Ask a politician a question? What what?

Here's a great idea from France. They just started a network TV show called "I Have a Question to Ask You" where people can ask questions to politicians. I mean, that's a whole lot better than scripted "townhall meetings". Anyway, someone asked UMP presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy his stand on gay adoption. Seriously, imagine Bush saying something like this:

I want to defend minorities because they have rights, but I don't want to oppress the majority[....] I don't accept it when people call me homophobic because I oppose gay adoption. [Translation mine]

This is what a more open democracy is like. Yes, Sarkozy isn't all that pro-the-gays, but he gets asked about it and he answers, instead of being asked about it and calling the interviewer "out of line". If we're going to have a dialogue with our politicians about GLBT rights, we have to be able to have a dialogue with them at all.

Maybe that's why they didn't go to Iraq....

A porn magazine just told us that over 263,000 civil unions (both gay and straight) have happened in France since they started in 1999. The divorce rate for these is 13%. They also found that the number of civil unions quadrupled from 2001 to 2006.