Obama

Obama came out of the closet yesterday in favor of gay marriage.  Long overdue.  And while there is primarily a political motive behind his declaration--as there is with anything a U.S. president does--it's still a good day.  Clint Eastwood had a good quotation about it in GQ magazine.  Before you read it, I'm going to make a bet with myself.

You heard those lines in Eastwood's growl, right?  I win.

Anyhoo, gay marriage is illegal in the UAE, where I currently live and work ten months of the year, but homosexual relationships are common.  Young Emirati men and women don't get any chance to interact with each other until they marry, and they have to release the pressure somehow.

To show you how acceptable it is here, consider the following example.  A student came up to the front of another teacher's class to give a powerpoint presentation.  Mistakenly, he clicked on the wrong file.  Soon, the entire class found itself watching gay porn.  The student was embarrassed and turned off the video.  Now in the U.S. several things would've happened:

1.  People would've been shocked.

2.  The student would've been ridiculed or made fun of by some of the other students.  For weeks.

3.  Someone would've complained to the school administration.

4.  Separately, the student and the teacher would've been either (a) talked to by the administration, (b) censured by the administration, or (c) fired/expelled.

In the UAE, none of these things happened.  The reaction of the students was to think, "Well, that just happened."  Nothing else came of it.

Another teacher who heard the story talked to a student who had been in class that day.  He asked him whether the "misclicking" student had gotten a hard time over his mistake.  "Why?" replied the student, and the teacher responded, "Well, because the student outed himself in front of his class."  The student replied, "We all knew that he is gay.  These things aren't secret here."

No closets to come out of, apparently.

I didn't post yesterday, so I'll be adding another Band Wars review later today.