I got into a bloody battle the other day with some idiot on a blog who was pissing and moaning about the California Supreme Court's ruling that prohibiting lesbians and gay men from marrying was a violation of the state's constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law.

It's coming at a bad time, he said. He was afraid that having that issue in the news, and a constitutional amendment designed to strip that right away on the ballot, would drive right wingers to the polls and cost us the White House in November.

Of course, he's not insane; that Rovian strategy did in fact work quite well for the Republicans four years ago, and four years before that. And yes, it might work again, although I'm thinking, at least in California, it won't.

But whether I'm right or wrong about that, one thing I do know: anyone queer with a television or Internet access is going to have a few rough months, at least as far as political ads and punditry go. It's gays, guns, and God, and there are people who sincerely believe the last on that list wants them use the second on the first. And this hostility towards us and our civil rights is going to continue to feed the gaping maw of the sensationalism-hungry cable news monster.

It's already happening. I once thought using the term "San Francisco" as code for "gay" was a dogwhistle, but this series of ads for Republican Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO) — who once called George W. Bush a "deep thinker" — against Democratic challenger and former Kansas City, MO, mayor Kay Barnes proved me wrong. You don't need better-than-human hearing to hear this loud and clear:

I've been spending a bit too much of my non-existent free time (read: time I should be sleeping) over on the website of the liberal blogosphere's Great Orange Satan, DailyKos. And whilst there, I tend to gravitate wildly towards any posts about queer issues.

Today I saw one tantalizingly titled "DNC thinks LGBT has too many letters?" and checked it out. It seems only a bare handful of queer blogs and bloggers got credentialed for the Democratic National Convention in August.

One of them is Pam's House Blend, a widely respected political blog run by Pam Spaulding. Two others are also strong political blogs with queer bloggers or site owners, John Aravosis' AMERICABlog.com and ThoughtTheater.com. And the fourth is Andy Towle's Towleroad.com.

John Aravosis, Pam Spaulding, Andy Towle

And that's it, kids. Four, two of them only tangentially queer.

LGBT political blog The Bilerico Project are the folks who blogged about this on Kos, and they're pretty pissed off.

I'm wondering what the selection process was for DNC credentials though. To start with there are only two gay blogs who got credentialed (unless you count Americablog and he's more politics; gay is a sidenote). I realize that Towleroad is a quality site with tons of regular readers - their traffic kicks our ass completely.

However, Towleroad represents a certain segment of our community only - but it's the segment that's more likely to donate to the Democratic party. Is that what this is about? I thought the idea was to get some diversity. Plenty of LGBT blogs applied other than us. We got tossed two bones - and one is only for some of us.

What was the selection criteria other than traffic?

One commenter even plaintively said that "even AfterElton/AfterEllen" has more political focus than Towleroad. Yeah, not so much. We are a pop culture blog, after all.

However much we appreciate the shout-out (and we do), and whatever the demographics of Towleroad's users, the assessment that the site's not political is absolutely not accurate. I'm not even remotely in Towleroad's target demographic (my guess is that shoe-obsessed lesbian bloggers don't feature largely in their marketing strategy), but I read the blog almost every day. It's consistently political, covering world issues including violence against LGBT people, same-sex marriage laws, the right to serve openly in the military, political oppression of queers at home and abroad, and of course, soccer players wearing nothing but towels, which apparently is the problem some folks have with them.

It was a crushing blow to find out that while I was researching an important article on gay male sex on television and getting my nails done, the gays got over political activism.

First I had to get over my shock at there being a trend among my people that I wasn't already at least aware of, if not on the forefront of. Remembering the early days of ACT-UP, and actually having been at the White Night riots (and if you don't know what those are, seriously, you need to take queer history 101 immediately) - in fact, being one of the few les/gay people who remembers when San Francisco Pride was actually called the Gay Freedom Day Parade - I suppose it's no surprise this news doesn't make me happy.