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 Ice
Cube 
 "There
was some-thing truly visceral about Cube's voice that made his ever-present snarl that much more serious. As he barked on Death Certificate and Amerikkka's, he was the nigga you love to hate as well as the wrong one to fuck with."  "Even
though Sonic Youth grabbed Cobain by his hypodermic
needles and helped foist him into the spotlight, alterna-fans
du jour didn't return the favor when the New York
noisemakers lobbed this bottom-soaked missile their
direction." "People
are more aware of the world that they want to live in,
and now they have to realize that they can actually
create that world and fight for the things that are
worth fighting for and not feel apathetic. We are all
going to die. There is no point in holding anything
back."
 "There's
a scene in Richard Link-later's Waking Life
where the protagonist crouches down to read a note
in the street that says, 'Look to your right,' which
he does, only to come face to face with a speeding
car aiming right for his head. That's what it's like
to listen to Mars Volta's De-loused in the Comatorium
for the first time."
 "Well,
well, well. President George was in one hell of bind
when it turned that that Saudi Arabia funded Al Qaeda,
not Iraq. Realizing we'd invaded the wrong country,
Bush did the honorable thing: he's come out against
gay marriages."
 "By
the time this page fully loads, Guided By
Voices' Robert Pollard will have probably
composed, performed, mixed and pressed yet
another tightly coiled pop-rock nugget."
 "Unless
his friends and neighbors turn bitch and
completely bail on him, the hyperskilled
Lyrics Born will be here later this day,
that day or whatever day, until he's too
old to physically rhyme or sing anymore.
In that, perhaps he can take some solace,
dropping that baggage off at the door in
the process."
 "There
is no doubt in my mind -- and in this
I seem to have a lot of company -- that
Transatlanticism is Death Cab For
Cutie's best album so far, not bad for
a group that's been professionally plugging
away for just over four years now. And
there is also no doubt that Ben Gibbard
is one of pop music's finest talents.
."
 "There
is no one thing to know in Lord of
the Rings more important than the
fact that everything is disappearing,
and disappearing fast. Jackson's final
film in his peerless trilogy tenaciously
latches onto this theme and never lets
go." |
by Ross Levine Well, just when certain nations were about to be downlisted from their "Axis of Evil" status, new demon states have arisen in the world, one in particular even closer to our shores than Cuba. The city of San Francisco, presently under the iron grip of Mayor Gavin Newsom, is now ripe for invasion from those same forces of democracy and freedom that recently liberated the Iraqi people from the mad Satan of the Spider Hole. Certainly, regime change is in order when thousands of same-sex couples are allowed to wed under the protective canopy of the radical republic's city hall, in defiance of one of the principal tenets of our democracy -- marriage must be between a man and a woman, period. Indeed, we're talking
weapons of mass destruction once again, because as you know -- you being
anyone who has lived in this world long enough to slough off childhood
innocence and confront the depravity that surrounds us -- one must be
ever vigilant to prevent the possibility of a total moral collapse,
which is always just a hair away.
It's true that when women
won the right to vote the moral collapse was almost upon us, but then -- lucky
for us all -- it was found that women could actually be trusted to cast
their ballots intelligently. And when Kennedy won the 1960 election,
he graciously decided not to let the Pope run his administration after
all. And when black people were allowed to drink from the same water
fountains as whites, well, it turned out they really didn't have as
many contaminating diseases as we thought. And when they were subsequently
allowed to marry white people, they may have been a different color
from their spouses but at least they were different sexes, too. Now, however, it seems our luck may have run out. Which means we must stand forth and draw a line in the wedding cake. To put it bluntly, the pillars of society cannot remain perpendicular to the Earth if two people of the same sex are allowed to take the vows of holy matrimony. Society is one ornery camel, and there are only so many straws you can stick in its hump before its knees buckle and the ungainly animal we call civilization comes crashing to the ground. Surely, if we allow the barbarians by the Bay to succeed in their scheme, brothers will be honeymooning with sisters, men in our rural municipalities will be clamping diamond horseshoes onto their equine brides, and Mormons will no longer have to think twice about marrying whenever the spirit moves them. Every time you grant one group of people their civil rights, it becomes more likely that another group will ask for theirs. And the more civil rights you give away, the less there are for the rest of us to keep for ourselves.
But we're not simply talking civil rights here, we're talking marriage. Marriage, the blessed covenant between two people, one with a penis, one with a vagina. Well, no, let's not be so literal -- our handsome groom may be a wounded war hero, and we wouldn't want to deny him the right to marry just because of an unfortunate disfigurement. So it has nothing to do with what's underneath the clothes, but more a matter of a sexual yin and yang. In an acceptable picture of domestic bliss, there has to be a woman and there has to be a man. It's a continuation of the "Two cars in every garage" idea, one a sports car with a big stick shift and the other a steadfast SUV with a womb-like interior for carrying kids. It's just not natural to have two sports cars in the garage, or two mini-vans; society requires balance in order to continue functioning. If you throw that balance off, it means people aren't exactly sure what their roles are. And once that occurs, it's much more difficult for governments and corporations to know how best to manipulate them. This could lead to change, and change brings instability, the last thing we need during our perpetual war on terrorism. Which is not to
say that there isn't a place in this world for non-traditional casting.
We certainly do not mind seeing Scarlett O'Hara portrayed by a black
woman, but a black man? That's carrying things a bit far. Color
is one thing but gender is another. It may be time for us all to accept
that, in an acceptably dark bedroom, the parts can each find their proper
place with color no barrier at all. But if the parts don't quite fit
together because they're both the same, then that becomes a problem,
as a marriage really is the sum of its parts. It's about Part A fitting
into Part B, not about Part A rubbing against Part A. If you do not
have enough parts -- or if you have too many -- marriage becomes too
complicated, and that is not good. That's because marriage has to be
something you can easily explain to a four-year-old. You have to be
able to say, "Here's the mommy and here's the daddy and then the mommy
and the daddy get married and have the baby." If you have to go into
all sorts of verbal machinations about sexual identity, the oppressiveness
of gender roles and sexual desire for purposes beyond procreation
-- well, that's going to be one bewildered four-year-old.
And in a good
democracy, if there's an idea that a four-year-old cannot comprehend,
it cannot be a good idea. Now don't get us wrong -- we're not being intolerant. Just because same sex people shouldn't be allowed to marry one another doesn't mean we want them to live their lives alone. Ideally, of course, we would like them to just say no to sex, so they would understand that the whole issue is really not a matter of life and death. You can certainly live without sex, a realization which would demonstrate to them that heterosexual marriage remains an option. But if they can't give up sex -- that is, homosexual sex -- then they can at least keep it where it belongs (bathrooms, parks, seedy bars and such) and thus not sully the sanctuaries of our churches and temples. In other words, they can do what they want, but it shouldn't be inflicted on the rest of us. People who indulge in such abhorrent sexual practices as bestiality and necrophilia, for instance, can't expect the public to tolerate weddings held in barns or graveyards in the name of equality. We've heard gay activists explain that these things are not related, that even if someone wanted to marry a sheep or a cadaver, neither of those two could ever, let's say, sign their names to a marriage certificate. But we all know quite well that there will inevitably be someone out there to effectively teach a ewe to hold and use a pen; even a corpse, through telekinesis of some kind, could be animated long enough to scrawl an "X" on a sheet of paper. So the danger is definitely there, and one mustn't foolishly leave it to chance that something in this vein will not come to pass.
Which is why we must have a law. The U.S. Constitution in particular is no stranger to forceful, definitive and specific delineations of less than theoretically equitable policies. Remember when people were ingeniously counted according to their status? If they were free, they were considered 100% human; but if they were the property of someone else, well, they became three-fifths of a person which at least was better than half. It means they had representation in the federal government, but not too much since, after all, they couldn't vote or even go across the street without their master's permission. The law -- that is, the supreme law of our land -- reflected what was then the national way of doing things. Why should we now attempt to have legislation drag the people by their noses into something that most of them don't want? Clearly the majority of Americans are happy with marriage just the way it is, and only when that changes will it perhaps be time to consider adapting the institution for the "Johnny and Johnny" or "Jenny and Jenny" come-latelys. It simply doesn't work to force things down our collective throat. Look at integration -- nobody wanted it, and now, after 30 years of trying to make it happen, things are more segregated than ever. So what the heck was the point? If we'd kept it on the books, we could all be sending our kids to private schools and loving ourselves for being such law-abiding citizens. And here's one more thing to consider -- let same sex people marry and you open the doors to impressionable young people who will look at successful homosexual unions and maybe think that's it's not such a bad way to exist after all. That's right, they may have never had even the slightest inclination of hitting the sack with someone of their own configuration, but now it becomes a legitimate alternative (like when Jackie Robinson became the first black baseball player; we can all see what's since happened to sports). In the same way, the legalization of gay marriage will mark a turning point. It won't be like now, when everyone knows a friend of a friend with a son or daughter who's a homosexual, but instead, everyone will have to have an extra child or two in order to guarantee that at least one of their our own brood will grow up normal. Gay people will probably try harder than heterosexuals to make their marriages work because they'll know that the eyes of the world are upon them. This could skew the numbers of undecided adolescents going gay much higher, if they find something admirable in these successful same-sex relationships. Or later on, when gay marriages will have inevitably deteriorated to the same level as heterosexual ones, it will be too late -- there will be so many gays in society that it would take a flood or some other apocalyptic event to bring their numbers back down to present levels. This is why our leaders must act now. California's recently elected governor Schwarzenegger must terminate the sordid situation unraveling on Van Ness Avenue and reassert the rule of law. If it becomes necessary, the federal government must also be willing to respond. This is a much more serious matter than even the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, one of the first tests of the powers of our central government. This is not about a bunch of farmers protesting a tax on spirits but an entire metropolitan area flouting the law in the name of its own agenda. The liberals wouldn't like it if Birmingham reinstated slavery, now would they? Whether our president should send in the military or not, however, is a matter to be decided -- we're sure most of our boys feel safer in Baghdad than they would in San Francisco, where they'd face not being killed or maimed so much as being raped and sodomized. Still, they're sworn to protect our nation, and if the President decides on such a strategy -- Operation Save Our Sanctity -- they must be ready to serve.
But a military occupation of a major Northern California city is only a temporary solution. In order to solve the problem for future generations, the Congress and the states must act. A constitutional amendment has to be drafted protecting us from the dangers of same-sex marriage. Not only must it assert that marriage must be between a man and a woman, it must state categorically what marriage must not be. Not between two men, not between two women, not between a man and a cow, not between a woman and a cow and so on and so forth. The more specific the better. It must also redefine the meaning of the words "man" and "woman" to go beyond the mere line-up of chromosomes. We certainly do not want people marrying as men and women in name only. We must, by altering the Constitution, alter the course of our very civilization. Only through "Constitutional selection" -- that is, governmental matchmaking -- can we hope to put our country back on track. By limiting marriage to the union of manly men and womanly women, we guarantee the brightest future possible for the America of tomorrow. Just imagine a whole race of Super Americans carrying our nation's vision and ideals throughout the world. So let's work together to put San Francisco in its place. Just as the city was rebuilt after the devastating earthquake and fire of 1906, so it can be refashioned today to make it a model for morality and democracy on the Pacific coast. Otherwise, the entire region, from San Diego to Salt Lake City, may fall further and deeper into, dare we say, the wrong conjugal crack. 25 February 04 Ross M. Levine is an author, Marcel Proust marathoner and manatee-hugger who feels safer on the edge; i.e., in New York or California. He agrees with the King of Brobdingnag that we're "the most pernicious race of odious vermin to crawl the surface of the Earth." He thinks Americans have too much freedom -- fries, that is.
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Copyright 2001-2003, Morphizm.com. All Rights Reserved. |
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Way to go, pretty boy! "The city of San Francisco, presently
under the iron grip of Mayor Gavin Newsom, is now ripe for invasion
from those same forces of democracy and freedom that recently liberated
the Iraqi people from the mad Satan of the Spider Hole." (Photo: Reuters/Kimberly White)
