Prop. 8 Ruled Unconstitutional

Proposition 8 cannot withstand any level of scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause, as excluding same-sex couples from marriage is simply not rationally related to a legitimate state interest.
-Chief U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker

The Proposition 8 battle is far from over, of course. Nevertheless, Walker's full ruling is worth reading for the manner in which it systematically and logically lays waste to every argument against same-sex marriage made by Proposition 8's proponents.

The other marriage penalty

The Oct. 2 New York Times ran an illuminating analysis that attempts to quantify the lifetime financial costs incurred by same-sex couples for living in a country that doesn't recognize their right to marry. Reporters Tara Siegel Bernard and Ron Lieber estimate gay couples could be paying anywhere from $28,595 to $211,993 more than financially similar straight couples.

Few will be surprised to learn that access to affordable health insurance is a big driver of this disparity. Most U.S. companies and governments - including the State of Texas - do not allow their employees to cover same-sex spouses as dependents under their group health plans. Even if a company offers domestic partner coverage, the federal tax code treats a same-sex partner's coverage as taxable income, so you can't use pretax dollars to pay the premiums.

Same-sex couples also get screwed on Social Security benefits, estate taxes, adoption costs, and pension plans that pay a survivor benefit to a heterosexual spouse but not a same-sex one. They cannot fund a non-working spouse's portion of a joint IRA and they wind up paying higher legal fees to codify rights that straight couples take for granted.

The one area where heterosexual couples might pay more is if both of them earn roughly the same amount, which could trigger the so-called "marriage penalty." However, this doesn't even come close to making up for all the ways our system cheats same-sex couples. Equal protection, anyone?

Hi honey, I'm stupid!

From our neighbors to the north, here's an interesting essay by Susan Krashinsky in today's Globe and Mail that dissects advertising's dependency on positing men as hopeless dumbasses in order to sell things to women.

With women controlling the majority of household purchases, marketers have determined that one of the easiest routes to a woman's pocketbook is by taking a swipe at bumbling male significant others. Krashinsky dissects five TV spots selling everything from hardware to ice cream that employ this formula.

Of course, men and boys watch these ads, too. While some men resent being portrayed in a light that would likely result in boycotts if the genders were flipped, it isn't very macho to whine about a TV commercial. More importantly, men stand to derive a tangible benefit from these stereotypes. If your wife thinks you're an idiot, she'll probably just give up on pursuing an equitable division of household labor.

Meanwhile, back on the couch, the crumb-crusted manboys of the world can safely pop open another beer, scratch their balls and say, "See that, baby? I is normal!"

Hitchin' day

I've been wanting to blog more about getting married to and going on honeymoon with Kate, but catching up at home and work has kept both of us busy over the last several days.

Fortunately, we just received proofs from our ace wedding photographer, Brett Buchanan, so I'll let pictures do the talking.

Kate and I decided to do formal photos before the ceremony, so this was taken right after I saw her in her wedding gown for the first time. I was blown away, folks. Walking up to her made me feel giddy and a bit weak in the knees.


Here's my groomsmen and me doing the obligatory ham jive. From left, Kevin Fullerton, me, Jonathan Toubin and David Wyatt. David served as officiant for the ceremony and did an amazing job.


We were married in Wellesley, Mass. at the home of Kate's extraordinarily gracious Aunt Charlotte. Her backyard proved to be an ideal setting, though the arrival of Tropical Storm Hanna gave us a scare. As it was, the first big, fat raindrops starting hitting the tent just as the ceremony got under way. Since everyone was already inside, the rain helped make things even more romantic.

Once everyone was situated for the reception, Kate and I hit the dance floor for the first time as a married couple to Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love." If it's true that rain on your wedding day is good luck, we're in great shape.

Love and the Turtle Boy

The Tuesday before our wedding, Kate and I went down to Worcester City Hall to apply for our marriage license.

On the way out, we decided to take a candid snapshot of ourselves at the edge of Worcester Common in front of the long-dry Burnside Fountain (ca. 1912), which was originally part of a watering trough for horses.

I knew Massachusetts was liberal, but I had no idea the commonwealth would embrace a public work of art that seems to depict a young boy having his way with a turtle.

Last single man post from Texas

One week from today, Kate and I will be getting married. Accordingly, this here blog will be taking a back seat for awhile. I may try to post in the days leading up to the wedding, but we've decided to maintain radio silence during the honeymoon.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm a lucky man. But I'm also running late, so I best close now.

A month and counting

One month from right this minute, I will be married to Kate Harrington. Our good friend David Wyatt will be officiating the ceremony in front of family and friends from all over the place.

All the cynical, curmudgeonly or irreverent things I may spew here should always be tempered by the fact that I could not be any happier about getting to spend my life with Kate.

I am a lucky man, folks.

Shower time

Kate and I made a whirlwind trip to Houston this weekend for a wedding shower thrown by my mom's good friends Patty and Karen.

We were fortunate to have a good portion of Kate's family in town from New England for the event. It was good to see everyone before the wedding, which is now less than 50 days away.

While Kate and the ladies opened gifts, Kate's dad, my dad and I dined at Tony Mandola's Gulf Coast Kitchen in the River Oaks Shopping Center on W. Gray. I had gumbo and linguini doused in shrimp marinara sauce.

Somehow, I made it out of there without wearing any of either.

Warren Chism will save your marriage

The same bunch of moralists who’ve spent millions on do-nothing abstinence education programs for kids are starting to implement similar initiatives for us grownups.

Starting September 1, the marriage license fee in Texas will go from $30 to $60 unless you and yours take a state-sanctioned eight-hour marriage education class. The state is using $8 million in federal welfare funds to pay for the classes and maintain a registry of who has taken them.

There’s more on the way when the Texas Legislature reconvenes next year. Longtime state representative Warren Chism (R-Pampa) wants couples seeking a divorce to wait two years unless they take a class designed to save their marriage.

While the administration of such classes would primarily be a publicly-financed sop to faith-based organizations, I’d love to see the comedy clubs get in on it. If they can teach defensive driving, there’s no reason our great state’s bastions of belly laughs can’t defend the sacred institution of heterosexual marriage.

218 Days and Counting

In anticipation of our upcoming nuptials (doesn’t that word sound like something you’d pull out of a deer carcass?), Kate recently set up a wedding website for us. We’ll be adding to it periodically as the date draws closer.

I also want to extend word of our availability to producers of wedding-themed reality shows. Especially My Big Redneck Wedding.

For the Bride Who Has Everything

In the course of planning our wedding, Kate and I have stumbled onto a mind-boggling variety of wonderful products that go a long way toward restoring the dignity of marriage in America.

Take custom bridal lingerie, for example. If I was a blushing bride with traditional values, the first thing I'd do is go to bridalpartytees.com and buy some panties with my hubby-to-be's claim duly noted right across the crotch.

What God hath joined together...let no thong put assunder.

Lazy Sunday Afternoon

Kate went to Dallas this weekend to try on wedding dresses, so I decided to indulge myself in a full-bodied reversion to male-pattern slothdom.

Instead of dressing up and going out on the town, I stayed home in dirty clothes, ate not one but two meals from Taco Cabana, drank wine from the bottle and listened to 80s AOR like Zebra and Fastway when I wasn't slouched in front of the TV, wistfully watching grainy video of my old bands. The only responsible thing I did was remembering to feed the cats.

Although the whiny little taskmaster in the back of my skull wants to tsk-tsk this abdication as a waste of precious weekend, I'm proud of myself for achieving a remarkably high level of contentment by doing nothing much in particular.

That said, I'll be glad when Kate gets home. I miss her and the cats are starting to get scared.

Merry Massmas 2007

As you may have surmised from the lack of posts this week, I have been on holiday. Kate and I flew to Massachusetts Friday afternoon. After a two-hour layover in Houston, we arrived in Boston just before midnight. After scraping several inches of snow off our rental car, we drove to Worcester and got there just before 2am. We stayed with Kate’s mom and her stepdad, Michael.

Kate spent Saturday afternoon looking for wedding dresses with her 12-year-old sister, Eloise and her stepmom, Phyllis. Meanwhile, I had lunch with Michael and his son, Patrick. Michael was kind enough to show me around Worcester, pointing out various historical and cultural places of interest. Worcester has a grand train depot and lots of cool older buildings, both of which are in short supply in go-go Austin. We even got to see a real live American bald eagle at the EcoTarium, where Kate’s dad was once executive director.

When Kate finished her dress hunt, we picked up her sister, Eloise and drove down to Rhode Island for the night to visit Kate’s dad and his wife, Mary. Poor Eloise was subjected to all eight minutes of “Free Bird,” courtesy of the local classic rock station. After arriving in Portsmouth, we sat down to a superb roast beef and Yorkshire pudding dinner. Then we had homemade brown sugar ice cream and conked out early.

Kate and I took a nice walk around the neighborhood with her dad and Eloise on Sunday morning. Although there was plenty of snow on the ground – at least by Texas standards – it really wasn’t all that cold. Being closer to the coast probably helped on that count.

We drove Eloise back to Worcester that afternoon, stopping at Weintraub’s Deli for an amazing corned beef sandwich and their house label birch beer. I also had a cup of chicken soup to ward off any pathogens inadvertently acquired during our travels. I don’t care what Marc Katz says – there’s really no such thing as authentic East Coast deli food in Austin.

Kate’s family has a long tradition of attending the Christmas Revels show at Harvard’s Sanders Theater. The Revels started back in 1971 and are now a venerated Cambridge tradition. Phyllis graciously took Kate, Eloise and me to the Sunday night performance. The Revels spotlight the winter solstice traditions of a different culture every year. This year’s culture was the Balkans, which offered lots of colorful costumes, acrobatic dancing and haunting women’s choral pieces. The entire audience was invited to sing “Dona Nobis Pacem” and I was vaguely able to follow along thanks to Kate’s pre-Yule tutelage.

Christmas Eve day was comparatively low-key. We wrapped gifts in the morning and had lunch with Kate’s mom and Michael. His two sons were there, too. Then we visited Kate’s grandparents and her Aunt P.K. in Paxton. We took a nice walk through Moore State Park as the sun was setting. There we saw an 18th century mill along a placid flowing stream. It was about the most picturesque thing I’ve seen all year, so naturally I didn’t have a camera with me.

Because Kate has three sets of parents, one set of grandparents and an extended family gathering to visit, Christmas was something of a whirlwind. I think we ended up doing seven separate gift exchanges this year. That’s a far cry from the sparsely attended Bloody Mary Christmas morning I typically do in Houston with my folks, but it was fun getting to see everyone and eating all that food. It was also my first white Christmas, though no snow actually fell during our trip.

Speaking of H-town, four of Kate’s cousins are planning to converge there in June for the big Red Sox/Astros showdown at Minute Maid Park. Now I really need to find a way to get good tickets for that game. Naturally, I’ll be the only ‘Stros partisan in the bunch.

We ended up at the Wellesley home of Kate’s Aunt Charlotte on Christmas night. Aside from the excellent food and company, Kate showed me the back garden where we’ll be getting married in September. It was covered in snow, of course, but I was able to imagine how it might look in late summer. We stood on the freezing cold porch and I remarked that next time we were there, we’d be just about married. That helped warm me up.

Kate’s mom took us to the Worcester Art Museum on Wednesday. Worcester has one of the best smaller art museums in the country. We spent a couple of hours there and had lunch. I’d like to go back sometime and see some of the exhibits we missed.

Just as we did last year, our final night in New England was spent in Petersham at the rustic family farm house of Kate’s friend, Caitie Huppert. Before dinner, Caitie had everyone join hands and told us how good it was to have us there. Although I’ve only known them since last Christmas, the Hupperts really have a way of making one feel welcome. In fact, the same can be said of Kate’s family. That’s just one more reason I consider myself to be one very fortunate Texan to be by Kate’s side.

Study Finds Divorce is Killing Our Planet

Some unhappily married couples stay together for religion. Others stay together for the children. Pretty soon, they may be staying together to reduce their carbon footprints.

A new study out of Michigan State University says divorce is bad for the environment because couples and families living together consume resources more efficiently than those living apart.

"For a long time we've blamed industries for environmental problems,” said study co-author Jianguo Liu in a desperate bid to spin quantification of conventional knowledge into something that passes for news. “One thing we've ignored is the household."

Liu and company calculated that divorced households used between 42 and 61 percent more electricity and water in 2005 than before splitting. If those couples had stayed married for the sake of our big blue marble, the U.S. could have saved 73 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water.

Following this study's logic, I guess we should all keep living with our parents until we become polygamists.

Calling All Batchelosers

The Austin Chronicle is now searching for our fair town's least eligible bachelor in its Batcheloser contest.

You can learn more about the candidates and vote here. The winner gets a SXSW wristband (which, honestly, is probably the last thing such a man needs).

What makes a Batcheloser? Is it serial unemployment, involuntary celibacy, hobbyism-as-compensation, social paralysis or bad hygiene? Nah. I think these factors are merely symptomatic.

To truly embody the ideal, you must knowingly squander potential in an inelegant manner before shrugging your shoulders and saying, "Fuck it" to no one in particular. To that end, many of Austin's foremost would-be Batchelosers can't even be bothered to enter a contest.

And when that happens, ladies and gentlemen, we all lose.

Blue Bells Ringing

When Kate got home from work last night, I not-so-nonchalantly foisted a box of Blue Bell Pop & Fudge Bars into her hands and suggested we enjoy a couple of banana fudgesicles while discussing supper plans.

Unbeknownst to her, I’d spent my lunch hour surrupticiously opening the Pop & Fudge box from the back, removing some of the frozen confections and placing an engagement ring inside the box before resealing it with semi-concealed strips of packing tape.

I'd also placed a semi-frantic call to Russell Korman Jewelers the night before to make sure the ring wouldn’t be damaged by being in the freezer for a few hours. The lady who answered the phone assured me that a few hours wouldn’t hurt. The conversation that followed went like this:

“Just out of curiosity, what are you planning to do?”

“Um, my girlfriend really likes banana fudgesicles so I thought I’d surprise her by putting the ring in a box of banana fudgesicles and resealing it.”

“Oh...well...good luck with that!”

This was the first time I had voiced my plan out loud to anyone. I didn’t realize how ridiculous it might sound to some people until right then. I could only hope Kate would appreciate it.

When she noticed the ring amid the pop and fudge, I dropped to one knee, pulled a dozen roses out of the cupboard and asked Kate if she’d grant me the privilege of becoming her husband.

I’m very happy to report that she said yes.

Here's Chism in Your Eye

The Texas House tentatively passed a bill yesterday that would raise the marriage license fee from $30 to $100 unless couples agree to take an eight-hour marriage education class. Authored by the ever-reactionary Warren Chism (R-Pampa), House Bill 2685 would grant a free marriage license to couples who take the class (unless they’re gay, of course).

Aside from the paucity of legitimate research demonstrating the long-term effectiveness of premarital education in actually preventing divorce, whether I choose to avail myself of such a service is none of the state’s goddamn business. Chism’s bill is primarily a sop to faith-based organizations that would reap a windfall in class fees for conducting what amounts to state-sanctioned religious indoctrination.

At the same time, the bill is another attempt to make up revenue lost through property tax cuts primarily benefiting wealthy landowners by imposing a regressive, fee-based tax that will disproportionately bite the poor.

Naturally, Chism doesn’t want to stop at prodding Texas couples into premarital education. He also wants couples seeking divorce to take a 10-hour marriage crisis class or wait two years until their divorce becomes final. Chism’s ultimate goal is to do away with no-fault divorce altogether in the holy name of the wee widdle children. I guess as long as they’re not eating government cheese, it is fine by him if children grow up in a home with two angry parents who hate each other.

There’s no romance in divorce, but it is a basic human right on the same level as marriage. Not allowing it creates a marital relationship built on political, economic and spiritual coercion instead of interpersonal respect.

Fortunately, Chism’s bill has yet to find a Senate sponsor, which makes its chance of getting signed into law questionable at best.

Mary Cheney Gets Some Savage Love

Poor Mary Cheney. She can’t comprehend why having a baby with her same sex partner would have anything to do with the war her political party is waging on gays and lesbians whose daddies aren’t the vice president.

Why can’t the big, bad media leave her and her partner alone with their widdle bwessing? After all, it’s a child, not a political prop, right?

Here’s renowned sex columnist Dan Savage explaining to Mary why she’s full of more than just a bundle of joy:

Mary, you worked on both of your father’s campaigns, and you kept your mouth clamped shut while Karl Rove and George Bush ran around the country attacking gay people, gay parents, and our children in 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006. It’s a little late to declare the private choices of gays and lesbians unfit for public debate, Mary.

And so long as your party insists on making the fitness of homosexuals to marry or parent — or, hell, exist — a subject of public debate, Mary, your decision to become a parent is germane and very much fit for public discussion and debate. The GOP’s selective embrace of some pregnant dykes - only knocked-up lesbians with powerful connections will be treated with respect - is a disconnect that demands answers. From you, from your father, from your venomous mother, from the idiot president you helped elect.

Savage does give Cheney credit for challenging James Dobson’s popcorn fart assertion that same sex parents are somehow damaging their kids more than traditionally-sexed breeders, but not for long…

You kept your mouth clamped shut when your father needed the political support of assholes like Dobson. And now that your dad is a despised lame-duck VP, dad’s gay-bashing political allies feel free to treat you with the same contempt with which they have long treated other gay and lesbians. And now you cry foul?

Sorry, Mary, and fuck you. You and your whole fucked-up family crawled into bed with bigots like Dobson when it suited you. And now you and your whole fucked-up family have some explaining to do. So welcome to the political debate, Mary, and remember…

Your side started it. It only serves you right that you’re going to have to finish it.

Amen to all that.

Coahuila to Allow Gay Civil Unions

Believe it or not, the Texas-Mexico border state of Coahuila has passed legislation allowing civil unions for gay couples.

While Coahuila is by no means a gay-friendly area of Mexico – some cities there ban public displays of same-sex affection – the new law does grant rights to gay couples that most straight married couples take for granted like familial health benefits and property rights for survivors.

If not for the Texas Revolution, Texas would still be part of Coahuila and gay couples here would now have the right to be civilly united. Stick that in your Texas Independence Day cake and eat it!

No, Virginia, You Can't Have A Divorce

After leading the fight for state constitutional amendments against gay marriage, Christian fundamentalists are now trying to make it harder to get divorced in Virginia.

The Family Foundation will be lobbying that state's general assembly this year to change current no-fault divorce laws for straight married couples with children. These faith-based busybodies want Virginia law to require both parties to agree to divorce before a marriage can be terminated.

Exceptions would be granted for abuse and cruelty (which is sure to lead to a spike in false claims of domestic violence). Married couples without children wouldn't be affected because marriage is really all about the children, dear. And there's nothing better for kids than one parent wanting out of a marriage while the other parent won't grant a divorce.

I chuckle profusely at the idea of those homophobic Virginians who voted to ban gay marriage not being able to leave their own marriages without their spouse's permission.