Why do they even let Doubthat write for the papers?

Andrew Sullivan responded to Doubthat's column about gay marriage.

If you have total gay freedom and no gay institutions that can channel love and desire into commitment and support, you end up in San Francisco in the 1970s. That way of life - however benignly expressed, however defensible as the pent-up unleashed liberation of a finally free people - helped kill 300,000 young human beings in this country in our lifetime. Ross may think that toll is unimportant, or that it was their fault, but I would argue that a Catholic's indifference to this level of death and suffering and utter refusal to do anything constructive to prevent it happening again, indeed a resort to cruel stigmatization of gay people that helps lead to self-destructive tendencies, is morally evil.

Doubthat felt the need to dig himself in deeper.

I think that at least some of the guilt that Sullivan heaps on my head actually belongs to people who would defend (or even celebrate) the wild promiscuity of gay culture in 1970s San Francisco as a “benignly-expressed … liberation of a finally free people.”

In other words "Yes, I think AIDS was homosexuals' own fault. Oh, and the fault of everyone who doesn't despise them and shove them back in the closet."

You know, just in case you were confused by the moderate sounding persiflage.

He goes on to say:

So what should conservatives have done instead? Basically, they should have pushed (in, let’s say, the early 1980s) for what Ryan Anderson and Sherif Girgis have urged as a contemporary compromise: A domestic partnership law designed to accommodate gay couples without being sexuality-specific. (In other words, it would be available to any couple who couldn’t legally marry each other: A pair of cohabitating siblings or cousins could enter into it as well, for instance.)

Coulda, woulda, shoulda, but they didn't, didn't, didn't, did they?

Let's remember what they actually did do, which was to advocate concentration camps for homosexuals, or propose that having sex while carrying HIV should be grounds for the death penalty. Very constructive and compassionate.

In the meantime this domestic partnership err... retroactive proposal of Doubthat's is ...different. I'm trying to picture how it might seriously work. Suppose you have two sibs and a cousin living together. How do they pick which pair gets, uh, domestically partnered? Can they change later if say, the sibs partner but then the cousin loses her job and needs to be on the health insurance of one of the sibs?  If the domestically partnered sibs adopt a child, how does that relationship get affected if they need to switch to the cousin?  Somehow I don't think Doubthat has really thought this through.  Which would be consistent with Doubthat not offering this as a serious proposal but only as yet another way of fobbing gay people off with second class status.

I will finish with Sullivan's words, being much more intelligent and compassionate than anything Doubthat has to offer this week.

We gays are here, Ross, as you well know. We are human beings. We love one another. We are part of countless families in this country, pay taxes, work hard, serve the country in the armed services, and look after our own biological children (and also those abandoned by their biological parents). Our sex drives are not going away, nor our need to be included in our own families, to find healing and growth and integration that alone will get us beyond the gay-straight divide into a more humane world and society.

Or are we here solely to act as a drop-shadow to the ideal heterosexual relationship?

If so, what form would that drop-shadow take? What morsels from the "microcosm of civilization" are we permitted to have as citizens? And at what point does conceding the substance of gay needs in a civil union actually intensify the deliberate social stigma of exclusion from marriage, rather than mitigate it?

As far as I could tell, Doubthat, despite supposedly having responded, has no answer.

More canoe stuff

I was volunteering at the Rural Clinic this morning, starting at 9:00 am. 

I had a clever plan to get up at 5:50 and work on the boat--I could surely put the stem pieces of fiberglass on and still leave the house by 8:30, right?

I woke up at 5:00 am.  I have no idea why this happens to me; this is the antithesis of how my body used to behave when I was younger.  But I figured since I didn't seem to be able to go back to sleep I might as well get up, get dressed, have a cup or two of tea, read the NYT blog on my Kindle (which has kind of become my equivalent of "the paper") and get started on the canoe.

You may remember from our last episode that I had laid a second strip of fiberglass all along the keel line of the boat, to help protect it, since it is a corner and therefore more vulnerable to begin with, plus it's at the bottom of the hull, closest to the rocks and gravel below the water.

The glass fibers don't cling to each other hardly at all, which means the fabric frays like crazy as you brush epoxy over and through a cut edge.  Think nylon--the kind of nylon they make backpacks and stuff sacks out of, if you've ever worked with that--only nylon that is covered with glue and can give you slivers..)  And of course, the epoxy means all those long curling strings of fiberglass get solidly glued to the layer below so you end up with an embossed cross between scribbles and calligraphy in some unknown language with a lot of Cs and Ss all over the bottom of your boat.  It is possible to sand this down smooth--a longboard with 80 grit sandpaper does a pretty good job.  However, after nearly 12 hours to cure, the epoxy still balled up on the bottom of the sandpaper.  I did the best I could, but I really need to go over it again tomorrow.

i epoxied the stem strips on, then used the rest of the epoxy for the second coat on the keel strip.  Then I cleaned up, had breakfast, and went to the Clinic.

When I got home a little after noon, I rolled the boat out into the sun.  Stories abound in the annals of strip canoe building of builders who worked under artificial light, and then, when they got their masterpiece outside, were horrified by flaws they had missed during the building process.

I found two little bubbles, one in each stem piece, that mean I need to sand the fiberglass off there and re-apply it.  One down side of the white pine is that bubbles are white--and don't show as well over a light wood as over a dark one.  The sunlight definitely helped.  Also the cheap brush that I used for to apply the epoxy?  Shed bristles everywhere.  No big deal--I can sand them out--but I won't be using those brushes a second time.

I really need to sand the boat some to fair everything down, then put one last coat of epoxy on.  I had thought I wasn't going to worry too much about burying the weave--I don't care if it shows a bit; people will be looking at the butternut stripes anyway.  However one of the sites I was reading this morning mentioned that a rough surface on the outside creates extra drag.  And that is not acceptable at all.  So a third coat of epoxy it is!

Next steps--fair with longboard.  Decide whether to add extra fiberglass strip to hollows that resulted from thin board at chine.  Fix stems.  Extra fiberglass piece over stems.  Fill coat of epoxy at stems.  Third coat of epoxy over whole boat.  Make cradles to put boat in.  Take boat off strongback!

I am not sure I'm going to make it to that stage this week.  We'll see.