next week’s lesbian civil rights issue: universal cat health insurance
Gay activism’s newest front is social security benefits. Protesters and politicians are rallying in Hollywood because gay people can’t inherit their partner’s social security benefits when they die.
First: why do married people get to inherit each other’s social security benefits?
Second: this is why the gay rights movement sucks. They have located the absolute least compelling, most arcane aspect of anti-gay discrimination and are marching around bitching about it. This is worse than when they said adoption policy hurt their feelings.
This issue affects almost no one. Take all the gay people in America. Cut out the ones who aren’t “married” to someone of the same sex. Cut the remainder in half, because they will die before their partners do. Cut that number in half, because half of surviving spouses get bigger benefits than their spouses anyway. There: social security survivors benefits affect less than one quarter of gay people, a puny crowd to begin with, and that’s assuming social security even exists by the time most of us are old.
On top of that, the issue is not even emotional. It’s about money. Crass! These people might as well be Tea Partiers complaining about taxes.
Like I’ve said before, we’ve got to stop parading whiny grown ups and start exploiting children. It wouldn’t hurt to actually help gay kids too, for example by making schools teach gay history the same way they teach about other minority groups. And we should ask Obama to put a lesbian in the vacant Supreme Court seat. (Okay, I am not going to rally for that. But people who like to rally should!)
