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Spilled Milk: Homo’s Odyssey

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This post is the fourth in a series of Spilled Milk columns by Emmy Award-winning writer and producer William Lucas Walker that chronicle his journey through parenthood. Spilled Milk, which originates in The Huffington Post, appears on these pages every Saturday.


Not too long ago, our little clan took a road trip from Los Angeles to Portland, Ore. Road trips are one of those mysterious things families feel compelled to do but no one knows why, like camping in the Mojave Desert or supporting the career of Miley Cyrus. I predict in the end it won’t be gay marriage that brings about the destruction of the American family. It will be the road trip.

After getting the kids settled into the back seat of our Honda Odyssey with their DVD players and movies, we hit the freeway. Once out of L.A., I was finally able to sit back, pop open my laptop, and begin jotting down a few ideas for this column. That’s when Kelly woke from his nap and grabbed the steering wheel from me, babbling some nonsense about “safety” and not using my computer while driving. So we switched seats.

Relocated to the passenger side, “safely,” I narrowed my list of possible topics to two: “Surviving Your Child’s K-Mart Taste” and “Parents I Hate.” Then suddenly — at 70 miles per hour — the transmission on our car blew out. And a column was born.

I’m an American, a proud gay American who was raised to believe that bad things don’t happen to Hondas. Yet ours has blown two transmissions in five years.

As we decelerated, the plume of smoke belching from underneath our hood began to panic my unflappable daughter. I tried to calm her as Kelly looked for a place to get off the road. “Think of it as an adventure, honey! We’re inside a fire-breathing dragon who just lost a leg!” She began to cry.

Somehow we managed to limp across four lanes of traffic to the next exit and turn down a hill into the welcoming parking lot of a visitors center that overlooked a picturesque lake. A visitors center with bathrooms and vending machines and other kids to play with. A visitors center we soon noticed had a chain-link fence around it and a propped-up sign gloating, “Closed for Renovations.”

“Look, an abandoned castle!” I tried, failing.

We called AAA Roadside Assistance and waited. Turkeys cook faster. An hour and 40 minutes passed as my iPod faded from Gaga to gone and the sun sank deep into the lake. The battery on our cell phone now dead, our world turned pitch black and eerie quiet.

When our Triple-A savior finally arrived on the scene, I could have jumped for joy. Instead, I froze. The white knight who showed up for our rescue turned out to be a physical composite of every high school bully I ever suffered: a tattooed skinhead-type, complete with soul-deadening stare and missing front tooth.

I hesitantly approached the massive flatbed tow truck idling before me and handed up my membership card through the cab window. Barely looking up, he grunted, “You know we only tow free for seven miles. After that it’s 10 bucks a mile. You got about 15 miles to the next town.” I asked if he could fit a family of four in his cab. His shrug said he’d manage.

After finishing his paperwork in silence, he finally lumbered down from his cab and stopped, getting his first, long look at my family. He stared at Kelly, then at me, then at our kids, finally speaking in the slow, guttural tones of a wife beater:

“These kids y’all’s?”

We answered that yes, they were.

Traveling as a two-dad family can have its challenges. Twice a year we visit my parents in South Carolina, a state so welcoming that its constitution bans not only same-sex marriage and civil unions but birth control and bagels. On its face, California might seem an improvement, until you find yourself stranded in the dark off I-5 in one of those counties where Prop 8 passed with 98 percent of the vote.

This man, whom I had now cast as the bastard love child of Ned Beatty and his horny hillbilly in the sequel to Deliverance, stared at us for what seemed a heart-thumping forever. Then he moved off. He spent the next few minutes hauling out huge, heavy chains with giant metal hooks. In my mind I pictured him encircling them around Kelly and me after he’d shot us, to more easily sink us to the bottom of that all-too-convenient lake.

After attaching the giant hooks to our Odyssey — of course, to complete our family portrait and ensure our suspect status, we were two men driving a minivan — he moved to the side of his flatbed and began pulling mysterious levers that caused his vehicle to groan as it slowly tipped its flatbed to meet our homosexual automobile.

This was too much for our youngest, James, a boy so Bam-Bam butch that for years we’ve referred to him as God’s joke on the gay daddies. By now he truly was jacked up by the adventure of it all. Biologically drawn to the smell of metal and grease like a moth to a blowtorch, James pushed forward and started peppering our AAA guy with questions: “Is our car dead?” “Do you have a bathroom in your truck?” “Who knocked out your tooth? Was it Batman?”

At this point Kelly intervened: “James, stay back so he can do his work.” Mr. Triple-A stopped what he was doing and looked at us. “His name’s James? I got a boy named James.” He had six kids, he informed us, all named after famous people in the Bible. Of course you do, I thought. A home movie began unspooling in my mind, starring a toddler Moses and barefoot Bathsheba helping their brother Goliath blow up frogs by sticking firecrackers up their butts.

Then he did something unexpected, something… perfect. This man whose menacing silence and sidelong glances had me rattled took off his work gloves and asked James to hold out his hands. He then began to gently pull the huge, oil-stained gloves over our son’s tiny fingers. Next he asked if James wanted to help him work the levers on the side of the flatbed so that he could haul our minivan up onto the truck. Mute with awe, James could only nod. As the chains grew taut and our car began to make its slow ascent up the ramp, James’ eyes widened to the size of the moon that had finally peeked through the clouds overhead.

Before long we were all crowded into the cab of the tow truck for the ride to the nearest town. I never would have thought it possible, but somehow the five of us fit. My family was safe. Jesse — he had a Biblical name, too — pulled out his phone and handed it to us so we could see pictures of his family. As the glow from the faces of his wife and kids lit up the inside of the truck, he looked at Kelly and me and said, “So… did you guys get married when y’all had that little window a few years back, before the Prop 8 thing?”

We said that we did. “That’s good,” he said. “My mom did, too,” he said. “She called up me and my brother and sister and told us, ‘Me and Maggie’s gonna have a wedding. You got a week and a half to figure out a way to get here.'”

From there on out, this man I was so sure I had pegged continued to upend my preconceived notions. When he learned we live in Hollywood, he told us that as a teenager he’d been bused in from the suburbs, commuting 20 hours a week to attend the Hollywood High magnet program in theater arts. Theater arts?

“Yep, it was great. For P.E. we took dance. Spent English readin’ Shakespeare. Instead of shop, we built sets for musicals. I loved it.”

He never charged us the $80 he should have for the extra mileage. Instead, he directed us to the one motel in that truck-stop town that had a swimming pool for the kids. Then he advised us which mechanic to see the next morning and which taco stands to avoid. And before lowering our big, gay minivan into the parking lot of the auto shop, he stopped to put his gloves on our daughter so she could work the levers this time, sending her into a spiral of rapture. After that he offered to drive us to our motel.

After we’d said our goodbyes and settled into our room, we made sure to sit the kids down and tell them how lucky our family had been that Jesse was the one sent to help us. Being kids, they got it: somehow the five of us fit.

After Kelly and the kids fell asleep, I got curious and Googled the name Jesse. Turns out it’s Hebrew for “God’s gift.”

 

* * * * *

William Lucas Walker is an Emmy Award-winning writer and producer whose television credits include Frasier, Will & Grace and Roseanne. He co-created the critically-acclaimed Showtime comedy The Chris Isaak Show. Bill and his husband Kelly are the parents of Elizabeth and James, born in 2001 and 2005. The children were gratified by the legal marriage of their parents in 2008, an event that rescued them from a life of ruinous bastardry.

Spilled Milk chronicles Bill’s misadventures in Daddyland. The first recurring humor column by a gay parent to appear in a mainstream American publication, Spilled Milk has regularly landed on the front page of The Huffington Post.

Follow William Lucas Walker on Twitter: @WmLucasWalker, @SpilledMilkWLW or Facebook: “Spilled Milk” by William Lucas Walker.       

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News

‘Repercussions’: Democrats and Republicans Stand Against ‘Pro-Putin’ House GOP Faction

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April 18, 2024

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Some House Democrats and House Republicans are coming together toward a common opponent: far-right “pro-Putin” hardliners in the House Republican conference, who appear to be led by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

Congresswoman Greene has been threatening to oust the Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Last month she filed a “motion to vacate the chair.” If she chooses to call it up she could force a vote on the House floor to try to remove Speaker Johnson.

House Democrats say they are willing to vote against ousting Johnson, as long as the Speaker puts on the floor desperately needed and long-awaited legislation to fund aid to Ukraine and Israel. Johnson has refused to put the Ukraine aid bill on the floor for months, but after Iran attacked Israel Johnson switched gears. Almost all Democrats and a seemingly large number of Republicans want to pass the Ukraine and Israel aid packages.

RELATED: Marjorie Taylor Greene, ‘Putin’s Envoy’? Democrat’s Bills Mock Republican’s Actions

Forgoing the possibility of installing Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker, which is conceivable given Johnson’s now one-vote majority, Democrats say if Johnson does the right thing, they will throw him their support.

“I think he’ll be in good shape,” to get Democrats to support him, if he puts the Ukraine aid bill on the floor, U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) told CNN Thursday. “I would say that there’s a lot of support for the underlying bills. I think those are vital.”

“If these bills were delivered favorably, and the aid was favorably voted upon, and Marjorie Taylor Greene went up there with a motion to remove him, for instance, I think there’s gonna be a lot of Democrats that move to kill that motion,” Congressman Krishnamoorthi said. “They don’t want to see him getting punished for doing the right thing.”

“I think it is a very bad policy of the House to allow one individual such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is an arsonist to this House of Representatives,” U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) told CBS News’ Scott MacFarlane, when asked about intervening to save Johnson. He added he doesn’t want her “to have so much influence.”

U.S. Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, one of several Republicans who won their New York districts in 2022, districts that were previously held by Democrats, opposes Greene’s motion to vacate – although he praised the Georgia GOP congresswoman.

CNN’s Manu Raju reports Republicans “say it’s time to marginalize hardliners blocking [their] agenda.”

D’Esposito, speaking to Raju, called for “repercussions for those who completely alienate the will of the conference. The people gave us the majority because they wanted Republicans to govern.”

U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler, like D’Esposito is another New York Republican who won a previously Democratic seat in 2022. Lawler spoke out against the co-sponsor of Greene’s motion to vacate, U.S. Rep. Tim Massie (R-KY), along with two other House Republicans who are working to block the Ukraine aid bill via their powerful seats on the Rules Committee.

U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), a former Navy pilot, blasted Congresswoman Greene.

RELATED: ‘They Want Russia to Win So Badly’: GOP Congressman Blasts Far-Right House Republicans

“Time is of the essence” for Ukraine, Rep. Sherrill told CNN Wednesday night. “The least we can do is support our Democratic allies, especially given what we know Putin to do. To watch a report and to think there are people like Marjorie Taylor Greene on the right that are pro-Putin? That are pro-Russia? It is really shocking.”

U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), as NCRM reported Thursday, had denounced Greene.

“I guess their reasoning is they want Russia to win so badly that they want to oust the Speaker over it,” he said, referring to the Ukraine aid bill Greene and her cohorts want to tank. “I mean that’s a strange position to take.”

The far-right hardliners are also causing chaos in the House.

“Things just got very heated on the House floor,” NBC News’ Julie Tsirkin reported earlier Thursday. “Group of hardliners were trying to pressure Johnson to only put Israel aid on the floor and hold Ukraine aid until the Senate passed HR2.”

HR2 is the House Republicans’ extremist anti-immigrant legislation that has n o chance of passage in the Senate nor would it be signed into law by President Biden.

“Johnson said he couldn’t do it, and [U.S. Rep. Derrick] Van Orden,” a far-right Republican from Wisconsin “called him ‘tubby’ and vowed to bring on the MTV [Motion to Vacate.]”

“No one in the group (Gaetz, Boebert, Burchett, Higgins, Donalds et al.) were threatening Johnson with an MTV,” Tsirkin added. “Van Orden seemed to escalate things dramatically…”

Despite Greene’s pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine positions, her falsehoods about “Ukrainian Nazis,” and Russians not slaughtering Ukrainian clergy, reporters continue to “swarm”:

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Afraid and Intimidated’: Trump Trial Juror Targeted by Fox News Dismissed

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‘They Want Russia to Win So Badly’: GOP Congressman Blasts Far-Right House Republicans

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15 hours ago

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April 18, 2024

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A sitting Republican Congressman is harshly criticizing far-right House Republicans over their apparent support of Russia.

“I guess their reasoning is they want Russia to win so badly that they want to oust the Speaker over it. I mean that’s a strange position to take,” U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a three-term Texas Republican rated a hard-core conservative told CNN’s Manu Raju, in video posted Thursday. “I think they want to be in the minority too. I think that’s an obvious reality.”

Congressman Crenshaw was referring to the movement led by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), now joined by U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), over the Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s decision to finally put legislation on the floor to provide funding to Ukraine to support that sovereign nation in its fight against Russia.

“I’m still trying to process all the b*llsh*t,” Crenshaw added.

Crenshaw on Thursday also commented on Speaker Johnson’s remarks, stating he will hold the Ukraine funding vote regardless of attempts to oust him over it.

“To be clear, he’s being threatened for even allowing a vote to come to the floor. For allowing the constitutional process to play out as intended by our Founders. That’s a wild thing to consider, especially when his enemies consider themselves ‘conservative.’ Not conserving the painstaking constitutional process our Founders created, that’s for sure. Conserving Putin’s gains on the battlefield, more like it.”

Journalist Brian Beutler, a former editor-in-chief at Crooked Media, called it, “darkly funny to me that a pincer movement of MAGAns and leftists mock liberals for claiming the GOP works hand in glove with Russia, and then multiple conservative Republican dissenters are like ‘no it’s true, we’re lousy with Russian influence.'”

Watch Crenshaw’s remarks below or at this link.

READ MORE: Marjorie Taylor Greene, ‘Putin’s Envoy’? Democrat’s Bills Mock Republican’s Actions

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OPINION

Marjorie Taylor Greene, ‘Putin’s Envoy’? Democrat’s Bills Mock Republican’s Actions

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16 hours ago

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April 18, 2024

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For years U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has been called “Pro-Putin.” As far back as 2021, her first year as a member of Congress, the question had been raised on social media: “Is Marjorie Taylor Greene a Russian asset?”

In 2022 The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org reported: “Marjorie Taylor Greene Parrots Russian Talking Point on Ukraine.”

Back then, as the article highlighted, Greene had said, “there is no doubt that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s actions in Ukraine are despicable and evil.”

Now, she promotes a far more favorable view of President Vladimir Putin and his illegal war against Ukraine, a sovereign nation which the Russian autocrat wants to incorporate – at least partly – into Russia.

Just last week Greene spread demonstrably false pro-Russia talking points about a “war on Christianity” while defending and promoting President Vladimir Putin.

READ MORE: ‘Afraid and Intimidated’: Trump Trial Juror Targeted by Fox News Dismissed

“This is a war on Christianity,” Greene told far-right propagandist Steve Bannon. “The Ukrainian government is attacking Christians, the Ukrainian government is executing priests. Russia is not doing that.”

That’s just plain false, as NCRM reported.

Largely in response to her strong opposition to the U.S. supporting Ukraine, and her spreading Russian disinformation and flat-out pro-Putin falsehoods, Greene’s fondness for Putin and Russia has been making headlines.

“Republicans Who Like Putin,” was the headline last month at The New York Times, which observed: “A few Republicans have gone so far as [to] speak about Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in ways that mimic Russian propaganda. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has accused Ukraine of having ‘a Nazi army,’ echoing language Putin used to justify the invasion.”

“The Putin Republicans Have the Upper Hand” warned Washington Monthly‘s David Atkins on Wednesday, reporting on “conservative extremists led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.”

“They admire the strongman as a Christian nationalist leader, and won’t support Ukraine. The global consequences of their besotted love affair with the Russian strongman could be cataclysmic.”

“Russia Is Buying Politicians in Europe. Is It Happening Here Too?” The New Republic‘s Alex Finley wrote last week. The photo at the top of the page? Marjorie Taylor Greene.

READ MORE: ‘Used by the Russians’: Moskowitz Mocks Comer’s Biden Impeachment Failure

Finley pointed to Greene’s interview with Bannon, “about Ukraine’s persecution of Christians, which is a Kremlin talking point aimed at boosting the pro-Moscow wing of Ukraine’s Orthodox Church. The U.S. should be spending money on the border with Mexico, not on Ukraine aid? That’s a Kremlin talking point. Russia invaded Ukraine to defend itself against an expanding NATO? That’s a Kremlin talking point. Call for a cease-fire, and give Russia Crimea and eastern Ukraine? That’s a Kremlin talking point.”

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post last week ran this headline: “Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene says she ‘seriously hates’ people who support sending more aid to Ukraine: ‘Most repulsive, disgusting thing happening’.”

Then there is Greene’s obsession with Nazis. Specifically, equating Ukrainians with Nazis, which she did several times over the past week, including on Wednesday. That earned her the condemnation and wrath of U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), who demanded: “Stop bringing up Nazis and Hitler.”

Wednesday night, Congressman Moskowitz, known for his use of humor and sarcasm to make his points, declared: “Just submitted an amendment to Bill drafting appointing MTG [Marjorie Taylor Greene] as Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.”

Moskowitz’s amendment was in response to Congresswoman Greene’s amendments requiring members to “conscript in the Ukrainian military” if they vote for the Ukraine military funding bill, as Juliegrace Brufke reported.

READ MORE: ‘Big Journalism Fail’: Mainstream Media Blasted Over Coverage of Historic Trump Trial

The Florida Democrat wasn’t joking, as Axios’ Andrew Solender pointed out Thursday morning.

Moskowitz did not stop there.

He drafted legislation on Thursday to name the Capitol Hill offices occupied by Congresswoman Greene after the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, infamous for promoting appeasement in dealing with Adolf Hitler.

Chamberlain also signed the Munich Agreement, which allowed Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia.

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