The Next Hurrah

12/3 "Cold Case": Landmark gay television

I know this may not get a lot of comments, but I felt like I had to write something about this Sunday's episode of the CBS crime drama "Cold Case".

In recent years on TV, I've seen shows that tell me gay men are asexual and vapid, that lesbians exist as the butt of jokes unless they can find a man to turn them straight, that bisexuals and transgenders are incestuous and/or serial killers, that gay teenagers are only gay because they're bad people and because they want to infuriate their parents. I've even seen an FX show that made a hero out of a man who beat a gay man so badly that he had to be put into a medical coma.

What I haven't seen on most TV shows, especially network TV shows, is a simple, moving love story between gay men.

Until this Sunday.

LA Times: It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's...SuperKarl!

I don't hold any illusions about the role of the media in enabling those Republicans in power. I also see Karl Rove is a smart guy and is not to be underestimated. There are reasons to see him as a huge force for the GOP. What I don't need to see is a "respected" national newspaper like LA Times turn into a weak-kneed fangirl/fanboy. Nor do I care about seeing them fail to mention the history of their reporters (in this case, Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten).

The title says it all:

"GOP at a loss? Karl Rove has an 11th-hour plan to win"

Now let's wade through some of the rest:

Pandering and Parenting

Imagine you were living in a state like Arkansas, where the supreme court recently overturned an onerous and sweeping policy which banned gay foster parents. Calls were quickly made to write this ban into formal law, via the state legislature. You wonder what your elected officials might say in response to this law. This is what one of their campaigns said:.

"He was raised by a single parent and remembers the way he was treated by other children because he wasn't raised in a traditional two-parent home," Wright said. "Considering the controversy this issue has given way to, it is hard to believe a child going to foster care from the home of a meth addict is equipped or in a place to understand and cope with the ensuing controversy about his or her foster situation."

Can you guess who that's from? The Republican?

Nope. It's the campaign of Mike Beebe, the Democratic nominee for governor.

NY-Gov - Weld Drops Out

Last August, I wrote a somewhat hyperbolic item decrying William Weld's flip-flop on gay marriage rights when he suddenly got back into politics. Well, apparently he's gone from flip-flop to flop - after such campaign heights as his running mate donating to the opposing party's candidate, and the embarrassment of not getting the nomination at his state party convention and being asked by the GOP leader to drop out, Weld has left the race. 

KY-GOV - Fletcher picks new running mate, loses more ground

As if poor beleagured Ernie Fletcher (in the midst of a witch hunt by Partisan Democrats Gone Wild!) didn't have enough to deal with, his lieutenant governor opted out of a second term last week, but said he would stay in office until his current term expired. Admidst speculation that Pence will run in the 2007 GOP primary against Fletcher,  Fletcher asked him to resign immediately. Pence said no and Fletcher's people essentially had a little fit.

What was big time US Senator and Kentucky political kingmaker Mitch McConnell's response?

What Is Our Children Learning?

The campaign to stop school children from even hearing gay people exist continues to chug along. And before you shrug this off as some kind of red-state, Bible-thumping ignorance, you should realize the latest examples are Vermont and New York. It's easy for a parent to say that they object to what their child may be learning at school because that's something they don't want their child to know, but ultimately, that's part of what school is about. If organizations like GLSEN were truly trying to warp or corrupt children, they would have been shut out of schools long ago. This is about talking to kids about what it's like to be gay. Children don't have to be supportive. All they have to do is listen and then make their own decision.

The concept of children making their own decision is what those rooted in fear or ignorance dread the most (ironic, since they believe gays "choose" to be gay), because they want their children to naively assume homosexuality is invisible (or a damnable sin). Then when those kids go through life and they begin to meet gay people, the hope is that they will be so rooted in prejudice, they will never change their negative view of gays. What will this result in? Probably more situations like the one at Georgia Tech, where the mere existence of a tolerance policy for gays is somehow a violation of "religious freedom" and an excuse for a lawsuit. The whole point of this is to hound and litigate gays into being a stigma and a dirty word in every single part of American life. This starts at school, but will continue in the workplace, in public places, in the home - everywhere.

Pedro Zamora tirelessly educated about his life. His life was not a fairy tale. He took a lot of risks, he made a lot of mistakes. He wanted young people to learn not to pay the price he had to pay. Would the religious right consider this a shameful way for him to spend his final years, even though he potentially helped save who knows how many young impressionable people?

So much for a culture of life.

Thank You For a Great First Year

By DHinMI

We just passed a milestone at The Next Hurrah, and we almost missed it. Yesterday I noticed it had been exactly one year since Kagro X posted “David Corn Stands the First Amendment on its Head,” our first substantive post.  In the year since, we've had plenty of good pieces, some even audacious in their ambition and desired effect. For instance, Meteor Blades garnered tremendous attention for his proposal to rebuild an Eco New Orleans. DemFromCT has pushed Bird Flu into the consciousness of so many people that he's become a recognized expert and a founder of the Flu Wiki, where experts from the WHO and other entities exchange news and ideas to track this potentially pandemic-generating virus.  And Plutonium Page has repeatedly demonstrated the evidence for and implications of global warming. 

But we've also had our eyes on American politics.  RonK broke the story that Dick Gephardt now regrets his support of Bush's Iraq policy, a mea culpa that was quickly echoed by several other Democrats, including John Kerry and John Edwards. Before just about anyone in the MSM was writing about it, Trapper John was describing the deep rifts in organized labor that resulted in several major unions splitting from the AFL-CIO.  Mimikatz has examined the effects of tax and budgetary policy and ruminated on political ethics and responsibility. 

Two of our contributors so dominated blog reportage and analysis of major stories that we had to create new categories for them.  Kagro X showed that process could be both fun and deadly serious in his pieces on the Nuclear Option, and now he's examining the justifications for and procedures to generate impeachment proceedings against the Bush administration.  And with an assist by the Bush administration (for providing her so much raw material), emptywheel's pieces required us to add a new category for Bush/Administration Scandals. 

And finally, we have what I believe is the best piece written at The Next Hurrah, James' post on the death and legacy of Ismail Merchant, and how the media still doesn't know how to talk about couples who've shared a life of love and devotion with partners of the same sex. 

Now, on the year anniversary of our founding, we're adding a new contributor, emptypockets, who among other subjects will be tracking the days of our president in his series BushWatch. 

But without our readers, none of us would have continued posting here.  So, thank you all for reading our stuffr, thank you for commenting and sharing your thoughts and impressions, and thank you for becoming our friends. 

2006 anti-gay laws ROUNDUP

I thought I would list a quick roundup of anti-gay legislation which has passed or may pass in various states. Some of this is from the legislature, others might be from a citizen petition process. In the spirit of giving the bad news first, at the bottom I will list the states whose legislature or initative process defeated anti-gay legislation this year. I will also list some of the state gay organizations you can go to if you want to help out, whether through money, or volunteering, whatever you wish. If I have missed any potential laws in any states, please let me know. There are efforts to ban gay adoption and/or foster care in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, but aside from Ohio and possibly Missouri, most of those bans have achieved prominence this year (next year or 2008 may be a very different story).

The Lion, The Witch, and the Winger?

I know that the "Chronicles of Narnia" are very important to many Christians. I even knew that Disney planned to market this film primarily through churches, as happened with the 2004 blockbuster "Passion of the Christ".

But I didn't know that much about Walden Media, the production company responsible for "Narnia" (as well as the biopic about Ray Charles), or about the head of Walden, Philip Anschutz. This article could have shed light but is subscriber only. This love letter shed a bit more, but only a bit.

Please read this 1998 article on Phillip for a more sobering description of the "Christian billionaire". A few selected passages:

Gays win in Maine (and other states)!

THEY FAILED.

WE WON.

AP has called

this election. For the first time ever, Maine voters have approved civil rights protections for gays and lesbians. In 1998 and 2000, in spite of a lead in polls that was bigger than some of the leads in recent polls, voters repealed the anti-discrimination law.

Several anti-gay extremist delegates were trounced in Virginia, and openly gay candidates fared well nationwide, even in Ohio and Texas (which were not so progressive tonight). But back to Maine...