If it's the mid-term elections, it must be open season on the gays.

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For awhile there, while the right-wingers were popping their sweaty forehead-veins over Mexican immigrants, it looked as if LGBT folks might be able to get through just one election season without being used as a political football.

Then, a federal court ruled California's Proposition 8 unconstitutional, and suddenly the right-wingers shifted their ADHD outrage level from Code Brown to Lavender Alert. Once again, it is I and my de-facto husband who are being blamed for everything from the nation's decline to dirt, grease and stains in the family wash.

These days, every time the gay-marriage issue rears its head, I'm reduced to a blob of emotional jelly. Not again! I think in italics. I was just getting used to domestic bliss; now I've got to spend all my time thinking up new ways of justifying our existence, my cerebral italics continue. And while I'm doing that, who is supposed to take care of the dirt, grease and stains in our family wash? Me, that's who. And believe me, laundry is no abstract, thinky concept: Running out of socks and underwear is a very real, non-italic crisis that, in any household, appears in nothing less than a concrete, solidly upright roman typeface.

So, for about a week, I become one of those pathetic characters in a Cymbalta commercial. ("Where does depression hurt? It hurts right here, motherfucker!") Each day I'm reluctant to read the Public Forum sections in the dailies -- which are normally my favorite -- because I just know they will contain two anti-gay letters denigrating homos in the most contemptible terms, four pro-gay letters explaining again why the Constitution protects minorities, and one letter lambasting the paper for its bias in failing to include more anti-gay than pro-gay letters in its Public Forum section.

It just makes me tired. We've been through all this so many times. It's obvious that marriage equality will one day be the law of the land -- while churches shall, as always, remain free to decide who among their members may marry whom.

Everybody knows this. It's just that the far-right-wingers who have taken over the GOP are clinging so desperately to their scorched-earth, win-at-any-cost political strategy that they no longer care that they're tearing the country apart. They don't believe in good governance; they believe in fear-based campaigning, and it doesn't matter whom they hurt as they try to reclaim the glory days of their failed political majority.

I suppose it must come as something of a relief to the immigrants, who really have been having a rough time of it lately. It is just as irrational for Republicans to blame Mexicans for an economic recession the GOP itself caused as to blame gays for the failure of their heterosexual marriages.

Still, don't the teabaggers worry that every day they spend fretting over Mark and Steve's nuptials is a day in which Juan and Leticia are surreptitiously hopping over the border? And what about other burning issues of the day, such as the War on Christmas and the presidential birth certificate? I worry the GOP might be spreading its attentions too thin to be effective on any front.

So maybe it's OK for Dave and me once again to step up and take another turn as the wingers' punching bag. It's been about a week since we've gone on Lavender Alert, so it's high time for me to stop taking it personally and come out swinging.

After all, political football is only a game. I just wish, once in awhile, we could play something else instead. Something like Seven-Card Stud or Super Mario Bros.

Or hell, why not a new game called "Let's Create Jobs"? That one sounds like fun.

Brandon's Big Gay Blog