And if I seem angry, you fucking motherfucker, it’s because I am. Angered and shocked. I’m used to being attacked by right-wingers obsessed with gay sex and fixated on anti-gay stereotypes. It’s a new and different sensation to be attacked so crudely by a man of the left—particularly when that man’s fat ass squats in a large glass house.
So says a very angry Dan Savage as he, as my friend Brian said, “basically rips the large intestine out of Garrison Keillor and strangles him with it”.
What has made columnist and author Savage so angry?
Well, radio personality Garrison Keillor wrote in his regular Salon column thus:
“Under the old monogamous system, we didn’t have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck. Today, serial monogamy has stretched the extended family to the breaking point. A child can now grow up with eight or nine or 10 grandparents—Gampa, Gammy, Goopa, Gumby, Papa, Poopsy, Goofy, Gaga and Chuck—and need a program to keep track of the actors…
… And now gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives. In addition to the ex-stepson and ex-in-laws and your wife’s first husband’s second wife, there now will be Bruce and Kevin’s in-laws and Bruce’s ex, Mark, and Mark’s current partner, and I suppose we’ll get used to it. “
Trouble is, as Savage explains:
Keillor has been married THREE TIMES. He has children from two of his marriages, children who presumably need a computer program to keep track of their step-siblings, half-siblings, and sprawling extended families, children that have to be “apportioned out on Thanksgiving and Christmas.” Okay, fine, whatever. Keillor can recognize marriage, life-long commitment, and less complicated family structures as the ideal, even if he himself has failed—failed spectacularly—to live up to that ideal himself. It might have been nice, however, if the withered old hypocrite had admitted to Salon readers that he has failed to live up to the ideals he’s espousing. How about a little full disclosure, Garrison?
But not only has he married three times, he’s also had long-term affairs. In fact, his second marriage failed because of his adultary.
Garrison Keilor is the author of books like Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts From the Heart of America. The book opens:
“I AM A Democrat, which was nothing I decided for myself but simply the way I was brought up, starting with the idea of Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, which is the basis of the simple social compact by which we live.”
Hypocrite!
But there is nothing I can really add to the majesty of Dan Savage’s full reply. Read it here.
And many gay Americans still think the party that gave America DOMA and DADT is a friend to the gay community. In broad strokes, the difference between the Left and the Right on gay issues is that the Right will tell you they hate fags to your face. That’s about it. Vote Democrat to get rid of that idiot Bush by all means, but don’t fool yourself that the Dems will do jackshit for gay folk.
And just to underscore this point. When Hillary Clinton was asked today by ABC News whether, in light of General Peter Pace’s outburst, she though gay people were immoral, she managed to muster this:
“Well I’m going to leave that to others to conclude.”
Keillor himself has advised the Democratic Party to “jettison” issues that the Republicans use to “divide” them. He said in a radio interview in Kansas recently:
“I think that gay marriage is also an issue that does no good for us and I want to see us divest ourselves of this,” Keillor says. “The symbolism of gay people marrying is terribly potent, terrible powerful, and we ignore this at our peril in our party.”
With friends like these, as Brian – a former supporter of Howard Dean – says, as he looks elsewhere.
Still, as Savage says, it always is “a different sensation” when crude attacks come from the Left. Sadly, he’d better get used to it.
