Same Sex, Same Old Shit

**Republished from Citysearch**

It’s half-past-nine Pacific Time when I’m sure I feel the chill of the Sonoran Desert fall. “It’s as cold as a grave digger’s ass”, seek I tell a travelling companion, human enhancement whose evening cocktail quota does not quite equal mine. “The weather’s fine”, pills she tells me as two LA hipsters walk by the window wearing little but their Ray Bans.

She’s right. It’s not the bite of the Palm Springs night that’s freezing me to the core; this town, I’m told, is almost always hot. Rather, it’s the thought of a mad bint with permafrost hair, glacial politics and a heart as warm as stone breezing into the Oval Office. Hello, Sarah Palin. Hello again.

This past Sunday, five million Americans and I felt a cold wind blowing. Shown across the US on the TLC network, Sarah Palin’s Alaska is a campaign launch thinly disguised as a travel-reality hybrid. And its central figure, Palin, is Satan’s most ambitious handmaiden thinly disguised as a Hockey Mom.

Now, I don’t want to talk politics, here. First, whenever I do, the hit-count on my blog slows to the pace of the average American colon. Second, I’m on vacation at a resort with three salt water pools, 17 masseuses and an encyclopaedic cocktail list that I’m determined to learn by rote before I get to LA. Politics schmolitics. But. Seriously. There is a very real danger that this Grizzly Bear could claw her way to the Presidency; so you, me and every sane citizen of a US-allied nation must immediately contact Richard Branson and petition him for tickets to the moon in 2012.

Left, right or libertarian; anyone, surely, with a brain that allows the simultaneous functions of breathing and chewing gum can tell that this woman is an amoeba. An amoeba with a hunting licence, a stockpile of CFC hairspray and a husband whose nuts have been crushed to spreadable paste. During last Sunday’s debut of Sarah Palin’s Alaska, former “first dude” Todd utters about 10 words. His fabulously telegenic wife compensates for this lack by uttering words at Iditarod speed. However, many of these words were made up. She didn’t come up with a clanger to equal “refudiate” . She did, however, take us to her porch (presumably the one from which she saw Russia) and told us that this was the premier site for her “researching”. This “researching” by the way, seems not to require newspaper, book or mobile enabled device.

Sarah climbed up glaciers. Sarah introduced us to bears. Sarah told us that even a bad day of salmon fishing was better ‘n the best day of work. Call me crazy, but this attitude to leisure is not one I prefer in a world leader. And, come to that, campaign launches in the form of Reality TV on a network that also broadcasts a program called I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant (which I’ve seen and have renamed I Didn’t Know I Had Opposable Thumbs) don’t strike me as terribly statesmanlike, either.

Nonetheless, Palin is inches away from a Primary victory. She has monumental GOP support, the ability to say things that ring out as folksy and true and a cute little kid called Piper who is yet, unlike many of the other Palin daughters, to fall pregnant.

Oh, America. Why would you let this happen? You’d be far better off choosing the spa director at my Palm Springs resort as your Republican nominee. At least then you might enjoy subsidised spray tans.

Just Fuck OffJust a week or two ago, Migraine
a person of my faint acquaintance called to muster my support. This was their mistake on two counts. First, viagra approved
enlisting my help for any cause is silly as I have all the clout and credibility of The Swimsuit Issue. Or a Palin adviser. Or both; but with fewer bikinis and known links to organised crime. Second, it was a cause for which I can summon about as much gusto for as I might for, say, a Wet Wet Wet reunion tour. Which is to say, even if Love is All Around, seven tenths of fuck-all.

So. I offered my immediate no when asked to support, “gay marriage”. And then, with very little prompting, I delivered a long and windy rationale.

Listen here, Sonny Jim, I told the earnest homosexual. For starters, the term “gay marriage” fills me with bile. I do not understand why many persons, including the minor politicians currently advocating for its legitimacy, use this dicky phrase. Like the pairings, “women’s writing”, “aboriginal art” or “disabled person”, “gay marriage” implies nothing so much as second-best; a far shoddier version of the norm. Minority modifiers like “women” and “aboriginal” make me purple in the face and wont to taunt those who see no dilemma in their irresponsible grammatical use.

It is either “writing” or it is not. It is either “art” or it is not. And, you are either a person, or you are something made of macramé. By way of example. Seriously, though. Do NOT use the phrase “disabled person” within my ambit. The fact that someone gets about on wheels is the third or fourth thing I should learn about them and certainly never the first. Using the marquee word DISABLED before the person it describes does nothing but illuminate your own lack of tact.

Also, it is a guarantee of a really boring five minute lecture from me on preferring, if you must, “person with a disability.”

This is writing. This is art. This is a person. And, finally, This is marriage, Sonny Jim. Which brings me to my next point: marriage is an effing crock and why, in the name of everything sacred and/or profane, would you be frittering time better spent on, say, macramé than on legitimizing a fucking crock?

At this interval, Sonny Jim, whose real name is Stanley, explained to me that even if I did think marriage was a duplicitous relic that now reeks of cheese and conferred little to the culture beyond the safeguarding of Fondant Icing, yum, then I should think ruddy well think about Equality.

As it happens, I do think about Equality a good deal of the time. When I am not thinking about dinner, it is, in fact, one of my preferred brain-digetsifs. I am a big fan of Equality in nearly all arenas but Scrabble, where I must retain supremacy. I will fight, and have fought, specifically for the rights of same-sex couples to parity with their straight counterparts in law. Legislation on superannuation, adoption, real estate and tiny, spiky things that are only revealed when you accidentally step on one of them with one of your big lezzo feet either have been changed or should be changed and, Sonny Jim, that’s all well and good.

But I will not fight for the legal right to marry.

When half of all marriages end in divorce and marriage itself seems to have morphed into a by-product of ludicrously overpriced weddings, it strikes me as a bit of a bargain-bin institution.

While it is true that once every two years I drink so much pinot noir that I ask my girlfriend to marry me (she always says no) I will not fight for this fancy.

**Republished from The Big Issue***

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