You have a real talent for summarising my ramblings into succinct one-liners. ;) I should hire you full-time. You're right, of course - the irony being that the reason politicians, grubby little vote-hounds that they are, don't scramble around to implement equal rights is that they don't think people support the idea. But they do.
Well, that's the ultimate irony, isn't it? 'If you were gay, how would you like to be treated?' 'Oh. Oh yeah.' The extremist wingnut bigots are so deluded, though, that they'd probably self-loathe even if they were born gay. You mentioned religion; the funny thing is, I reckon Jesus would totally have been down with the gay kids. He made a point of not hanging around with the rich, the established, the priests... he made friends with the prostitutes adn the outcasts. Shame he didn't specifically tear up that rotten little Leviticus verse, although he does allude to it indirectly - 'Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath' etc. Paraphrased: 'Old Testament laws don't always have to be followed, y'know, and you should probably use your common sense about which ones should and shouldn't.' Stoning your children? Yeah, no. Stoning people for working on Sundays? Yeah, no. Discriminating against gay people? Yeah, NO.
Hey, maybe he did mention it one day, and they just failed to write it down. Or the Church quietly excised that verse a couple of hundred years ago. Who knows? I've got my own little theory about Jesus (though I'm sure I'm not the first to come up with this) - he was just an amazingly intelligent and compassionate guy who realised that the world wasn't ready for humanism yet. So he formulated a (mostly) decent doctrine based on 'don't be a dick' and presented it as a continuation of a religion that actually had nothing to do with his ideas, in order to get people to buy this new philosophy. Hence all the many, many contradictions and inconsistencies - they're the result of trying to cram a square Jesus into a round Jehovah. Or something along those lines. (Hopefully I've not offended you massively just there! I always forget to ask people's religious views before I launch into my opinions. Feel free to ignore, obviously! ;^_^)
Goodness me, look at Liam! Hasn't he grown. I remember watching him on the X Factor way back when, back when he was just another soloist in the Boys category. Didn't make it past bootcamp, as I recall. Bless him. Are those real tattoos on his arms? They look painful.
HAHAHAHAHA OH MY GOD that Romney ad is too f**king funny. It's like a parody. It is genuinely like a parody. 'Darling, is that a gay man walking up the drive?' 'I think it might be, Cindy. Fetch the net.' It doesn't look like it was actually paid for by Romney, though, which is a small mercy. 'Not endorsed by any candidate or committee.' Still. We all know exactly where gay rights would have been on Romney's priority list had he been elected.
Oh, do tell! :D I know very little about American politics, as I think I've amply demonstrated, but the Republicans are like the Tories in the UK, right? Namely, conservative, rich and... Toryish. I dunno. ;)