40goingon28 watches the Prop 8 trial so you don't have to

Since I work in the neighborhood and had some time to kill this morning, I wandered over to the federal courthouse to take in some of the Prop. 8 same-sex marriage trial. The line to get into the main courtroom was like the line for the bathroom at Amber at midnight on a Friday (RIP, BTW), so I went to the overflow courtroom on the 19th floor and watched it on closed-circuit TV with a bunch of other youngsters.

(P.S. Don't bother looking for it on CourTv or anything - the Supreme Court shut that shit down. Oh wait, I guess CourTv doesn't exist any more. Oh well.)

So anyway today we have Small British Psychologist Dr. Michael Lamb, who reminds me a little of Daniel Faraday from "Lost" and has the kind of English accent you just love in your experts on developmental psychology. He teaches at Cambridge so he's easily the smartest person in the room. He's going to be talking about how kids raised by gay and lesbian parents turn out pretty much the same as kids raised by straight parents.

So he's written like 15 books and a billion articles and yep, all the research shows it's true - kids of gay and lesbian parents are just as likely to be well-adjusted as kids of straight parents. There's tons of research. They're not even more likely to become gay. I mean, I pretty much assumed that was true, but it's nice to know science is backing me up.

(One personal note - as he's going through all the stuff that makes a well-adjusted kid, I'm starting to see what might have gone wrong in my own case. But let's not dwell on that.)

The upshot of the whole thing is that keeping the gays from getting married won't improve childrens' adjustment. It might cut down on Crate + Barrel's annual revenue, though. He totally didn't say that. I just made that up.

Here comes the pro-Prop 8 guy on cross-examination. He wants to start out by showing that Dr. Michael Lamb is a simpering Tool of the Left, so he quickly gets him to admit that he's a member of the ACLU, the National Organization of Women, and, I don't know, Communists for Whales or whatever. But the best part, which I wrote down verbatim and I SWEAR IS TRUE, was when the lawyer asked, with a tone of voice like he was getting a real zinger in there:

"You've even given money to PBS, correct?!"

Hold. The. Fucking. Phone. This Lamb guy supports that fag Grover? GAME FUCKING OVER. And that Jacques Pepin? SO FUCKING FRENCH. Lamb is toast now.

Hates America.

Not really. What really happened is that everyone in the courtroom busted out laughing. I guess in SF, donating money to PBS isn't like supporting the Church of Satan like it is everywhere else.

So the cross went on, and the guy was basically trying to establish that - gasp - there are differences between men and women. (Shocker that emerged: "Men can't breastfeed, right?" Lamb had to grudgingly admit that no, men in fact cannot breastfeed.) I bolted at the break, so I don't know what other Earth-shattering revelations will come forth later.

What this all means, big picture, I can't say. I'm definitely going back for more some other time, though. It was a hoot.