President Obama mandated Thursday that nearly all hospitals extend visitation rights to the partners of gay men and lesbians and respect patients’ choices about who may make critical health-care decisions for them, perhaps the most significant step so far in his efforts to expand the rights of gay Americans.

[...]

Hospitals often bar visitors who are not related to an incapacitated patient by blood or marriage, and gay rights activists say many do not respect same-sex couples’ efforts to designate a partner to make medical decisions for them if they are seriously ill or injured.

“Discrimination touches every facet of the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, including at times of crisis and illness, when we need our loved ones with us more than ever,” Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement praising the president’s decision.

This negates about one third of the paperwork requirements AT&T used to try to pry The Boyf off of my benefits when I worked there. I am extremely happy about this. Neither of us has any reason to think we’re ever going to end up in a hospital any time soon but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it, that we never know when we’re going to need this sort of support and contact?

One might ask where the President got the idea – other than from basic human decency, I mean – and one might be surprised:

Yesterday, President Obama ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that same-sex partners and others are able to visit their loved ones in hospitals across the country. The memo quotes the hospital visitation provision of the North Carolina Hospital Patients’ Bill of Rights which Equality NC proposed and got adopted by the state in 2008.

“We are thrilled to see that Equality NC’s work at the state level has provided a model which the President is now taking nationwide to ensure that hospital patients get the care and companionship they deserve,” said Ian Palmquist, Executive Director.

The Presidential Memorandum signed yesterday states:

Many States have taken steps to try to put an end to these problems. North Carolina recently amended its Patients’ Bill of Rights to give each patient “the right to designate visitors who shall receive the same visitation privileges as the patient’s immediate family members, regardless of whether the visitors are legally related to the patient” — a right that applies in every hospital in the State.

So, thank you, EqualityNC. I’m not involved with them beyond having made a few small donations here and there, but this is completely freaking awesome.

A senior cardinal defended Pope Benedict XVI from “petty gossip” on Sunday as the pontiff maintained his silence on mounting sex abuse cover-up accusations during his Easter message.

The ringing tribute by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, at the start of Mass attended by tens of thousands of faithful in St. Peter’s Square, marked an unusual departure from the Vatican’s Easter rituals.

“Holy Father, the people of God are with you and will not let themselves be influenced by the petty gossip of the moment, by the trials that sometimes assail the community of believers,” Sodano said.

So, legal marriages between hets are icky by association but untold thousands of molested and otherwise abused children are “gossip”? It must be so nice to be able to be forgiven for anything, no matter how heinous, by simply asking. Here in consensual reality, actions are supposed to have consequences. Happy fucking Easter.

For the purposes of full disclosure, I knew Cal Cunningham before he ran for any public office and I am currently planning to vote for him in the primary due to his positions on my most important issues, not due to personal association. We hadn’t seen each other in a dozen years before I got to speak with him last night after the forum.

Some thoughts on each candidate:

Marcus Williams: just plain not up to the task. He came off as unprepared and possibly a closet conservative. He fumbled answers to questions about more complex issues and returned again and again to deficit reduction as his main issue, even when it didn’t make sense – that is, when he wasn’t stumping for his own website. I haven’t looked at it yet, but his whole performance reeked of Gregarious Troubled Uncle, a cross between class clown and used car salesman.

Elaine Marshall: genuinely surprisingly scrappy. She came off as a much tougher campaigner and more skilled on the stump than I had expected. I’ve been saying for months now that she seems like the most outspokenly liberal candidate and she only wavered briefly from that last night (the stab at Hugo Chavez seemed kind of random to me). Marshall made a very impressive showing. When Calvin’s campaign didn’t seem certain of happening in the first place, Marshall was my candidate of choice. What I hadn’t expected was that she would get interrupted by spontaneous applause and encouraging hoots.

Ken Lewis: Heavily associated with DFO and widely expected to walk off with the DFO straw poll endorsement (which did not happen – he got over 50%, but not the required 70%), he likewise impressed me with his practicality and general air of calm competence… right up until his closing statement. Here’s a tip, counselor: don’t go negative and go over your time in a closing statement to which no one will be allowed a response, even if you are on your home turf. It was exceptionally rude and unprofessional and wrecked what had been growing respect for him over the night. Up to that point, the substance of his answers and his closing statement had really impressed me and like I say he strikes me as someone who would be extremely competent in the Senate even if he came off as also being just as dull as dishwater. He clearly knows what he’s talking about, but he doesn’t make me believe he’s excited about it. Lewis comes off sounding like he’s auditioning for the part of Al Gore Stunt Double. If he wins the seat I’ll be very happy and I’ll have his sign up in my yard but I do not hope that he wins the primary and very little could move me to vote for him over anyone but a Republican.

Cal Cunningham: I love the guy, but he looks like he’s been replaced by SeriousExpressionBot 9000. He was initially slow to take specific positions in my personal opinion but he’s ramped that up, gotten a lot more specific in recent weeks and has said the things I need to hear – pro-choice, pro-equality, pro-public-option – to keep me enthusiastic about him. Last night he came off as surprisingly rehearsed which reflects a very solid knowledge of his position statements but contrasts – sometimes weirdly – with other candidates who had something of an “um” problem when answering questions but sounded more off-the-cuff and relaxed. I would say it was a mixed performance, in part because the hand gestures and “Serious Candidate Is Serious” sharpness of his diction and tone to his voice both made him seem slightly robotic and caused one to wonder with whom he hoped to pick a fight. He sounded like he was itching to argue with Richard Burr, not other Democrats. That’s fantastic, except that campaign doesn’t happen until May. I confess that he also surprised me by receiving multiple interruptions in the form of applause and supportive hoots from the crowd. Cal also displayed a pleasing practicality when he said that he expects healthcare reform to have passed and be old news by the time the winner takes office but that it will have happened in a fashion that will require a “second phase” to incorporate necessities like a public option.

So, overall? I think Marcus Williams should call it a day. I think the other three candidates would each be extremely stiff competition for Burr in the fall. I have to assume he had some people there last night, somewhere, and if he has a lick of sense – always a controversial question – he’s worried. They all knew their stuff, they all had very different approaches to delivering it and while all three looked like they could clean Burr’s intellectual clock it was Cunningham and Marshall who looked most amped up – by far – to get in Burr’s Kool-Aid. That closing statement of Ken Lewis’ really did jettison my support for him as a candidate, but I think there’s a case to be made for either Cunningham or Marshall in May that a lot of people could find compelling.

This hilarious waste of perfectly good paint got linked from a comment thread on Unfogged sometime in the last few days. It’s well worth spending some time zooming around with one’s mouse and reading the explanatory text. Money quote: “Some stars shine brighter than others,” said of the stars on the American flag. My other favorite thing is probably the note that the little white boy represents both boys and girls and children of all races. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

At any rate, tengu was chatting with me the other night and asked if I had seen the response piece, “One Nation Under Cthulhu” and sent me the link when I said I had not. I’m impressed! It’s got buckets of blood, Great Old Ones, Deep Ones, some critters that could arguably be Mi-Go and/or Star-Spawn of Cthulhu and Satan wearing an expression somewhere between perplexed and pleasantly surprised. No Shoggoths, but I guess they would tend to crowd others out. The arm-stump Elder Sign being drawn on the Constitution is the crowning touch of class.

Best comment from the Wonkette thread on the response piece had to be, “If he passes out loaves and fishes, tell him you already ate.”

Finally, because the Internet is nothing if not a space that encourages creativity, this animated GIF. If you don’t get it, watch They Live sometime. It’s a classic.

I can’t even process that this would happen now, in 2009. I want to say it’s a sign of our success, that it’s a backlash against the way we’ve managed to modify society to be somewhat more accommodating of us, but that’s not true. It’s just business as usual for the class of persons who think they have a right – usually god-given in their minds – to patrol the borders of acceptable behavior and fuck up anyone they feel like.

I hope a lot of people lose their jobs over this but somehow I suspect the result will be promotions.

They’re using something called, amongst other things, “traffic shaping.” Basically it allows different types of traffic – web browsing vs. SSH vs. file-sharing vs. WoW vs. whatever – to be throttled or shut down without affecting other applications. As they note, WoW traffic went undisturbed but access to Flash video was all but eradicated. (I choose to forgive their mangling of WoW cosmology – Azeroth is a continent and the planet on which it is found, not an island – in light of their clever off-hand suggestion that WoW be a meeting place to organize protests in the real world.)

Looking at the final graph, here’s what they most blocked in descending order:

• SSH, normally used for encrypted command-line access but also very useful as a sneaky way to proxy web traffic. If you have a co-worker who can always get to anything online no matter what your IT staff does, and SSH is allowed, that co-worker is using an SSH proxy. (For purposes of full disclosure, guess who’s shite at getting that to work? Moi. I’ve just never cared that much.) Other possible transgressive uses of SSH: terminal session to an external host that has a command-line IRC client installed; encrypted file transfer; etc. If the chart listing percentage dropped is also a rough guide to their list of concerns then they are quite right to consider SSH the most subtle threat to their attempted smothering of information access.
• Flash, used by basically every video site, including YouTube and many news sites, to embed video.
• Bittorrent, which of course would make an excellent way to distribute, say, video of the militia murdering someone in the street without it being localized or necessarily traceable to the original person who held the camera.
• POP, because you don’t want just anyone receiving email from their international friends and relatives, do you?
• Alternative web ports and HTTP proxies are always a popular target for IT staff who want to control access to porn or, you know, news. I’m going to guess they’re just taking a stab at random ports that are likely candidates for alternate web traffic (say, TCP 8080 or 8181) but maybe they’re packing the serious web filtering heat on that scale. If so then I have to wonder if there are some embargoes being broken.
• Web cam = citizen journalist/potential YouTube star/access to international friends and family who’ve pointed a web cam at their HDTV tuned to CNN. Verboten!
• SMB: surprise, Microsoft is super-chatty in Farsi, too. Also file-sharing, though gods help the poor bastard who’s down to trying to share drives across international lines. Any modern ISP that is at all conscious of what it’s doing will be blocking this at its own borders anyway.
• Then, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down the list: normal old web traffic, email (I’m assuming they mean SMTP and IMAP only, since they list POP separately) and FTP.

So, related to my web filtering comment above, I don’t know a damned thing about what embargoes are in place. Ever since I got yelled at by a corporate VP in 1994 for calling up the Commerce Dept. on my own initiative to ask them about regulations related to international shipping of books that discuss encryption I’ve kind of let the lawyers worry about that stuff. That said, the ability to do this kind of traffic shaping on this scale suggests access to equipment that I would expect is embargoed. I don’t know, though. Maybe they can just buy all their Networking Company X equipment directly from X’s contracted manufacturer in China, y’know? I sure don’t. (Know, that is.) Maybe they’ve got enough people sitting around that they can just write up manual access-lists and try to filter everything by port on whatever devices they’ve got that can take ACLs and that’s why they’re only blocking some of this. I don’t know. In some ways the article raises more questions than it answers, for me, since it makes me want to know the specific techniques and technologies being applied.

All that aside, doesn’t it just kind of stab the ghost of my freshman self through the heart with an icicle to see the internet used to limit information and mask access to the truth? Yes it does. Why it still surprises me I’ll never know.

The vote was a very close one – just 59 to 57 – but I am reminded of the time I had to back a truck over a flexible irrigation pipe at the research farm. The irrigation system was made up of flexible hoses joined to one another by metal couplings. Having been warned to avoid backing over a coupling I managed to miss the nearest one but only by about this much. When a co-worker teased me about it my boss said to me, “You know what? An inch is as good as a mile.”

Part of why I’ve followed this bill as closely as I have – I wrote to and called my state representative, who in fact voted in favor of the bill, and I’ve already sent a thank you message – is that I am so utterly galled by the two main conservative responses to this bill: to claim that recognizing that queer students are often picked on will somehow lead to gay marriage being legalized and to claim that the bill is insulting to teachers and administrators because it suggests they don’t know which kids need to be protected.

I hate to break it to the conservatives – Republican and Democrat alike – in the state house, but some teachers and principals plain don’t know which kids need to be protected. Worse, though, and much more likely in my experience, they know exactly which kids are the targets of bullying and for one or more of a variety of reasons they simply turn a blind eye. Worst of all, there are some teachers and administrators who actually join in.

This happened to me twice in high school. For various complicated reasons two of my high school teachers had explicit knowledge, or close enough so as not to make a difference, that I was a gay student in their school.

One had become one of my favorite teachers ever over the course of my senior year. She was warm and supportive in her commentary on my work and I did well in her class. When she found out I was gay, however, she immediately went cold. She just froze up like a block of ice. For the rest of the semester she didn’t address me directly that I can recall in any manner other than the bare minimum required by my presence in her classroom – say, during role call – or to criticize me in front of others. On the last day of school I stopped by her room to thank her for what I had learned that year – she remained a gifted teacher – and she simply looked at me before turning around and going back to what she was doing.

The other made fun of me to my face in front of most of our very large classroom. He was known, however, as a master manipulator and so of course he did it in an oblique way that would have required me to out myself to my classmates in order to call him on it. I have probably felt more humiliated in my life but I couldn’t say when. This left such an impression on me that a couple of years ago, when I heard he’d had some major health problems and that some old classmates were sending him cards together, I commented to The Boyf that I wanted to send the guy a card but that I wanted to write in it, “I guess I’m not disappointed that you lived.”

Hell, one of my acquaintances, when he asked an assistant principal to help him ward off some bullying, was told that “things might improve if [he] got a fucking haircut.” Yet another acquaintance was the object of such scorn that when he was assaulted one day in the lunchroom a group of teachers held up makeshift Olympics-style scorecards. Eventually he dropped out of school and, last I heard, had run off to a major city in another state and become a prostitute to support himself. He was in ninth grade.

I don’t think that the existence of these rules would have necessarily prevented the experiences I and others had. I know they wouldn’t have fixed the environment that made such treatment possible. However, having them on the books is important. Bureaucrats live and die by the letter of the law and a smart kid could potentially use these rules to chip away at the ground under the feet of an uncooperative or complicit administrator. A good teacher or a good administrator could use it as a shield against those in their communities who think fags are for beating up. It wouldn’t have stopped that teacher from making fun of me but it would have given me something to call him out on. When I was that age and convinced I was the only person in the world who felt what I felt, I would have taken all the help I could get.

In an ideal world, the conservatives who think this bill goes too far by naming categories of student, who think that teachers and administrators will protect all students equally, would be right. Unfortunately, we live in nothing even a little bit like an ideal world.