Month: June 2011

Pride vs. Prejudice

At this very moment, my heart is filled with so much love for my hometown of New York and the people who live, thrive, and survive in this crazy and magical place.  After a long fought battle, our political powers that be finally passed a bill to allow gay marriage and essentially give them mainstream equality.  Long overdue, I say.

Although I personally have no one to call my own, it fills my heart with joy to see friends and family and even the occasional stranger who has found true love and is proud to show the world just how they feel about their significant other.  I would love nothing more than spending my days, months, and years growing old with someone who shares my passions and encourages me to grow, and is content with the thought of having me by his side and having his back in return as we go through life in pursuit of our mutual goals. 

With that said, it’s not fair for those who have found that to be judged, ostracized and denied rights simply because a group doesn’t approve of whom they choose to spend their lives with.

In all honesty, my fellow heterosexuals haven’t exactly made a strong case for marriage.  In fact, we’re not exactly stellar examples when it comes to simple relationships, either.  Monogamy itself appears to be a dying tradition, as people tend to use past hurts and recurring fears as justification to act the hell up and subsequently jeopardize any chance of having stable and healthy partnerships.  The numbers are staggering when it comes to divorce rates and single parenthood.  In the long run it affects our children, who grow up mimicking what they see; the bitterness, the promiscuity, the emotionless attachments just to fill voids as a sad substitute for what they don’t see: genuine loving relationships.

So for those who have shown what it is to be committed and invested in a long-term partnership — and desperately want to hold sacred all that the vows entail — I say let them.

For all the flamboyance and over-the-top imagery that tends to be associated with homosexuals, I somehow managed to find the two tamest gay men out of the whole bunch to be the best of friends with.  Whilst I flounder in the love department, these two have successfully found partners with whom they have been in long-term monogamous relationships with, and have even had civil ceremonies because they couldn’t wait for the rest of the world to catch up with their progression.  One has recently adopted a beautiful baby girl to make their family complete, and the other has endured the greatest test of their union as he battles an illness that doesn’t discriminate — and it has proven to have made him and his relationship stronger than ever.  They both have inspired me in ways I could never imagine, and when I think of either of them being subjected to any hardship, it makes me want to start rolling up in Catholic churches and publicly remind them of their legendary hypocrisies.  But that would make me digress from loving my fellow (hu/wo)man.

So for this moment, I’ll share in the pride that millions have shown this past weekend, and pray that it’s the beginning of a new era in which love and acceptance stands at the forefront — making a clearing for people to be who they are without fear.  

…Something we all should aspire to. 

 

Public Display of Erection

As tragic as it is, it’s just too comical to ignore.  Do people not watch Dateline?

Countless careers  and public images have imploded for the dumbest reason in the history of man.  I sit here now thinking not how I should be disgusted as a woman because of the actions of people like Anthony Weiner or Tiger Woods… I’m more appalled by the lack of thought and consideration that prompted them to use multi-media messages and Facebook and Twitter to announce their horn-dog thoughts.

I’ve long abandoned any romantic thoughts that human beings have common sense, and that love and decency conquers all.  We live in a world where tabloids generate more public interest than real news, and sex tapes make people with no discernible talents into millionaire moguls and unlikely role models. 

But for someone like Weiner, who was riding high politically and personally — having an almost certain lock on becoming New York’s next mayor, and marrying a woman who all but guaranteed he’d have the blessing of Bill and Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail — the social networking sites will come to be his undoing.  That, and his ridiculously large, um, ego.  

That’s not to say that plenty of people haven’t succumbed to moments of delusional grandeur when armed with a camera phone during a lonely pause in their day, but one would like to think they had the good sense to either send them exclusively to significant others or — the more favored option — come to their senses and delete them entirely. 

But really people… How many times does this have to happen before it sinks in?  I was reading a New York Magazine questionnaire, in which readers were asked to choose the lines that were spoken by either Weiner or Tiger Woods, and I was shocked at how many I got wrong and what was said to the women on the receiving end of these messages.  Call me crazy, but if you have a lot to lose (for Woods, several hundred million dollars, endorsements, the wife and kids… for Weiner his entire political career and the little respectability he’d built for such an unfortunate name), why would you use such public forums to behave very, very badly?  One would think they’d learn from the colossal mistakes of their predecessors, but I guess when you reach a certain plateau in the public eye, the altitude up there must give people God complexes. 

Am I saying that they should have done what they did in private? In a way, I am.  My feminism is only matched by my realism, and the reality is men and women both act up when it comes to our carnal desires clouding our judgement.  We’ve all said and done things that in retrospect weren’t the smartest ways to go, and you can only hope nobody gets hurt in the process and you don’t lose more than a moment of dignity.  I’d rather their spouses not had the task of picking up the pieces of their broken lives in front of the world.  I shake my head at the women who, instead of putting these guys in check, encourage them further and then whine about how their privacy has been violated after they contact the media, and schedule interviews and hire Gloria Allred to further take our gender down the food chain. 

While Weiner’s not the only pol-idiot who was caught with his pants literally down, his mistake was being so defiantly dishonest and even egging the press on — further sparking the flames that burned him.  It’s unfortunate because New York has lost one of our toughest congressmen at a time when we need all the help we can get in this time of record job losses and other pressing issues that the world was briefly distracted from during this absurd scandal.

And although I am saddened by the end result of his lack of discretion, I must say he’s taught me a thing or two about how to spice up a text message!