ELLEN DeGENERES=BIG, HUGE HEART

I've seen Ellen DeGeneres perform live a couple of times and I totally ... totally ... laughed my ass right off on each occasion - totally worth the ticket price, totally worth my time, totally love the Ellen.

Next, I'd really like to attend her talk show, live and in-person (and hopefully not from the Riff-Raff room either, thank you very much ;-) On her Friday broadcast she got rather emotional while talking about a teenager in California who lost his life after he asked another boy at school to be his Valentine. Here's the story as reported by People:

Ellen DeGeneres took a rare political stance – though she was careful to call it a personal stance, because, she said, "this is important to me" – on her show scheduled to air Friday, regarding the murder of 15-year-old Lawrence King, shot in the head on Feb. 12 by a classmate in a suburban Oxnard, Calif., junior high school.
King was killed because he had asked another boy to be his Valentine, DeGeneres reminded her audience about the news story that sent shockwaves across the country.
As the 50-year-old show host, emphasized, "To be gay you can get killed for it ... we need to change the message." (To see the clip from her show, click here.)
Choking back tears, she added, "Larry is not a second-class citizen. I am not a second-class citizen. It is okay if you are gay."
DeGeneres said the country must change the subtext of hatred aimed at certain groups as is found in jokes, movies, speeches and other elements of the culture. "All of it is unacceptable," she said. "Laughing at someone because he's gay is just the start of it."
Noting that change is on the minds of people this political season, DeGeneres said, "We can do it with our behavior ... Fight hate."

Here's the video - it's only a couple minutes (give it 10 seconds for the color to normalize).

I feel like I kinda want a few moments to myself after seeing that. It's just astonishing that shit like this still goes down in our world. Remember the Sally Jessie Raphael talk show in the 90's? What happened was, one of the male guests expressed his crush on another male and was then murdered by the homophobic bastard he had a crush on.

UPDATE: Just a quick thx to an anonymous Gimme Never Gets reader who correctly pointed out that the TV talk show referred to in the above paragraph should have been The Jenny Jones Show. The guest who lost his life was Scott Amadure. Sunday, March 9 is the 13 year anniversary of Scott's tragic passing and I will take a moment on March 9 to remember this man and I hope that his family has peace and that Scott's soul rests in peace for all time.

I just don't know about that kind of insanity. I'm totally with Ellen on this one. Gay people are NOT second class citizens. There is NOT an excuse for homophobia. There is NOT an excuse for raising your child to be homophobic. There is NOT an excuse for YOU if you do not accept human beings as we are all individually born to be. There IS hope.

For me, hope is helped by humour. Take a look at this video of Joe Solmonese of the Human Rights Campaign being interviewed on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report.
I'm not the biggest fan in the world of Stephen Colbert, but I do sometimes appreciate his shtick. Thanks to the brilliant humour in this clip, maybe some more people will be able to understand that when they hate on others they only hate on themselves.
Really, watch this! It's hilarious and I know that if you're even just a little bit like me, you'll laugh too because it's funny and because it cleverly reinforces the truth we all know.

You can learn more about Human Rights Campaign, here.