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RICHMOND, Virginia, March 11 - The governor of the great state of Virginia has shown that, when it comes to equal rights for gays, lesbians and transgendered people, he is, well, all for equal rights for gays, lesbians and transgendered people.
There was no mention made of bisexuals, who, as usual, got the short end of the stick, but who, being attracted to persons of both genders, have twice the chance of getting a date on Saturday night, according to filmmaker and former comic Woody Allen, who made that joke, like, seven hundred years ago.
Gov. Bob McDonnell yesterday directed state agencies of all sizes, stripes and orientations not to discriminate against gays and lesbians, the Associated Press reported today.
State Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli, who, not that this matters, is a Republican, sent a letter last week to state colleges saying they lack authority to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, and ordered them to rescind any anti-discrimination that include protections for gays and lesbians.
It is admirable that Atty. Gen. Cuccinelli sent a letter. Letter-writing is, alas, a lost art, what with emails, texting, Twitter and the general decline of literacy in America, not to mention the fact that the U.S. postal service is considering stopping Saturday service as a cost-cutting measure.
That said, it is the content of the letter with which we must concern ourselves, and that content is, in a word, stupid.
Apparently, Gov. McDonnell agreed, in essence if not in word, and that is why he issued his directive. His directive trumped that of the Atty. Gen., because he - the Gov. - has much more power.
Before the Gov.'s directive reached far and wide into the psyches of Virginians everywhere, the Atty. Gen.'s letter had occasioned no little amount of agitation among, predictably, gay rights groups and, predictably, Democrats.
College students - who, by dint of their youth, vitality and idealism, are the Hope for the Future - rallied, but in a very modern, by which one means troublingly virtual, way.
The Washington Post, quoted in the Associated Press report, which was run on the Huffington Post news site - one apologizes, but one is simply too tired, at the moment, to track down original sources - reported that 3,000 people joined a Facebook page titled, "WE DON'T WANT DISCRIMINATION IN OUR STATE UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES!"
While that sentiment is to be applauded, the use of all capital letters and an exclamation point is not.
The Post further reported, according to the AP by way of the Huffington Post, that one protest was organized by a group at William and Mary College, in Williamsburg, Va., the second oldest college in America, the motto of which is: "We're different, and we like it that way."
The group, called Queer & Allied Activism, launched a social media campaign, the Post wrote, "urging students to protest on Cuccinelli's Facebook and Twitter pages, and to sign a petition organized by the group Equality Virginia."
The group's acronym - QAA - has no meaning, and therefore cannot be called, even by a stretch, clever, but its use of an ampersand is alluring.
One certainly applauds the students' efforts, but one is alarmed to hear that students are now protesting from the safety of their laptops while, perhaps, sitting around their dorms or frat houses in their pajamas. One is all for lounging in sleepwear, but one also remembers the days when students actually ventured out of doors to protest injustices.
Alas, it is a new day. The thought occurs that maybe the weather was bad. Protesting in the snow, while offering the opportunities, during dull moments, to create snowmen, or even snow penises, can be trying.
But recent weather reports, you see, say temperatures have been in the high fifties and low sixties.
That's practically balmy for Virginia winters, or seems like it should be. One doesn't know; one has never been to Virginia in the winter or even in the spring, summer or fall, if memory serves, which it generally does not.
--30--
Two males, both seventeen, were stopped by Parsippany, N.J. police Thursday at about 11:30pm EST on the front lawn of the Parsippany High School, where the young men, using their shoe soles, were outlining, in the snow, the image of a 25-foot penis.
(This photo does not show the young men's art piece. It shows an effort created by students at the the University of Cincinnati football stadium. It is included here for illustrative purposes, you see.)
According to the New Jersey Local News Service, Officer Steven Miller (no relation to the aged rock musician or the beer) saw the teenagers creating the snowbound phallus and "caught them soon after they left the school in a vehicle."
The NJLNS further reports that one of the artists was made to "erase the imagery as Parsippany Police Officer Robert Appel stood by."
This, of course, is an outrage. In an era when funding for public art has all but dried up, these young men were performing a noble civic duty.
That authorities saw differently, however, is not altogether shocking. As a rule, police tend to lean toward the anti-snow-penis.
In 2005, police in New Windsor, New York (pop. roughly 23,000), used shovels to demolish a six-foot snow penis erected (sorry) by Jessica Sherer, nineteen, on the lawn of her boyfriend's house.
There is no recorded indication whether the statue was, indeed, of her boyfriend's penis. If so, and if it was to scale, he obviously received a gift from the gods, as evidenced here:
But, because the world is populated with boors, not everyone saw it that way.
"We got some calls that people thought it was offensive," New Windsor police Chief Michael Biasotti told the Hudson Valley Times Herald-Record (a newspaper so nice they had to name it thrice).
Biasotti did not elaborate on what anyone could possibly find offensive about an artistic rendering of the male penis, the absolute perfection of which is the strongest possible argument for the existence of a God Almighty.
What is known is that police, finding no one home, took it upon themselves to shovel-pummel Sherer's snow penis senseless. (The first photo below shows the result.) Was this reaction reasonable or extreme? New Windsor Town Supervisor George Meyers sounded mixed.
"We probably weren't 100 percent correct in going on the property and knocking it down," he told the Hudson Valley newspaper of (times) record (herald). "But our intentions were pure. Some people were offended. There are school buses going by there every day."
Perhaps Meyers was anticipating the possibility that, seeing the snow penis, a school bus driver might laugh so hard that he or she would inadvertently drive the vehicle into a tree. Or, alternately, that forty school kids spotting the snow penis might cause such a ruckus - laughing, screaming, throwing things, etc. - that the non-plussed driver would inadvertently drive the vehicle into a tree. Either way, at least they'd all die laughing, and their last visual on earth would be a snow penis. One is hard-pressed to think of a better final vision.
For his part, Biasotti, the police chief, expressed concern that, snow-penis-wise, a copycat effect might manifest.
"Now we're going to get snow penises popping up all over town," he told the Hudson Valley newspaper.
One dasn't touch that one with a ten-inch pole.
Sherer, the snow artist, vowed to rebuild a day or so after the contretemps. Whether she did so or not is a mystery left to the ages; there is no followup in the Hudson Valley Times Herald-Record-Trumpet-Chronicle-Post-Examiner-Daily-News.
Above: The damage done by New Windsor, NY, police to Sherer's work.
Below: More snow penises. They suggest that snow-penis erection - apologies - has become a national past-time on a par with baseball, apple pie, and breast enhancement surgery. Would that we had known that before the Winter Olympics rolled around.
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