I just got this email from Daniel Mintz at MoveOn.org’s Civic Action division:

Dear MoveOn member,

Think of Barack Obama giving his inaugural address, surrounded by millions of the people who worked to elect him. Really, stop and imagine it. Does it make you smile? Us too. Does it make you want to celebrate? Good.

Because we’re organizing Inaugural Bashes that night in cities across the country and we want you to come-in fact, we want you to host. The Portland Inaugural Bash could be an informal party in a friendly local bar or restaurant, a smaller get-together at your house, or an elaborate Inaugural Ball-it’s up to you.

The important thing is that we come together to kick off this new progressive era. Can you host an Inaugural Bash so the folks in Portland have a place to celebrate? Click here to register your event:

I just sent back a short reply:

Daniel, thanks for your request, but my place is already booked for a “Rick Warren is an intolerant homobigot” bash that night.

I think what’s bugging most today about Warren is that his inclusion is poisoning what should be a most joyous occasion for me – the inauguration of the first admitted cannabis user, the end of the Cheneyburton Maladministration, the GOP relegated to white Christian Southern/Appalachian men, and the first democracy in history to elect an ethnic minority.

I haven’t been this conflicted since that homobigot Reggie White helped my beloved Green Bay Packers win a Super Bowl.Some have defended Warren, citing the need to reach out, to show Obama’s the president of all Americans, even the intolerant ones.  The choice has been characterized as finding common dialog with those with whom we have “policy differences”.

This issue of gay marriage is not a “policy difference”, Mr. Obama.  Whether we should increase funding to NASA is a policy difference.  Calling the issue of equal government treatment of LGBT citizens a “policy difference” is like calling the Missouri Compromise and the Dred Scott Decision the solutions to “policy differences” over property rights.

I’ve written volumes on this issue, but I’ll say it again: gay marriage isn’t even really about teh gay, it’s about gender discrimination.  Or more simply, our government’s “one penis at the altar” requirement.

I’m a straight guy.  When I was considering acquiring the state’s license of matrimony, I did so knowing the state could not limit my choices based on religion, race, creed, color, ethnicity, disability, or any other factor.  If I wanted to marry a black blind Hispanic Scientologist amputee Libertarian of Guatemalan descent, the state cannot tell me no.

But if my Guatemalan sweetie has a penis, the state can tell me no?

It’s not about teh gay.  If Pam and I were single, we could marry.  Pam’s gay and we’d be married, so it ain’t about teh gay, it’s about the penis.  Pam and I would only present one penis at the altar, so our marriage would be A-OK (maybe not by Kate and Iva, but we’re being hypothetical here.)  Heck, Daimeon and Julien could get married and they’re both gay, but there’s just that one penis, so God’s cool with it.

And if you don’t think it’s all about the penis, consider this:  Here in Portland we have a married couple, perfectly legal and recognized in all fifty states, where both partners are female.  It’s just that at the altar, they were “one man one woman”, and later the man accepted his transgender nature and became, legally and surgically, a woman.  So it’s not even whether two penises or no penises live together forever in matrimony, it’s just in the granting of the license when only one grantee can wield a penis.

The penis mightier than the sword, I guess.  😛

Can anyone think of any other government-sanctioned license, regulation, or position allowed to discriminate based on the penis-bearing status of the applicants?

When you look at this from the penis perspective, it makes the bleating of the bigots even clearer.  They’ll cry, “We don’t want to redefine marriage!” and you’ll understand that they really mean “We can’t accept anything but binary gender!”  

For there is a slippery slope to gay marriage, but it’s not the slope to incest, polygamy, and pedophilia as Pastor Cracker Barrel supposes (I’d argue that binary gender distinctions lead to that slope, but maybe in another post).  It’s a slippery slope away from the “penis = man, no penis = woman” understanding of gender and to a more enlightened view that understands sexuality and gender have very little to do with the little head and everything to do with the big head.

Finally, there’s a fun element to turning the gay marriage argument into the “one penis at the altar” argument; fundies blush when you say “penis”.  

Just for fun once, I asked a fundie whether Jesus masturbated.  We’ve got most of his story up to age 12, then he reappears at age 30.  You told me Jesus was a man with all the temptations and feelings of man, and I know about 12-18-year-old males… Then when he told me that was wrong to ask about Jesus’s relationship with his penis, I pointed to Ezekiel 23:19-20:

19 Yet she multiplied her whoredoms, in calling to remembrance the days of her youth, wherein she had played the harlot in the land of Egypt.

20 For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.

The whole chapter is quite a read, actually, if you like stories of donkey-cocked men spooging-horselike as “they defiled her with their whoredom, and she was polluted with them”.  I liked the movie, Bukkake Gangbangers 17, better.