Bill Frist on Marriage or Bill Frist Isn't a Man Because Real Men Don't Conduct Illegal, Unethical Research on Kitties

This is a recent quote from Senate majority leader Bill Frist:
"I basically say, Mr. Vice President, right now marriage is under attack in this country," Frist said on CNN. "And we've seen activist judges overturning state by state law, where state legislatures have passed laws defining marriage between a man and a woman, and that's being overturned by a handful of activist judges around the country. And that is why we need an amendment to come to the floor of the United States Senate to define marriage as that union between one man and one woman."

Some interesting facts about Bill Frist:
He didn't vote until he was 36.
As a medical student, he "adopted" cats from Boston area animal shelters to use them to conduct medical experiments. In his own words, he would "treat them as pets for a few days" before it was time to "cart them off to the lab to die."

There are so many more things to know about Mr. Frist. Oh I'm sorry, I mean Herr Doktor Senator Frist. I invite you to research them yourself if you are interested in finding out more about him. Type "Bill Frist" and any of the following terms ("eli lilly", "campaign finance", "civil rights", "corruption") into the search engine of your choice.

I digress. Back to manhood and how we might define it so there is no room for marriages which attack marriage in this country.

What makes a man? Presumably Senator Frist knows, or believes he does. Torturing pets makes him an expert in things biological. One would think that it's important this be carefully defined now that Frist is planning to use a proposed Constitutional definition of marriage as between "a man and a woman" as a campaign issue for the GOP this year.

How might we define "man" for Frist? Casting aside all the research on gender as a social construct, let's just go with our guts (thank you Mr. Colbert) There are many men out there who for one reason or another do not embody all or even many of even the less negative social characteristics of masculinity (most of my faculty for example) but who are indisputably men (I have this impression because they self identify as men through exclusion of people perceivable as women. Also, they make jokes about their wives, fart in public, and harass female graduate students). Therefore, I'm sure Senator Frist would agree that to avoid subjecting men to the kind of gender assessment scrutiny that women are (routinely, daily) subjected to, "man" must be defined by biology.

This raises the question of what part of biology. Frist knows what lurks in the hearts of cats, but what does he know about what makes a man? A simple and obvious biological definition seems to be that a man is someone who has a penis (and the rest of the equipment). Before we run off half cocked and include this definition in the proposed amendment, we need to remember that such a narrow definition as this would exclude anyone who might have lost some or all of that equipment (due to trauma, illness, or maybe a run in with young Dr. Frist) or who is for whatever reason morphologically non-standard. Clearly this population of men shouldn't be denied the right to marry due to disfigurement or extreme variation. Thus, "man" should be defined as someone who has, had, or could have (with some corrective surgery) external man parts.

Woops, hold the phone. According to a Texas judge, we can't rely on that. This might allow transsexuals to marry. In her ruling, this judge wrote that rather than rely on external sexual characteristics "...We must instead be guided by biological factors such as chromosomes, gonads, and genitalia at birth." We've already rejected the gonads and genitalia at birth thing because it unfairly excludes people who unintentionally or unavoidably have non-standard or non-discernable man parts. We need something more basic. How about chromosomes. Now there's something solid. A man is someone who possesses a Y chromosome.

Unfortunately, there are a number of sex chromosome variations resulting in configurations other than full on XX/XY types (I defer to my sister for a more complete discussion of this). According to the site linked above, sex chromosome variations are more common than Down Syndrome and Cystic Fibrosis. Oh dear. There could be adults who don't even know they have non-typical sex chromosomes, and they could be MARRIED! Someone should tell Frist. I am pretty sure he skipped genetics in favor of the "Recent Trends in Unethical Research" course, so he probably is unaware.


I don't know about you but I have an exceptionally hard time stomaching the idea that this man is in a position to decide anything other than whether he wants to spend his recreation hour nervously reading a book in his cell or getting some air out in the yard with the other inmates. Why the fuck is a monsterous bastard like this calling the shots our senate?

I just donated some money to a Boston area animal shelter. What else can you do? Really. I guess if you are eligible to vote in the US you can care about who gets elected to the US congress, you can research your local candidates, and you can VOTE in November.

Pictured above are Bootsie, Simab, and Agador - adoptable cats at the Northeast Animal Shelter in Salem Massachusetts. You can visit these cats or other adoptable cats here, and you can donate here.
You can make a donation in Senator Frist's name here.