Marlo Thomas gives us a brief history of the early 2nd Wave Movement, and in glass-half-full mode celebrates how far we actually have come, baby, while Dame Judy Dench has James Bond in drag and tells it like it actually still is in a video worth viewing.

Women in China are forced to celebrate the kinds of traditional roles and activities women have been forced to celebrate for millennia, while Air India and Air France fly 100% female-operated flights for Women’s Day.

Last but not least, Egyptian women get right down to it and hopefully will continue to ignite worldwide protests by demanding equality for themselves. UPDATE: Unfortunately, it didn’t go that well for them, but I have faith they will not give up.

I realized it as soon as I burst into tears reading Michael Moore’s quote about the Wisconsin protests today:

“It’s Been Decades Since I’ve Seen Anything Like This”

Oh, yes, thank Goddess, it must be true. Not being in Wisconsin, and with limited media coverage, it’s been difficult to gauge the intensity, the potency. But if that’s how Michael Moore characterizes it, it must be real. At long, long last, it must be true that the Spirit of Revolution has finally resurrected herself and is making a stand. At last.

As I said, I burst into tears.

Tears of relief, of release, of joy.  At long, long last We the People have awakened — again. We the People are about to take back our power, our government, and our nation. Or at least, that is the potential we have. Our struggle is absolutely no different from that going on in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and everywhere else where the instinct for Truth and Freedom has made itself known and will continue to make itself known.

The message that Obama delivers to us in no uncertain terms is: YOU are — must be — the leaders you’ve been waiting for.

Had he come into power and delivered all we THOUGHT we were getting with the blessed relief of a charismatic and we thought Progressive replacement for that dreadful, criminal George W. Bush, offering us Change We Can Believe In, we’d have sat back and simply enjoyed watching.

But watching isn’t what’s needed now.

We — the world and the planet herself — are on the cusp of a whole new era, the Aquarian Age, and it requires our full attention and participation. NOW, dammit, NOW. Old Piscean institutions, belief systems, structures and ways of being have to go. NOW, dammit, NOW. It will take more effort by more of us, standing up to The Piscean Powers That Be and saying: you’re done, through, out of here.

The Change We Can Believe In is us. It has to be.  Can’t get to the other side of this any other way.

Without getting all mystical, there are many different predictions of a dramatic change of course for this era — the End Times or the End of Time, a new Golden Age, an era of peace for 1000 years, the end of the Mayan calander in 2012, and so forth. I know in my heart it’s true and I know in my heart that my generation (boomers) and those who have come after have had and will have integral roles to play.  My generation changed the world, but only a little (compared to what’s coming). It will be up the the newer generations to take it from here and create that sparkling future. We boomers still have a part to play in that, but the thrust of the hard work and heavy lifting will have to rest on the shoulders of the younger generations — like the ones who are leading the charges in places like Egypt and Wisconsin.

I’m so proud of how well the Wisconsin protests have gone, and of how beautifully organized the students kept things, quite on purpose. They created a mini-city within the Rotunda of the Capitol, and it made me understand that the younger generation is every bit capable of creating all the new forms we are going to need.

Because what’s coming is very, very different from what we have now.

Ms. Riley is my kind of woman, and if I were in Kentucky, she’d have just earned another campaign worker. Do yourself a favor and read her fabulous response to the mealy-mouthed Profitt’s inappropriate and self-aggrandizing request for her intervention. Or her sympathy. Or something. Profitt is the joker who said Valle should apologize to him – apparently for jamming her neck and head stuck beneath his foot.

But this isn’t about rehashing all of that again. This is about the violence part, and the misogyny from which it sprang. I don’t know how anyone could look at that video and not see it for what it is, with the misogyny embedded in every second, every breath of all the participants. But again, that incident is not the intended focus here.

Ms. Riley’s strong admonition to Profitt –

“You don’t put your hands on women – EVER!” –

reminded me of a line of inquiry that has been playing on my mind for some time now.

You don’t put your hands on women EVER?  Why not?

Aren’t women supposed to be equal nowadays? If we’re equal, no one has to open doors for us, help us carry stuff, or hold back on hitting us, wouldn’t that make sense? After all, can’t we stand up for ourselves (now), right?

Well, first of all, beating someone up is usually considered assault, which is against the law. So even women should get some protection on account of that.

Another reason beating up women isn’t allowed (well, except sometimes, apparently)  is that we are usually smaller and weaker than men.  Men are expected to “pick on someone your own size,” instead of picking on the weak and vulnerable. Even though many women are actually taller than many men, and/or heavier, we’re still usually weaker.

But there’s yet another reason, which I fear has fallen into disfavor for lack of understanding of the principle, and definitely lack of adherence to the principle in this culture’s current era. The principle is embodied in that old mantra, “women and children first” for the occasion of sinking ships and such. Fortunately, we don’t have all that many sinking ships these days, certainly not with women and children aboard, but even so, would anyone think to mention that, let alone enforce the rule, if we did? Feels unlikely to me.

And why should it, anyway, you might ask. Well, children should be protected always, and I think most people would agree, because that’s any adult’s job — to protect a child in harm’s way. But should women get preferential treatment? If so, why? Doesn’t “equality” erase all such preferential treatment?

No, it doesn’t. And I’ll tell you why: Women are the givers of Life, and that doesn’t change no matter how “equal” we might get (or imagine ourselves to be). In earlier times there was somewhat more respect for Life, and for those who give Life, and a better understanding of all that means, probably because we were closer to Nature (more of us lived on farms or visited family who did).

And ours is NOT a culture that holds Life holy. We mostly hold death terrifying, something to be avoided at all costs, at all times. This antipathy toward Death is itself something of a denial of the sanctity of Life because Life holds Death as part of its never-ending cycle of Regeneration.

If this culture revered Life, it would hold the givers of Life in reverence as well, and we clearly don’t. In fact, we can see startling evidence of exactly what society thinks of women in this man’s actions, and the non-actions of those around him at the time.

Profitt demonstrated an extremely high comfort level during his act of stomping on a woman. He acted calmly, and with deliberation, and most of all with as clear a sense of entitlement as I have ever seen in someone who is accosting another or doing some other wrongful deed. So clear was his sense of entitlement that, as I’ve already mentioned, he later complained that she should apologize to him.

Where does such a sense of entitlement to beat up (or stomp on) a woman come from? How can that exist in this country? It wasn’t just a sense of entitlement to rough her up, but to egregiously do so in public  — with potentially hundreds of people, mostly strangers, looking on. Breathtaking in its audacity.

Breathtaking too in its implications as evidence of how women are thought of in our society. We are regarded so poorly that this man felt fully entitled to stomp on one of us before a crowd of strangerse. He felt no threat from those assembled, no threat from later reports (or even videos) of his activitie s– a calculation that later proved not at all accurate or reliable, but even so.

How can we be held in such contempt that such an assault is thought by some to be acceptable in our own country?

How can we be held in such contempt that we can still be beaten in our own homes by men who profess to love us? Raped, by men who choose TO sexualize their violent hatred of us? Stalked and too often killed by men who become enraged that they can’t control or “own” us, in much the same way we own animals, land and inanimate objects?

Too many women in this country (and the world) are still dying, every single day, simply because they are women.  It’s time to stop.

I want all men to hear Dea Riley:   “You don’t put your hands on women – EVER!”

And then I want other men to take up the cry as well. It’s unlikely the violence will ever stop until MEN make it unacceptable behavior.  Enshrined in law is good, an essential first step (hard won gains, they were, too). Making it unmanly (as it is) and inappropriate by other men will get us there faster.

Probably not. But the irony is killing me, and I have to get it out.

Before Obama was esconced in office, he confessed that he was very afraid of getting enclosed in a “bubble” once in office, so that he would lose touch with what the people of America were saying and thinking. He wanted to keep his cherished Blackberry in part to guard against that, and he reportedly reads 10 letters a day from Americans to guard against that. I wonder who chooses the letters.

Unfortunately, his worst fears have materialized despite his best intentions and feeble attemtps to avoid them.

He is in a bubble so dense and opaque that he can’t see or hear the American people, even when we speak as loudly and clearly as we did on November 2, even when the netroots and ALL of our famed commentators speak for us. There is just no way to reach him.

NO WAY TO REACH HIM.

You can write, call, email, fax, cry, scream, petition, shout, protest, pray — none of it works to reach him so that he can hear what we are trying to convey to him. I think it couldn’t be any worse if he’d been kidnapped and kept in isolation somewhere.

It didn’t help that his (thankfully former) Chief of Staff, DLCer and chief Corporatist Rahm Emmanuel, had such open contempt for the Left, for Obama’s base. And it doesn’t help that Obama is such a people-pleaser EXCEPT where his base is concerned. No, where his base is concerned he can throw them under the bus, upbraid, denigrate, deny, lecture and patronize with nary a second thought.

I had deep, deep concerns about Obama from the start of his candidacy, in large part because he was so infuriatingly pro-bipartisanship at a time when it was increasingly clear that for Republicans, bipartisanship means “be reasonable, do it our way.”

I eventually decided, based on the incredible outbreak of heartfelt love for him around the world that I must be missing something that everyone else knew.

I’m sure he’s a good and decent man. But he’s — well, no match for the Republicans and not enough of a leader in these trying times to make up for that.

I’m tired, dejected and heartbroken. From the very first day of the Bush administration, we had one horror after another, each and every day. It became more than I could bear, and yet I did — we all did. By the time we got to elect a Democrat, I certainly felt like we were owed some relief, and some accountability, and some reprisals and undoing some of the damage that had been foisted on us.

Instead, we got complicity. People-pleasing. Forward-looking instead of holding people accountable. We got more of the same breathtakingly illegal or abuse-of-power policies.

And we got lies. It’s not clear to me to what extent we’ve been lied to on other issues, but President Obama has consistently lied to us about the BP Gulf Oil Spill and the damage. And people will be dying earlier than they would have otherwise because he let BP poison our beautiful Gulf of Mexico without properly cleaning it up (as if it ever COULD be properly cleaned up). He protected BP, the huge multi-national corporation, over the citizens of his own nation. and one of our most beautiful and important ecosystems and commons. I don’t know how I can forgive him for that.

But the biggest frustration is his inability to hear ANYthing other than through his advisors, who’ve been dead wrong pretty much ever since he was elected.

And here’s the danger of that, not just for me but for millions and millions of Americans: we grow weary of caring. We drop out. Just as we disgustedly stayed home this past election. The biggest danger is that we might drop out and turn off to politics and our civic duties permanently. Most people will only take so much abuse before they stop hitting their heads against that brick wall and just walk away.

By the way, if you’re interested in a little laugh on me, here’s my overly optimistic take on the 2008 election. It was ridiculous.

Then Washington Post staff writer Robin Givhan takes exception to the sexism running rampant in the coverage, in that while “he gets the benefit of being perceived as an individual,” the mistresses are treated as “types,” and she takes strong exception to their jobs (e.g., cocktail waitress) getting slimed in the process. She too, however, can’t seem to manage to avoid jugmentalism on their sexual escapades:

In many ways, the women have gotten, if not what they deserve, then surely what they could have expected. They are being portrayed as tarts, self-serving women who have stretched the definition of right and wrong until it has snapped in two.

I have to confess. I’m really uncomfortable with “she got what she deserved” attitudes about women in any regard. Too often such a remark has been used to blame the victim (rapes, domestic violence, etc., ec.), and it certainly doesn’t play well in an article supposedly decrying the sexist coverage of all this.

But what I’m really annoyed about with regard to Givhan’s article is the fact that she completely misses — or glosses over — the very worst sexism in the whole mess: Tiger Woods’ serial infidelity. I saw his caddy Steve Williams interviewed this afternoon and one of the phrases he used was that Tiger had “made a mistake.”

Uh, no. Tiger didn’t make a mistake, Tiger busily pursued an entire way of life until he ran into an immovable object. He was busy purusing a way of life that demeans women, especially but not exclusively the one he’s married to, and did so as a matter of course.

You have to have a very deep disrespect for women to behave this way. I now want to know much more about Woods’ parents. I know — we all know — he was quite close to his father, but now I want to know about his Thai mother, Kultida, Earl’s 2nd wife — about his father’s relationship with her, and Tiger’s relationship with her. I want to know where or from whom he learned this deep-seated misogyny?

Here is the story of Hope (irony there) Witsell, from the righteous feminist blog “Sylvia Has a Problem.” Read it. Not much else I’ve got to say will make much sense if you don’t.

This story amply demonstrates in the starkest and most shocking of ways how the faux GLORY that attaches superficially to our (women’s) sexuality including our full or partial nudity when it’s on display for commercial purposes, or delivered over for the personal delights of boys and men (i.e., in pornography, also a commercial interest of course, but a more private one), versus the withering shame with which individual women can be castigated and ostracized when simply following what society lays out as the path to all that promised glory and acceptance, especially male acceptance.

You see, we women aren’t really free to simply enjoy — and share — our own sexuality on our own terms as Hope Witsell attempted to do. This 13-year old child-woman got caught up in a trend that I personally don’t approve of (sexting), but which should never have cost her her life. How UN-innocent could such a thing have been at age 13? One thing for sure: she’d never have done it had she understood the sheer hell she was about to unleash for herself.

Shame is perhaps the deadliest emotion there is, as we can see here, and sexual shame the worst possible flavor. That’s why suicides among gay and lesbian teens is so much higher than the rest of the population. I hope her parents live the entirety of their lives, every single moment, in deep guilt and regret for withholding the love, approval and comfort that their daughter so desperately needed in her crisis of shame. Instead, I believe they and all those who taunted and bullied her engaged in what Nicholas Kristof and his wife/ co-author Sheryl WuDunn call “discriminating against her to death” in their book Half the Sky.

I also have to cite John Bradshaw, therapist, former priest, and author of wonderful books on addiction and healing the inner child, that such shaming is itself a form of sexual abuse. NO ONE should ever be shamed for their basic, innate sexuality, nor for expressing it even if inappropriately (by some standards) or misguided ways. (Some young people who have themselves been molested and as a result act out sexually with other children should be healed, not shamed.) NO ONE should be made to feel, in Bradshaw’s inimitable words, that one IS a mistake rather than that one merely made a mistake, which is a temporary problem from which one can recover.

I think we can now also say that tough love can kill. I’ve always had my suspicions.

There are some wonderful comments on the blog as well. I’m especially fond of this one:

I wonder why it never occurred to anyone to just drag her to the town square and stone her to death.

And on the other hand, he was clearly exhibiting a sense of entitlement, the clear conviction that he was above the rules everyone else must follow. He clearly thought he could break his marriage vows and get away with it by insisting on privacy. Not an attractive trait at all.

Then Donny Deutsch on “Hardball” tonight reminded me that he is not just an adulterer but a serial adulterer. I know I’ve certainly lost count of how MANY women he’s been involved with so far. Not pretty, not pretty at all.

I rather hope Elin has left him (I’ve heard reports of her purchasing a multi-million dollar home in Sweden).

I hope she’s left him because serial adulterer always = serial misogynist. And no woman deserves to be married to a confirmed misogynist.

So there’s not an ounce of sympathy for Tiger in my entire being now, and likely never will be because misogyny isn’t something one can easily (or usually willingly) divest oneself of. It’s a permanent flaw, and as far as I’m concenred, a fatal one.

Their worst fears on the subject, and I’m convinced the main reason men support abortion rights for women at all (to the extent they do), is that they could become an unintended father and certainly want to keep their partners’ options as wide open as possible, and thereby their own options as well.

But then there are a few men who do get it because the woman they love has developed a troubled pregnancy and in some cases they have actually faced the possibility of losing their beloved in the process. Here’s one such young man:

I’ll never forget the day my wife decided to have an “elective abortion”.

OK, I guess that technically she didn’t decide, I did. You see, she was unconscious at the time. I’ve posted about this before, but the current debate about health care reform has brought out a host of individuals who claim that abortion is “elective” surgery, so I thought I would re-visit it.

Here’s how the love of my life “elected” to have an abortion.

One night after dinner, my sweetheart went to the toilet. I still thank God that I didn’t head downstairs to watch football. After a while I knocked on the door (at that time we were living in a one-bathroom townhouse), and received no answer. Eventually, I went in, and found my bride lying on the bathroom floor in a puddle of blood. We found out at the hospital that the child we were trying to have had been conceived as an ectopic pregnancy. We hadn’t even know she was pregnant. A therapeutic abortion and removal of her right fallopian tube saved her life, while reducing by half our chance to have the children we so devoutly hoped for. The doctor told me that had we arrived thirty minutes later she might have bled to death.

This is just one example. Difficult and life-threatening pregnancies are much rarer than they used to be, but they do happen, and sometimes they happen very late in a pregnancy (3rd term).

Let’s not forget too that women still die in childbirth or as a result of childbirth, which would make any law preventing a woman from freely choosing not to continue a pregnancy simply barbaric — every bit as barbaric as forced abortions would be.

Health and life aside, forced pregnancy also condemns a woman who may not want to be a mother to at least 18 years of mothering, or constant care for that child. In reality, we all know that the “constant care” a mother has for her children, even after they turn adult and have their own children, doesn’t truly end until the mother’s own life ends, or her child’s prematurely ends. That too is pretty barbaric: “We don’t care if you don’t want to take on the role of mother, you’re going to anyway, and the child’s welfare be damned.”

Sure, the child of a forced pregnancy could be given up for adoption, but that too is pretty cruel (aka: barbaric). Even women who don’t want to BE mothers (or not yet) usually have Nature’s own firmly embedded, hormone-driven maternal instincts to deal with. It’s very had to give up a child for adoption, even when you know it’s best for both of you.

It’s also a terrible thing to demand of a woman: You must bear this child you don’t want, and then after all the annoyances and inconveniences and demands of pregnancy (not to mention expense), after you’ve gone through the hell called childbirth, you can give it away and never expect to see or even know anything about the child you carried for 9 months for the rest of your life. Barbaric and inhumane.

Let’s cut to the heart of the matter for me: when women are forced to continue pregnancies they do not want, those women immediately become 2nd class citizens (0r worse) because the contents of their uteruses suddenly become much more important than the grown woman to whom the uterus belongs. Nothing about her life is as important anymore as that growing lump of protoplasm.

I’m no constitutional scholar, but I can’t see how forced pregnancies could in any way be considered equal protection under the constitution. She is a fully formed, adult human being and yet her rights have been suddenly subjugated to the unnamed, unborn, non-viable fetus.

It’s an outrage, frankly. And here’s another:

Any suggestion that women can’t be trusted to make moral, well-considered, sober decisions about themselves infantalizes women and also reduces them to something less than full humanity, full adulthood, full citizenship. Men’s choices about their health and their bodies aren’t routinely taken out of their hands by the state. No one ever thinks of it, let alone mentions it or seriously proposes it as a new law. But somehow, to some people, women an ‘t be trusted with all the decisions about their lives and bodies.

Here’s another outrage:

The notion that “life begins at conception” is a religious conviction, not a scientific one. If and when science could determine when the soul enters the body for good (assuming it could find/prove the existence of a soul), then we’d have something to talk about. In the meantime, it’s preposterous for any religion to try to impose its theology on the entire population, even if it is the dominant religion in our society (or thinks it is).

The big piece that men don’t get, though, isn’t usually discussed much. They may understand the above arguments intellectually (and agree with them or not), but probably not emotionally.

The piece they’re missing — even many of our good progressive men, I fear — isn’t usually talked about much, I think, because it is pure emotion. I myself get to sputtering when that level gets triggered for me. We’re talking about a purely visceral reaction — rage stirred up in many women’s hearts whenever legislators threaten our sovereignty over our own bodies, when they think it’s okay to subject us to the merest possibility of maternal mortality or 9 months of inconvenience (even if health never becomes an issue, except that bearing a child reduces your lifetime reserves so is always a health issue).

But that’s not all — depending on the individual woman, there’s also likely to be hysteria and panic, a sense of betrayal, and any number of other emotions. What would be YOUR reaction, you men, if legislators were seriously considering something that if enacted would potentially threaten your life, limit your ability to decide what’s best for you, your life, your family and your own body? You’d be enraged in a way that is difficult to articulate because it would make you, like me, a babbling idiot to even think about it. You’d play host to a range of nearly overwhelming and utterly visceral emotions.

Of course, there’s a strain of conventional wisdom that says that Republicans will never get rid of abortion: it’s far too useful as a whip to wake up their base and get them foaming at the mouth, opening their wallets, traipsing to the polls. It’s just too useful as a wedge issue. They could be right but an awful lot of damage can be done between here and a complete and total ban on abortion, and Ben Nelson’s amendment to the Senate Health Care Reform Bill is a sterling example.

Just how deep, strong and vigorous is this unnamed, usually repressed, unspoken vein of emotion on the subject of restricting abortion rights? Very. Shockingly strong. Think: Lorena Bobbitt strong emotion.

Sure, I’ll vote for him if he runs. But I won’t work for him or contribute a single dime. OTOH, if he has a primary challenger or two, they’re more likely to get my vote. The only possibly worse candidates I can think of are Blue-Dog Democrats — wait! make that Blue Dog Democraps — or Joe Liebermann.

In fact, I consider Lierberman an excellent comparison to Obama. The only worse betrayer of the people I can think of is Joe. Or actually, make that equal, not worse. Obama is probably worse: we’re talking dreams and hopes, horrible things for a man in Obama’s position to betray and yet he has done just that, again and again and again.

From upholding far too many of Bush’s illegal and power-grabbing practices, to protecting the entire Bush administration for all their wrongdoings (including not intervening for Don Siegelman), to his lackadaisical approach to the campaign promise to end DADT, to his non-performance as a leader on Health Care Reform, to all his wrong-wrong-wrong cabinet and other picks (again and again installing foxes to guard all the hens), to his apparent loss of memory over the promise to get us out of Iraq, and now finally this enhancement of the war in Afghanistan.

One of the things that made me the angriest and most disgusted with him was was letting his generals get away with the rank insubordination of leaking ANYthing to the press, but in this case leaking in an attempt which paid off handsomely, to manipulate him to their agenda. They should’ve been fired so fast it roused McArthur and Truman both.

I noted, but didn’t really listen to, at least one analyst on CNN last night making what was probably a convincing case that things are very complicated in that region — what with Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, India and perhaps others all trying to gain an advantage — so something needs to be done re Afghanistan.

Well, I’m not so sure. But no matter: I could care less. Enough is enough is enough. This is the last in a long line of transgressions. I’m reminded of what I have often told my husband or son after the very last transgression of whatever that I could stand: “Had you NOT failed on all those previous occasions, THIS one wouldn’t bother me to this great an extent. THIS one would get a pass as the others have too often gotten a pass. But I’m up to here, and can’t take any more, so YOU LOSE.”

Had Obama not been such a heartbreaking freakin’ disappointment on so many different levels and fronts, I could probably stand this Afghanistan thing. But, it’s not the last straw, it’s actually at least one straw beyond the last straw.

I’ve gone from elation, wide-eyed idealism and a form of reverence over Obama’s victory last November, to cautious optimism in the face of disappointments (in his appointments, in wrong-headed bipartisanship which can’t work in a vacuum, in his catering to Republicans while dissing his base, and so on and so on), to disgust and anger, to near-loathing, to (now), a numb sense of ennui.

I know I’m not alone. You cannot raise people’s hopes to the extent he did and then dash them to the extent he has without some serious repercussions. Someone in Washington needs to pay some goddamned attention, and fast, or I predict 2010 is going to be a bloodbath of Biblical proportions for the Democratic Party. Maybe they could listen, for a change, to Dennis Kucinich who speaks elouquently for me on this issue:

“Why are we still in Afghanistan? Al-Qaeda has been routed. Our occupation fuels a Taliban insurgency. The more troops we send, the more resistance we meet. If we want to be truly secure, we need to redefine national security to include financial security. Yet America has record debt, skyrocketing unemployment, huge trade deficits, record business failures and foreclosures.

“The people of Afghanistan don’t want to be saved by us. They want to be saved from us. Our presence and our Predator drones kill countless innocents, creating more US enemies and destabilizing Pakistan. The US-created Karzai government is hopelessly corrupt and despised by the Afghan people. Our solution: Provide him with a high-level US minder which will make him even less legitimate. Another strategy: Buy or rent “friends” among would-be insurgents and give them guns and cash. But when the money runs out they shoot at U.S. soldiers. We’ve played all sides in Afghanistan and all the sides want us out. They do not want our presence, our control, our troops, our drones, our way of life. We are fighting the wrong war, in the wrong place at the wrong time. What part of “get out” do we not understand?”

Let’s see, where to start?

Let’s start with Larry Craig, Senator from Idaho. You may remember that Craig was arrested on June 11, 2007, at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on charges that he solicited an undercover policeman for gay sex in an airport men’s room.

“But I’m not gay”
One of the most revealing comments by Craig in the aftermath — caught by no one else save moi AFAIK — was his insistence that he doesn’t participate in the gay lifestyle and therefore is not himself gay. Of course, those are not his exact words, and in fact you had to be listening rather carefully to catch his actual meaning, but it was unmistakable to me: It’s not real — and especially not true! — if you (a) deny it (especially to yourself?) and (b) don’t let it leach out into any other areas of your life, like your nice, tidy wife and children or your Senate career. Nope, keep it all behind closed (public bathroom) doors and tightly segregated from the rest of your life, your REAL life, and that demonstrates you’re not gay. You’re not participating in the gay lifestyle (whatever that is), you don’t admit or claim to be gay, ipso facto, or so the rationale goes, you’re not gay.

So with this illusionary layer of subterfuge, however flimsy, Senator Craig can reassure himself he’s not gay at all. He may have a few, um, weaknesses or perhaps bad habits that even he finds annoying (but oh so delicious) now and then, but nothing serious, you understand. He doesn’t live the gay lifestyle so he can’t BE gay!

He’s not alone. The Washington Republicans are replete with closeted gays, both those in elected office and those serving as aides. For a long time it was hard for me to understand how any gay (as well as any member of a racial or ethnical minority, or any feminist) could be a Republican.

Eventually I came to understand that too: If your homophobia is so strong you can’t even admit to yourself you’re gay (or have trouble doing so), then you’re going to want to be on the side that insists that homosexuality is wrong — exactly where no sane gay would reasonably be — and then if you vote long enough and hard enough against gay interests along with the rest of your homophobic political party, others will also see you as someone who “couldn’t possibly be gay — look at his wife and certainly his voting record as well,” no matter how many times you’re caught in the bathroom tapping your toes in a certain coded way. You now have the entire GOP serving as cover for you.

This kind of attitude (aka: rationalization) appears rampant among the legions of closeted gays of the GOP. They will consistently vote in line with their own internalized homophobia (aka: self-hatred) if for no other reason than that in their own minds, they simply cannot risk accidentally outing themselves, even if the truth of their personal lives is an open secret among their Congressional colleagues.

It would be funny, were it not pathetic: A homophobic society created aall those scary lies about homosexual men and women, and then somewhere along the line individuals began to believe those lies enough to scare themselves as well. It reminds me of when my son was a toddler and, dressed in what he thought was a scary mask and costume, charged Grandma with his best “boo!” Playing along all too wholeheartedly, Grandma put up such a horrific show of terrified wailing that she scared him. That’s what society’s homophobes continue to do: scare themselves.

Those Married Closeted Gays
Note that some closeted gay men do get married — and I’m not talking about to their gay partners. Sometimes these are marriages of convenience where the woman fully understands and is content to settle for the glamor of the role she plays (as an elected official’s wife, for example), or gets some other payoff. Sometimes the wife is completely unaware and/or in denial herself, as Larry Craig’s wife seemed to me to be on the few occasions I saw her on TV during this scandal.

Sometimes these closeted gay men have so completely repressed their own native sexuality that they have convinced themselves as well as their wives that they are heterosexual, with perhaps naughty temptations that they keep completely to themselves but find they have to deal with now and then. THESE are the men whose marriages are indeed threatened by homosexuality of any kind, anywhere and, presumably, who stand to be sorely tempted to abandon their traditional man-woman marriages if gay marriage is legalized and becomes “normal” to society’s eyes. After all, why stay where your heart really isn’t if there’s a better choice?

The only way it makes sense for anyone to be concerned that gay marriage or gay rights of any kind (including being free from discrimination and hate crimes) is a threat to anyone in any way is if they feel some homosexual temptation that they think is normal among the general population, and are fighting it with everything they’ve got.

There is actually substantiating data for my analysis — scientific validation:

Both groups exhibited increases in penile circumference to the heterosexual and female homosexual videos. Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli.

You can see how gay rights could very well threaten those marriages built on a shaky foundation.

TheTaskForce.org maintains a running list of automatically-conferred, selectively-denied rights that married couples enjoy, but partnered couples don’t. Check it out, why don’t you?
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