In case you missed the Pride Parade this year - I'll confess, I did - check out Senator Tom Duane's podcast, complete with a chat with Scott Stringer. And if the idea of listening to a chat between two of the funniest politicians in New York isn't enough for you, check it out for the fantastic production values and fab musical score alone.

Oh, and snort. Here's a quote, from Albany, meet Podcast.

"It turns out not everyone in New York State or in Albany even knows what a podcast is".

How. Totally. Awesome.

Rock Hackshaw has a piece on marriage equality up, here, that I'm going to have to comment on. He's wrong, in my considered opinion, but wrong in a way that is instructive.

First, we need to acknowledge that the opposition to marriage equality is not even, in that sense, about marriage. It is about the acceptance of gays and lesbians in our society. That's the often enough unspoken context of this debate; one eschewed by advocates, who prefer to merely address the charges made by opponents, and by the opponents themselves, who often enough make their case not with actual gays and lesbians, but with the depraved hordes that they believe lie in wait beyond our ranks: the polygamists, the bestialists, and so on.

So it is in this case as well. I'll say to the charge that marriage equality opens the floodgates to polygamy and what not else simply this: show me the people who are demanding that. Then demonstrate to me that marriage equality will have the consequences you point to. You won't be able to, for one very simple reason: there is no constituency arguing on behalf of, say, bestiality, and your argument essentially comes down to the assertion, unproven and unprovable, that any change in the institution of marriage will destroy it. That's a non-sensical claim; the institution will be strengthened, not weakened, when a new class of citizens joins it. Marriage has undergone significant shifts over the past century, beginning with the end of the idea of marriage as a life-long contract. Whether that's good or not is another subject; but the institution's continued vitality is demonstrated, I think, by the fact that gays and lesbians care enough about it to want to join in its practice.

In 1995, the Supreme Court ruled in Romer v. Evans, striking down a homophobic constitutional amendment in the state of Colorado:

We must conclude that Amendment 2 classifies homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else. This Colorado cannot do. A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws. Amendment 2 violates the Equal Protection Clause, and the judgment of the Supreme Court of Colorado is affirmed.