Frightening the Women and the Horses

SAN FRANCISCO, Ca.--A couple canoodled--by which we mean aggressively swapped spit--on a Bay Area Rapid Transit train today, prompting onlookers to note: We don't care what the heterosexuals do in the privacy of their own bedrooms, but really, do they have to flaunt their mainstream lifestyle in public, forcing it upon good citizens the world over? 

Crime of the Century (Wagging the Dog Division)

ABERDEEN, Scotland, March 17 -- A twenty-eight-year old man has been fined nine hundred dollars for attempting to "assault" a female Scottish police officer with a dangerous weapon: his penis.
   Various British news outlets - the Sun, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mirror and BBC News, but not the Times, because that august broadsheet dasn't touch news of the common willie - reported today that the man, named Marium Varinauskas (photo, below), was arguing with his girlfriend when police were called to his Aberdeen apartment.
   When officers showed up, a Huffington Post roundup of the British press stories noted, he was "drunk and in his underpants." Colloquially, this means he was entirely shitfaced and nearly bare-assed nekkid.
   The HuffPo did not say, however -  nor, apparently, did the British press - what kind of "underpants" Mr. Varinauskas was wearing, so readers learned news neither of style, color, brand nor type: thong, bikini, briefs, boxer briefs, boxers, or other. This cannot be seen as anything other than an appalling oversight.
   An official told the court that Mr. V. (honestly, how many times does one need to type out "Varinauskas" in his ever-shortening lifetime?) stood over the police officer "exposing his penis and thrusting it in her face, forcing her to take evasive action to avoid getting struck." 
   It is unclear what "stood over" actually means. Mr. V. was, when deputies arrived, sitting on a couch. Presumably, as they were standing, they loomed  over him. When he stood, he'd have been eye-to-eye with them. 
   For him to have "stood over" the female officer, then, suggests that she was somehow below him, perhaps in a kneeling position, which would further explain why the potted Mr. V., who later confessed to having been in an alcoholic blackout, might have mistakenly thought it entirely correct and context appropriate  to "thrust" his member "in her face." 
   Alas, we will never know. 
   With classic Scottish understatement, a police department spokesman said, "This was a distasteful experience for the officer." 
    

The Joys of Holy Matrimony (End of Days Division)

PATERSON, New Jersey, March 11 - A fifty-one-year-old New Jersey man is preparing to stand trial five times, one for each of the daughters he allegedly raped repeatedly, three of whom he impregnated and who gave birth to a total of six children, the Associated Press reported today.
   According to the man's wife, he was sure the world would soon end, and therefore thought it prudent to create a "pure bloodline" by impregnating his daughters. Prosecutors in Passaic County told the AP that one of the daughters was raped as late as 2002, shortly before the wife left the man and took the children with her. The daughter was in her early teens at the time.
   In testimony, one daughter, the AP reports, "described experiencing and witnessing beatings administered with wooden boards and steel-toed boots." She added that the man would punish even the most trivial transgressions by withholding food.
   The children were home-schooled and not allowed to socialize with peers.
   The man faces twenty-seven charges, including many related to sex crimes. His first trial is scheduled for April. More sordid details - there's only so much one can write without becoming dispirited - are in the AP story.
   This situation calls into question the notion, promulgated by conservative social critics and lawmakers, that for marriage to remain "a union between a man and a woman" is better for the children. Plainly, some heterosexual men see "family" as their own personal cult. 
   This point should be noted by gays and lesbians eager to enter the sacred institution of matrimony. 
           --30--


NOTE (March 12, 2010): This story is updated here.

The Joys of Holy Matrimony (Statistical Evidence Division)

   A report recently released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that, in America, marriages last longer than non-marriage cohabitative relationships, a phrase this reporter just made up.
   According to a March 2 Reuters report, the CDC study suggests that seventy-eight percent of marriages last five years or more. Less than thirty percent of what the CDC, unlike this reporter, calls "cohabiting unions" (making it sound like the unions themselves are cohabiting, something that hasn't happened since the days of Jimmy Hoffa) last the same amount of time. 
   The study was based on a nationally representative sample, whatever that is, of 12,571 American men and women. 

   Normally, one prefers to go to the source - to dig beyond the Associated Press or Reuters - in order to flesh out blog items. But the CDC report, available here, runs forty-six pages, forty-five-and-one-half pages longer than that for which one has any patience a 'tall. 
   However, gays and lesbians enthused about marrying might want to study the report. They'll find nothing about themselves in it, of course. But they will amass interesting conversational fodder for when they dine with their heterosexual counterparts and try to convince them that gay people are just like they are, and therefore should be allowed to marry. 
   This, of course, is a canard. Gay people are irrevocably different from straight people by virtue of being well-groomed, well-spoken and well-mannered, and of having a capacity for sexual relations the deviance of which is quite rightly thought to be a danger to the safety of the women and the horses.