You Believe in How Many Gods?

Isn't "Spring Forward" Day strange? I mean, it's not like I was planning to do work for exactly twenty-four hours today; and yet, I feel like the loss of an hour has completely thrown my writing and reading plans into disarray. Not to mention that I normally spend way more than one hour a day doing absolutely nothing productive (often just stroking my goatee--and no, that is not a euphemism). So how is that losing this hour today has been so disruptive?

But if you're like me, you could probably use some cheering up as you plow into your (strangely daylit) evening hours. And so, Fosco offers you this picture, published earlier in the week at the HuffPo:

You may recall that Fosco is no fan of the air heir to the throne, mainly because he's dimwitted and cranky (Charles, that is, not Fosco). But Charles certainly isn't cranky here, is he? One wonders what that small Anglo-Indian girl could have said to make the Prince point and laugh like that. Of course, chances are he's not laughing with her. Isn't cultural difference funny?

From the Annals of Racist Cleaning Products

When Fosco bought a Clorox Bleach Pen today, he didn't realize he was purchasing a racially-targeted product. Until he got home and looked a little closer.

Let's zoom in for the detail. See?

Apparently, Fosco will not be allowed to use this item to clean Oz's laundry. Or, maybe Fosco is allowed to use it on Oz's laundry as long as Oz himself doesn't use it. At any rate, there are some complications here.

Fosco's next question, of course, is what type of stain removal item should be used by non-Whites? Does Clorox make such a product? Is such a product equally stain-removing? Any suggestions?

A (Hypothetical) New Addition to the Fosco Family

It's possible that Prop H8 isn't an entirely bad thing...

Now follow the logic here:

1. Once we allow same-sex couple to marry, then (as Fosco noted earlier) Fosco and his boyfriend Oz will want to get married.
   
2. And once we allow same-sex couples to get married, at some point gay couples are going to want to use advanced genetic engineering to make babies with each other.
   
3. And once that happens, it's only a matter of time until Fosco and Oz jump on the bandwagon and want to produce a child that is a genetic combination of them both.
   
4. And that leads inexorably to this:

Behold: the genetic combination of Fosco and Oz, as created on the website MakeMeBabies! (thanks, Mere, for the idea).

Of course, you may be forgiven for misrecognizing this as a baby photo of one of the Jackson Five (Marlon? Tito? Frito?). Is it just me, or does MakeMeBabies! think that either Fosco or Oz is Black?

At any rate, this horror-child must be avoided at all costs. And that's probably the best reason to support Prop H8.

Prop H8 Updh8

Yes, it's been literally days since Fosco talked to you about Prop H8. Don't worry, there is still Prop H8 news and Fosco is digesting it for you (so you don't have to!). Here are two Prop H8 titbits from the last couple of days:

• Tom Ackerman has a great trick to try on your married straight friends. As Ackerman writes:
  

  I no longer recognize marriage. It’s a new thing I’m trying.
  
  Turns out it’s fun.
  
  Yesterday I called a woman’s spouse her boyfriend.
  
  She says, correcting me, “He’s my husband,”
  “Oh,” I say, “I no longer recognize marriage.”
  
  The impact is obvious. I tried it on a man who has been in a relationship for years,
  
  “How’s your longtime companion, Jill?”
  “She’s my wife!”
  “Yeah, well, my beliefs don’t recognize marriage.”
  
  Fun. And instant, eyebrow-raising recognition. Suddenly the majority gets to feel what the minority feels. In a moment they feel what it’s like to have their relationship downgraded, and to have a much taken-for-granted right called into question because of another’s beliefs.

  Feel free to try this at home. Passive aggressive and funny... Fosco likes.
  
  
• In an NYTimes op-ed piece, Charles M. Blow considers how to sell same-sex marriage to Black people. Blow notes that Black women are likely to be the most hostile toward gay marriage (for a number of reasons, most of them unsurprising). Black women are also more likely to vote than are Black me.
  
  Blow argues that the arguments the gay community has adopted to promote marriage equality are not likely to convince Black women. Rather, he suggests we frame the debate in terms of the health of Black women! Here's the logic:
  

  [B]lacks overwhelmingly say that homosexuality isn’t morally acceptable. So many black men hide their sexual orientations and engage in risky behavior. This has resulted in large part in black women’s becoming the fastest-growing group of people with H.I.V. In a 2003 study of H.I.V.-infected people, 34 percent of infected black men said they had sex with both men and women, while only 6 percent of infected black women thought their partners were bisexual. Tragic. [...]
  
  So pitch it as a health issue. The more open blacks are to the idea of homosexuality, the more likely black men would be to discuss their sexual orientations and sexual histories. The more open they are, the less likely black women would be to put themselves at risk unwittingly. And, the more open blacks are to homosexuality over all, the more open they are likely to be to gay marriage.

  While this is worth a try, Fosco isn't convinced that it will make much of a difference. Really, what woman (of any race) is going to listen to the suggestion that she may be having sex with a closeted homosexual (or secret bisexual)? Blow's logic may make sense, but I just can't imagine any woman believing that his logic applies to her.
  

Your Prop 8 Omnibus

So there is this thing called Prop H8 that takes away marriage rights from CA gays (like, for example, Fosco). While the Obamagasm (which, btw, Fosco is not complaining about) has mostly kept Prop 8 out of the coverage of the MSM (although, see the eloquent Keith Olbermann plea), the internets are buzzing. So how can you make sense of it all? Who is there to read and distill all the Prop 8 coverage for you? That's where Fosco comes in.

1. First things first. Fosco needs to apologize for an earlier post in which laid partial blame on black voters for the passage of Prop 8. While there were indeed exit polls that suggested black voters supported Prop 8 at , there is good reason to be suspicious of these numbers. And, even if these numbers are correct, a thoughtful analysis reveals that the black support would still have been too small to pass the measure by itself. You can read these analyses here. Fosco plans to amend his earlier post accordingly and apologizes for jumping on this bandwagon.
   
   The question of how this black scapegoating came about is an interesting one. There has been much hand-wringing in the gay community about racism recently. This piece from Pam's House Blend is particularly thoughtful.
   But I do want to think that there are less-racist reasons why this story became a story. Because Fosco is a "literature-type," he would like suggest that the outrage over (possible) black support for Prop 8 is about the seductions of narrative. Here are two (related) explanations.
   
   Think about the surprise and anger that gay people and their allies felt on Wednesday morning when they discovered that California is so astonishingly retrograde. At that point, there was one set of exit polls available, those from CNN. The CNN exit polls were not particularly nuanced at this point, breaking down the results by five sets of demographics: age, religion, previous voting behavior (first-timers vs. regular voters), educational background, and race. All of the demographics except race followed Fosco expectations: old people are more homophobic, college graduates are more tolerant, etc. For Fosco (and, I suspect, for many people), only the last category provided any new information: the suggestion that black voters were more socially conservative than he expected (of course, as Fosco noted above, there are reasons to doubt the methodology of these exit polls and consequently their findings). But anyway, on last Wednesday morning, the exit polls seemed to offer one piece of new and interesting information (black support for the measure) that could then be subsumed into a narrative about the surprise passage of Prop 8.
   
   But, once this narrative (that black people "caused" the passage of Prop 8) became established, there was another reason why it became almost irresistible: its tragic irony. There is something in us (particularly in well-educated types) that loves a good irony and this narrative had it. The irony: the same social group (black people) that turned out in record numbers to help elect Barack Obama (a man that most gays ardently desired as president) also doomed gay marriage in California. In other words, one of Fosco's most wished-for outcomes (an Obama presidency) was fundamentally tied to Fosco's loss of civil rights. What high tragedy! No wonder this narrative was easy to embrace.
   
   Which is not to say that racism isn't implicit in these narratives (because it is, I think). My exercise here is not to excuse myself and the gay community from blaming black people for the passage of Prop 8; rather, it is to look for the ways that racism worked alongside/within other structures of meaning-production (such as narrative desire) to produce negative outcomes. Remember: complexity is a good thing.
   
   
2. So who is to blame for Prop 8? Well, as the always brilliant number-crunchers at fivethirtyeight.com note, a primary culprit is the elderly. According to Nate Silver:
   

   The good news for supporters of marriage equity is that -- and there's no polite way to put this -- the older voters aren't going to be around for all that much longer, and they'll gradually be cycled out and replaced by younger voters who grew up in a more tolerant era.

   Are we sure that we want to expand Medicare?
   
   
3. Of course, no round of blaming would be complete without Fosco's new favorite nemeses: Mormons and Catholics.
   
   Recently, Fosco focused his anger on those pesky Mormons. However, it turns out that the Catholics are a problem as well. For one thing, the involvement of the Mormons in this fight seems to have been orchestrated by the Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco George Niederauer (no, not that George Niederauer). According to an article in the SF Chronicle:
   

   The June letter from Niederauer drew in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and proved to be a critical move in building a multi-religious coalition - the backbone of the fundraising, organizing and voting support for the successful ballot measure. By bringing together Mormons and Catholics, Niederauer would align the two most powerful religious institutions in the Prop. 8 battle.

   That bastard! I just don't understand why any self-respecting Catholic would get into bed with the Mormons... Don't they know about the naked touching?
   
   As the article goes on to note, it is Catholics who responded to pulpit-pressure at the last minute who passed the measure:
   

   The last Field Poll, conducted a week before the election, showed that weekly churchgoers increased their support in the final week from 72 percent to 84 percent. Catholic support increased from 44 percent to 64 percent - a jump that accounted for 6 percent of the total California electorate.

   More proof that the Catholic Church is now waging an organized war against the individual consciences of its members (psst: Vatican II is dead).
   
   
4. And what about those Mormons? Well, they're still evil, of course (and not just because they are busily posthumously baptizing as Mormons Jews who died in the Holocaust).
   
   What were the Mormons saying at their anti-gay rallies? Here is a priceless paragraph from an article in that charmingly British "newspaper" The Economist:
   

   Mr Perkins [a Mormon] informed the crowd that gay marriage and tolerant school lessons are little more than “a recruiting process for homosexual behaviour”. Anybody who doubted the connection should take a look at Europe, where homosexuality is apparently rampant.

   That "apparently rampant" line is so deliciously dry. Nice work, Economist. (But, is Mr Perkins right?)
   
   But not all Mormons are evil. There are some who stick to their progressive beliefs, like the Feminist Mormon Housewives (kudos to you, ladies!). And such dissent is not easy, as noted by a comment to Andrew Sullivan's blog. According to the commenter:
   

   Those who openly speak disagreement with the church's orthodoxy are routinely excommunicated (you can easily Google public examples, most are secret). There are reports on public websites that Mormon Bishops even questioned individual’s actions supporting Prop 8 in “Temple Interviews,” a form of confessional where members validate that they are living up to the highest church standards.

   All of which makes the intolerance of the Catholic Church look like french kissing.
   
   So how does one deal with the Mormons? What if we actually took them at their word re: their support for other gay civil rights (just not marriage)? Well, someone has had that brilliant idea! Utah is about to become a lot more progressive...
   
   
5. And then there are just the garden-variety religious nutballs. Like the execrable flat-earther and View cohost Sherri Shepherd. This Defamer headline says it all,
   

   Sherri Shepherd Vows to Defend Biblical Definition of Marriage That She Cannot Remember,

   but you should still watch the insanity here.
   
   
6. Did you know that you can see who donated money to either side in the Prop 8 struggle? The searchable database is here.
   
   Note, this database apparently only includes donations greater than $100 (as the donations of Fosco and his friends do not appear). So don't assume that absence from the database means no donation was made.
   
   
7. Finally, what are we supposed to do about Prop H8 until it is overturned? Here are some good ideas:
   
   • refuse to pay CA taxes (caution: may only work for celebrities!)
     
   • protest, protest, protest (especially at Mormon "churches")
     
   • boycott Utah (Fosco's been onboard with this one for years)
     
   • boycott people who supported Prop 8 (See, this already worked! And worked again!)
     
   • did I mention protest?

How McCain Could Win

As featured on Guanabee:

Apparently, this is what Walnuts McCain would look like if he were actually a member of his secret black family. I don't know about you, but I actually think it makes Walnuts look more good-natured and approachable. Now this is a man I would want in the White House! (I guess this is no surprise, as television has been familiarizing us with crusty-yet-lovable old black men for more than thirty years. Like him. Or him. Or him.)

As for "Chet Obama" there: why are white people such dorks? (And is he wearing John Edwards's hair?)

All the details on this poster can be found here.

McCain's Secret Black Family?

No, not that secret black family.

But this one.

Follow the above link to the (boo! hiss!) Wall Street Journal to read a fascinating history of the descendants of the slaves owned by John McCain's great-great-grandfather, a family lineage that also shares the name "McCain."

Whether or not the Black McCains are related to Walnuts is an open question:

The black McCains of today were raised to believe that they were blood relatives of the white McCains, dating back to slavery times. White McCains say they're unaware of any biological connection between the families. A spokesman for Sen. McCain declined to comment.

Seriously, though, this is not a shot at John McCain (although I reserve that right for the future). It's just a really interesting story about the ways in which African American history in this country is entwined with official "white" history. This is Skip Gates territory, my friends.