A Hillary Clinton Thought

Maybe Hillary Clinton decided to say something nice about Nancy Reagan by talking about her stance on stem cell research, and had a brain fart and said "HIV/AIDS" instead? If so, that was her second mistake. Her first was wanting to pander to the right-wing nuts in the first place.

In a situation like this, where the deceased isn't worthy of adulation but you want to be respectful, all you do is offer condolences to the family. That's it. Hillary, in trying to score points with conservatives -- who will never, ever, show her the same courtesy -- offended many of her core supporters (in November, if not necessarily during the primaries) -- people of a certain age who lived through the days of the despicable Reagan administration. In case you weren't alive then, or somehow have forgotten that bastard, here's Dan Savage's rant.

Nancy supported her husband's evil, reportedly abandoned her friend Rock Hudson when AIDS was killing him, and only started advocating for stem-cell research after Ronnie was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. And her puerile "Just Say No" anti-drug effort, if anything, did more harm than good.

If Donald Trump becomes our 45th President, remember this day.

Dan Savage To White House: F.U.

The White House has a blog. It's not written by the President or First Lady or one of the kids, so it's not something I'm going to check out on even an occasional basis. However, there's a post there titled "It Gets Better." The post contains the transcript of a speech made by Senior Advisor to the President Valerie Jarrett at a dinner in Washington for the Human Rights Campaign. Even though she spoke about all of the recent suicides, it's pretty much the same self-congratulatory and self-serving pablum that comes from the administration. And Dan Savage called them on it. (As you can guess from the title of my post, he drops the F bomb on them.)

What would amaze me, if I were able to be amazed by the doings of politicians and their flunkies any more, is that they take "It Gets Better" as the title for the post, but don't bother to post a link to the It Gets Better website.

It Gets Better: The Miracle Of Love

My thanks to a friend who is known on the Interwebs as LCM, Centre of the Known Universe, for posting this video earlier..."The Miracle of Love" by Eurythmics:



I'm posting it because it makes me feel better to hear it after all of the stuff that follows this sentence, and perhaps it will make you feel better as well.

Last week I wrote about the It Gets Better video project started by sex-advice columnist Dan Savage in response to the news of 15-year-old Billy Lucas of Greensburg, Indiana, who committed suicide after being bullied and harassed nonstop by anti-gay bigoted thugs in his high school. It's designed to get the message out to kids who are struggling -- because of bullies, "religious" people, bigoted school officials and parents and the like -- that suicide isn't the answer, that if they hang on and get through this time in their lives, they'll one day escape their circumstances by going to college or moving to a big city with a stronger gay presence, and their lives will be so much better.

Just since then there were two more young kids who killed themselves after being bullied.

Message For LGBT Youth: It Gets Better

In response to a suicide by a gay teenager from Indiana who hung himself after relentless bullying at his high school, sex-advice columnist Dan Savage has started a YouTube page, the It Gets Better project. He explains the page in his column:

"My heart breaks for the pain and torment you went through, Billy Lucas," a reader wrote after I posted about Billy Lucas to my blog. "I wish I could have told you that things get better."

I had the same reaction: I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

But gay adults aren't allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don't bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

His idea: having adults make a video in which they talk about how they survived growing up despite abuse and hate and bullying, and now are living wonderful lives, passing on the message that no matter how bad things are, they'll get better. Dan and his husband filmed the first one. Watch it after the jump...

Savage Love

I'm a big fan of Dan Savage's sex advice column, "Savage Love." I definitely recommend his books: "Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America," "The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant" and "The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family" if you haven't read them already. (The image shown is from a compilation of letters from his column. Don't click to look inside from this photo -- you have to do that at Amazon.com.)

But this is about a letter in this week's column. I'm sure his sometimes caustic advice isn't everyone's cup of tea, but on the other hand, I'm sure he gets many letters that aren't possibly from people with real problems. There's a lot of...creativity...in them. Whether or not this particular writer is making it up, Dan's answer made me laugh...

My mistress wants to deny me the pleasure of regular food. We want to create a "slop" that I can eat four to five times daily that is highly nutritious but as bland-tasting as possible. Any ideas? Can you consult a nutritionist? -- Seeking Slave Food

Are there any vegan restaurants in your area?