boycott the bigots

imagine if you stayed at a hotel and gave your money to someone who then used your money against you - to deny you equal rights, to keep you a second-class citizen, to make sure that you pay the same taxes as everyone else but receive less benefits than most of them. you'd be pretty pissed, right? well to every gay and lesbian traveller who's stayed at manchester grand hyatt or the doug manchester-owned san diego marriott nearby, that's exactly how you should feel.

the union tribune reported saturday that dougie has given a staggering amount of money to an anti-gay initiative to amend the state constitution to deny gays the right to marry. we're not talking about a mere 10 or 20K here, but rather an eye-popping one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars. that's not just saying you don't like the gays - that's saying you really don't like the gays and you're going out of your way to show it. by the way, dougie's cool with the gays who work for him - he just doesn't think they should have the same rights and benefits he has, because the bible tells him so. never mind that the us constitution implies a separation of church and state, or that the 14th amendment implies equal rights for all.

what's great about this story is that manchester is already a massive prick - here's a guy who's walled off the harbor with cold, onion-garnering architecture, disregarding the public's concerns about bay access. he's fighting the city and its citizens (and threatening massive lawsuits if we dare cross him) to retain control over another waterfront project that shouldn't belong to him - the naval broadway complex downtown. and he's the poster child for the good old boy network of fat cat developers who control the politicians through big donations, and who really run this conservative town.

well now you can call him a massive bigoted prick, because he feels his personal religious beliefs give him the right to deny equal rights to his fellow citizens. and you can add terry caster, who runs a-1 storage and robert hoehn of hoehn motors to the bigot list. sounds like mr. hoehn knows how to say "homophobe" in german, to paraphrase his commercials.

caster has the best line of the article, calling our society "sick" without "solid marriage". terry, have you noticed that hetero marriage, with it's one-in-two divorce rate, ain't looking so solid? and please explain how gay marriage weakens any straight couple's marriage. i can just see them now, struggling over how to salvage their once-strong marriage so damaged by the mere possibility of gays marrying. sounds like terry probably agrees with that wingnut oklahoma politician who says gays are the biggest threat to america. welcome to the republican party!

it's unfortunate that the culture war has come to this, but it's time to take notice of san diego millionaires who take our money and then fight to deny us the rights they already enjoy (conservative san diego leads in money-giving to the above initiative). these are the same people who would have fought against making inter-racial marriage legal a couple generations ago. the sensible action for any gay person, or anyone who believes in equal rights for all, is to boycott manchester's overpriced hotels, hoehn's overpriced cars, and caster's storage units.