Best Keillor article I've read in.... well, ever.

But I think this is not the crowd to appreciate what yer saying. We'll see.

Mr Keillor is a master storyteller.. and that's a rare gift/skill. Everything he writes makes me feel good about life. And I need that living in a country being run into the ground by maniacs.

LazyEdna

about how wholesome life was back in the olden days when he gathered around the old crackerbarrel for a racy game of checkers, when men were men and women were housewives, etc., that's not exactly how he's lived HIS life, is it? I'm sure there are a lot of gay parents who have lived less--as he says--flamboyant lives than he has, with his multiple marriages and putting his children through hyphenated and complicated extended families. How can he be so judgmental when his life as a famous person is so publicly flawed? And I am sorry, but his comments about gay men are just absolutely offensive, even if he does try to qualify them.

I'm a childfree, straight Unitarian who supports gay marriage, and frankly, gay marriage and the plight of people like me are firs-world problems.

We'll take care of ourselves. Let's make sure the kids who get made don't get screwed.

While nature may not care about the emotional well-being of older people, or anybody really, children certainly do care about the emotional well-being of the older people in charge of raising them, though they probably wouldn't put it quite that way. They just feel anxious, upset and guilty when the people they count on most fall apart or lash out.

Your comments reference a golden age that never existed, a paper-thin surface version of a community where conformity ruled. While you personally may not have had "to contend with troubled, angry parents" many, or even most, of your peers certainly did. Their parents may not have verbalized these feelings and may have instead simply channeled those feelings into alcoholism, domestic violence, depression, etc. Your generation was clearly so lucky not to have heard about the problems, instead simply having to deal with the side-effects.

As for your ridiculous comments about gay parents, how would gay marriage make the problem of confusing extended family relationships any worse? We could do away with the awkward "partner" label once and for all. Why are gay parents responsible for changing your laughably outdated "stereotype"? Your "chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts" characters conjure images of self-obsessed suburban house-wives far quicker than anything else. Why don't you go meet a few gay couples raising children before you pontificate again.

Parental narcissism is obviously undesirable, but it pops up in many diverse ways, in gay and straight parents, in permanently monogamous pairings and in fragmented-by-divorce family trees. Simply proscribing a "shut-up and be unhappy" approach to parenting is not going to help anyone.

what a bizarre, smug-sounding article. I don't get it.

Nature doesn't care about the emotional well-being of older people.

Nature doesn't care about the emotional well-being of anyone, really. Let's all be unhappy and deny ourselves pleasure and go back and live in the 50's? Whatever. I've always found Keillor boring and self-satisfied, but this one was really odd.

It is quite odd that a man married three times with kids by different women would write this piece.

I guess many of us have closets full of ignorance and bigotry, but not all of us choose to open it for an audience like Keillor does here.

Just because something is "natural" does not make it right or wrong; Hume settled this philosophical issue over two hundred years ago. Having children and passing along genes might be a "goal" of natural selection but that's a descriptive evaluation, not a moral one.

And I'm not even going to go into Keillor's borderline slurs against homosexuality.

I like GK's take on expensive studies that produce obvious results and I had a laugh at the intended absurdity of his assumptions about Gay marriage and what it may entail.

I'm Gay and I think Gay marriages are a terrible idea and the thought of being a Gay parent thrills me about the same. Why should Gays fight to participate in an institution that has been falling apart on Heterosexuals for the past 50 years. What's the statistic on divorce rates now? At least %50 in most developed countries. That's what's so funny when preachy conservatives go on about Gays trying to undermine the sanctity and specialness of marriage. What a waste of energy that would be. Straights have already managed that themselves.

As for breeding, well Mother nature freed us from that imperative. We get to be a positive influences on a whole lot of children as their teachers, doctors, counsellors, priests, sports coaches, entertainers, aunts and uncles and friends. That's enough for me.

That being said I think Gay's and Lesbian's relationships and their right to be parents (if they so desire) must be equal under the law.

Now I'm just going to slip into my tight black satin pants, my cerise silk shirt and mince out the garbage, feed the cat and maybe sit down and go through my monthly bills.

Yours in giggling feyness

David Edler

Oh, honey. You know I love you, but go watch La Cages aux Folles and shut the hell up. Your remarks about gay marriage are offensive.

Besides, you have got to know better. "Traditional" families could be as toxic as anything ever seen today. I had a mom and a dad and my mom stayed home while my dad went to work every day and then he came home and kicked me in the head while I huddled on the floor, crying and trying to protect my head with my arms. We had plenty of Tupperware; so did my next-door-neighbors. In that family it was the dad who beat the mom. In my husband's family, it was grandpa (one of the traditional two, called 'Grandpa G' to distinguish him from 'Grandpa F') who came home drunk and sometimes locked everyone else out of the house.

It was the flamboyant man with the small weird dog (actually it was a cat) who saved my sanity. He maintained a cool, pleasant oasis to run to where folks acted civilized. Thank God for theater queens.