As a 49-year-old gay male who's seen it all and heard even more, I say that the worst Keillor can be accused of is a bit of clumsiness. Lighten up and save your outrage for a more deserving target, people.

Basically, Keillor's ambiguous in coming to a real conclusion about

how it "should be". But the flaw in his article comes in his

assertion:

"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."

If this is how parents are supposed to be, then we would never see

those "lovely" Ethiopian, Somali, Hispanic, etc. faces in classrooms

in the first place and all men in the U.S. would look like Garrison

Keillor or Rush Limbaugh and all women would look like Laura Bush.

What about Somali mothers standing in back in their traditional

African attire? Where would they be in his article? What about a

Somali author coming to the classroom to tell of the "clip-clop" of

camel hooves across the stone-tiled streets of a small Somali village?

Or the desert winds blowing through the canvas walls of a tent in a

refugee camp outside Mogadishu?

For one, Keillor's article does not belong on a truly progressive

medium like Salon.com. If the editors at Salon listen to A Prairie

Home Companion, then they'd know Keillor upholds, before anything,

traditional white, Lutheran Scandinavian Midwestern culture. The next

thing Keillor upholds is a sense of progressivism that comes from an

ethic that is based in Scandinavian Europe of the past eighty years -

a post-WWI to the present social reference that embraces tolerance;

that is, as long as what is being tolerated does not subvert the

dominant culture in the countries of Scandinavia - Norway, Denmark,

Finland, Sweden, and Iceland. So, in the end analysis of this article,

I think Salon is a bit irresponsible in their editorial obligations

because they did not preface Keillor's cultural references and actual

politial bias. That's dangerous because it's causing all this unneeded

"hate" for Keillor by the regular readers of Salon who, I venture to

guess, do not know Keillor beyond the fact that he was in Robert

Altman's last film with Merril Steep.

But in any event, Keillor is sludgy, protestant, morally uncertain,

and must be taken in a kind of "oh that old coot" kind of way. But he's a smart man, maybe not as old as a coot, but just about as odd looking as one with the bookishness to prove it.

This is tired. Just tired, honey. Let's look at the facts: In this 1950's paradise you described, spousal rape was still legal. Women had little legal recourse or finanacial access if they chose to leave abusive husbands and instead had to stay at home "boiling potatoes." White Americans were responding to desegregation and an emerging civil rights movement with violent hysteria. Awesome.

The fact that so few children grow up in stable families and eat "pizza" every night for dinner can just as easily be blamed on structures of global capital that necessitate parents to work several jobs, push away local food production, and shut up local produce markets for Wal Marts and Dominoes. Instead, GK would apparently like to blame the few queens who have the audacity and creativity to scrape together some sort of enjoyment from this mess we live in: "flamboyant gay men" who "worship campy pop stars!" I am a roomate to a healthy, lesbian family. I wear polka dots and go out, they raise kids. We meet where we do, but let's not pretend we all have the same interests, asthetics, or politics just because we are gay.

Romanticizing the past as it was written by those in power is not only a form of cultural amnesia, it just doesn't make sense. This is where we live, afterall, the here and now, and what are you going to do, GK? Take shallow stabs at single parents or gay families? PLEASE, IF THAT IS ALL YOU HAVE GOT TO SAY, THEN SIT DOWN, BECAUSE WE HAVE HEARD IT BEFORE. These are times that call for compassionate thinkers who can acknowledge the complexity of our situation, not washed-up, mild-mannered homophobes!

For the record, I don't give a shit about gay marriage. And I am a lesbian. I want there to be structures in place that will help all of our complicated, varied, but certainly not tupperwared-boiled-potato-families, survive healthfully. Childcare. Universal healthcare. Decent schools. A series of legal arrangements that can be chosen that govern issues of inhertiance, disability, child custody, and financial agreements. The health of my future family is bound up with the health of a family where a grandma and oldest brother have to raise the youngest kids.

Do you want to come up with constructive ways of making families work as they are, or do you want to harp on a past when you, and few others, were having a good time. Some suggested reading: The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Koontz.

Looking at all the self-righteous comparisons of G.K. to Ann Coulter, (really? Ann Coulter?) by people who seem to have lost the ability to either read what is written or to denote the irony that saturates the article, I have a suggestion: get a clue folks. As for all the bombast about G.K.'s purported homophobia, anyone who is so wed to a narrow minded notion of identity that spoofing a stereotype is confused for hate, you really need to get out more. G.K.'s mock bucolic ironizes both the past and present, both straight mannequin parents and gay clothes horses. G.K.'s article affirms the value of love, across the generational and gender divide, a point which seems lost on his frankly hysterical critics. Love isn't perfect though, and raising children doesn't make for suburban heroism. Parents, either gay and straight, can, as Philip Larkin once observed, "fuck you up." But then, perhaps that's stating the obvious.

The irony here is that the last person to wear green chartreuse pants would be a gay parent. Within the gay community, no one is more boring than the folks with kids. They're too busy to think of fashion! The flamboyant gay parent is a stereotype that never existed, which is why Garrison's very hetero-oriented joke falls completely flat. He ought to focus on another stereotype: the old dog who needs a new trick.