I’m sitting in a car in a small town called Victoria, Kansas, about ten miles from the geodetic center of the United States, with no Internet or cell phone capacity. I can’t even look up the exact definition of “geodetic,” a term I discovered on the map, but I’m guessing that this is sort of a synonym for geographic center. 

By the way, did you know that Arlen Specter comes from Russell, Kansas? We just passed through the place and they had a sign bragging about Bob Dole and Specter as you drove over the town limit. What will we learn next! Does Rick Santorum hail from Dodge City? Did Sam Brownback grow up on the Main Line? What a crazy old world we live in.

My news items this week were nothing to write home about, I’m sorry to say. The most interesting topic concerns the posture of the Obama administration on the question of federal marriage recognition - a posture that has yet to be assumed. I recently wrote about the federal challenge to the first section of the Defense of Marriage Act, filed by the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders in Boston last month. The U.S. government normally defends national law against constitutional suits. But back on the hustings, candidate Barack Obama voiced opposition to both sections of DOMA.  Will President Obama reverse course and instruct his lawyers to contest GLAD’s position? Or will the man stay true to his professed beliefs and either stay out of the case, or even better, argue on GLAD’s side?

Now, in addition to GLAD’s DOMA challenge, two federal appellate judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit have separately ruled that married gay court employees should receive the same benefits as their heterosexual counterparts. However, as the New York Times reported this week, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management has informed court authorities in a letter that such benefits run counter to federal law and can’t be provided. An exciting impasse! 

I gather that one of the Ninth Circuit judges ruled that DOMA was unconstitutional, while the other one ruled that benefits should be provided to partners as well as recognized “spouses.” But however they ruled, does the Assistant Director of some federal HR bureaucracy have the power to tell two appellate court judges to go stuff it? And if so, will the President go along with the status quo, or will he intervene? Inquiring minds want to know!

Bad Bar
God, it’s hot in this car. I think you can kill a dog or a small child in minutes if you leave them closed up in a car in the summertime. How long, one wonders, does it take to kill a grown woman if you leave her in a car with the window open in March? I’m sure it takes longer than a few minutes. But surely it will happen in time. 

Meanwhile, during my inexorable journey towards the grave, I will try and extract a few other salient details of GLBT news from my memory banks. I know there was a bar in Houston that refused to allow a guerilla gay bar to assemble on its premises. Guerilla bars, as most of you know, are spontaneous evenings where gays and lesbians take over a regular old bar and turn it into a homo haven for the night. Usually, the festivities are welcomed by the accidental hosts, but last Friday night, managers of the Union Bar left about a hundred gay revelers standing out in the rain while straight looking people were invited inside. 

After an Internet and media outcry, the bar people apologized and insisted the place was too crowded to accommodate the guerillas. Not sure if anyone bought this, but at least they felt badly about it. Needless to say, we are all determined to avoid the Union Bar if and when we find ourselves carousing in Houston.

The Horror! The Horror!
As you may have guessed, I’m out of the car and back online. “Geodetic” means “of or relating to geodesy.” Geodesy, in turn, is the branch of geology that studies “the shape of the earth and the determination of the exact position of geographical points.” And now you know! As for those of you who were already familiar with the terminology and are rolling your eyes and thinking “what kind of idiot has to look up the definition of geodesy!” wipe that smug smile of your face. I’m sure we know many things of which you are blissfully unaware. The square root of a peach. The standard deviation of a tumbleweed drifting along a field of winter wheat at sunset. 

I saw that last night, by the way. The tumbleweed in the field, I mean. And I also got to ride on my wife’s brother’s giant red combine! Later today, we are going to drive south from Hays, Kansas, to Austin, Texas on a two-lane road that actually runs the whole length of both American continents. Here, it’s called 183, and it should take about 15 hours to complete the quaint trip. 

I’m telling you this because our route will take us within a stone’s throw of Grandfield, Oklahoma, a small town in the Sooner State where teacher Debra Taylor was recently fired for using The Laramie Project in her lesson plan. The Laramie Project is a play about how the death of Matthew Shepard affected the citizens of Laramie, hardly a salacious topic but one that apparently stretched the fragile limits of tolerance in the Grandfield school system. I have half a mind to take a brief detour to Grandfield, although a couple of days ago, when last we veered off the highway into rural Oklahoma, we were horrified to find ourselves in a dry county. I certainly don’t want to repeat this traumatic experience, and I have a feeling Grandfield might be an iced tea and Pepsi kind of place. We’ll play it by ear.

LBB, Chapter 208, In Which Stephanie Attacks Her Partner With A Catheter
I have news hound Rex Wockner to thank for our latest installment of Lesbians Behaving Badly. This week’s episode finds us in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where Bad Lesbian Stephanie Lighten, 26, allegedly threw her 34-year-old wife Jennifer onto a couch and tried to impregnate her with a vial of sperm. The sperm, obtained from Stephanie’s brother, was to be administered via a syringe with a catheter tip, later confiscated by police.

According to the report, Jennifer escaped the couch and locked herself in the bathroom until Stephanie broke down the door and hurt her wrist. While Stephanie was off in the kitchen fashioning an ice pack, Jennifer hopped into the family SUV and was making a run for it when Stephanie hopped on the side and tried to force her way into the moving vehicle. Police arrived in what sounds like the knick of time and arrested the drunken malfeasant. To quote the news account, Stephanie was “liquored up.” 

Ladies, Ladies! Did our courageous lawyers at the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders spend years toiling over legal briefs in order for the state of Massachusetts to respect your hellish mĂ©nage? Of course, the answer is yes. Our fight for marriage rights must embrace the rapscallions, the saints, and all the same-sex families that merely muddle through - those, for example, who content themselves with pounding on the bathroom door and forego violent excess; those who stand and yell at the departing SUV rather than throw themselves on the running board, hang onto the side mirror and rage helplessly at their spouse through the window. Those who may indulge in a glass or two of Viognier before dinner, but who refrain from reaching the point where they are characterized on the police blotter as “liquored up.” 

Oh, but before I finish this section, my esteemed reader Nicole has singled out yet another repellent television ad, the pitch for some kind of service that delivers fresh “catheters” on a regular basis, saving us from the demoralizing need to “reuse catheters,” whatever exactly that means. It occurs to me that I missed the opportunity to begin a paragraph with the once-in-a-decade expression: “Speaking of catheters.” Ah well, you know my rule, I never go backwards. I call it the Omar Khaayam doctrine.

The commercial congers up vague images of colostomies or other, unnamed maladies that leave their victims dependent on mysterious apparatus - tubes and bags that must be regularly cleansed of their offensive residue and…  reused! If we, the audience, are unable to imagine the ensuing distress, we need only look at the face of the hapless spokeswoman, her expression a study in disgust and humiliation. Thank god for the sponsors of the commercial, and for their wondrous supply of unsullied catheters, delivered right to your door in suitably opaque packaging.

Nicole points out that this ad is often featured on the Rachel Maddow show, one of our communal favorites. It’s not Rachel’s fault, of course, but it makes you wonder how the catheter people select their demographic targets. Liberal Democrats over the age of 50? I have also wondered something else. Why would the purveyors of such arcane services want to run a TV ad on prime time cable news in the first place? Wouldn’t it be more cost effective to buy the back cover of Urology Today? I have the identical thought when I see a TV ad from tort lawyers asking the general public to call them if they happen to be afflicted with an obscure disease. You know the ones: 

“Hi. I’m Jim Langsford, Attorney at Law. Do you or a loved one suffer from pleural mesothelioma caused by exposure to asbestos dust or fibers? My office is here to help.” 

My sympathies to the fractional one percent of my fellow citizens who are fighting Big Asbestos, but why do the rest of us have to listen to this? Oh, please don’t email me with your personal catheter stories either. I already said I was sorry.

The Rest of the Stories
Oops! I’ve used up most of my column without delving into the heart of my news pile. Therein, I would have found a press release from the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, informing us that their lawsuit against the Hog State’s new anti-gay parenting law has just survived a motion to dismiss. 

In other ACLU news, the civil libertarians have sent a stern letter to a school in Peoria, Arizona, where a principal told a 14-year-old to take off his gay rainbow wristband, or turn it inside out. It seems counterintuitive, but very few of these reactionary school honchos seem to have familiarized themselves with the ABCs of constitutional law, particularly the main case that governs free speech on the public campus, Tinker v Des Moines. 

“It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” wrote Justice Fortas famously in 1969. In Tinker, the Court upheld the rights of students who protested the Vietnam War with black armbands. And as the ACLU wrote in its letter to the Prince of Peoria, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the black armbands of a half-century ago and the rainbow wristbands of 2009, ergo, leave the poor kid alone.

So what else might we discuss in our waning minutes? The New Hampshire house judiciary committee deadlocked on a same-sex marriage bill, and also voted 5-5 on a trans-rights bill that has been described by opponents as a free pass for pedophiles to troll for small children in public lavatories. Both bills now go before the full house without a recommendation for or against passage.

The Pope told an audience in Cameroon that condoms increase the spread of AIDS, an astonishing pronouncement even considering the source.

What’s the zany pontiff’s prescription for the intractable virus? A “moral and responsible attitude towards sex.” 

And finally, as usual the people running New York’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade refused to allow openly gay paraders, although anyone can march as long as they are not holding signs or symbols that do not express the message of the organizers. Do you care? Oh, so do I. Of course I care. Very much so.

-arostow@aol.com