Haydennet.com – Joseph Andrew Hayden, Juris Doctor

My Yorkie Monte got a stimulating two mile round trip walk to BART station this morning, that lucky dog.  Bobby joined me and made the walk much more interesting.  We’re thinking about dressing the dog  up as an ewok for a dog costume contest in Alameda if not too rainy on Halloween.

I wish I was with my friend Rick at Sanity rally in DC; I had my moment on Colbert once, though.  See the link on the contents here.

I’m excited about the permaculture yield from backyard that Bobby already orchestrated.  We worked pretty hard on it (more him than me).

I gave mom a lesson in the content management system called WordPress, and she seems to have it down.  She is going to help me with the Trupa.com genealogy site.

Spoke t my old high school friend  Jan today.  She married my other high school friend Mike and they live in Colorado.  Bobby and I are going to visit there for the holidays, so I will see them in Fort Collins, north of Denver.  She told me to be prepared for some really cold weather, but probably not as cold as New York.

I’m very surprised Christina Aguilera is already divorcing, and more surprised that I care. Love her pipes.  Supposedly she was going out with the lesbian DJ that Lindsay Lohan was seeing before rehab (again).

Auguri to Celine Dion on her twin boys. My favorites divas never have girls!  Very cool gesture that Celine named one of her sons after Nelson Mandela, who she met.

Had a great polyglot dinner and art discussion at Tropisueno with friends on Yerba Buena Lane last night before we went to the Badass Bear-aoke at Deco Lounge.

Oprah touring Yosemite is inspiring me to make concrete plans. We’re seeing Grand Canyon in 7 days!

I’m finding them interesting.  I’ve been using my friend’s old Iphone 3G as an Itouch and remember some of the cool things about the iphone that I used to enjoy when I was provided one for free at work.  My Droid has a couple of programs which try to do the same kind of GPS-gay-locating thing like Encountr and Purpll, but neither of them really have any critical mass, even in this gay Mecca of the Bay Area.

How often do you get to see the likes of Chaka Khan and Martha Wash for $5!?  I’m so glad we went.  My daughter and I took BART to 19th Street in Oakland.  She overheard some guys say “follow the bear”.  I met a few friends there and ran into a bunch of people I knew.  I’m glad I didn’t bring my dog, because the music too loud for me.  I can only imagine how hard it would have been for him.

After surviving some headaches the first day and some more altitude sickness, or bad food which caused my last night to be pretty bed and sink-focused, I must say that all in all I had a wonderful time at the pool with old and new friends in a new environment in a part of California I’ve never been to before, even though it reminded me in several ways of Lake Tahoe.

I’m also glad my car made it, despite some brake “burning” on the way down the mountain and a noise which my brother now believes was the wheel bearing. My friend Ed and I traveled about 900 miles round trip taking the scenic route up and down California in my Buick.

Here are the pictures from my camera and from others who attended:

Which old witch?  The bigot’s wish!  Sorry Judy, but the Mormon church and every other bigot (especially those adorning their hatred on front lawns and bumper stickers) can suck my Lolipop Guild.  Oh happy day!  The haters out of state and around the world have been put in their place by glorious jurisprudence.

I don’t even believe in hetero marriage, as I’ve said pretty much all along, but I’ll be damned if some people should be able to suffer while others cannot, and there truly are innumerable legal advantages to what marriage can bring (immigration alone).  My daughter’s classmate keeps pointing out that gay people have the right to marry (people of the opposite sex) but I can’t believe that rhetoric would even be taken seriously by those who spent money and time trying to limit the rights of a vibrant part of the population.

So congratulations to my home state, my father’s home state and the home of my grandparents and great-grandparents (to which I returned to live for the fifth time in 2007), for agreeing with almost half the voters (not that decisions of this magnitude should be made by propositions in the first place).  California realizes that we cannot remain in Draconian times by making endemic minorities systematically inferior.  I’m already embarrassed enough by our European neighbors who don’t have to think twice about these things.

My hope is that the case is indeed appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which generally does not put its fingers on domestic relations cases of any kind (although one could argue this is a civil rights case). Most cases that are brought to the US Supreme Court are not heard, and so the ruling of the federal Judges, such as this one, remain as law in good standing.  There is only a need to hear it if the Court feels like there was an error in interpreting the law, which in the federal arena, includes most importantly, the US Constitution.  On that basis, this decision is sound, and agreeing to hear the case could easily create a mandate that all states allow gay marriage, which is why the supporters of Proposition 8 had better be damn careful they don’t open up that Pandora’s box.  Still, I think it’s ridiculous to have a hodge-podge of gay marriage rights in one country.  Canada had that for a little while and it was seen as ridiculous, so they made gay marriage completely legal in every province.  Let’s have some common sense like they did.  Our grandchildren will be wondering what all the damn fuss was about.

I am also confident that no legislature in California would ever get the support it needed to overturn such a ruling and because of the Supremecy Clause of the US Constitution, it would be moot.  The haters should look at the bright side — the financial windfall that legalizing gay marriage necessarily brings to a jurisdiction should be welcome, especially by the party that touts fiscal responsbility and libertarian ideals of keeping the government out of our lives and by extension bedrooms.  Besides, California’s budget can use all the help it can these days, which is why even Republican Schwarzenegger wouldn’t have thwarted the gay marriage rights if it had crossed his desk and he had little to say in opposition to it.  Indeed, if it wasn’t for gay men, he may never have achieved the status that he had in his Hollywood career, which we all know was based almost exclusively on his physique and not his “talent” for acting.

The important line of the decision today was that there was “no rational basis” why one group would need to subject the other group to a position of inferiority.  Brace yourself for the backlash, my friends.  Gay Judge or not, the fight for righteous equality is not over.

Videos and pictures – One of the videos is from the Dyke March gathering after which I first heard, then saw Wanda Sykes and her wife.  Wanda was amused by a completely naked man with a genital piercing so behind her sunglasses and with her short dreads, I saw her pull out her camera and take a shot of him.  I’m glad their twins were not there!

I can’t believe that a 19 year old kid was shot and killed at the Pink Party.  A few others were injured.  I left relatively early that evening and I had quite a week with six days of staying in the city with various friends visiting from London, Berlin and Philadelphia.  My friend Gene hung out with me a lot and he put me up for a night when two unmentionably flaky people from the Sacramento area left me high and dry at 1am after begging me to wait for them. I knew all the hotels would be booked this weekend of all weekends, so I had the prospect f sleeping on my office floor, which fortunately did not have to manifest.

I met a lot of nice men and women and came into town with my daughter and her two friends and my Yorkie on Sunday, but I didn’t stay too late as the week caught up with me.  I was just getting over losing my voice the week before, but I got a lot of walking in and I had most of my energy back.