We live where we live, dammit, and that's not going to change.

Well, at least not until we can afford a bigger place in a better neighborhood. Priorities, you know.

*For the record, I detested it.

And after that dramatic interlude

Sorry, I'm a writer and a drama queen, so it was hard to resist the cliffhanger of the last post. Anyway, all is well with me -- it's Cavin who had to make a trip to the emergency room last night. He's fine now, nothing a little appendectomy couldn't fix. I left him there last night and came home to do work on the issue, since we go to press on Wednesday mornings. Let me tell you, nothing makes you feel like a crap-ass husband like having to leave your partner in a hospital emergency room because you have to go to work.

Fortunately, everyone at the office picked up what I had to leave off this morning, and I was able to get back to the hospital to stay the whole day. Overall it was a good experience as a gay couple, at least as far as it can be for a gay couple in a hospital who hasn't yet written up powers-of-attorney and living wills and all that. It's the first time I've been in the position where I experienced exactly how second-class I am -- not from the attitude of the nurses or surgeon, who were all quite nice. But because I was told that, should anything go wrong (god forbid) that we would need to contact an actual relative since I was, legally speaking, just a friend.

Of course, since Virginia passed that damn amendment, who knows if legal paperwork would even stand up if I found myself in a less friendly hospital.

Still, after Cavin recovers, which should just be a few days, we'll making an appointment with a lawyer. I just hope that someday my relationship with him won't have to reduced again to a Post-It on the front of his file because there's no appropriate space on the form.

The things you learn

I suppose I should preface this by saying that everything is okay, but I've discovered another advantage to living across the river in the suburbs.

The emergency rooms are so much nicer.

I'll explain later.