Today was hard.

It was hard to see the inevitable fallout of last November’s elections today – a fallout we in Minnesota have largely been saved from on a broader level by Mark Dayton’s presence in the governor’s office. There is no veto pen for a constitutional amendment, and so the now all GOP majority MN Senate was free to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and send it on to the House (where it will also pass).

I am no fan of the GOP. They are often willfully oblivious (god, I hope it’s obliviousness) to the social impact of their economic policies, chanting some starry-eyed Randian mantra of “the free market will save us all.” (Get back to me when you’ve had to actually buy your own health insurance, kiddos.) More often than not, I think they lack the ability to see life through someone else’s eyes – to imagine what it would be to have a different existence.

Sometimes, though, I think they enjoy the cruelty that can be enacted when you have power.

Today isn’t the only time I’ve thought this, but it was the most personally painful.

I listened to the testimony for a while, I’ve read the condensed versions of what happened and here are the takeaways:

LGBT and LGBT-supportive did an excellent job of explaining the humiliation this amendment will bring on our state – the hostile 18 months we are about to embark on that will leave scars even if Minnesotans vote no on the amendment. They reinforced that not one family would be helped with the passage of the amendment; they asked Limmer etc. what problem they were trying to solve with this.

The reply? “Activist judges” and “we just want to define marriage.”

What that said to me is: we want to do this because we can; because it will bring our voters to the polls; and because there is not a single story or group of stories compelling enough to make us reconsider because – in reality of realities – we think that you are less than we are and undeserving of basic human kindness.

If you listen to their inability to express what exactly it is they’re worried about or fighting against, they just can’t bring themselves to say what they really think so they insert “activist judge” or “we’re just defining” as though those are actual explanations.

I’m really sad today, especially as a Minnesotan. I’ve been so proud that we weren’t like those other states who were cruel enough to use their LGBT population as legislative punching bags. Proud of the DFL for keeping the Bachmanns of MN at bay.

And now I hear people talking about being ashamed of Minnesota. I said it while I was trying to cope with this brand of cruelty politics, but I’ve changed my mind.

The GOP isn’t giving us a choice on this – Minnesotans will have to reject this brand of cruelty politics in November of 2012 when we are actually going to be asked to enshrine anti-lgbt legislation into our constitution. There will be a massive amount of misinformation put forth (cruelty politics can’t succeed without scare tactics and actual lies) and we have to educate the public and get people to the polls.

This is not about marriage. This is a referendum on whether or not LGBT people are welcome in Minnesota as full partners in this state.

Enlist yourself. Go to Outfront and sign onto the email blast at the very least. Talk to your family and friends.

The Minnesota that I believe exists will reject this. But we have to help.

So there’s going to be a marriage equality bill of some sort weaving its way through the Minnesota legislature this year, and it’s nice and will lay good groundwork for the future, but with Pawlenty in office for the next two years, nothing is going to happen. If anything does happen, I will happily be rendered speechless, but in the meantime…

State Sen. Paul Koering came out a few years ago. He’s a Republican, which is relevant in that his status as gay has not equaled any sort of desire to protect peoples’ civil rights. According to the MN Independent, he said that “he would vote against it because the state faces bigger problems.”

I think that’s the new Republican line. It’s a crisis, we have no time for gay rights! Except that, well, marriage is also a financial structure and when people are losing their jobs…relationships with a little government backing have another layer of security in place. A crisis is actually a very compelling time to right the wrongs that we have entrenched into our laws.

But tonight I’m mentally throwing my hands up in the air. They always have some excuse for not dealing with things – politically and personally. If we have a relationship that’s public, we’re “flaunting our sexuality,” and if we keep things private, we’re lying to them. There’s never the right time, the right place, the right venue to have conversations about our lives.

And, yes, I’m totally talking around something right now. But it isn’t mine to wave around online, in public, so I’m trying to make a roundabout argument and failing. So here’s what I’m going to say:

Get over yourselves.

I’m so sick of bigots acting like seeing gay couples holding hands is the equivalent of having hardcore pornography paraded down the street (*think of the children!!*). I’m sick of bigots moping and whining about how hard it is to have to endure the existence of people whose lives don’t mirror their own. Yes, it must be so freakin hard for you to wake up every morning knowing somewhere two guys got out of bed together and are eating cereal. The agony!

This entire blog post sucks. I’m not eloquent, I’m not crafting a damn thing…I’m just exhausted and pissed off. I’m pissed at the bigots and I’m pissed at people like Koering whose capitulations just encourage them.

In other news, my mom got in a fight with a conservative friend of my dad’s the other night during which time I believe she called W a baboon. Which, if you knew her, would be hilarious. I also got her thinking about calling Pawlenty to yell at him about how her daughter has to leave the state to get married. That would be awesome.

In truly uncharacteristic fashion, I’ve not commented yet on the election at any length. Unlike many recent elections in which I got used to complete and utter depression after the votes were counted, this year left me torn.

When the news outlets called it for Obama, I felt it in my heart. He’s certainly mortal and will make decisions I don’t agree with during his time in office, but I have so much confidence in his ability to do more good than harm. That might sound like a backwards compliment, but it truly is a compliment. Every choice has a downside. But I believe that on the whole the choices Obama makes will be good.

It doesn’t hurt that he’s coming into office with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. We’re going to see a lot of changes. If you’re interested in some of the planning, Obama has a website at change.gov and I can’t tell you how elated I am to see the role of advancing technology in his administration.

But, of course, Obama’s resounding victory was not the only thing that happened on November 4th. The anti-gay ballot initiatives that passed in Florida, California, Arkansas, and Arizona were heartbreaking. (CA and AZ went against gay marriage, FL went against domestic partner benefits, AR outlawed unmarried people from fostering/adopting children).

I’ve been thinking about the way the Internet helps/hurts us as we process information. And I’m going to come out in favor of the Internet on this. In the wake of the passage of Prop 8 in California, a lot of media and vocal gays seized on the exit polling in California that said 70% of African-Americans voted for Prop 8. For about a week, the anger and hurt in some segments of the GLBT population blinded them to the racism that came pouring out because of that statistic.

But here’s the good thing – there are seriously awesome blogs run by people of color, like Pam’s House Blend, that led the online voice in calling BS on that line of thinking. Regardless of whether that statistic is accurate or not, the population of African-Americans in California is not large enough to have caused the proposition to pass or not pass. It’s a red herring.

And I think there is regrouping going on. I’m hopeful that the racism of the reaction of some white gays raises that issue for mainstream organizations like the HRC to what many other GLBT folks have said for a long time though – all these “isms” are gay issues.

What I’ve seen this week is people like Bill O’Reilly trying to entrench the racist narrative, and I think we’re too smart for that. Once O’Reilly’s ilk start exploiting something, I’m hopeful that even the most oblivious among us know to question its truth.

Anyway, while I know there are serious issues other than gay marriage that need to be addressed, I think this election was a wake up call to us as a whole. People still don’t respect us. If I’m being generous, I’ll say that they don’t understand and we’re not making compelling arguments.

Either of those statements make me depressed.

I’ll be at the Prop 8 protest this weekend, and I encourage anyone who cares about their gay family members or gay friends to do the same. Numbers mean something.

12:30 p.m. on Saturday at the Government Center downtown MPLS.

This post crosses a couple of topics that have been on my mind lately. Little things, you know, like pervasive racism and the second-class status of GLBT folks in this country.

Jack and Jill Politics wrote on a particularly heinous op-ed in the Chicago Tribune last week. The article embodies a lot of the problems I’ve had with Clinton’s campaign–which has used racist sentiment…actually, let’s be honest…it’s used white supremacist sentiment to rally rural and older white voters. Obama is too uppity for his own good, know what I mean?

Anyway, Kathleen Parker’s nasty piece dwells on the concept of “full-blooded” Americanness.

Full-bloodedness is an old coin that’s gaining currency in the new American realm. Meaning: Politics may no longer be so much about race and gender as about heritage, core values, and made-in-America. Just as we once and still have a cultural divide in this country, we now have a patriot divide.

Now, I understand that Parker may think her own audience is blind to their own motivations, but how is something about “heritage” and “made in America” and not about race?

She’s hardly masking her racist white supremacist sentiment:

It’s about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.

Man, you really can’t get much more KKK than that.

Here’s the thing, it’s all code. She’s not talking about my background. Fuck all that Mayflower and Daughters of the American Revolution bullshit. The WASPs never did think much of the Irish or the Slavs. But when she talks about full-blooded Americans, she’s also not using that code to slur me. It’s not about the old immigrants who are now neatly rolled up into whiteness, it’s the new immigrants…like Obama’s dad.

Now, where this does become about me is when the issue of…

Yet, white Americans primarily—and Southerners, rural and small-town folks especially—have been put on the defensive for their concerns with “guns, God and gays.”

And the justification for both their racism and their general hatred of anything not like them is:

What they know is that their forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years. What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.

Today, Governor Pawlenty vetoed the SF 960 bill that the Minnesota House and Senate passed. It would have allowed local governments in Minnesota to provide domestic partner benefits. I realize that “teh gayz” are a big selling point for the Republicans in a time when their economic and international policies are being shown for the shams that they are, but damn if it doesn’t break my heart every time they try to make life harder for us.

We’re part of this “multiculturalism” that Parker and her allies are scared of. (Or, rather, that she exploits this line of thinking to advance her name and get a book deal at some point. Controversy sells!)

And why are they scared of it? Because their heritage is being swept under the carpet? Bullshit. It’s the time-honored tradition of: if you’re doing better, it must be at some cost to me, so I don’t want your lot to improve.

Does it actually hurt heterosexual couples if I got Megan health insurance through my job or vice versa? I mean, unlike y’all, we have to pay taxes on the amount paid (FYI: that’s approximately $100 a month in taxes for health care at the U. On top of the normal cost of adding someone to your insurance.).

In order to be against gay marriage or domestic partner benefits or civil unions or black people becoming president or women becoming president or whatever, you have to believe that if any of these things occurs, you will have lost something.

And, you know what? If you think that people don’t deserve the same rights and privileges that you have because you’re afraid of a level playing field, you need to really think about what that means. It means you don’t think you’re good enough, it means you’re insecure about your position in the world, and it means you are petty and exploitative and just plain mean.

Congrats to Californians, by the way, whose largely Republican (I believe 6 of the 7 judges were Republican appointments) court said that not allowing gay marriages in CA was unconstitutional. It’s going to kick off a firestorm, but if marriage is going to remain a thing in this country (um, that’s a definite), then it needs to be across the board. Knock it down like miscegenation was knocked down.

/rant