Promoting the Gay Agenda: Protest of Proposition 8 in the Capital

This past Saturday, a rather large group of people gathered in our nation's capital and around the country to protest California's Proposition 8, which overturned a state constitutional amendment permitting civil unions between same sex couples. This was only one of several anti-gay laws passed across the country on November 4.

As the crowd gathered and then marched on Saturday, however, the purpose of the demonstration clearly went beyond a protest of Proposition 8. This was a march for equal rights: all rights for all people.

The setting:

In case anyone was worried about the "gay agenda": The crowd gathers:
The signs:

The National Organization for Women gathered signatures for a petition asking our new President-elect to endorse gay marriage:

(I signed, and got this sticker to prove it:)

(While we're at it, a view of my rainbow necklace, a product of grading procrastination about five years ago:)

OMG!!!!111!!One!Eleven!! Will NOBODY think of the CHILDREN!!!111!!!!!Eleventy-one!!!:

(LOVE the socks!)

Or the pets?!?! Because no civil rights event would be complete without the police: This being D.C., the police were almost all black, which I thought added an interesting historical dimension to this demonstration. They didn't appear at all hostile, just mostly bored, just another day on the job. The demonstrators that I was around all thanked them for their help in managing traffic during the march.

Speaking of which:

Then the skies opened up.That's the view from what I call my "Big Gay Umbrella" (VUBOQ calls it my Pride Umbrella. I got it at a bigass Wal-Mart in southern Illinois).

The weather service had issued tornado warnings all morning. I'm sure some fundamentalists interpreted this as a sign from god. I figured there was some stereotypical gay joke in there about tornadoes and rainbows and the Wizard of Oz, but I decided that wasn't really my joke to make and didn't go there.

Instead, given that I was meeting Fyodor and Elle (parents of the infamous cop-biter, Doobie) at the National Portrait Gallery after the march, and that the rain was coming at me sideways, and that the wind was about to pick me up by the Big Gay Umbrella and carry ME over the rainbow, I begged the forgiveness of MLK and Bayard Rustin and all of the other marchers for equal rights both past and present, then ran for cover. This is my view of the march from my perch in front of the Smithsonian Castle. As you can see, not everyone was wimpy as me:

Then, I headed toward the National Portrait Gallery. As I cut across the National Sculpture Garden, I found myself face-to-face with the National Archives. That's where the Constitution lives, for those who don't know. Scaffolding covered the lower half of the building, as you can see:

"Are the preserving or dismantling?" I wondered.