what are you doing reading Salon and listening to PHC? Don't you know there are wars and like, important stuff going on? Shouldn't you be out protesting or hugging little brown people or something productive like that?

The reason why we have had to suffer through two terms of Bush is because the opposition to him and his ilk is populated by the ham-fisted buffoons who reacted to this essay with venom. Perhaps y'all aren't aware of Mr. Keillor personal foibles which inform the content of his article. In any case, the nay sayers merely demonstrate their own cruel lack of imagination when they attack this piece. It follows that you dunderheads, failing this writing, fail in so many other ways as well. What a shame.

Actually Tiff,

My menial day job as a temp receptionist allows me to peruse the Internet. Is that okay with you?

Love,

me

GK is turning in to some scary Andy Rooney/Art Linklatter character. Xenophobia and homophobia are not cute traits to adopt.

I have enjoyed his radio show my whole life, but I find his "writing" for Salon to be worse and worse every time I take a chance and read one again.

I'm not sure why people attack his critics on a political basis - it's not about that. It's about becoming a stupid, careless writer.

Back in pre-Civil Rights, pre-hyphenated America, it was also illegal in many states for couples of different races to marry. The 1964 Civil Rights Act struck down all the anti-miscegenation laws, but it wasn't until 1967 that the Supreme Court struck the final blow to these laws in the aptly titled case, Loving v. Virginia. In that case, a white man and a black woman had married in Washington, D.C. and moved to Virginia. They were prompted charged with violating the state's anti-miscegenation laws, found guilty, and sentenced to spend a year in prison. However, the judge suspended the prison sentence so long as they immediately left the state and stayed away for 25 years. If they should set foot in the state of Viriginia as a couple within that time frame, they would be jailed. The judge stated, "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." The Supreme Court ruled on June 12, 1967 that the Virginia had in violation of the Constitution, writing "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights to the orderly pursuit of happiness of free men."

Refusing mixed race couples the right to marry was just as wrong as refusing gay couples the right to marry today.

Keillor's nostalgia for the "perfect" America of his past is nothing but hogwash and the ahistorical, selective nostalgia of a bigot.

My menial day job as a temp receptionist allows me to peruse the Internet. Is that okay with you?

sure, that's ok with me. Just maybe you should restrain yourself from telling other people to get over themselves and think critically until you, um, like take your own advice?

Of course, it could be that you really are more enlightened than the rest of us dullards who couldn't read between the seemingly bigoted lines to extract the deeply hidden humor. I'm sure that's it.

you must be pretty buff from hauling around that ego, huh?

What makes this item an example of careless writing? I think your reading was careless. Keillor is far from a model parent and father. He is making fun of the "do as I say not as I do" mobius strip of illogic. He was lampooning the mantra of the good old days because, as a child of those days he has made a very flawed adult. He has not been so generous with center stage. It follows that one should tread carefully hearing his advice. It's the point. Did you dumbass haters not get that? Are you so dumb? You'll never read another column? Why, does he write to far over your fucking heads! You humorless nimrods are a real test.

You didn't get the essay. You are angry at a ghost of your own poor reading. If you understood the piece, you wouldn't be angry but you don't have the comprehension skills to figure it out. I am surprised you are smart enough to log on to the internet--did your parents help?

Liberals have no sense of humor.

To which I add, and no sense of perspective.

A bunch of self-righteous, self-absorbed, narcissistic blowhards here.

Ok, you don't like Mr. Keillor. Wow, I am SOOOO IMPRESSED...

No sane person can hold that Keillor's satire amounts to pedestalizing the America of Norman Rockwell's paintings for the Saturday Evening Post. I'll leave it to gay/lesbian/queer readers to decide if his other comments were homophobic. Still, behind the satire lay a definite nostaliga, albeit one Keillor sees through. The proof of this pudding is his deciding there must be enough I-me-mine parents out there to make the satire intelligible to general audiences. That and not touching upon how, in its own way, having a child in his late fifities is Keillor's own form of preening, one that beats anything any gay man has floating in his wardrobe. But Keillor can't help it. He's a moderate Boomer Democrat, what out here in Minnesota is variously called sensible and reasonable. His nostalgia for the era of majority monogamy (as if that ever existed anywhere) is of a piece with the prevailing disease of mainstream liberals, the belief in American exceptionalism. In its more self-flaggellatory moments, American exceptionalism subscirbes to Robert Frost's observation that the older a man gets, the farther he had to walk to school as a boy. That has, often with spectacular results, been Keillor's stock in trade from the beginning of "A Prairie Home Companion." Why would he change now?