My jaw hit the floor last night when I read Dubya's comments regarding his quitting golf to show empathy to the families of the fallen soldiers in Iraq.

"Excuse me?!?! You think not playing golf gives consolation to the grieving mothers and fathers and siblings and grandparents and spouses and children and friends of the fallen?!?!"

Yeah, what Keith says...

MR. PRESIDENT, SHUT THE HELL UP!!!

The new Obama controversy

You be the judge...

At issue are comments he made privately at a fundraiser in San Francisco last Sunday. He was trying to explain his troubles winning over some working-class voters, saying they have become frustrated with economic conditions:

"It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Hillary's appearance on SNL...

The debate was HILLarious!

What the hell about Gitmo, Mr. President?!?!

"What's lost by embracing a tyrant who puts his people in prison because of their political beliefs?" Bush asked rhetorically. "What's lost is it'll send the wrong message. It'll send a discouraging message to those who wonder whether America will continue to work for the freedom of prisoners. It'll give great status to those who have suppressed human rights and human dignity."

What a fucking hypocrite and idiot!

Bush: Obama wrong on talking with enemies
'It can send chilling signals and messages to our allies'

The Associated Press
updated 11:20 a.m. MT, Thurs., Feb. 28, 2008

WASHINGTON - President Bush on Thursday strongly disagreed with Democratic candidate Barack Obama's expressed willingness to meet the leaders of Iran and Cuba — two U.S. adversaries throughout Bush's presidency. FULL ARTICLE

HI-FRICKIN-LARIOUS!!!

I've not laughed this hard in quite some time! Ya gotta watch 'em in order...

Excellent article! And some good information about tracking down execs of a company...

Customer backlash against bad service
Growing gap between promised and delivered experience

By Jena McGregor
Business Week

updated 5:29 p.m. MT, Tues., Feb. 26, 2008

In the annals of customer service, 2007 will go down as the year fed-up consumers finally dropped the hammer. In August a 76-year-old retired nurse named Mona Shaw smashed up a keyboard and a telephone in a Manassas, Va., Comcast office after she says the cable operator failed to install her service properly. During her first visit to the branch outlet, the AARP secretary says she was left sitting on a bench in the hallway for two hours waiting for a manager. She returned, armed with a hammer, and let loose the rallying cry "Have I got your attention now?" Afterward, she was arrested, fined $345, and became a media sensation, capturing the hearts of frustrated consumers everywhere. (Says Comcast: "We apologize for any customer service issues that Ms. Shaw experienced.")

Three months earlier, in May, Michael Whitford uploaded a video in which he chooses among a golf club, an ax, and a sword before deciding on a sledgehammer as his weapon of choice for bashing his nonfunctioning Macbook to smithereens. In the video, Whitford, a systems engineer from Chandler, Ariz., says that Apple declined to cover the repair under warranty, citing damage from a spilled liquid. More than 340,000 people have viewed the black-and-white smash-up on YouTube. Whitford, whom BusinessWeek was not able to reach for comment, denies in the video that he spilled anything. In early July, he wrote on his blog that Apple had replaced his laptop. "I'm very happy now," he wrote. "Apple has regained my loyalty."

Meet today's consumer vigilantes. Even if they're not all wielding hammers, many are arming themselves with video cameras, computer keyboards, and mobile devices to launch their own personal forms of insurrection. Frustrated by the usual fix-it options — obediently waiting on hold with Bangalore, gamely chatting online with a scripted robot — more consumers are rebelling against company-prescribed service channels. After getting nowhere with the call center, they're sending "e-mail carpet bombs" to the C-suite, cc-ing the top layer of management with their complaints. When all else fails, a plucky few are going straight to the top after uncovering direct numbers to executive customer-service teams not easily found by mere mortals.

And of course, they're filling up the Web with blogs and videos, leaving behind venom-spewed tales of woe. "There's a certain degree of extremism that's popping up, [a sense of] I'm going to get results, whatever means necessary,'" says Pete Blackshaw, executive vice-president of Nielsen Online Strategic Services, which measures consumer-generated media. "Companies can brush these off as being atypical, mutant consumers, or they can say there's a very important insight in [their] emotions."

Behind the guerrilla tactics is a growing disconnect between the experience companies promise and customers' perceptions of what they actually get. Consumers already pushed to the brink by evaporating home equity, job insecurity, and rising prices are more apt to snap when hit with long hold times and impenetrable phone trees. Just ask those who responded to our second annual ranking of the best companies for customer service, which uses data from J.D. Power & Associates. The average service scores for the brands in our study dipped slightly this year, and about two-thirds of the names that were in both years' studies were lower. (Like BusinessWeek, J.D. Power is owned by The McGraw-Hill Companies.)

Empowered customers
A swell of corporate distrust — exacerbated by high executive pay, accounting lapses, and the offshoring of jobs — has people feeling more at odds with companies than ever before. "[That] has a visceral effect on how customers approach more day-to-day transactions," says Scott Broetzmann, president of Alexandria, Va., Customer Care Measurement & Consulting. Meanwhile, he says, companies are responding with tighter return policies and increased focus on potential fraud. "You'd have to go back a long way to see the kind of acrimony that you're seeing now."

Technology is aiding the uprising, empowering consumers to do much more to make themselves heard. Now, with the proliferation of online video, they can be seen as well. "You could only get the point across so much with text," says Blackshaw. "As soon as you start adding sight, sound, and motion, you've got a whole other level of [emotion]." More consumers are equipped with mobile Web devices that can find executive e-mail addresses and phone numbers anytime, from any place. At the same time, customer angst sites are no longer just shouting "YourCompanySucks" into the cyberdarkness, but acting as gathering spots for sharing call-center secrets and trouble-shooting tips. And as the audience for more blogs and social-media sites such as Digg reach critical mass, it's easier than ever for consumers to wallpaper the Web with their customer-service nightmares.

Add a powerful media voice and a provocative site title to a blog, and it can have extraordinary impact. Bob Garfield, an Advertising Age columnist and National Public Radio host, lit up the blogosphere in October with a site cheekily called ComcastMustDie.com, one of the salvos in what he called his "consumer jihad" against the cable company. After repeated delays with his own service, Garfield, who has hosted a podcast on the site (special guest star Mona "The Hammer Lady" Shaw!), suggested that customers post their account numbers on the blog. Activity on the blog has slowed, but not before dozens of customers followed Garfield's suggestion; many report back, he says, that Comcast called them soon after they posted their account numbers and rants. Garfield can't help but point out the irony. "They've outsourced their worst-case customer-service issues to a blog dedicated to wiping them off the face of the earth."

Marcelo Salup credits Garfield's blog for finally getting Comcast to show up on time when his Internet and cable connections failed. Years of dialing the call center for a technician yielded at least eight missed appointments by Comcast, he says, but a post on ComcastMustDie brought a phone call the next morning and, later, a lead technician who showed up on time. Now, Salup says: "Anytime I have a problem, I also post it on the blog."

Other Comcast customers have used blogs, too. Dan Ortiz says he called the cable provider at least 20 times during his first month as a subscriber to fix dropped Web access and screen-image problems. Then the 26-year-old bike messenger logged on to The Consumerist, a blog with more than 2 million unique visitors a month that's part of Gawker Media's digital empire of snark. There he found a consumer vigilante's gold mine: a list of e-mail addresses for more than 75 Comcast executives and employees, along with instructions for launching what the blog calls its "executive e-mail carpet bomb."

Ortiz got lucky. After firing off a note copying all those names the day before Thanksgiving, he quickly had an inbox full of out-of-office replies, complete with contact information containing direct numbers. He called a Chicago manager at home, who put his lead technician on the case. Ortiz says a swarm of eight trucks showed up on his block. "Once you get ahold of [executives], they bend over backward for you," he says. He adds that Comcast sent him a tin of gourmet popcorn for Christmas and more than $700 in credits. Even better, he now has the mobile numbers for the lead technician in his area. "I'm not calling customer service ever again," he says.

The unenviable task of responding to such digital vitriol falls to Rick Germano, Comcast's senior vice-president for customer operations, who took over the role just as Garfield's "revolution" got under way. Germano says reading blogs "is very new, at least to Comcast" and that he's expanding the number of "e-care" representatives to help track and respond to blog comments and e-mails that come in through a new link to his office on Comcast's site. "We're servicing a million customers a day," he says. "An extra hundred doesn't really faze us." A Comcast spokesperson says the company is making efforts to improve customer satisfaction and that it's reacting to other blogs besides Garfield's. Scenarios like Salup and Ortiz's are "not the type of experiences that we want our customers to be having. We're going to respond to our customers wherever and however they have voiced their experiences. Ideally, we'd prefer it to be in the traditional ways."

Going to the top
For consumers who really want gold-plated service, little compares to a resolution from "executive customer service." These "Valhallas of customer service," as Ben Popken, editor of The Consumerist, has called them, are powerful support reps who may sit at corporate headquarters or even in call centers. Typically, they respond to complaints that first come in to executives; these specialists may also respond to high-profile customers who pose legal or P.R. threats. The Consumerist, which instructs customers to try regular support numbers first, has been active in outing such numbers at a couple dozen companies.

Although executive customer service has been around for years, many companies are reluctant to talk about it. "They're usually stealth," says consultant Broetzmann. "Obviously, you don't publish the phone numbers. You don't even tell people they exist." Washington Mutual and Circuit City declined to provide details to BusinessWeek about their executive customer support; Bank of America wouldn't say more "because of operating and security purposes."

Consulting firms that help companies manage call centers and train employees say the online posting of these numbers is having an effect. Baker Communications, a Houston training firm, started up a course 18 months ago to prepare more people for such executive-service teams. More than 25 companies have sent employees, says Baker CEO Walter Rogers.

The biggest challenges in customer service may be dealing with consumers who are hard to mollify. For some, the sting of a bad experience cuts so deep that it transforms them from a merely upset customer into an activist no longer just looking for a refund. Take Justin Callaway, a Portland, Ore., freelance video editor. He started his campaign against the wireless company Cingular — now AT&T — in 2006 after a technical glitch that he believes ruined one of his computer speakers. He had the speakers, which contained an amplifier, turned up full blast. When his cell phone rang, he says the speaker next to it made a loud noise and then went dead.

Callaway didn't call customer service right away. But when he looked into the issue for a grad school project months later, he learned more about GSM networks, which Cingular uses, and radio frequency interference, which he believes caused the damage. "I really felt irked that they didn't disclose [it]." He got some friends together to record a tune about Cingular. One of them helped him animate an angry bandit in the shape of the carrier's orange trademark, complete with an AT&T blue-and-white pirate's bandanna and an eye patch shaped like Apple's logo. (Cingular/AT&T is the only wireless provider that offers the iPhone.) His video, "Feeling Cingular," has been viewed more than 37,000 times on YouTube.

About a month after posting the video, Callaway got an e-mail from Bob Steelhammer, then a vice-president for e-commerce at AT&T. "Justin, in the spirit of goodwill, I would like to replace the $100 computer speakers on your home video-editing system," Steelhammer wrote. "Please let me know what brand and model [they] are." Callaway, who works with video equipment, says that even if there's not damage the phone causes an irritating buzz, and feels AT&T should do more to make consumers aware of the issue. That's why he didn't accept the offer. "It wasn't about the speakers anymore," he says. He's not stopping with the video, either: Callaway is seeking class-action status for a suit against Cingular over subscribers' inability to use their phones in some settings without interference. An AT&T spokesperson says that, due to the proposed litigation, it could not comment, but it works to resolve consumers' issues promptly.

Flight or fight
Most customers, of course, don't have the time or energy to go that far in their service insurgencies. They want an apology, a human being who answers the phone, or simply some bottled water after a few hours sitting on the airport tarmac. But that doesn't mean they aren't above a few digs at executives' expense or a call to a cell phone after hours. That's especially true when a direct line to the CEO is the BlackBerry sitting right there in their laps.

The US Airways plane Ron Dee was on last October had just pulled away from the gate when the pilot came on the loudspeaker to tell the Cleveland-bound passengers that they were 42nd in line for takeoff, Dee recalls. A one- to two-hour delay was expected. Later, thunderstorms delayed the flight even more, prompting another warning: The crew was coming up on its allowable flying time.

Dee, who develops real estate for a restaurant company, flies 100 times a year and is used to delays. That wasn't what upset him so much. "About three hours into the wait on the runway, there's no water left on the plane," he recalls. (A spokesperson for Republic Airways, which operated the regional jet for US Airways, says that records from its vendor show the flight was fully catered and that other beverages would have been available.)

After a quick search on his BlackBerry, Dee found e-mail addresses for Doug Parker, US Airways' CEO; Robert Isom, its COO; and Henri Dawes, its director of customer relations. His first missive, time-stamped 5:59 p.m., fired this shot: "If you get a chance, please call me and we can discuss how we handle customer service in our restaurants. Maybe that would help your company." The next, at 6:40, invoked the JetBlue Airways incident last February, a weather-induced operational snafu that was followed closely by CEO David Neeleman's departure. "What is that CEO's name from JetBlue [who] resigned? I am going to call information and get his home phone number. Maybe he can get us back to the gate." Says Dee, whose flight was delayed more than four hours: "I probably sent an e-mail every 15 minutes or so for the last two and a half hours" he was on the plane.

He had nothing better to do: The flight was brought back to the gate, and Dee spent the night in a Philadelphia hotel he paid for himself. He never spoke to Dawes, but he did get three vouchers totaling $425. Would he use the BlackBerry as a stalking device the next time he's stuck on the runway? "Absolutely," he says. "You guys as a company, regardless of who you are, exist because of me and my fellow paying passengers."

© 2008 MSNBC.com

'I married a gay man"

WOW! An excellent article, and she really gets to the core of the problem: societal & religous judgments (and institutionalized homophobia in the US military) create & perpetuate the problem...

'I married a gay man'
How one woman recovered from a heartbreaking deception

By Anonymous, as told to Jessica Kowal
Self
updated 12:00 p.m. MT, Sun., Feb. 24, 2008

"You have chlamydia," my obstetrician told me as I lay on the examining table, six months pregnant with my fourth child. "You've got to talk to your husband." I was in total disbelief. "This is impossible," I protested. "We're both monogamous." But of course I knew that wasn't really true, and the doctor's words forced me to finally acknowledge what I'd suspected for a long time: My husband was most likely gay.

When I confronted my husband, Chris (not his real name), with my test results that night, he denied he was to blame. "They've got to be wrong, or I must have picked up something in the gym," he insisted. "I haven't done anything wrong." Instead of arguing about how I felt or figuring out how I wanted to handle the larger issue, I focused on what I needed at that moment — to take medicine and get healthy — much as I had throughout our rocky marriage. It took a few more days of wrenching confrontation for our marriage to disintegrate. When Chris spoke to a health official who called to check on me (my case had been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta), he realized our baby was at risk for premature birth and newborn pneumonia, and he became hysterical, as though he were having a nervous breakdown.

That evening, after we'd watched our three children play on the lawn of our home in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, he curled into a fetal position on a porch chair and admitted more than I ever wanted to know: He had been having anonymous sex with men. "I don't know how this could have happened," he stammered. "It's nobody that I knew ... it was mostly oral sex ... it just happened...; At gay bars, there are back rooms with holes in the walls..." A wave of nausea swept over me as I listened to his agonized confession. But I kept quiet and thought, I've held up as long as I could. And I am done. With. You.

I was 30 years old when this happened, and Chris and I had been married for 11 years. We looked like the perfect family in our Christmas card portrait. Both of us grew up in the small-town South, and Chris was in the military. Yet I finally understood that our entire married life, except for our children, whom we both loved completely, was built on a falsehood. At that moment, I felt as if I were standing alone in the world, stripped of all dignity, with a big sign on me that read idiot.

The movie "Brokeback Mountain" turned a spotlight on gay men who lead double lives, having sex with other men while they are married to women. But that film only scratched the surface of their wives' miserable experience. When I saw the movie, I started to cry as I watched Ennis, the young cowboy played by Heath Ledger, wed his sweetheart even though he'd been involved with another man. I wanted to scream: "It is such a lie! Don't do it!" My mind flashed back to my own wedding day, when I was the virgin bride standing before family, friends and a minister. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

This kind of union happens more often than people may think; research done by University of Chicago sociologist Edward Laumann, Ph.D., estimated that between 1.5 million and 2.9 million American women who have ever been married had a husband who had had sex with another man. That means there are a large number of women who have no idea what their husband does in secret.

We periodically see stories about married men in public life who are gay or have been implicated in homosexual behavior — such as Senator Larry Craig (R–Idaho), who was arrested last summer for allegedly soliciting a male police officer in an airport bathroom, and former New Jersey governor James McGreevey, who proclaimed that he was a "gay American" when he announced his resignation from office. While the media focuses on the men, I watch their wives standing next to them and wonder about the suffering, lies, emotional confusion and rage that they may be living through. Because I've lived it all.

There are so many obvious questions for a wife like me: Didn't I realize he was gay? Did I ignore red flags? And if I had suspicions, why didn't I confront him earlier or divorce him?

I suppose I was always suspicious, but I was in denial. Early in our relationship, Chris told me he'd had homosexual experiences as a teenager but assured me it was youthful curiosity. I didn't think there was anything wrong with being gay — I have an openly gay cousin. And I didn't care what went on behind others' closed doors. But I also didn't believe that a gay man would ever be attracted to a straight woman, and I was naive — too naive to see why a homosexual man would marry and spend years lying to his wife, his friends, his family and himself.


The beginning
I was a 19-year-old college freshman in Kentucky when I met Chris. He was 22, a senior and a talented musician who could sing and play brass, keyboards and woodwinds. I'd never had a boyfriend before, and I felt incredibly flattered when this popular, good-looking guy asked me out. I was also pleased that we had a similar religious upbringing. I grew up going to a Methodist church, and I've always had a strong Christian faith. Chris's father was a Southern Baptist minister who preached fire and brimstone, and Chris was taught that being gay was the ultimate sin — an absolute sentence to hell.

Two unusual things happened on our first date. After we watched the movie "Romancing the Stone," Chris said, "I think I could marry you." I was speechless, wondering if I was living in a romance novel. Then, after he kissed me good-night, he shocked me again, saying, "No matter what you hear, I'm not gay." In fact, I had heard other students say that everyone in his fraternity was gay. But in the world we lived in, people often claimed a guy was gay if he wasn't a jock or really macho, so I didn't want to judge someone because of who his friends were and what he did. I decided to take Chris at his word. Besides, he'd taken a girl — me — out on a date, so how could he be gay?

We immediately started seeing each other exclusively. I thought it was a storybook romance for nine months — until Chris abruptly said, "I can't do this anymore." He refused to explain why; I was distraught and confused. A few weeks later, over the holidays, we met to talk. We obviously still had feelings for each other, and without explaining why he'd split up with me, Chris declared, "If we're going to be together, let's make it official: Will you marry me?" I accepted on the spot. It was a dream come true.

Of course, I could have asked more questions, but I convinced myself that Chris had gotten cold feet because we had become serious so quickly. I also had a stubborn streak, which I practiced as a child and maintained throughout our marriage. I was determined to make our relationship work. I wanted to show Chris that I would stick with him through everything.

I didn't believe in premarital sex, but once we were engaged I went on the Pill and told Chris I thought we should make love. He refused, explaining that he respected me too much and that sex had ruined his previous relationships. Frustrated, I kept reminding myself that, as he said, "We will have the rest of our life together." In premarital counseling, we told the minister that divorce didn't fit with our values. This pronouncement made me feel more secure, but I shouldn't have ignored my nagging intuition that something was seriously wrong. After all, what man wouldn't jump into bed with his fiancé.

I was a 20-year-old virgin on our wedding day and a disappointed bride when Chris couldn't get an erection that night. I retreated to my side of the bed and cried myself to sleep, wondering, Is this what our life together will be like? The next morning, we decided to start our marriage on the right foot — by going to church. We had sex that afternoon. It wasn't as passionate as I'd hoped, but I convinced myself yet again it would all be fine. Chris had won a prestigious position in a military band, and we moved to the Washington, D.C., area to begin his career.

A lonely wife
After Chris's boot camp, we settled in as newlyweds, but we never achieved the "happy couple" life I had envisioned. We rarely spent time alone together because Chris preferred to have dinner parties, go to parties or play cards with friends. I returned to school, and he had rehearsals, and we were with other band members and their wives on most of our weekends. I missed the intimacy I was certain other married couples had.

I also expended a lot of energy trying to keep Chris interested in sex. After we got married, I wanted to have sex every day, but he told me I was a nymphomaniac. I learned to do whatever I had to do to make it happen, because sex reassured me that I was loved and wanted. We probably had sex three or four times a week, and I felt as if I was constantly pressing for it.

In "Brokeback Mountain," there's a scene when Ennis flips his wife over on her stomach when they have sex. I got very emotional when I watched that because it was the position Chris and I often used for intercourse. Even though it wasn't as physically or emotionally satisfying to me, it was as intimate as we were going to get — and I wanted children.

Questions about Chris's sexual preference didn't disappear. At a party with his work friends, I got into an argument with a woman who'd been drinking, and she said, out of the blue, "Well, at least my husband's not gay." I was stunned, and I can't remember what I said in reply. Later that evening, when I told Chris what happened, he reminded me that he'd always been teased about being gay, but he assured me, "It's not true."

I defended him to others, but our marriage was often tense. He toured with the band, and when he came home, he'd sometimes stay out all night without telling me where he'd gone. Assuming he was having an affair with a woman, and feeling insecure and unattractive in the middle of my third pregnancy, I became hyperinterrogatory and angry. It didn't help: Chris became even more distant, and he started drinking heavily.

It's easy to say I should have left him, but the choice wasn't so simple. We had virtually no savings, and I couldn't afford to take the children and raise them on my own. I also still believed that the marriage could weather such trials, in part because he was such a good father. He took us camping, played with the children, planned holiday celebrations and even baked the kids' birthday cakes. Chris was 100 percent better at parenting than my own father, and I got used to the idea that my fulfillment could come from the family rather than the marriage.


My shocking discovery
That thin fantasy crumbled on my oldest son's third birthday, well before my chlamydia diagnosis. That day, I caught Chris hiding cash in a desk drawer. "What are you doing? What is the money for?" I demanded. He became defensive and announced, "I haven't gone to bed with anybody, but I've been going to gay bars." He said he was trying to sort out confusion about his sexuality. As the puzzling pieces of our marriage flashed through my mind — the lack of physical affection, his preferred position for sexual intercourse, his disinterest in spending couple time with me — I started sobbing and asked, "Are we getting a divorce? Are we going to counseling? Is this something you're going to pursue?" He repeated, as before, that he was committed to our family. I desperately wanted to believe him.

He agreed to go to counseling, but we had to pay in cash and keep it quiet because of the U.S. military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. If anyone found out that Chris was gay, he could be fired. As usual, I didn't dwell on my emotions; I focused more on my family's well-being than on what the future held.

You might wonder why Chris couldn't accept his homosexuality, but the sin factor was ingrained in him at an early age. Being gay would not only endanger his job and family life, it could also cost him his relationship with his parents, his church and God. Chris feared that coming out would invalidate him as a human being — and might even send him to hell.

Our therapist doubted the marriage could survive, yet I was dedicated to our union if Chris was determined not to be gay. The therapist told Chris that he'd have to stop going to gay bars, and we tried, again, to start afresh. I was soon pregnant with our fourth child, and we were living as if we were Ward and June Cleaver.

Then came my fateful visit to the obstetrician and Chris's confession. I was officially done with the marriage, but we maintained the facade of a normal family while we waited for our divorce to go through. I took off my wedding ring but blamed it on swelling from pregnancy. I focused my attention on caring for our children, even though I felt as if I were dying inside, questioning my self-worth, my intelligence as well as my existence. I felt like such a chump. In church, the children and I sat in the front row as Chris played the organ. My in-laws, knowing our marriage was troubled without knowing why, even sent us videos about how to improve our relationship. It was the worst time of my life.

The only thing that saved my sanity was the Straight Spouse Network, an international support group founded by another woman who'd been married to a gay man. During my first SSN meeting, I sat in the corner and cried the entire time. At least I knew I wasn't alone. I soon learned that straight spouses typically blame themselves for not being sexy enough to keep their husband from straying. As bad as it is when another woman manages to steal your husband, at least you believe you can compete. When your husband wants another man, it denies your entire being. I also learned that a surprising number of gays in the military are married because marriage is such a useful front. You can't be gay in the military, and if you're married, then of course you're not gay.

Chris was still living with us (sleeping in the spare room) when, through SSN, I met my ultimate soul mate, a father of three who had been married to a lesbian. We soon started dating, which, astonishingly, infuriated Chris. One night, in a rage, he called my parents and told them, "I'm gay and I've been going out with men, but she's screwing around with another guy." I'd always assumed that my family would support me if I needed them, but my parents and older sister saw me as an adulterer and tried to convince me to stay married! In the town I'm from, leaving a homosexual husband was too scandalous. They urged me to stay in the marriage, regardless of what it cost me emotionally. My mother even suggested that I try different things sexually to keep Chris interested and mentioned that Chris could take medication to weaken his libido.

Moving on
I often joke about writing a book called The Girlfriend's Guide to NOT Marrying a Gay Man, because I should have trusted my instincts from the start. I see now that many gay spouses genuinely believe they are doing the right thing by getting married, because they are lying to themselves more than anyone.

My soul mate and I got married the year after our divorces became final, when I was 34. My kids accepted him very quickly, and we later adopted a child together. When we first started dating, my daughter told me, "I love it when he comes over because you're so happy!" And making love with him leaves me feeling like the most gorgeous creature on earth.

My relationship with Chris is as good as it can possibly be, given the circumstances. We do birthday parties and some holidays together, and he and his male partner live in — and have redecorated — our former house, although he continues to hide his private life from the military.

Marrying a gay man completely reshaped my life and altered some dearly held values in ways I'd never planned. I am living proof that you can be religious and conservative yet also care for, and even get along with, a gay former spouse. I now know that you can recover from an experience that shakes your identity to the core. Somehow, I'm an even stronger person because of the pain I endured.

I have marched for gay rights and spoken about my experience to groups of gay fathers, because I believe it was intolerance and the fear of homosexuality that put me and my family through complete hell — and I hope none of that was in vain. Everyone has a fundamental right to be who he is, and I pray that Americans as a whole can become more accepting of homosexuals. Perhaps then, gay people won't feel the need to pretend they're straight and get married as a way to "prove" it to everyone else.

© 2008 MSNBC.com

"Why Hillary? Why not Obama?"

As I'm standing in Starbucks this morning wearing my red, "Hillary Clinton for President," baseball cap, I was asked that question, and without missing a beat, I turned to the inquisitor and responded:

• Because I need more substance than just Southern-Baptist-Preacher style rhetoric regarding "change."
• Because Obama failed to provide a plan for universal healthcare - instead stating, "affordable healthcare for everyone." That's not the same.
• Because from day one when Hillary takes office, you've got a built-in ambassador to the Middle East through the First Gentleman. The President can deploy the former President to negotiate real & lasting peace that will truly make America & Americans safer at home.
• Because I'm not comfortable with the fact that Obama has attended the same church for 20 years with a preacher who is known for his vitriolic rants against the "white man." Just as I left the Southern Baptist Church because I did not believe & support its hate-mongering against homosexuality if Barack Obama did not believe & support his preacher's hate-mongering against the "white man," then he & Michelle would have found another church. I'm not comfortable with the possible implications of their staying in that church.
• And quite frankly & directly, straight men haven't exactly done a bang-up job leading this country the past several decades, so I think it's time for someone with a vahjayjay give it a shot and let us see if testosterone & having the "bigger one" really are a requirement for the office of the president.

After he wiped the dumbfounded look off of his face, he responded, "You make some great arguments, and I'm happy to find an educated voter who knows why he's supporting his candiate."

I smiled and said while turning away, "Oh, I definitely know who I'm supporting & why."

I have to thank my friend Christine who asked me for political advice right before the Arizona primary. Unfortunately, I hadn't really articulated my beliefs prior to her question, so I didn't respond very well. Since her posing that question, I've taken the time to organize the thoughts in my head and thus my being able to successfully articulate them today when put on the spot, as it were.