Surely some people are going to be confused by this NY Times article and surrounding hooha about how Obama signed an executive memorandum (basically an executive order) that extended federal benefits to gay couples, but gay people are mad about that.

I’m one of those mad gays, and I must admit I’m a little confused too, so I think writing out a quick nonexhaustive representative recap of everything Obama and gay that has happened in the past year or so would help me get a handle on it and put it all in perspective.

Campaign season – Obama has nine campaign promises related to gay rights, declares himself as a “fierce advocate” for gays and lesbians (PS great word choice re: fierce)

1. Pass hate crime legislation to include gay, transgendered people
2. Pass a workplace antidiscrimination bill – ENDA
3. Fully repeal DOMA, which keeps the federal government from recognizing gay relationships or states from recognizing other states’ same-sex union contracts
4. Create federally recognized civil unions, an everything-but-marriage alternative to marriage
5. Won’t sign a constitutional gay marriage ban
6. Repeal DADT – allow gays to serve openly in the armed forces
7. Protect and extend adoption rights for gay couples
8. AIDS – he’s against it, supports curing it.
9. Pass the Uniting American Families Act, listed here, which would allow binational same-sex couples to be treated as real life couples in immigration law, such as gaining citizenships or being approved for visas.

January, Inauguration – Invites Rick Warren, someone who compares being gay to incest and pedophilia, to give the invocation.

February – Nothing.

March – Nothing. Be patient! Recession!

April – Nothing yet! You are not important as other things!

May – Nothing yet! Quiet your grumbling! Dijon mustard, more recession!

June – Obama addresses gay rights for the first time, sort of, with an eye roll.

The Department of Justice releases a legal brief comparing gay marriage to incest and saying that a discriminatory law is okay as long as it saves the government money.

Obama, smelling the shitstorm, quickly signs yesterday’s ineffectual executive memorandum to mollify the angry queers to save a DNC fundraiser (which the White House admits). The memorandum, to review, gives gay partners some benefits, which they sometimes already had, and not healthcare or pension benefits, to some federal employees, but not if you’re in the military, in which case you get fired, and it expires when his term is up. What do gays get to do now? Use sick days to take care of spouses and children and get included in calculations for family size when determining overseas housing allocation.

More detail and background here.

***

One of my favorite consequences of being gay is that you are automatically thrust into an advanced civics class.  Upon coming out, I became immensely fascinated with all of the complicated ways that discrimination can be written into law.  You really get an appreciation for checks and balances and the deliberate mechanisms that make all government changes proceed at a snail’s pace, necessitating extensive and exhaustive debate on every issue before it becomes law when your personal love life, relationships, and your family are the subjects of the debate. I think a significant portion of gay activists’ frustration and anger stems from the appreciation of the system we have – we know that our best strategy to gain our legal rights is to convince people that we are real, live humans.  It’s much more satisfying to have our rights acknowledged through a popular vote or legislative process than through judicial decree.

Every once in a while, though, it really becomes overwhelming and too much to handle.  Shit is seriously convoluted when you need to go to a lawyer to figure out how much you’re getting fucked.  “Partners will be considered in calculations for housing allotments”. Give me a fucking break. I don’t want to be a special case for HR, I don’t want to be fine print. I am not an issue.  I am not an issue. I am not up for debate.  You really go crazy when every day you hear things like “the gay rights debate” or “the delicate and divisive issue of gay rights”.

It’s tiresome to debate people on a false premise. Gay rights are often presented as a moral issue.  It’s not. For it to be a moral issue, it would have to be a choice.  It’s not a choice.  Let’s not get confused here, love-the-sinner, hate-the-sin people. Gay rights are not a moral issue, other than the immorality of denying/obstructing/failing to advance (when able) civil rights.  Gay sex and gay relationships are as moral and immoral as straight sex and straight relationships.  Gay cheating should be as immoral as straight cheating, and gay PDA is as gross as straight PDA. If you want to crusade against sleeping around, knock yourself out, but do it fairly and do your moral grandstanding against everyone.

Here’s honesty: I’m young, healthy, unemployed, a pacifist, single and a UBT. Not one of those nine big gay rights issues or bills affect me in any way, yet I am deeply and personally involved in the outcome of all of them. DADT, DOMA, ENDA, hate crime legislation, etc. are all just a layered, codified way to express the following phenomena while in civil society and in public discourse:

6 in 10 Americans think gay marriage should be illegal.

Half of Americans think that homosexual relations are immoral.

Americans rank homosexuality in between euthanasia and abortion in terms of morality.

4 in 10 Americans believe that homosexual relations should be illegal.

4 in 10 Americans think that being gay is unacceptable.

4 in 10 Americans think that gay people should not be allowed to be elementary school teachers.

4 in 10 Americans think that homosexuality is a result of environmental factors.

4 in 10 Americans don’t even know a gay person.

I don’t have the data to look at, but I bet dollars to donuts that those four people are the same four people all the way down the list.  R-squared is at least 0.9.

Please excuse me while I fagaliciously and indignantly wave my finger up and down, pop my hip, purse my lips and say “YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW ME”  in a serious manner.

This is where the outrage comes in – the people that we are debating about gay issues think being gay is a choice, therefore a moral question, and then that it’s immoral, yet they don’t even know any gay people. It’s absurd that it’s a public debate, and it’s more absurd that politicians need to pander to these people.

It comes down to this: We understand that people that don’t know us don’t like us.  However, self-respecting gay people should have no need to persuade, compromise, or debate on civil rights.  We should have full rights and recognition from our government. Failure to extend full rights, despite promises to do so at some point in the future, is the same as saying we can’t have rights.  Both end in no rights.  So when Mr. Fierce gives us a laundry list of expectations, but then insults us, ignores us, ignores us some more, insults us, and then signs a patronizing, nonconsequential symbolic act to salvage a fundraiser, fuck him.  Get back to principled, effective leadership like he’s shown in the past and then we’ll talk about throwing you fundraisers.

Readers, I am enlisting you to help settle a dispute.  Two burning questions to be answered by digital polling.  Results of the polls are infallible and binding.  Money is on the line, not to mention self-esteems.

Look at the following image of my (single) friend:

Did you look at it? Good.  Now you have all of the necessary information to answer the questions:

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I apologize for getting my panties in a bunch about Obama’s inaction on gay rights.

Last week, the Department of Justice released a legal brief in response to a legal challenge to DOMA, the law that among other things, denies federal benefits to legally married couples.  This is a law that Obama wishes to fully repeal.

The DoJ almost always defends federal laws that are challenged – a reasonable person would expect a government to defend its own laws.

The brief has some real winners for legal arguments, such as saying that it makes total sense to deny rights and benefits to gays because it saves the government money (It’s the economy, faggot! Recession and all…), and that gay people are just like uncles and nieces having sex.  I wish I were kidding.  It literally says those things.

The New York Times has a pretty scathing editiorial addressing this brief, pointing out, “The brief also maintains that the Defense of Marriage Act represents a “cautious policy of federal neutrality” — an odd assertion since the law clearly discriminates against gay couples”.

The president of the gay rights organization Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solmonese, penned an open letter to the President telling him that he is being not good.

Both are very informative and persuasive documents!  So persuasive, indeed, that the adminsitration acknowledged that it has been being mean to the gays and that it is sorry if its actions or lack of actions have hurt our feelings and he’s gunna make it up to us right away.  In fact! They even set up a website to prove that they are very much sorry.  Check it out:

http://www.obamasplanforgayrights.com

I have previously determined that the semicolon is the gayest punctuation mark, ending decades of bloodshed and multigenerational feuds, but which letter of the alphabet is the gayest?  It’s a very important question.  If we want the New York state assembly to pass a gay marriage bill, or if we ever hope to overturn Prop 8, or if we could one day aspire to cure AIDS, it’s a question that must be answered.

Luckily for all of you gay rights-o-philes, I AM ON THE CASE.

I am statisticser than Nate Silver, so don’t question any of my methods, results, or conclusions. Everything I do is done correctly and perfectly, just like the rest of Science.

Methods

Using my facebook friends as a dataset, I categorized each of them into one of three categories: Gay, Straight Dude, or Straight Bitty.  “Gay” includes anyone who I know to consider themselves gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. They are lumped together for statistics’ sake, seeing as there are 13 Ls, Bs, or Ts in my friend list, or  1.3% of my friends. If you are a BLT, friend me so I can do better analyses!

Also, people that are not out and could very well be rounded up to gay are still considered straight until they sack up and come out.

My friend breakdown:

I then took data from all newsfeed items from the last ten days from each friend group.  (I of course excluded those goddamn quizzes that people are always fucking taking that are so fucking dumb, because I hide every single quiz that appears immediately. They are dumb and no one is interested in what color your chakra is, snore.  Gays are far and away the worst offenders per capita. In the past 10 days, my gay friends have taken 111 quizzes. Straight dudes took 23, which is approximately 6% the quiz-taking rate of gays. Straight bitties took 240 quizzes, which is half that of gays per capita, but still a veritable shit ton.)

Over 415,000 eligible characters (letters of the alphabet only, capital and lowercase not distinguished) were counted for the three groups and the frequency of each letter of the alphabet as proportion of letters utilized was calculated.  The comparative frequency of each letter was then compared across the three groups.

Results

Comparative frequencies, shown as a proportion, i.e. (percentage of letters that are As for gay people)/(percentage of letters that are As for straight bitties).

In this Tower of Hanoi of a data table, letters for which the numerator group was at least 5% more than the denominator are bolded for convenience, and italicized and underlined when at least 5% less than the denominator. 5% as a cutoff point was an completely arbitrary decision.

*Gender effect

**Homosexuality effect

Conclusion

As with the punctuation mark analysis, for characters where there are differences, the differences seem to be either a product of homosexuality or gender, indicated by asterisks. For example, gay dudes and straight dudes both use the letter X about 20% more than the ladies, but gay people use the letter K about 10% less often than straight people.

The gayest letter is by far the letter Q, which is not surprising, since the words ‘queer’ and ‘queen’ both start with Q. Additionally, to nobody’s surprise, X is the manliest letter, considering words such as ‘extreme’ and ‘Vin Diesel’ start with that letter.  K is the straightest letter, you hooded ghost-looking bastards. No letter is particularly feminine. The closest thing to a feminine letter is Y, which stands for ‘yucky’.

[For all previous gaynalyses, click here]

You can now read this blog from your mobile device!  I figured if I’m asking people sitting on Boston Common to read this, then being able to read it on an iPhone should be pretty reasonable.  

I have an LG Dare, and it works pretty well for me.  Please let me know if there are any technical difficulties because I’m using a third-party plugin for this.

Had a great time today marching with Mayor Menino’s gang at the front of the parade.  Weather: Gorgeous. Crowd: Happy, beautiful, popular. Parade: Almost exclusively politicians and churches. Here are some photos from the parade.

The Guvna, his lovely wife, two quaid friends of mine (right), and me

The pro photographers were going nuts here. Mayor and Governor! Zowee!

These guys (the Hat Sisters) pretty much had me laughing.

This was pretty much the average crowd density along the whole route.

Aaaand I just remembered that I’m single. 

Me: “Smile for Twitter!” Them: those precious expressions.

Seriously. Out of 150 groups, 18 were politicians or political groups and 20 were churches. A ton were schools. Full list of participants here.

Like maybe 5.  What kind of pride parade has more churches than underpants!?

The Boston Globe estimated that 500,000 people were in attendance.

PS If you came to this site because I said you were cute and handed you this website address, click here.

You wanna know what else is pretty fabulous? I’ll be marching at the very front of the pride parade tomorrow with Mayor Menino cuz I got it like that.  Come and get a high five from me! I might be wearing a fanny pack. Parade info here.