(And in case you’re wondering, that does mean I’ve given up on recording How I Met Your Mother this year. I’ve been trying to keep up on CBS’ website, but they haven’t been uploading every episode.)

Now, if only I could remember who my previous favorite lesbian comedian was…

(via The Soup)

So, uhm, is New York saying that Carl Cameron is a prankster?

Now that election day has passed, however, there’s a new game of the Oppression Olympics going on. See, in case you hadn’t heard, this was a bittersweet election for gays because the historical nature of Barack Obama’s victory was undercut by anti-marriage voter initiatives in California, Arizona and Florida. (As well as a measure to limit adoption to married couples — really a way of making a gay adoption ban seem less about teh gayz — in Arkansas.)

California’s Proposition 8 was the most painful one because it broke a new barrier in voter-mandated discrimination. Hawaii was the first state to amend its constitution to take away a right that already existed (ironically, the right for same-sex couples to marry was created in a voter-approved amendment, though voters obviously didn’t foresee that they might not be entirely comfortable with equal rights — and for added irony the Hawaii State Supreme Court ruled that refusing to marry same-sex couples was gender discrimination, not discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, which kinda proved critics of the ERA right) but California voters declared their wish to take away a right already being exercised by their fellow citizens. Prop 8 gets even sadder if you think about the state’s history and how it was affected by discriminatory measures like the Chinese Exclusion Act and the internment of Japanese-Americans. Quite bluntly, the people of California should be smarter than that vote suggested.

That heartbreak has started to turn, unfortunately, upon minority communities who, the common wisdom says, made the difference in the Prop 8 vote, helping push it over the edge. There are blog posts like this titled, “We scratched your back, you stabbed ours” and Dan Savage weighed in.

I love the way this premise presumes that LGBT people who cast their votes for Obama just did it as a favor for African-Americans, it’s not like gay voters evaluated the candidates and made our choice on who was the most qualified. Apparently, gay voters are all a bunch of Will Trumans who only saw Obama as “the black guy”. Had I known that they gays had traded their Obama votes for votes against Prop 8, I wouldn’t have bothered paying attention to silly things like candidate positions and issues.

Of course, idiocy goes both ways and a provocateur like Jasmine Cannick is one of them. Cannick has previously thrown about homophobic stereotypes and Cannick repeats her ‘why should I care about gays when African-Americans clearly have it worse?’ schtick.

I usually feel uncomfortable with the phrase “There’s a special place in hell for…” but the Oppression Olympics is a topic that makes me angry enough to overcome that feeling. There’s a special place in hell for people who regularly start up the Oppression Olympics, it’s a beautiful banquet with all sorts of amazing food waiting to be served but before anyone can eat they all must come to an agreement about which group was the most oppressed in life. Ms. Cannick can sit between Gloria Steinem and Dan Savage.

To talk me down, here’s Rachel Maddow and Melissa Harris-Lacewell discussing the issue with the intelligence and calm you’d expect from the two:

From what I’ve seen on the soaps in the past, casting more actors of color won’t help much because the soaps have shown they don’t know what to do with minority characters. If they get storylines, nonwhite characters on soaps often end up in their own little subsection of the universe, like they did for many years on The Young and the Restless (where, fearing controversy, the African-American characters went through every possible relationship mix in order to avoid an interracial romance).

So, while a commitment to more diverse casting is great, that’s not going to amount to much without a greater change.

I guess in my mind, 30 Days was canceled quite a while ago.

I still can’t get over that “I never thought I’d see” feeling. I took a while to warm up to Obama during the primaries and part of that was because of his race. Until last late night, I believed the first President who wasn’t a white man would be someone who, as Wanda Sykes put it, “someone who knows what Uncle Tom’s Cabin looks like from the inside”. That’s why Obama’s speech on race meant a lot to me, he frankly discussed an issue I expected he would minimize to get elected. That he took such a nuanced view of the issue did worry me in these days of sound bite politics — I’ve supported politicians who could speak with a similar level of clarity and insight before and they usually lost to someone good at framing and feeding the media sound bites.

The last time I was so pleased by an election, Willie Brown’s crew were voted out in San Francisco. It’s a good feeling.