Most Americans don't care about gay marriage. But it matters very much to the knuckle-draggers and Christianists and whack jobs in Bush's ever smaller base.

The successes of the LGBT civil rights movement and the more prominent role openly gay people are playing in the public eye has actually turned up the temperature in middle schools and high schools for queer kids.

I always kind of divided the gay guys I met up into two groups when I first started coming out. There were the guys who thought there was something fundamentally wrong with them and hated themselves and were so burdened with shame and internalized homophobia. It just really paralyzed and shredded them. And then there were guys like me who thought, "I'm fine, everybody else is crazy. My church is sick and the family's crazy, but me? I'm fine."

Owning a gun in America is one way for conservative white males to demonstrate their anger at crime, liberalism, feminism, and modernity.

Yes, yes: Taking out Saddam Hussein means war, and war is bad for children and other living things. I went to grade school in the 1970s, and I recall the poster. But there are times when war is not only a tragic and unavoidable necessity, but also good for children and other living things.

The only way to get gay issues off the front pages of Canadian newspapers is to grant gay and lesbian people our full civil equality and leave it alone.

I'm 52, which means I don't really... I was never a person who celebrated birthdays to begin with. At this stage, it's certainly something that someone who made a big deal out of their birthdays in their 20s and 30s kind of hangs that up. Not because you're sad to be getting older. I'm thrilled to be getting older. I have so many friends who died when they were 25 and would be ecstatic to be here with me turning 50. It's a thrill and a privilege to still be alive.