The first thing that went through my mind was: cross burnings.  The second was: children are evil (my workplace is overrun by hundreds of twentysomethings).

I tried to be rational.  Whoever defaced the page had no way of knowing who had printed it out – just as I had no idea who the defacer was – so it wasn’t personal.  Still, it was hurtful.

And it was bigoted.  The defacer didn’t know anything about me – my political affilitation, my sex, my race, nothing.  Die hard Democrats read mainstream editorials, don’t they?  So much for the good will of Dave Matthews’s “American Prayer” starring Idi Amin and Perez Hilton - and Michael Moore’s patronizing, post-Election email exhorting his followers to be kind to their Republican friends (as if they have any).

I’ve been the object of hate before.  As a teenager, holding my black boyfriend’s hand in Greenwich Village, a truck swerved to hit us while we waited to cross the street.  To be honest, I prefer that kind of hate.  It’s direct, out in the open, and in response to an action – in that case, our hand-holding – not in response to a thought.  Had I committed a hate crime without realizing it?

As I headed back to my office, images of the Ku Klux Klan, going after people they didn’t know in the middle of the night, raced across my brain.  Then I had to stop myself.  And chuckle.  There was no comparison.

But my gut kept telling me there was.  Whoever stamped ”DENIED” across my document clearly felt justified in defacing it.  Though petty, this was a hostile act – another tiny blow in the insidious war on free thought.  And one thing I’ve noticed in the stifling PC smog of LA: the Obama generation doesn’t think twice about openly ridiculing folks who don’t follow in lockstep.  They’re still acting like there’s a Texan in the White House.  They can’t let go.  They don’t want to.  Because, like the believers of a certain 7th century ideology that’s made a big comeback in recent years, their objective is not, despite claims to the contrary, to coexist.  To quote Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, it’s “to rule.”

Instead of gossiping at the water cooler, today’s privileged jugend hover in packs around TV monitors to mock the usual suspects - poor old Sarah Palin, the Tea Partiers, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Miss California (chivalry is deader than dead).  Together, they telegraph their warning to anyone who might disagree: don’t. 

They believe Loose Change is an important documentary, Al Franken a natural for the Senate, and Arlen Specter a hero.  They judge people not for their principles or achievements, but by the letter that comes after their name.  The one coworker I saw who dared walk the Yes We Can-festooned halls in a McCain T-shirt last fall got singled out by a supervisor (”Are you serious?”).  The answer?  Of course not - the tee had been donned as a joke.

Kids today.  They enjoy complete freedom to open their pieholes at the slightest brainfart.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  That should be a benefit of freedom.  Yet despite the apparent spontaneity of their farts, a strange uniformity pervades.

To their credit, Americans born after 1980 seem to be almost entirely free of old-time prejudices like homophobia – kudos to Will & Grace, I guess - though it’s hard to tell where genuine acceptance ends and “Vote No on Prop 8″ fanaticism begins.  Where I work, no one voted “yes” - at least no one would say so - so we’ll never know if “DENIED” would have been stamped across a human forehead.

But too much of a good thing, even media-sanctioned tolerance, becomes oppressive.  “You’re so negative” is an accusation I’ve heard many times since moving to Hollywood, usually in response to less than total elation about the release of the latest Spiderman sequel or the nasal squeals of the current American Idol.  Whatever happened to critical thinking?

I used to think its absence here was an organic deficiency of the West coast.  Back East, where the weather stinks, people spend more time indoors, are more likely to pick up a book and exercise their own imaginations.  In the easy, optimistic climate of California, kids grow up tanning and surfing, and the sky is generally blue.  Irony gets bleached out.  Life is good.  Why bring everyone down?  Opinion – “DENIED.”

Sometimes I wish I had been born in Malibu.

But lately – okay, since the Election - I’ve begun to suspect that the rejection of critical thinking is more than a regional custom.  Forget the swine flu, anti-thought is a viral pandemic - and it’s spreading fast.  As Marge the Palmolive lady used to say, “You’re soaking in it!” 

Twenty-somethings are fond of declaring, “It’s a free country!”  But is it?  Really?  And what exactly does that notion mean to them, anyway?  Because from what I can tell, they believe the First Amendment is a natural phenomenon which, unlike the climate, will never change.  At the same time, these kids – who see nothing odd about surrounding themselves with creepy, halo’d icons of The One - mock folks who actually make the effort to exercise their right to free speech on talk radio, at Tea Parties, and at workplace printers.

Talk about a false sense of security.  They think this double standard is perfectly normal.

As a young’un said to me not long ago, “But Republicans… aren’t they, like, evil?”  When I was growing up, the only Republican I knew was my grandfather – and he used to describe himself simply as a “skeptic.”  Party affiliation aside, I always thought skepticism was supposed to be a good thing.

Not anymore.

As the media distracts us with constant fear-mongering about hate speech, racism, and possible assassination attempts on our President – by rightwing nuts, of course – a virulent new strain of politically correct intolerance has risen swiftly and silently in our midst: an all-out intifada against the individual. 

In 1950, journalist Edward Hunter coined the term “brainwashing” to explain how some American POWs were converted to Communism during the Korean War.  Today, the practice is commonplace.  In 2009, every time an American turns on a television, he faces non-stop identity assault from a rat-tat-tat of guilt-inducing messages and innuendo: America is bad; America is collapsing; America should become more European; America deserves to be put in its place; America must bow to the wise and humble global community (especially if it’s Third World).

I’ve talked with otherwise well-educated twenty- and thirty-somethings who seem unable (or unwilling) to distinguish between the cavalier anti-war ravings of Madonna in concert and the published propaganda of Hillary Clinton  (Making History) and Barack Obama (The Audacity of Hope).  While it’s reassuring to know that Gen Oers still know how to read, it’s chilling to observe how readily they accept the words attributed to their idols at face value.

For reading these books, they are validated by their peers, complimented for their good taste - and tacitly discouraged from turning a critical eye to even a single sentence.  No surprise, then, that brainwashing is also known as “thought reform,” with social acceptance the dangling carrot.  The thoughts in these books are “good.”

This is the exact opposite of how Gen Oers are taught to view literature by conservative thinkers like Mark Levin and Ann Coulter (who, BTW, actually write their own books).  In these cases, the same kiddies are emboldened to ridicule, condemn and name call – no reading required.  The thoughts in these books are “bad.” 

Guilt also plays a major part in brainwashing.  Everyone from gay activists and environmentalists to socialized medicine zealots use it to browbeat people into submission (like any of us need more that).  If you resist their arguments, then you must: a) be suffering from internalized homophobia; b) own shares in Exxon, or c) secretly want minorities to die waiting to get into the ER.

Brainwashing can only work in an environment of isolation – and there’s no lonelier place for a conservative than New York, San Francisco or Hollywood.  Hopefully, that’s changing as many of us are starting to speak out.  Still, the Left controls the arsenal of psychological weapons (film, print and digital media) used to break people down.

The challenge for young people is that, unless they already know someone who at least identifies as a “classical liberal,” their malleable minds will be hard pressed to discover the joy of civil discourse or rational debate.  They won’t be exposed to any.

In 1983, best-selling shrink M. Scott Peck published his second book, People of The Lie.  In it, he tells the stories of several patients whom he came to believe could be clinically diagnosed as “evil” - a character disorder he describes as “militant ignorance.”  According to Peck, an evil person prefers to psychologically destroy others rather than face his (or her) own faults, exhibits zero empathy towards his targeted scapegoat, and enjoys falsely labeling other people as evil.

You know, like spending eight years comparing people you disagree with to Hitler.

Self-deception, Peck states, is the number one risk factor for evil, easier to maintain in groups – like MoveOn.org, Al-Qaeda, Queers for Palestine, Rachel Maddow’s Facebook page - than individually.  Ironically, Hollywood has long told us this sort of mass bias is wrong.  Just watch Gregory Peck and Dorothy McGuire in Gentleman’s Agreement, Ginger Rogers and Ronald Reagan in Storm Warning, Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thorton in Monster’s Ball, the entire Screen Actors Guild in Crash… the list goes on and on.

So when did groupthink suddenly become cool?  When did words start meaning the opposite of what they were intended to mean?  When did “progressive” come to mean ”do nothing,” and “conservative” mean “progressive” (i.e. “do something”)?  When, as Andrew Klavan has so eloquently pointed out, did the belief system of the angels get reduced to the two-syllable mantra: “Shut up?”

When did dissent become a de facto hate crime?

In Don Siegel’s classic sci-fi flick, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the citizens of Santa Mira, California, are gradually replaced in their sleep by emotionless impostors – the proverbial “pod people.”  The film is often interpreted as an allegory for Communism and McCarthyism (a tactic first reviled, then hijacked, by the Left).  But Body Snatchers is more relevant than ever – right here, right now.

You walk the halls, wander the streets, visit the homes of other two-legged beings who appear to resemble you on the surface, yet seem to have no clue you exist as a separate person, mentally, emotionally or spiritually.  These seemingly intelligent beings talk about you, in front of you, as if you were in another room, automatically assuming you are of like mind.  (Maybe they just never read Miss Manners.)

If you say something to correct them - or just ask a question about their leader – they blink, not comprehending.  You repeat the question.  They smile at you wanly.  It does not compute.  Welcome to Santa Mira, a.k.a. Hollywood, a shifty dreamscape, where nothing is exactly as it seems, where a marine layer rolls in every night, blanketing its sleeping citizens in a fine vapor of paranoia.

Does anyone know the way to San Jose?

Back in the harsh reality of daylight, the O generation carries on, oblivious to its own cruelty or mortality.  As long as they have Dancing with the Stars and Tivo, all is well with the world.  Are these overgrown, enlightened rejects from Village of the Damned the new ugly Americans?  If so, they are primed to be thrown over, fatally, themselves.  By whom?  I think we all know – and it ain’t The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

At the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter have managed to escape pod-dom by staying awake for days on end.  Exhausted, Wynter finally succumbs.  When she awakens, changed, she gives McCarthy some icy advice: ”They were right…  Stop acting like a fool, and accept us.”  If she’d had a rubber stamp, she might have branded him – “DENIED!”

McCarthy flees, desperate for human help, lamenting in voiceover how “a moment’s sleep, and the girl I loved was an inhuman enemy bent on my destruction.”  Watching the attractive people I see everyday, working out at the gym, driving their Smart Cars, grabbing a Starbucks, watching CNN, listening to their iPods – and talking about Hope – I know how he feels.

When did they all fall asleep?  When are they going to wake up?  Perhaps when they learn, the hard way, that freedom is not just another convenience.

Meanwhile, try not to express a dissenting or individual thought – and don’t gasp if one of them lashes out viciously at a friend who steps out of line - because that’ll clue them in that you’re still human.

And then they’ll come after you.

The realization didn’t come overnight; it had been forming for some time.  But the Gestapo tactics over Prop 8 – McCarthy-style blacklists, boycotting of otherwise gay-friendly businesses, apologies coerced out of individual supporters who made the “wrong” choice, enforced politically-correct donations to the Human Rights Campaign - clarified it for me.

I hadn’t left the community, it had left me.  When did the gays get so mean, anyway? 

Well, isn’t it “mean” for California voters to deny us our basic civil rights?  I can hear the retort.  And I understand the anger, believe me, to a degree.  Feelings have been hurt.  I also agree that changing any Constitution over this issue is a bad idea.

But don’t you think there has to be a vanguard leading the way to new and better things?  Not if capitulating to an Ozzie and Harriet social custom is the vanguard’s idea of fresh.

I must be immune to gay marriage fever.  Because I can’t help sympathizing with the citizens whose majority vote to defend their long-valued concept of marriage has been stigmatized as bigotry.  The pro-8 voters I’ve talked to are resigned to the likelihood that the screaming minority will ultimately get its way, that gay marriage will come to California.  So the psychological game, at least, is over.

The score: gays, one – black and Latino Obama voters, zero.

Still, why the sudden urgency, the live or die hysteria for gay marriage now - or else!?  Last time I checked, gays and lesbians in California enjoyed more rights than their brothers and sisters in any other state.  And I can’t recall any of my West Hollywood friends ever being dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night by police and never heard from again – or told by their employers they couldn’t get health benefits for their domestic partners.

What exactly is it that the affluent gay community here feels it doesn’t have?  And when did I first start to feel the sad disconnect between myself and LGBT groupthink?

When I came out in 1977, there was no Rosie, Ellen, Lance - or Logo.  Harvey Milk hadn’t been shot yet.  Matthew Shepard was still in diapers.  Our role models were literary pioneers like Tennessee Williams, Quentin Crisp, Gertrude Stein, and Christopher Isherwood.  (We still had attention spans then.)

Beauty queen-turned-orange-juice-hawker Anita Bryant was busy “Saving Our Children” down in Dade County, Florida – overturning a local ordinance to protect gay people from discrimination in housing and employment.  (Her success sparked the Briggs Initiative of 1978 in Orange County, CA, which would have banned gays and lesbians from teaching in California public schools – if folks like Harvey Milk, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford hadn’t pitched in to stop it.)

At 17, I got applause when I nervously wore my “Anita Sucks Oranges” T-shirt to school.  Times, they were a-changin’.  Living in New York didn’t hurt.

Gay pride marches down Fifth Avenue were new and exciting then - and full of purpose.  Only four years earlier, the American Psychiatric Association had removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.  The parades were marked by a sense of defiance and hope that wasn’t manufactured.  Tired of living invisible lives - and fed up with being harassed, entrapped, beaten, jailed – the gays were galvanized and moving forward in unison.

In the summer of 1979, protests all over Manhattan disrupted the filming of William Friedkin’s Cruising, a thriller about a cop (Al Pacino) who goes undercover to track down a gay serial killer – and in the process finds himself drawn to the sadomasochistic underground of lower Manhattan.  The gay community was concerned that the script perpetuated stereotypes about gay men as compulsively promiscuous – and miserable to the point of being homicidal.

In reality, gays were acting out sexually all over the place, certainly in the Village.  You could catch glimpses of activity during a stroll on any Hudson River pier or along the closed portion of the Westside Highway, which pedestrians used as an elevated promenade to walk down to the still-standing WTC.

Gay men were fighting back against the rusty restraints of convention and exercising their new found freedom by indulging themselves like there was no tomorrow.  (And as we all know, there was a very tragic tomorrow just around the corner: AIDS.)  Adolescent behavior?  For sure.  But also understandable.  Many gay men were experiencing a delayed stage of teenage rebellion – just one of the normal growing pains that got lost in the tricky shuffle of living a double life.

Free love wasn’t an old concept yet, and many gays and lesbians eschewed mainstream assimilation, taking pride in the avant garde, open relationships they forged.  The LGBT community wanted to be different.  It wasn’t unusual back then for urban gays to express disdain for suburban, two-car-garage gay couples who aped the bourgeois, heterosexual norm.  (Born in concrete Manhattan, suburbs and shopping malls always seemed romantic to me!)

As an impressionable young man out and about in the big city, I rarely met another gay person who didn’t mock organized religion or deride anything even remotely connected with the church – including marriage.  Gays wanted to be recognized, but they also wanted to go their own way.

The first A Different Light bookstore, exclusively for gay lit, opened in Los Angeles in 1979 (stores in San Francisco and New York soon followed).  Little by little, gay characters became more visible on screen.  In 1981, Tony Randall starred as a gay man in the sitcom Love, Sidney.  The following year, Making Love became the first studio feature about a romance between two men (played by Michael Ontkean and Harry Hamlin).  The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) was formed in 1985 to keep a watchful eye on negative gay stereotypes in the media.

In 1990, MCA broke new ground as the first entertainment company to offer health benefits to same-sex couples.  A few years later, kd lang and Ellen Degeneres came out of the closet – without committing career suicide.  Philadelphia and Brokeback Mountain won multiple Oscars.  The culture was awash in gaydom.  We even had a hawkish Vice President with an openly gay daughter!  (Oh, I forgot – we’re not supposed to mention her.  She’s from the party that, like Iran, isn’t supposed to have any homosexuals.)

The list of gay victories goes on and on.  It didn’t matter who was in the Oval Office or what faction was in power.  America is not China or Saudi Arabia (not yet anyway).  Despite our imperfections, human rights are still the objective here.  Is the gay community on either coast cognizant of that anymore?

My personal disillusionment with my fellows began in the mid-1990s, after I wrote a nonfiction book about a well-known gay man who married a woman in order to have a family – and stayed married to her for the rest of his life, warts and all.  When the book came out, I got it from both sides: the right wingers said I was an activist with a “gay agenda” to ”out” a famous family man; the gays griped that I should have denounced his marriage as a fake and called his wife a “beard.”

I couldn’t do that.  Despite obvious complications, this man and woman had a deep commitment to each other and to their children - a vow that was tested by time and by tragedy (his eventual death from AIDS).  It surprised me that gay people, who were celebrated for and proud of creating their own nontraditional families, could be so judgmental.  I was damned if I did, and damned if I didn’t.

The response to 9/11 left me feeling even more betrayed.  Though there was a bona fide gay hero in the attacks - Mark Bingham, the athletic businessman who helped storm the cockpit of United Flight 93, throwing the Islamists’ suicide mission off course – he soon got brushed aside in favor of the Loose Change/neocon conspiracy/hate-Bush zeitgeist that was sweeping the Left.

Mark Bingham

Never would I have imagined I’d develop a social phobia about hanging out with other gay people – my purported comrades - but lo and behold, I did.  Not long after I moved back to LA (a relocation that coincided with 9/11), it seemed to me the gay community was morphing into little more than an offshoot of MoveOn.org.

The movement, or should I say urban gay culture, didn’t seem to be about being gay anymore; it had become fixated on hating US authority – not so much Big Brother as “Big Daddy,” some imaginary, omnipotent, no doubt conservative patriarchal figure in the sky (obviously the product of a lot of transference).  Spoiled American gays were running out of oppressors to attack – so they found a convenient new target just within reach: themselves. 

Case in point: the mystifyingly misguided group “Queers for Palestine.”  In their mechanical hatred of all things Bush-related – well, almost all things – these good little left-wing soldiers stand in perverse support of possibly the most homophobic regime on earth.  Once upon a time, even I used to glibly spout that a gay person voting Republican was like a Jew voting Nazi – but Queers for Palestine go straight to the source.  Talk about internalized homophobia.

Did no one see the threat to decades of gay activism smoldering in the rubble of the Twin Towers? 

Five years later, The Advocate finally published a story about a nasty run-in between a 43-year-old lesbian in Jackson Heights, New York, and members of the Muslim Thinkers Society, who had set up signs on a local street corner declaring “Allah will destroy nations that allow homosexuality.”  After a verbal argument with these shameless bigots, the woman claimed that one of the “thinkers” had pushed her to the ground.  Naturally, police charged her with disorderly conduct, not the friendly neighborhood Muslims.

Did the gay community rally to her defense?

No.  United against evil Republicans and their bugaboo “Religious Right,” gays have turned a willful blind eye to Islamic supremacy, many choosing to view it not as a palpable threat to their own existence, but as a fear-mongering fabrication of the imperialist Bush administration.  Self-destructive groups like Queers for Palestine rail against the phantom human rights abuses and war crimes of the staunchest defenders of social liberalism - the US and Israel – without realizing the deadly, tyrannical hands they are playing into.

As reported by Yossi Klein Halevi and others, queers in Palestine are considered criminals – no ifs, ands, or buts.  They are routinely harassed, entrapped - and brutally tortured – by police.  One young man Halevi interviewed was forced to stand in sewage, his head covered by a shit-filled sack, before being ordered to sit on a Coke bottle during a sadistic interrogation.  Nice.

Imagine just for a moment the incredible outrage you would hear from the gay community in the States if a US police officer – or even better, a US Army officer – were accused of such barbarity.

Meanwhile, few gays in wealthy, free, out/proud America seem the least bit concerned about the monstrous physical and psychological treatment of their brothers overseas.  Of course, we suffer from a media blackout here.  CBS, NBC, ABC, and MSNBC rarely report anything grotesque or violent – unless it’s a hate crime committed by a white American or a sex scandal involving an evangelical preacher (or a Republican).

This is what happens when Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow are mistaken for journalists.

Eight years after 9/11, the LGBT community gets its activism fix by indulging in nostalgic, anti-establishment indignation over petty domestic slights.  Ganging up on an annoying little old lady carrying a cross at a Prop 8 rally satisfies the itch between workouts and White Parties.  But wouldn’t it be genuinely awe inspiring to see masses of musclebound gay men taking on, say, a congregation of homophobic Islamic “thinkers” (who, BTW, love the idea of pushing gay men off cliffs to their death)?

John Cena, eat your heart out!  (Hey, I can dream, can’t I?)

By 2001, mainstream chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders were putting the independent LGBT bookstores out of business.  Who needed A Different Light when the corporate biggies all boasted gay-and-lesbian sections?  Capitalism was promoting homosexuality in a major way.  Any closet case can now order a gay book anonymously online – without brown paper wrapping!

But ironically, no gay conservative can buy a gay conservative book in the last dwindling Different Light.  Walk into the West Hollywood store, ask for the latest title by talk radio lesbian Tammy Bruce, and brace yourself for the dirty look you’ll get.  But request An Inconvenient Truth by heterosexual Al Gore or What Happened: Inside the Bush White House by Scott McClellan – no problem!  We’re overstocked!

Because gay is no longer taboo in America, the community has shifted its focus from supporting “difference” to espousing a blanket Leftist agenda – in essence, suppressing diversity - and driving many of its own into a new (conservative) closet.  I recently overheard one West Hollywood resident, who was lamenting the passing of Prop 8, follow it up by saying, “Well, that’s okay because first we had to get Obama elected.”

Earth to homo: Obama isn’t for gay marriage.  Yes, he just endorsed a non-binding United Nations declaration that calls for worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality (probably because Bush refused to sign it last year).  But more than 50 nations, i.e. the members of the powerfully anti-gay Organization of the Islamic Conference (which is more intent on passing a binding resolution to criminalize defamation of Islam) are not participating.  And we know how the UN loves to reprimand them.

No, Obama only hobnobs with politically-correct homophobes like Nation of Islam “Supreme Minister,” Louis Farrakhan.  Farrakhan may be a person of color, a fellow minority, but that doesn’t mean he is your friend.

Same with former President Bill Clinton, who became inviolable in the eyes of many in the LGBT community.  Aside from sharing an interest in oral sex, what did he do for gays?  In 1993, he approved a US military policy called “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” which deigned to permit gays and lesbians to serve in the US military – if they kept their sexual orientation a secret.  Three years after that, he passed a federal law called the Defense of Marriage Act, mandating that a grand total of zero same-sex relationships be treated as “marriages.”

With friends like that…

Meanwhile, in 2004, Hitler reincarnate George Bush failed to get the votes for a reprehensible Constitutional amendment to redefine marriage as consisting ”solely of the union of a man and woman.”  This prompted smarmy San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to grab the spotlight by illegally declaring gay marriage legal in that town.  Herds of dykes and fags immediately stampeded onto the steps of city hall, where they tied their knots and turned on the tears for the TV cameras. 

Sorry to say, but these calculated displays of emotion embarrassed even me.  Not because the people getting married were gay – but because they were adults behaving like naughty, willful children.  Since when did the entire population of the Castro district want to emulate mom and pop?  Whatever the reality, these Oscar worthy performances have become part of the arsenal against debate.

Then, just before Christmas last year, lame duck Nazi Bush threw a monkey wrench into everyone’s preconceived notions, passing the Worker, Retiree and Employer Recovery Act of 2008.  This landmark law made it mandatory for businesses to roll over retirement benefits to same-sex partners in the event of an employee’s death.  Prior to this, employers could refuse, forcing same-sex survivors to pay tax on the inheritance of the deceased partner’s retirement savings.  (Legally married heterosexual couples aren’t subject to this penalty.)

National LGBT rights groups hailed the heartening move, which received scant attention from the media.  But it was too little too late.  Pampered California queers had tasted the glory of ’60s-style civil rights martyrdom – and they weren’t about to give it up.  In the process, they insulted every African-American from South Central to Harlem. 

Newsflash: blacks in America didn’t start out as hip-hop fashion designers; they were slaves.  There’s a big difference between being able to enjoy a civil union with the same sex partner of your choice - and not being able to drink out of a water fountain, eat at a lunch counter, or use a rest room because you don’t have the right skin color.

Two people of the same sex being denied the opportunity to marry is not the same as two people of opposite sexes and different colors being denied that same opportunity.  Interracial couples who couldn’t marry because of anti-miscegenation laws were still men and women - trying to do what millions of other men and women were already doing: joining together in holy matrimony, usually to raise a family.

Like it or not, same sex couples cannot have babies without the help of an outside party.  This does not mean gay people do not make fabulous and caring parents, or don’t know how to build solid family units.  Many most definitely do, and families these days come in many variations.  But contrary to Utopian wishes, animals, vegetables, minerals - and people - are not all the same.  There is no level playing field in nature.  Biology is not “fair.”

Defend Equality – Love Unites! the anti-Prop 8 poster disingenuously declares.  Fine - except that all the shouting at Mormons in Westwood and harassing customers at the Mexican restaurant where Sharon Tate ate her last meal wasn’t done out out of love – it was done out of spite.

As one lesbian I know generously put it: ”Don’t talk to me about the sanctity of marriage!  The divorce rate is through the roof!  Give me a break – marriage is a joke!”

Really?  Then why do you want it so much?

Which brings me back to my earlier point: I don’t believe most gay people really do want marriage.  There’s certainly no consensus on it.  As a rule, gay folk tend to distrust organized religion (not without good reason) and middle class heterosexual norms.  So why the sudden mania for wedding bells?  Could it be the result of watching too much Bravo?

Having once been accused of advancing a nefarious gay agenda myself, I can’t help but see where this stubborn trend is taking us: right into the clutches of the dreaded Far Right fanatics, who claim gays and lesbians are bent on undermining the time-honored institution of marriage and radically changing it from the inside out.

Well, guess what.  Judging from how the gay community is currently playing its cards, I’d wager that is the goal.  But no one in is saying it out loud.

Gays don’t want marriage because they desperately long to be part of a stuffy, archaic ritual laden with church baggage.  They want to get married because, now that they have clout and 99% of the same rights as straight people, they’ve run out of goals - and they feel entitled to the only thing that’s still beyond reach: absolute acceptance. 

Didn’t mama ever tell you that you can’t please everybody?

Sure, it would be wonderful if the world were a peaceful paradise that wasn’t comprised of a million conflicting cultures, where gay relationships were naturally on a par with straight ones, where no one blinked when I call my husband “my husband” – and we all lived happily ever after.  But it’s not.  And it never will be.

Personally, I love the look of a wedding band on a man’s hand – even more so on two men’s hands.  But gay couples have been wearing commitment rings for decades without asking for permission, and without the sanction of any state.  I’m not against gay marriage, I’m against the way it has been shoved down everyone’s throat.  Thanks to the in-your-face blitz – launched, remember, by an opportunistic straight politician (Newsom) - the LGBT community has blown a prime chance to present the case for gay marriage with clarity and persuasion.

Brit blogger Mark Simpson makes a strong argument for civil unions as a viable alternative, citing their success in France – where, as an option for all couples, they’ve become increasingly popular.  Gay Americans should heed his advice and focus their considerable energy on making sure legal contracts between two same-sex partners are made equal to marriage in the eyes of the law – reaffirming gays and lesbians as the true innovators of cohabitational freedom.

Civil unions already offer gay couples the same basic legal status as married couples in several states, including California (and they’re a lot easier to get).  But as a result of the gay community’s mass hissy fit to usurp marriage, the religious right has been re-ignited in its holy war against legal recognition of any gay relationships at all.

So maybe it’s time for the so-called “vanguard” to try a little change.

American gays and lesbians need to stop playing victim and come up with a more inclusive tack.  We need to get out of the ghetto and stand up for the American values that allow us to live in peace – and to continue fighting for our rights (the ideals we actually share with our mythic “red” state foes). 

If Melissa Etheridge can get over herself and see the light in Reverend Rick Warren, so can the rest of us.  As the saying goes, you get more with honey than vinegar.

Because unless we’re all on the same page, we’re not going to make it.  Lesbians and gays are right up there with Jews at the top of the global jihad hit list.  And all the equality in the world isn’t worth anything if we’re not alive to enjoy it.

3000 diverse, multi-colored, multi-national, multi-religious, multicultural, gay, straight, bisexual, married, divorced, single people found that out the hard way on 9/11.

40 years after the Stonewall Riots, it’s time for the LGBT community to reconnect with what made us rebel in the first place: the right to live not as conformist dhimmis, but as social, intellectual, and artistic pioneers.  Instead of stirring up resentment trying to snatch a piece of a stale pie we don’t really need - and setting back our cause in the process - we need to keep moving forward, not “separate but equal,” but different and equal.

It’s time to reprioritize, show some gratitude for how far we’ve come, and try some magnanimity for a change.  Let the so-called “bigots” keep their rituals.  We have our own way of doing things.

But we also can’t keep operating in an us-against-them vacuum.  We need all the allies we can get.  Because history repeats itself.

And once again, more than ever, silence equals death.