By Wynn Wag­ner

When I was a kid, divorce laws in Texas were so strict that it was darn near impos­si­ble to get un-hitched. Mar­ried cou­ples once went to Nevada or Mex­ico for divorces because their laws were more lax. When the non-Texas divorce was final, there was never a ques­tion that it was a legal divorce. Get divorced in Mex­ico, and you were divorced everywhere.

That’s all dif­fer­ent from the mar­riage apartheid that some right-wing reli­gions are impos­ing on cit­i­zens. South­ern Bap­tists and Roman Catholics don’t cot­ton to same-gender mar­riage. If their own gay mem­bers can’t marry, they say that no gay cou­ples should marry.

It’s one thing for a reli­gious cult to keep a sacra­ment or rite of pas­sage from a minor­ity group within their ranks. It’s quite another to let them dic­tate the canons for other reli­gious groups.

These reli­gions style them­selves as “main­stream.” What they are doing is try­ing to weld them­selves into sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment. These fina­glers are try­ing to be the state reli­gion. In Texas, they’ve suc­ceeded beyond belief.

If cults like the Roman Catholics and South­ern Bap­tists can’t con­trol their own mem­bers, they shouldn’t be allowed to get the gov­ern­ment to do their enforcers. No gov­ern­ment should be the mus­cle for any reli­gion what can’t keep its own mem­ber­ship to live with­ing its rules.

My church says that mar­riage is good. Old Catholi­cism teaches that we all need love, regard­less of race or gen­der or any of the other acci­dents of birth. That isn’t good enough for Texas, of course.

My church says I’m mar­ried, but Texas thinks it knows more about the­ol­ogy than my church. New York, Con­necti­cut, Iowa, Canada, Scan­di­navia, and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia all say I’m married.

Cou­ples can get divorced in Nevada but can’t get mar­ried in New York.

I don’t remem­ber any South­ern Bap­tist say­ing Texas should ignore Nevada divorces. Some said Nevada was immoral, but that’s dif­fer­ent from the caus­tic effects of get­ting gov­ern­ment to enforce your big­oted notions. If Nevada divorces were legal, then New York mar­riages should be legal.

This is ger­ry­man­der­ing moral­ity laws.

Note to coaches: it’s okay to be gay, but keep your pants zipped around kids. There are plenty of other gay coaches you can diddle.

By Wynn Wag­ner

It was 1971 (give or take), and I was in a writ­ing class at TCU. It all seemed inno­cent enough. This would be an easy A because I had been out in the world, writ­ing as a pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ist with a pro­fes­sional edi­tor on a pro­fes­sional news­pa­per. What could go wrong?

The pro­fes­sor was the head of the Eng­lish Department.

“Please take out paper and pen,” he said. Action: good for him. I like it when you get right down to the nitty and the gritty.

“Spelling doesn’t count in here,” he said. I was bor­der­line in love with this man. “You’ll all have edi­tors, and spelling is their job.”

What more can you want in a class?

“Take a half hour,” he con­tin­ued. “Write an essay called ‘What I Did on my Sum­mer Vacation.’”

The hell? He dropped his con­de­scend­ing lit­tle bomb and left the room. Are we not Eng­lish Majors here? This was sup­posed to be an upper­class course on writ­ing. We’d all seen all sorts of classes, but this was a cheap shot. What’d I even done for vacation?

I wrote and turned it in. The next class, the pro­fes­sor read a few papers. He read mine, and I had every­one hold­ing their sides laughing.

“You like it?” he asked, and every­one said they did. There were a few hoops and a cou­ple of hollers.

“It was funny, Mr. Wag­ner,” the pro­fes­sor said, “but it wasn’t an essay.”

Oops. I thought it was.

“Any­body want to tell Mr. Wag­ner what an essay is?”

Nobody was there to pour pep­per sauce into the gash in my ego.

“An essay is a short work where the nar­ra­tor learns some­thing and changes,” the pro­fes­sor pro­fessed. “What Mr. Wag­ner did was clever reportage.”

And he went on and on, doing things to change my wound into scar tis­sue. Every­thing was good about my paper, except that I missed the point of the assign­ment about as thor­oughly as a point could be missed.

He read a few more and then turned to the black­board. The pro­fes­sor wrote about 15 emo­tions on the board.

“Write all these in order on the back of your essay (or report paper, in at least one instance).”

Did he have to add that? I already got his cruel jab. The School of Hard Knocks had moved inside an insti­tu­tion that would one day be awarded an .EDU domain. The pro­fes­sor knocked me down, and he was adding some locker room towel slaps. Wasn’t it? I was a slick com­mer­cial jour­nal­ist with real world writ­ing creds, but I wasn’t an essay­ist. I thought reports prob­a­bly paid more than a stu­pid essay. They only pickup essays to stick into Eng­lish text­books, and that only hap­pens after the author is dead. I was there to learn how to make more money from my craft.

“Got the emo­tions?” the pro­fes­sor asked. “Good. Now cir­cle the emo­tion that best fits your essay. Mr. Wag­ner, please just cir­cle the first emo­tion because slap­stick isn’t really an emotion.”

I won­dered what I could do to make this guy cut me some slack. (Hint: Nothing.)

The assign­ment for the next class was to write the same essay but make it the next emo­tion in line. We weren’t allowed to add any new facts. It had to be the same essay with the same storyline.

And that was our entire semes­ter. We rebuilt and re-crafted our orig­i­nal paper using the next emo­tion on our list.

It was the most amaz­ing semes­ter that I spent in col­lege. This pro­fes­sor (cold heart and all) took away the prob­lem of lin­ing up facts. We did that our first class. What hap­pened for the rest of the semes­ter is that we learned how to turn any­thing into what­ever emo­tion we needed.

I hated the class, of course, because I had to endure a year of being picked on.

So bite me, prof. And thanks too.