X is to Y as...

This analogy never showed up on my SATs.

"It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right. . . . Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife."

-- Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), advocating a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in a speech Thursday to the Heritage Foundation.

from the Washington Post

And to think I'd been a supporter of The Big Gay Agenda. Before John pointed it out, I hadn't realized how similar bestiality and homosexuality really are. For clarification: in such a relationship, who's the turtle?


Hearings

Autumn, and the trees decide again they don't
need leaves.

Mothers add more blankets to the bed.
Yellow lights in windows of the junior high
mean that nightschool is back in session,
tired grownups sitting in the plastic desks
learning to bisect the hypotenuse,
how to say spreadsheet in Japanese.

This week on the televised hearings,
we get to watch our congressmen
nervously pronounce the word homosexual
in public; the committee trying to determine
whether queers are good enough
to pull the triggers
on machines designed to foreclose lives
contrary to the national well-being.

But the Congressman can't
pull the trigger on his own tongue
to fire out the word without
tripping over it, fumbling, stumbling
into the ditch between home and sexual.

You might say his defense industry is troubled,
as if he had a subterranean suspicion
that to say it might mean, just a little, to become it-
which might be right,

since language uses us
the way that birds use sky,
the way that seeds and viruses
knit themselves into a mammal's fur
and hitchhike towards the future.

When you say a word,
you enter its vocabulary,
its got your home address, your phone number, and weight-
it won't forget,

-the way the parents who finally bring themselves to say lesbian
enter, through that checkpoint,
the country where their daughter lives.

Tonight, all over Washington, senators in mirrors
will practice
until they are as fluent saying homosexual
as they already are at saying Mr. President
and first strike option.

Sometimes we think the truth
is the worst thing that could happen
but the truth is not the worst thing that could happen.

Now it is autumn and in stores
the turquoise wading pools
spangled with starfish and shells
are stacked against the wall, on sale,

implying what was costly yesterday
is cheap today, and may be free tomorrow-
All our yearnings and our fears:
so many seahorses,
galloping through bubbles.

-- Tony Hoagland