The Bubble Genius Bob & Chez Show 5/10/12

I’m as close to a Kinsey 0 as you’re ever likely to meet. Straight straight straight, couldn’t be straighter if I tried. I’ve also had friends who were gay since high school (I was part of the outcast caste in high school, what can I say?). I’ve had co-workers who were gay. I have no doubt I have relatives who are gay.

I want my gay friends, my gay co-workers, my gay relatives to be able to get married if they want. Why in the name of all that’s good in the world wouldn’t I want that?

The average adult, or so I read some time ago, regularly interacts with something on the order of 100 people—friends, relatives, co-workers, neighbors, that nice checker at the supermarket. Even taking the homophobes’ lowball (you should pardon the expression) estimate of the percentage of the population that happens to be gay, the blunt fact is that if you aren’t gay, you know someone who is.

Think of all the people you know, all the people you like, all the people you love. Do you really want any of them to be unhappy? Do you really want to be the cause of their unhappiness? No? Then get over yourself and buy Adam and Steve a nice Le Crueset teakettle.

As Dan Savage recently said, “We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people the same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about clams and farming and menstruation and fabric and adultery and masturbation and divorce and slavery.” Some of us can, anyway.

That Mitt Romney was a bully in his teens surprises me not in the least. Mitt Romney was never an outcast. He never needed to seek out the company of people who would accept him. Mitt Romney has always been an alpha male—not necessarily because of something innate to Mitt Romney, but because his father was an alpha male—and has always reveled in it, which to my mind helps explain his lack of empathy as an adult: he never needed empathy growing up. I do agree that it feels somewhat unfair to make a big deal out of the story since most of us were terrible people in high school, but most of us grow out of it.

(And for the record, I’m with Chez on Robin Williams.)

–alopecia