I would rather not expend my precious space on this page growling at Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. But the man is a twit and gets twittier by the day.
Stymied by the attorney general in his obsessive quest to stop the full same-sex marriages that will begin May 20, as ordered by the state Supreme Judicial Court, Romney has taken to championing an 89-year-old state law that was designed to prevent people of different races from marrying each other.
The law prohibits people from getting married in Massachusetts if their home state would not allow the marriage. Massachusetts permitted interracial marriage before some other states did.
Interestingly, Romney seems to think this law applies only to people from the 38 states where same-sex marriage is specifically banned and not to people from the other 11 states where same-sex marriage is not possible but also is not explicitly banned.
Of course, all these gay-marriage bans, including the federal Defense of Marriage Act, eventually will be found unconstitutional, as will laws that allow one state not to recognize another state's marriages. Constitutional notions like 'privacy,' 'equal protection' and 'full faith and credit' will be their undoing.
In the meantime, though, the governor of Massachusetts is actually using a blatantly racist dinosaur of a law to try to limit the number of same-sex marriages that take place in his state. That is unconscionable, and it's very surprising that the media isn't saying so.
Mitt Romney someday will be ashamed of his actions in this particular civil-rights struggle. History will remember him in the same paragraph as former Alabama Gov. George Wallace who, in 1962, declared, 'I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.'
What a legacy, Mitt.
Wank
It seems the U.S. government wants you to engage in some solo, oral, anal or nocturnal emissions.
The National Cancer Institute surveyed and tracked 29,342 men aged 46 to 81 and found that those who ejaculated 21 or more times per month over their lifetime were 33 percent less likely to develop prostate cancer than men who ejaculated only four to seven times a month.
And people who came at least 21 times a month during the previous year were 51 percent less likely to have been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
The findings were reported in the April 7 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Chief author Michael Lietzmann told Reuters that frequent ejaculations may decrease the concentration of 'chemical carcinogens which readily accumulate in prostatic fluid' and reduce development of crystalloids 'which have been associated with prostate cancer in some.'
The lead author of an earlier Australian study that came to the same conclusions, Graham Giles, concurred: 'The more you flush the ducts out, the less there is to hang around and damage the cells that line them.'
I already set aside 10 minutes a day to use my high-tech 'Sonicare' toothbrush to promote gum and tooth health. Depending on how this new mandate is implemented, I'm lookin' at an additional five minutes to one hour a day, it seems.
But, hey, it's a health thing! And if the current U.S. government says ejaculating is good for you, you know it's gotta be true, because the current U.S. government is otherwise all about trying to get you not to have sex.
I imagine some fundie activists hate this study, and Catholic honchos are probably having conniptions, given that masturbation is a 'mortal sin.'
But the take-home message is oh-so-clear: Shoot daily, one way or another.
The L Word
The housemates and I watched every episode of the first season of Showtime's The L Word. I like it better than they do, but they haven't axed it from our schedule yet.
Some of the plot twists are a little contrived and some of the dialog is melodramatic, but all in all, the show does an OK job of representing some of the lesbians who have passed through my life.
The ones that aren't there are the PC dykes I remember from my days in Chicago (1987-1993). I worked at a newspaper totally run by lesbians and had the delicious opportunity to interact with a broad spectrum of lesbians that I wouldn't have met or hung out with otherwise.
Comedian Kate Clinton has argued that the PC dykes I remember are more or less a thing of the past—and my hunch is that that's right.
Housemate Bob was beyond annoyed by The L Word's 'male lesbian' plot line where one of the girls was dating a cute, sensitive guy who identifies as a lesbian. He'd never heard of that. I hadn't either. But I googled it and apparently it's not pure fiction.
Both housemates proclaimed to not understand the 'drag king' phenomenon and, I must admit, it does strike me as lesbians mimicking a particularly moldy and boring piece of gay male culture.
Otherwise, The L Word dykes are fun to watch, much of it has the ring of truth, I've taken an actual interest in some of their journeys, and I think it's excellent that lesbians, for the first time, have a home on the small screen.
If you have a few extra bucks, you might shell out some dough to reward Showtime for all its groundbreaking gay programming. And the higher ratings your subscription creates will, of course, result in even more gay TV. Hollywood lives to copy-cat.
And that will drive the fundies crazier than they already are, annoy sectors of the Bush administration, and boost the already-advanced project of washing away America's homophobia and replacing it to homo-familiarity.