Just to put this into context: news reports are saying this is the “2nd annual Gay Pride Month” that Bush is nixing. This begs the question: did Clinton get similar grief when HE nixed the same thing for 6 or so years?
Jophiel wrote:
You raise a validated question; is blacks the same as gays? I don’t know the answer, I wish I did. Only Jesus knows that. Clinton signed for gay pride, and a lot of other things I wouldn’t do. Does that mean there’s a grandfather clock? I’m not saying gays shouldn’t have pride. I’m proud of gays, because they don’t have abortions. But an abortion isn’t a family, and my administration is about family.
Is blacks the same as gays? I’m sure SOME of them are. 
Your administration is about family? What do you mean? Shouldn’t a government protect the interests and rights of ALL its subordinates/citizens?
Coldfire wrote:
I believe everybody has a family. Maybe some more than others. That’s where their heart is. Now, I come from a nucular family, everybody knows that. We had hardships just like you do, we weren’t always president. Just last year, I was governor. But even then I had a family, and that’s better than being gay. I’m not just parodying the party line. I deeply feel God attended for us to be a family, to bail eachother out in the time of need. Who does gays have to take care of them? America isn’t a nanny state. They tried that over in Canadia, and look what happened to the taxes. Tax incidences on the poor. Americans want to know why can’t we keep what we earn? In my family, we want to know too, which is why my dad voted those tax plans, and I’m gonna vote those tax plans that take pockets away from poor people.
Any other questions?
Gays have families. Some of them may not have their birth family anymore because of narrow minded, judgmental thinking, but they have families. They have their partners and their friends that are more than ready to “bail them out”, though I have to say I have more straight friends that need bailing out of things than I my gay friends.
[sub]bolding mine[/sub]
What?
Yes. But I’ll save them until this gets moved to the proper forum for them.
Arden Ranger wrote:
[/quote]
Are you questioning the switch to first person, or the switch to plural?
I think if you re-read my first post on this thread, it might help clear things up.
Johnny Angel,
If you’re trying to give us an impersonation of your president: it’s a really bad one.
If you seriously mean whatever I could pick up from those incoherent strings of words, I’m asking you to stop it right now. This isn’t a thread about what your dad voted for, and it certainly isn’t an opportunity to unleash your seriously flawed world views on your Northern neighbours, and on family values.
In short, close that bottle of glue on your desk already.
To Coldfire (and the other fellas that missed it)
Whoooshhh!
He’s funnin’ with President Bush’s “unique” speaking style. I though it was kinda funny. Please let him sniff a little more glue. I’m bored.
I honestly couldn’t tell. That tells us something about Dubya, Johnny Angel, myself, or all of the above.
" . . . my administration is about family."
I have gay people in my family. So I guess “your” administration is all about family, as long as it does not contain any gay people?
I had forgotten about Bush and his “Jesus Day.” Now I AM a little pissed-off. Though I think “Gay History Month” would be a much better name than “Gay Pride Month.” No sense being “proud” of something you have no control over. I’m not proud of being from Pennsylvania, for instance, but I am interested in Pennsylvanian history.
Howzabout “Gay Geometry Week”?
I have no idea how it would work, but I’m all for it.
Fercryinoutloud folks! Give Johnny a break! Of course he is fooling ya! I can’t believe that you would take it the way you did! He showed wit and creativity, and you want to condemn him for it? I feel that you are being rude, and he was being funny. He even declared what he was going to do in his very first sentence, in his very first post!
Here’s a prescription for you Coldy, Eve, Jophial, and Arden: Read more Doonesbury!
Bush does speak like that, and he does mangle sentences like that. It was not a poor representation at all. Heck, Dubya even jokes about his own word mangling.
I’m sorry, but I think y’all owe him an apology.
Johnny, kudos. Keep up the good work.
-Tcat
It seems that the big argument in favor of Gay Pride Month is that it has been done before therefore it must continue to be done. That logic is the cause of too much government stupidity.
The other argument seems to be that if other things are going to be so honored, then Gay Pride (or some other element of gay culture) should certainly be. There are only twelve of these proclamations available, is being Gay on the Top 12 list? For you, apparently, but is it not a legitimate point of debate? For me, being gay would not make the list but I don’t think that means I am anti-gay. Presumably Bush proclaimed June as “Something Else Month”. What was that something else and can you reasonably say that it is not deserving of recognition. (Note: I am not saying that Bush wasn’t sending a message or politicizing anything. I am just saying that the act described is not inherently a negative act. I would have made the same decision as Bush but likely for different reasons.)
What I would propose is that our government stop producing these stupid proclamations. If they can’t find something better to do with their time they should just go home early and leave the country alone. Let Hallmark make these proclamations.
Ooops. You’re right—mea culpa. Mia farrow. And all that. Wooshed right over my head.
. . . I don’t have to start reading Doonesbury as a punishment, do I?
Johnny Angel, if only he were half as brilliant as you are, many, many things would be better with this world. 
Signing the proclamation is a statement - when the guy in charge of the land says, “Hey, these people deserve some recognition for what they’ve been through,” it means something. By discontinuing the tradition Clinton started, that also says something. When the CEO of a company says derogatory things about his employees[sup]*[/sup], doesn’t that affect morale? Similarly, if he’d taken the high road and signed it, it would send a clear message - these are a part of our country’s people that should be recognized. It could have been a good thing, but, as Eve, I’m not surprised, nor am I going to let it affect my pride month. It would have been nice, it would have been presidential, it would have been the right thing to do, but he didn’t. So be it.
Esprix
[sub]*Not that I’m comparing him to a CEO or the US to a company, but the heirarchy analogy stands.[/sub]
How’s about a Gay Heritage Month? Do you think Dubya might go for that?
[eric cartman voice] I’m half lesbian, ‘cause my dad was a full blooded lesbian. [/eric cartman voice]
Just a thought…
I sometimes wonder why it is the intelligent posters we have here on the SDMB so often miss the point in responding to the posts of others. My pet theory is that people don’t actually read posts, they react to key-words within them. That theory has found validation in this thread.
I know the people who have been posting on this thread are smarter-than-your-average-bear, so the only reasonable explanation for most of you to have missed the point is that you didn’t actually read. Even if your eyes glanced over the set-up, and were willing to overlook a grammatical oddity here and there (where are the grammar police people are always bitching about in the pit?), I don’t think anyone who read my posts for comprehension would have failed to notice the pattern of sentence fragments, confused antecedents, errant clauses. There was one comment from Arden Ranger about I and We. How did this stand out when “Gays are human rights, that’s not the question” didn’t?
And the puns. Nobody who had actually read would have missed so many puns. Never mind the bumbling malapropriation of Republican rhetoric. I can see how that would be too subtle, too hard to distinguish from actual Republican rhetoric. Never mind the subtler puns like voted for vetoed. A reader wouldn’t have missed such gaudy wordplay as “I’m not just parodying the party line.”
Nobody reads posts. It’s not just in this thread. It’s endemic here at the SDMB, and across the net. I’ve caught myself at it, responding hastily to posts I haven’t taken the time to understand. I’ve had to trash really good posts because I came to realize that the post I thought I was responding to was all in my imagination. Even now you’re not really reading, are you? Just skimming for trigger words. Your mother was a Bolshevik, with a pegleg. A couple of times (at least) I didn’t realize my mistake until I had already posted. On the other hand, I have many times had to state explicitly again and again in the same thread what it was I was trying to claim, and what I was not trying to claim, because people are in a hurry to infer more than anyone means to imply.
But since I knew the absurdity of trying to communicate explicitly, I wonder why I thought I’d manage to do it subtly. I said to my wife, “Well, never mind them. Where’s Eve? She’ll get it.” Oh, but what I fool I am.
Look, I understand how it is. We skim the vanity threads, or post to them blindly, because we’re more interested in extoling our opinions to other people who won’t read them than in what other people think. We skip over ongoing heated debates to post tangents. We grep the ass-kissing threads for our names. But when we actually engage other posters, it is no great imposition to make sure we know what they are saying before we take them to task. It is, in fact, minimal civility to consider other posters more than voyeurs of our own intellectual self-gratification. Nobody reads the posts they respond to. Our discourse is in shambles. This board is a chorus of solipsisms, and I’m as guilty as anybody (well, not quite anybody) but I feel that the time has come to raise the trumpet call for a change that will never happen. So, years from now, when the epistemological apocalypse has hit, and people rise lamely from the intellectual marl and try desperately to remember where it all went wrong, somebody somewhere will remember this thread and know that I, Johnny Angel, had said something about how gays were black.
Well I didn’t really get to read all that… But I’ll admit that it took me reading it about three times before I caught “extrude” and then I got it. Problem is, Johnny, is that there are people on this board who really write like that. Sure, of course some people didn’t read it thoroughly, but some people might have taken it at face value because there have been enough people who actually would have meant it at face value. Also, people who didn’t know you better might not know that you don’t really think that way (I know I was surprised at first blush until I figured it out).
Nicely done, though. The art of satire is a hard one to master, but baby, you could write for The Onion.
Esprix
shrug
I freely admit I didn’t get it. Now that it’s been explained, I still don’t find it particularly funny. Of course, I don’t find Shrub particularly funny. Just sad.
But that’s just me.
Arden Ranger wrote:
Obviously a guy who refers to Bush as Shrub' knows from funny. Demicans and Republicrats, indeed. We all dig that *Gasoline Alley*. Remember that one time they had The Devil on the NASCAR circuit, and his nom-de-vroom was De’Ville?’ Talk about a compound fracture of the funny bone that still acts up when it’s about to rain!
But what about my post about how nobody reads posts? Any thoughts on that, like maybe about how long it is, or the average word length, or whether or not there’s anything interesting on NPR right now?