Yet another reason to loathe Garrison Keillor

Fine, I've never been a fan of his. As a Reader's Digest addict as a boy (when every article seemed to be of the "Can Cocaine Conquer America?" kind) I had to endure his gross homilies about growing up poor but surrounded by lovable eccentrics who made sure he'd grow up to become an NPR star one day. I sounded like a crank when I expressed reservations about Robert Altman's swan song, but mostly because I questioned the ornery fucker's choice of collaborators: you'd think Altman would've been hip to Keillor's jive years ago.

But now Keillor writes this. And Salon published it. To wit:

Under the old monogamous system, we didn't have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck. Today, serial monogamy has stretched the extended family to the breaking point. A child can now grow up with eight or nine or 10 grandparents -- Gampa, Gammy, Goopa, Gumby, Papa, Poopsy, Goofy, Gaga and Chuck -- and need a program to keep track of the actors.

And now gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives. In addition to the ex-stepson and ex-in-laws and your wife's first husband's second wife, there now will be Bruce and Kevin's in-laws and Bruce's ex, Mark, and Mark's current partner, and I suppose we'll get used to it.

The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men -- sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That's for the kids. It's their show

What a fuckwit! Dan Savage takes him down mercilessly: .

What an asshole. Asshole, asshole, asshole. What Keillor wrote today on Salon is every bit as offensive as Ann Coulter’s “faggot” joke about John Edwards and relies on the same set of cultural prejudices.
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Most of the gay male parents I know adopted children that men and women in “opposite-sex marriages” weren’t interested in—children with HIV, older children, mixed-race children, children with developmental disabilities, children abused, neglected and abandoned by their heterosexual parents. Every year I go to Michigan for Gay Family Week in Saugatuck and I’m staggered by the love, patience, and compassion demonstrated by these men. These couples deserve our gratitude and support. What they don’t deserve is a rich, old hypocrite insinuating that they’re more interested in their fussy hairdos and over-decorated apartments than they are in raising their kids.

Then there are conservatives who assume that liberalism = support of gay rights (as I once told my students: "This country's leaders are still wary of fags, kikes, and niggers"). What makes Keillor's opinions doubly offensive is the folksy drawl in which he'd probably deliver it aloud, which is probably his idea of humility. If you supported John Kerry and (now) John Edwards' positions on gay marriage and adoption Keillor's remarks encapsulate why "mainstream" Demos remain as deluded as the GOP.