Random Musings

Okay, so while I’m still on a high from yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling striking down the Defense of Marriage Act and dismissing Prop H8 I found a truly wonderful story about the impact of the decisions.

Steven and Sean Brooks, a binational gay couple, were in court yesterday, in front of an immigration judge, whose ruling could have split up the couple because of DOMA.

According to Lavi Soloway, who represented the couple: “A copy of the 77-page Supreme Court decision in United States v. Windsor was delivered to the court by our summer intern, Gabe, who ran five blocks and made it in time for the decision to be submitted to the Immigration Judge and to serve a copy on the Immigration & Customs Enforcement Assistant Chief Counsel.”

‘DOMA is DEAD’ it announced.

The judge threw out the case against Mr. and Mr. Brooks because they are a legally married couple in America, entitled to all the rights of legally married couples.

I’m still grinning.

Kris Jenner, fame-whoring, daughter pimping, sex tape fronting, married to a woman—or so it seems on the surface—Kris Jenner is getting a talk show this summer.

Since all Kris can do is talk about her daughters, I’m wondering how long it will take her to whore our her latest grandbaby meal-ticket, and then how long before the show is cancelled.

In the words of Margaret Cho, “This is gonna be a Kardastrophe!”

We had a Free HBO weekend a couple of weeks back, so I went mad DVRing movies from that channel.

One was, of course, Behind The Candelabra, about Liberace’s love affair, and bad breakup, with Scott Thorsen.

I found it good, but sad; it wasn’t until Liberace’s mother passed away that he felt he could truly be free as a gay man, though he remained deeply closeted until his death, and even afterwards.

That said, the shallow part of me, which I love, is beginning to run an ad campaign to see that Matt Damon’s Ass gets an Emmy nod.

It was real, and it was spectacular.

A little more on DOMA? Okay.

Some who are much more familiar with the rulings are looking very closely at the decision, for clues on how the court might rule on future challenges to state laws barring gay marriage. And they think they’ve found something ….

Buried in the decision is a reference to the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia, in which SCOTUS struck down a state law against interracial marriage as unconstitutional. To LGBT advocates, that reference looks as if it might signal a readiness on the Court’s part to do the same to state laws banning gay marriage.

In Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court ruled that the Virginia law outlawing interracial marriage was unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, ruling that the freedom to marry must not be limited by discrimination and that the Virginia law had no legitimate purpose other than maintaining discrimination.

And that’s exactly the argument that lawyers in the Prop 8 case made in asking the Court to strike that law down. Now, SCOTUS declined to take a position on Prop 8, invoking standing issues, and it did not directly address the question of whether states could or couldn’t continue to refuse to marry gay and lesbian couples, and it did not declare a constitutional right to marriage.

But the DOMA decision made an expansive case against discrimination based on sexual orientation, and more specifically, the citation of Loving v. Virginia which could be an encouraging signal.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

So, the other day I’m watching TV and one of those wacky commercials came on, this time for something called the Air Curler. It’s an attachment to a blow dryer that looks like it has a plastic pitcher on the end of it. You, um, insert your hair into the pitcher, turn on the blow dryer, and your hair is magically spun into delightful curls.

Stupid? Of course. But then I saw something else when they removed the Air Curler from the blow dryer.

To put it bluntly, it looks like one of those Cock Sleeves that some men—and I ain’t naming names—slip over their penis and then proceed to, um, jack off pleasure themselves, until they cum into the patented Cum pitcher.

Sorry for the mental image, but it had to be said.

But … speaking of that device, Carlos and I have started watching Hannibal, having DVR’d the season.

It’s quite gruesome, so far—but I expected no less—and really interesting.

It doesn’t hurt that it stars the Pia Z’adorbale Hugh Dancy. Oh, he’s not Hannibal—that would be –he’s the FBI investigator who begins working with Dr. Lecter.

But he’s a delightfully cute man.

In Light of the deaths of DOMA and Prop H8, here's a little refresher course on what to say, and not say, to The Straights.

I got caught up in the Jodi Arias movie on Lifetime the other day.

Back story: I had the shingle on my face about three years ago. Shingles affects the nerves and, in some cases, the sufferer endures constant nerve pain for the rest of their lives. I do not; I do, however, get very bad, very bad, headaches located in the same spot where I had the shingles. I used to get them about once a month, and then less often and less often, to the point where I’d forgotten about them, Until Monday night when one struck, turning me into a light-sensitive vampire, who sits in a dark dark room until the pain subsides, generally 24 hours later.

Which was why I was channel surfing and came upon the Jodi Arias Lifetime movie.

All I gots to say about that is: Bitch was cray. Way cray.

So cray I am surprised that her attorneys didn’t use the insanity defense.

Cray.

Gee, ain't it funny? 

Just when you think things have changed .... The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?

Paula Deen. Her restaurants are packed, her books are flying off the shelves, but she’s losing some big deals, y’all. And I kinda wish I had a Way Back Machine, so I could travel back in time and apply for a job as one of Paula Deen’s minions and tell her, as nicely as I could, to STFU before she opened her yap.

The Food Network said Pack her knives and go … literally … and now Smithfield, whose products Paula used to hawk, have canned her ham … see what I did there? … and rumor has it that QVC will quickly follow suit.

There is also talk that Deen’s publisher, Random House, may close the book on her, and diabetes drug makers Novo Nordisk and Sears Holdings are said to be “monitoring the situation.” Then, let’s toss in Harrah’s Hotels and Casinos, which have Paula Deen Restaurants in their casinos, who have decided to rebrand her restaurants as something other than Paula. Even WalMart … Wal-freaking-Mart … has decided to take Paul’s dishware and cookware off their shelves.

Now, you can say that this is all a lot of Who shot John? Over words Paula Deen may have used decades back, but it’s also about a history of Paula Deen and her treatment of African America employees at her businesses.

I recently caught sight of a video from 2012—last year—and taped by the New York Times, where Paula was asked about her ancestors who were slave owners and the story of her great-grandfather who killed himself when his slaves were set free: “Between the death of his son and losing all the workers, he went out into his barn and shot himself because he couldn’t deal with those kind of changes…Back then, black folk were such an integral part of our lives. They were like our family, and for that reason we didn’t see ourselves as prejudiced.”

Trouble is, after that bit, she then tells the interviewer and the audience that she has black people in her employ who are just like family. One, and I think she said his name was Hollis Johnson, was a particularly dark-skinned man, or, as Paula put it, pointing to a black wall behind her, “He’s as black as that.”

Yes. She did. And then she dug herself in deeper. When asked if Hollis was there with her that day, Paula looks around and asks, “Hollie? Hollie? Where are you? Oh, get away from that black wall, we can’t see you.”

Yes. She did. I was all about giving Deen the benefit of the doubt for her use of the n-word, thinking about when she said it, where she lived and how she was raised, and that she said it, apparently, so long ago. But, while she may not toss about the n-word as handily as those old days, the way she speaks of African Americans—even the ones she considers “like family’”—and the way she treats her African American employees, makes me hope that everyone cuts ties with Deen. And fast.

Like I said, though, I would have liked to have access to a Way back Machine and given Paula, and anyone else who thinks and speaks like she does, a heads up about their future. Maybe then they’d think twice, and speak less.