Antigay Evangelicals Freaking Out Over Gay Marriage

I’ve read a lot of the posts, tweets, status updates, and comments about what’s happening in politics and I’ve taken them all in with a lot of consideration. A lot of people are worried. Some are scared. And I don’t think anyone under the umbrella of LGBTI knows what to really expect.

Ironically, according to this article, evangelicals are really freaking out over this Trump statement…

When asked whether he would rollback marriage equality laws, Trump nonchalantly said that it’s no longer an issue he cares to pursue.

“It’s irrelevant because it was already settled,” he said. “It’s law. It was settled in the Supreme Court. I mean it’s done… these cases have gone to the Supreme Court. They’ve been settled. And… I’m fine with that.”

You can read more about this here. There are a lot of comments and opinions below the piece. 

However, I still don’t think everyone feels completely safe. I know that feeling well because I was married in Vermont, drove home through three different states where marriage was legal, and then crossed the border from NJ into PA where I live and all of a sudden I wasn’t legally married anymore. That’s not easy to parse. You’re legally married in VT, NY, NH, and NJ, but not in the state where you live and pay the most taxes.  I live a mile from the NJ border, and in PA at that time gay marriage was not legal. At that time NO politician was supporting gay marriage. No one. It took Judge Jones to rule on this in PA, which happened before the SCOTUS ruling.  I posted about Judge Jones’ ruling here.

“We are a better people than what these laws represent,” Jones wrote of same-sex marriage bans in his ruling, drawing comparisons between the civil rights movement and the modern gay marriage movement. ”It is time to discard them into the ash heap of history.”

“By virtue of this ruling, same-sex couples who seek to marry in Pennsylvania may do so, and already married same-sex couples will be recognized as such in the Commonwealth.”

And then, just when we thought we were safe in PA, a woman from some little town in PA named Theresa Santai-Gaffney decided to fight the ruling.  

Twenty Republican House members on Tuesday signed a letter addressed to Schuylkill County Register of Wills Theresa Santai-Gaffney supporting her decision to legally intervene against the May 20th decision by U.S. Middle District Court Judge John Jones dismantling the state Defense of Marriage Act.

Gay people all over PA panicked. Santai-Gaffney wound up censoring her Facebook page because of the controversy and all the backlash from the gay community. People were scared and livid. But she was ultimately shot down in every single court. 

Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., denied without comment a Pennsylvania county clerk’s plea to stop [same-sex] marriages in that state.  That appears to remove the last potential legal barrier to Pennsylvania becoming the nineteenth state in which same-sex marriages are permitted. A federal judge struck down the state ban, and state officials declined to appeal. The Schuylkill County clerk sought to appeal in their place, but that move has now been turned down at all three levels of the federal court system.  The Pennsylvania case had no direct link to the Utah case discussed in the post below.

At the time, we had a Republican governor in PA and he didn’t fight Judge Jones’ ruling either. Of course it was much nicer when SCOTUS later ruled on a federal level, but knowing that we’d won in the courts before the SCOTUS ruling helped ease our minds a little in PA. And we were terrified that someone could just come along and take it away from us.

And I think that’s how a lot of people feel now. Unfortunately, only time is going to tell. But at least the questions are being asked right now.

The Mysterious Hunky Gardener

I first spotted this mysterious hunky gardener on Facebook after a friend posted about him. I had no idea he’d gone this viral. He reminds me of the guy who installed my new gutters two summers ago.

So, what do we know about this Gardener Of Earthly Delights? Well, nothing. He’s handsome. He gardens. He was filmed by a drag queen named Monica Moore, who decided to share his beautiful visage on Facebook.

You can check out his photos here…and don’t miss the comments.

The “Shameless” Trans Story Line

I used to watch Shameless regularly, but I stopped because it all became so hopeless and, well, shameless. But I think I’ll start watching again just to check this out. I didn’t even know they were doing a trans story line.

In a seventh season plot line of the Showtime series Shameless, out teen Ian (Cameron Monaghan) starts dating a new guy named Trevor (Faking It’s Elliot Fletcher), but isn’t aware that Trevor is transgender at first. Since this is TV, Ian finds out dramatically and has something of a personal crisis. He hurls all sorts of drunken questions Trevor’s way, then later has a more levelheaded chat with a LGBTQ group over lunch.

You can check this out here. The article goes into more depth. I know I’ve posted about Shameless somewhere on the blog, because I’ve always thought it was one of the few TV shows that portrayed a gay man realistically.