A state employee has resigned and officials have disavowed an international advertising campaign that led to calls for an investigation of tourism posters proclaiming “South Carolina is so gay.”

The campaign, which plastered the London subway with posters advertising the charms of South Carolina and five major U.S. cities to gay European tourists, landed with a resounding thud in South Carolina, where the issue of gay rights has long been a political flashpoint.

The advertisements were timed for London’s Gay Pride Week, which ended Saturday. The posters touted the attractions of the state to gay tourists, including its “gay beaches” and its Civil War-era plantations.

So basically someone decided it would be cool to try to attract tourists who are not white Protestant males with trophy wives and 2.5 beautiful freckled children, and the world imploded and now the baby Jesus is crying.

I really can’t fathom what is so horrible about suggesting that gay people might enjoy vacationing in South Carolina or anywhere else.  I promise the fine people of South Carolina are in no danger of catching homosexuality as a result of this ad campaign.

So here’s the bit that really pisses me off:

Oran Smith, president of the Palmetto Family Council, a conservative activist group in Columbia, the state capital, said that at first he thought the ads were an Internet hoax.

“I think with today’s economy, we have to be really smart with our tourism dollars, and South Carolina’s market, very clearly, is the family-friendly market,” Smith said. “So if we want to spend our dollars in a way that’s wise, we need to go after our market, and our market is families.”

Gay people don’t have families?

I am really, really irate that somehow “family-friendly” and “anti-gay” have come to be synonymous to some people.  When I think of family, bigotry and exclusivism are not the things that come to mind.  It makes me sad that anyone would equate them.

This made me happy though:

The campaign was designed to “send a clear message to everyone who sees this campaign that it is long past time that ‘so gay’ should be used as a negative phrase of disapproval,” said Andrew Roberts, chief executive of Amro Worldwide, the travel agency that commissioned the ads.

“From where we sit, and for all our many customers, being described as ‘so gay’ is not a negative thing at all. We think it is just great to be so gay,” said Roberts, who called the campaign a success, having reached more than 2 million people in London.

And I actually kind of liked the ad:

Fashion magazines are manipulating images of skinny models to make them look “fatter” than they really are.

The move is a response to critics who blame images of so-called “size zero” models for the rise in eating disorders in young girls.

I have no words.

No just kidding, I do:  What the fuck??

We can’t possibly actually find healthy-looking, normal-sized, attractive women to take pictures of (since anyone over a size 0 is automatically ugly) so if we want to promote healthy images we have to take pictures of skinny women and digitally fatten them up… because the last thing on earth we want is for real women to think their bodies are acceptable.

I’m sorry but the media is retarded.

Illinois State Representative Monique Davis thinks so, anyway.

I don’t know what you have against God, but some of us don’t have much against him. We look forward to him and his blessings. And it’s really a tragedy — it’s tragic — when a person who is engaged in anything related to God, they want to fight.

…

I’m trying to understand the philosophy that you want to spread in the state of Illinois. This is the Land of Lincoln. This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God, where people believe in protecting their children.… What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous, it’s dangerous–

…

It’s dangerous to the progression of this state. And it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!

…

You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.

How sad that Christian parents are apparently so incapable of guiding their own children that the very knowledge of atheism’s existence poses a threat to their children’s wellbeing…

I think organized religion is an incredibly harmful force, but I don’t insist that religious people hide their faith on the grounds that my kids will be in danger simply by knowing it’s there.

It’s my job to teach my kids about religion. And it’s their job to decide whether to accept it. I don’t get to demand that the rest of society pretends to believe what I do just because having to explain differences makes my job as a parent a little harder.

Anyway, Representative Monique Davis is officially a bitch, although she did (sort of) apologize:

Sherman says Davis told him she “took out her frustrations and emotions on me and that she shouldn’t have done that.”

So, you know, she’s sorry that she took out her frustrations on him. But I highly doubt she’s sorry for believing his world view should be hidden from children.

State Rep. Jack Franks was chairing the hearing that day and says Davis’ outburst was uncharacteristic, adding “she was having a bad day.”

Yeah, when I have a bad day, I always verbally attack people who are different from me and tell them that their ideologies are tantamount to child abuse.

It makes me happy to see Fox News debunking myths rather than perpetuating them, but I have to say I think it’s a little discouraging to think that these might be believed by any significant portion of the population:

1. A female is not a virgin if she does not have a hymen.

2. Men are more visually stimulated than women.

3. Only women can have multiple orgasms.

4. Being uncircumcised is unhygienic.

5. A woman must be in love to climax.

6. Men do not have sensitive nipples.

7. A woman must have an orgasm in order to conceive.

8. Men’s members need to be handled with care.

Number 8 is just weird.  The rest of them are… silly, I guess.  Do people above the age of fifteen believe this stuff?  Seriously?

Some of my favorites:

from www.funnyordie.com posted with vodpod

Arkansas’ marriage-age crisis is over. A law that mistakenly allowed anyone – even toddlers – to marry with parental permission was repealed by a measure signed into law Wednesday by Gov. Mike Beebe, ending months of embarrassment for the state and confusion for county clerks.

Lawmakers didn’t realize until after the end of last year’s regular session that a law they approved, intended to establish 18 as the minimum age for marriage, instead removed the minimum age to marry entirely. An extraneous “not” in the bill allowed anyone who was not pregnant to marry at any age with permission.

You have to admit this is pretty funny.

They repealed the botched law, and reinstated 17 as the minimum age to marry for boys and 16 for girls.

Does this confuse anybody else? Why should girls be able to legally marry at a younger age than boys? Oh, right, because girls need a man to take care of them and should get hitched at the earliest opportunity! (And why are we referring to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds as “girls” and “boys” anyway? That’s just annoying. We’re talking about almost-adults here.)

Anyway…

Bond, a Democrat, said there hadn’t been any reports of young children attempting to marry under the 2007 law.

Color me shocked. I know if it were legal for toddlers to get married here I’d have had my two-year-old married off months ago. One less mouth to feed…

A roommate-finding site cannot require users to disclose their sexual orientation, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Thursday, in the latest skirmish over whether anti-discrimination rules apply to the Web.

…

To inquire electronically about sexual orientation would not be different from asking people in person or by telephone if they were black or Jewish before conducting business, the panel said in an 8-3 ruling that partly overturns a lower federal court decision.

This makes me happy.

I actually kind of missed the boat on the whole Sweet Valley cult following thing. I was too busy obsessing over the Baby-Sitters Club (oh, the shame!) to pay much attention to Sweet Valley during my middle school years, and I didn’t pick up my first Sweet Valley book until I was in high school. I read half a dozen of them, mostly because I’d already read everything else that looked remotely interesting in our high school library — I was the geeky girl who was always getting into trouble for reading during class. I thought the Sweet Valley books were pretty lame, to be honest, with all the “We are so perfect because we’re blond and pretty!” bullshit. I have never seen an author so eager to remind everybody that her protagonists are blond and beautiful. We get it. Move on with the story. Plus the superfluous swooning over various dreamy hunks got old pretty quickly. Anyway…

I’m a little late on this one — it’s been floating around various blogs for a few days now, and I’ve been stewing about it but haven’t had time to rant. Apparently Random House has decided that we didn’t get enough of the Wakefield twins in the 80s, and the series is being updated and re-released so that these stories can be enjoyed all over again.

Of course, a few things have changed since the 80s, so some details of the books have been modified: most notably, the girls are no longer a “perfect size six.” Now they are a “perfect size four.” Because, you know, a size six is just fat now.

This pisses me off from so many angles I’m not sure where to start. First of all, a size four is not perfect, and neither is a size six. There is no perfect clothing size which we must all strive to attain in order to gain society’s approval of our bodies. People come in different sizes and larger bodies are not inferior. (Nor are smaller bodies; I’m too small to wear a size four in most brands but I don’t see how this makes me less perfect than anyone else.)

Beyond that, have you ever freaking shopped for women’s clothing? There is no such thing as a perfect size anything! I wear zeros. I wear twos. I wear fours sometimes. I wear children’s t-shirts. I wear women’s tops from small to large. There is no consistency in sizing clothes for women.

Different designers more or less pull measurements out of their asses and/or apply sizing labels to clothing at random. Even within one brand, sizing changes. I once found a perfect pair of jeans at the mall, tried them on and loved them, but noticed that a seam was coming out. I grabbed another pair — identical brand, identical style, identical fabric and size — and they didn’t fit. Look in any woman’s closet and you’ll see a range of sizes, all of which fit that woman just fine. How the fuck do you get “perfect size four” out of that?

And really, is it absolutely necessary, in an age where more and more young women are eating disordered and teenage girls are faced with more pressure than ever to conform to impossible standards of beauty, to update these stories to reflect that we are now required to be even thinner in order to be socially accepted? Sorry girls, a six just ain’t good enough anymore.

Seriously though. Were the Sweet Valley books not anti-feminist enough? Were there two many girls who somehow managed to read these the first time around without feeling like shit about themselves? What’s the deal here?

Julio Diaz was mugged in a New York subway station, and showed incredible compassion for the teenage mugger.

“He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, ‘Here you go,’” Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”

The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, “like what’s going on here?” Diaz says. “He asked me, ‘Why are you doing this?’”

Diaz replied: “If you’re willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me … hey, you’re more than welcome.”

The mugger joined Diaz for dinner, and ended up giving him back his wallet — and the knife he had used to mug Diaz.

“I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It’s as simple as it gets in this complicated world.”

Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.