Kluweless in Minnesota.

It's the story of a professional athlete, but not of his performance on the field of play.

It's about the power of spin, but also about allegations no amount of spinning can remedy.

For eight years, Chris Kluwe was punter for the Minnesota Vikings. Punter is the strangest position on a football team. He can't score points, he doesn't block people or tackle people. His job is to kick the ball high enough and far enough to give the human missiles on his team enough time to launch themselves into the punt returner's most vulnerable sweetbreads.

Kluwe was good; few punters play eight seasons, let alone with the same team. At the end of the 2012 campaign, he was statistically one of the best in the game, still had a year left on his contract and felt good about his chances of hanging with the team for another year.

Then things went a bit sideways. Here's how it started, courtesy of Chris Kluwe's guest column for Deadspin:

"During the summer of 2012, I was approached by a group called Minnesotans for Marriage Equality, which asked if I would be interested in helping defeat what was known as the Minnesota Gay Marriage Amendment. The proposed amendment would have defined marriage as "only a union of one man and one woman." (It was voted down, and same-sex marriage is now legal in Minnesota.) I said yes, but that I would have to clear it with the team first. 

"After talking to the Vikings legal department, I was given the go-ahead to speak on the issue as long as I made it clear I was acting as a private citizen, not as a spokesman for the Vikings, which I felt was fair and complied with. I did several radio advertisements and a dinner appearance for Minnesotans for Marriage Equality. No one from the Vikings' legal department told me I was doing anything wrong or that I had to stop."

According to Kluwe, at the beginning of the 2012 football season, he was summoned to head coach Leslie Frazier's woodshed and told to keep his pie hole shut, that religion and politics should play no role in professional sports.

Kluwe respectfully told Frazier that he intended to continue standing up for his beliefs, and the meeting ended tensely. However, the following day,

"Viking owner  Zygi Wilf, came up to me, shook my hand, and told me: 'Chris, I'm proud of what you've done. Please feel free to keep speaking out. I just came from my son's best friend's wedding to his partner in New York, and it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.'"

I think I'd feel pretty good at this point, wouldn't you? The guy who signs your paycheck tells you he's simpatico with what you're doing and you should keep it up.

Ummm...not so much. That's when another one of Kluwe's bosses, special teams coach Mike Priefer, decided to start acting like an actual Viking. You know, those guys whose idea of a fun Friday night is a few pints of grog over at the disembowling alley.

Sorry, Viking jokes are challenging.

Anyway, according to Kluwe, this Coach Preifer started harassing him about his views at practice, at one point even announcing during a team meeting, "We should round up all the gays, send them to an island, and then nuke it until it glows."

Sounds reasonable, but I wish he'd be more specific about the island. I live within nuclear fallout radius of quite a few and my straight friends and I would appreciate a little heads up from the Thomas Edison of that light bulb.

What do you think? Is Chris Kluwe telling the truth? Was he released from the Minnesota Vikings due to his political beliefs? The team claims it was a business decision, that an aging punter was released to make room under their salary cap.

That may be true, but what about the alleged behavior of his coaches? Do you believe that Kluwe could conceivably have fabricated these allegations as part of an endgame, a devious master plan to showcase his activism on its largest stage yet?

Look, we all know that the NFL packs more testosterone-infused sausage than the meat department of a freaking Super Wal-Mart. But these players are a bunch of kids, and most of them are quite a bit more accommodating to other points of view than we, the elder class. Something tells me they wouldn't have nearly the problem that these dinosaur coaches have.

Bigotry will never disappear, but we can shrink it, we can shrivel it up, one purple-hat-wearing moron at a time. If, according to a study by the New York Times, five percent of American males are gay, that translates to two or three players per professional football team, or a total of sixty to ninety closeted athletes living in fear of their employers.

Imagine that happening where you work.

I believe Chris Kluwe.

The Morning After

"And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him."
- Revelation 12:9

Is it truly the beginning of the end or just another dry run?

Right now, we seem to be sitting squarely in the eye of two catastrophic prophesies; or in delicious terms, we're in the fluffy white middle of the dark Oreo wafers that signal the end of time.

Some, including Columbia Pictures, have sided with the ancient Mayans, predicting December 21 as the end-date of a five-thousand, one-hundred and twenty-five-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. 

Or who knows, maybe the guy jotting down the calendar put down his Bic after hearing that a couple of dudes down at the temple had just invented basketball using the enemy chieftain's head for a ball.

Calendar shmalendar, game on.

Others may feel that the events which ensued last Thursday in my home state signaled the death knell for a hopelessly sinful human race. At the stroke of midnight on December 6, two groundbreaking Washington statutes linked elbows and dos a dos'd onto the shiny parquet of the square dance floor.

We, the citizens of the Evergreen State, may now marry whomever floats our tug. How about that?

Oh, yeah, we can also possess an ounce of weed. I wonder how many Seattle's two-hundred fifty couples that received their licenses at midnight opted to take advantage of both new laws shortly thereafter.

King County's courthouse overflowed with giddiness; these people have been waiting...and waiting...some as long as thirty-five years, to tie the knot all legal like. For all intents and purposes. most of these pairs are already married anyway. With or without this new edict, people are still greeting each other after a long day at work, figuring out dinner and discussing whether or not they trust their daughter's new boyfriend or how that woman at work who never washes her hands after leaving the stall did it again today. 

And then there's the weed. A fairly sizable throng gathered for this one, too, but these folks thought it might be cool to swarm around the Emerald's City's largest hookah—the Space Needle—to usher in Seattle's new status as the sticky icky capital of green America. If you'd like, feel free to pick the moniker which most accurately portrays our little city of smoke on the water:

- Clamsterdam
- Eutokia
- The Big Apple...pie with ice cream.

Since the Needle's home, Seattle Center, sits a mere roach clip flick from most of the city's newspaper offices and TV stations, photo ops abounded for those willing to smoke openly early last Thursday morning. I say, well played, red-eyed renegades. After all, when are you ever going to get another chance for your mom to see you on ActionNews8, your bloated purple face choking and heaving trying to contain massive huff from a tar-speckled Bart Simpson bong?

Lately, public apprehension has reminded me a lot of the mood around that whole "Y2K" thing back at the turn of the millennium. We agonized and prepared tirelessly for the likelihood that our digital toasters would think it was 1900 again and wouldn't work since toasters hadn't been invented yet.

And nothing changed.

Or remember when Bewitched got a new Darren? I didn't think there was any chance that Dick Sargent could have the same carnal magnetism with Samantha nor the raw emotional connection to Larry Tate that Dick York had.

How dreadfully wrong I was.

So here we are, four days out, and everyone still seems to be okay. Perhaps a few states will follow suit in the coming years and gradually wear away the stigma of both issues, much as the civil rights movement and repeal of prohibition assimilated paradigm shifts which we now take for granted.

A few states will surely hold out, believing that allowing same sex marriage will only burst open the floodgates of permissiveness toward legalized plural and bestial wedlock.

Ironically, those are the states where that behavior is most prevalent.

Carolina Needs Gay Marriage Like the Taliban Needs Speedos.

Welcome to the club, Tar Heel State.

Congratulations to the newest member of the Dinosaur Coalition, North Carolina, which joined twenty-nine other states in approving a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

While they were at it, they may as well have voted on bringing back the VCR, Pepsi Clear and Dairy Queen Beef Nuggets, since these folks are apparently still residing in an era where even the family basset hound wore a mulleted perm.

The origin of the name "tar heel" is unknown, but one theory holds that it's a moniker given to Civil-War-Era Confederate troops who stuck to their ranks like they had "tar on their heels."

Sounds accurate. The amendment passed resoundingly, securing sixty-one percent of the vote.

I'd like to break this down a bit, so please bear with me. Proponents of this measure claim that our nation was built on Judeo-Christian principles, that, while our forefathers penned the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, each document was inspired by a God himself. Apparently, he used one of the really early versions of PowerPoint to convince a skeptical Thomas Jefferson.

They contend, therefore, that since the Bible dictates the bond of marriage to exist exclusively between one man and one woman, so should proscribe the law of our land.

Okay, whatever. Let's cut to the chase. This stance on same-sex marriage has nothing to do with Christianity or the Bible. If our elected officials truly believed in an "All Jesus, all the time" philosophy, they'd devote themselves completely to heeling the sick, feeding the poor and in between, hanging out with a prostitute or two.

Okay, is it turns out, they're nice and biblical on one of the three.

While it may seem like it, this isn't about two dudes or chicks raising a child who'd rather visit Copenhagen than stick it between his cheek and gum, a kid who's been infused with so much gay from his parents that his genetic makeup can be used as a nice foundation prior to applying the bronzer.

It doesn't concern the ethical high ground which can only be achieved via male/female matrimony. After all it's not like one of North Carolina's most renowned married heterosexuals didn't visit a little damage on his cancer-stricken wife and kids.

And finally, this fight isn't about opening the door to "abominations," like state-sanctioned polygamist or bestial bonds. If that were the case, at least eight of that sixty-one percent in Carolina would have favored experiencing the musky, yet legal, delights of the barnyard.

This is about power, and it's about control.

Egalitarian marriages are mortal threats to the American patriarchy, which struggles to maintain its grip. Just as emancipation freed slave from master, just as suffrage elevated women from property to person, same-sex marriage liberates another eleven percent of the population from its oppressor.

Make no mistake; this train isn't stopping. The tracks have been laid out all the way to the coast on what is truly the last civil rights frontier.

This will happen. And when it does, some may pull out the Sharpie and mark out another box on the end of days checklist, while others will embrace marriage equality as the last act to ultimately align the nation's laws with a framework established nearly two-and-a-half centuries ago.

Only then will the Civil War truly end.

Would the Las Vegas of gay marriage also have two-for-one prime rib?

I've been a little edgy, lately. Big surprise, right?

It's like that feeling when your kid uses too much toilet paper, and they flush, and there's that moment when everything's swirling around, and you hold your breath and hope that your equipment can prove itself worthy of the challenge, dispersing all matter, both organic and otherwise, and permanently transferring ownership to septic Siberia.

Or, there's the other possibility: rising tide levels result in catastrophic flooding and a biological event demanding a plunger, towels, Lysol and possibly a post-traumatic, Silkwood-type decontamination shower featuring three to four SOS Pads.

That's how I've been feeling this past week; Sorry for the crass analogy, but I'm waiting to see where all the swirling shit will end up.

I suppose it started last Friday. Mitt Romney, pandering to his fellow tightie whities at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, boasted about successfully prohibiting, as governor of Massachusetts, out-of-state gay couples from entering his state to get married and then returning home.

"On my watch, we fought hard and prevented Massachusetts from becoming the Las Vegas of gay marriage," Romney blustered.

It's a good thing no one tossed him a freaking football at that point, because he would've spiked it and leaped into a front row of flabby Caucasians ill-prepared to support his robust frame.

Yeah, nothing can chill a soul to its core, nothing can rattle a society's foundation, like a couple of women driving up from Virginia, getting married, spending two nights at the Worcester Best Western...and then leaving the state.

That was enough for one flush right there. But as I reached for the metal plated handle, another presidential candidate's sweaty palm slapped my forearm from its destination.

On Tuesday, Governor Chris Gregoire signed Washington's same-sex marriage bill into law, making my home state the seventh to afford gay and lesbian couples full marital rights. It was a proud day to be a resident of Washington and one I hadn't imagined would happen so soon.

But before you could say, "I now pronounce you Stan and Mike," guess who swooped into the Evergreen State to douse my warm endorphin blanket with a ham tin full of gelatinous piety? None other than the candidate who won't go away, Rick Santorum.

The guy is like eczema in a brown sweater vest.

Remember him? He's the dude who stated that allowing two people of the same gender to marry would crack open a Pandora's Box of biblical proportion—soon, men would engage in legal bestiality and women would elope with...I don't know...huge vats of salsa.

The former Pennsylvania senator spent the day offering his support to a crowd of pastors and '"values voters"(which is code for "I hope no one ever finds out what's in my computer") toward repealing Washington's sparkly new law.

And by the way, if some guy wants to marry a farm animal, they should be allowed to, for the animal's sake. I grew up near rural south King County, and after bearing witness to some long-term pairings, one of the parties didn't get much out of the deal and should be entitled some form of compensation.

Having Rick Santorum in such close proximity caused me to reflexively pull the lever, desperately desiring the swirling, soily soup in my head to disappear with a cleansing whoosh.

It's looking like the circling mass may not be eradicated until November, however, when the Roto Rooter van pulls up and a guy named Obama steps out, pulls up his sleeves and opens his toolbox.