Boom.

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 5 Comments

Last chance to get married before queermos make it impossible to love

Maybe you’ve heard about it, but yesterday the President said that he believes gay people should be allowed to get married. It’s kind of a big deal. Obama is the first sitting President to come out in favor of gay marriage. The last one made a re-election strategy out of opposition to same, and whether it worked or not, yesterday’s announcement is likely to be a branding issue until November. The screencap above—from Fox News’s mad cousin, Fox Nation, which subsequently changed its headline—suggests the kind of discourse we can look forward to. So yeah—probably half the country will say infuriating things while the rest of us address the most pressing civil rights issue of our time.

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Okay, fine, Rick Santorum

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 10 Comments

The other Rick/other Santorum

Now that Combat! blog’s endorsement of Jon Huntsman has somehow failed to catapult him to front-runner status, we are forced to consider Rick Santorum. The former Senator and Very Good Boy from Pennsylvania is running third in the most recent Iowa poll, suggesting that he might conceivably win tomorrow’s caucuses. There is still no way he will become President. He won’t win the Republican nomination, either. The man who once compared gay marriage to sex with dogs and corpses will never win a national contest, for the historical reason that bigotry only works on the state level. And bigotry is Santorum’s whole damn raison d’etre.

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Happy Contrarian’s Day

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 1 Comment

This Darwinian valentine courtesy of defectiveyeti.com.

It’s Valentine’s Day, which means I will be taking even more opportunity than usual to discomfit others with jokes about how I will inevitably die alone. The best part about feeling incapable of normal social interaction is that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; you keep telling people that you don’t know how to get along, and eventually they are forced to concede your point. The power of such contrarianism is nowhen more evident than on Valentine’s Day, when smug assholes like myself are moved to observe that A) the holiday and probably the very concept of romantic love are blatant constructions of a society bent on making us buy stuff and/or have children who will subsequently buy stuff, and also B) we do not have a date this year. There are so many of us, and yet we are all alone. Contrarianism is a trap, and I submit as proof this amazing letter to the editors of The Economist refuting it.

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Hey, what are you doing today?

By Dan Brooks in Church People 5 Comments

Is it voting? Because if it’s not, and you live in Iowa, you’re letting these people run the judicial branch. I know they look nice, but they are complete pricks. Consider: the pleasant young couple above chose to make their wedding, the symbol of their love, a symbol of their opposition to other people’s love. Was your wedding a public celebration of your commitment to letting gay dudes and lesbians marry one another? Therein lies the problem. Even though many of us—maybe even most of us—either support gay marriage or don’t care enough either way to try to make a law about it, the small number of us who have been commanded by a 6,000 year-old book* to stop gay people everywhere we can find them are way, way more fired up. Case in point: Bob Vander Plaats, who since losing his bid for governor has organized a statewide campaign to recall Iowa Supreme Court Justices for their decision in Varnum v Brien.

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