Life in a Town of Liberty and Lobs

Elton John came to Austin this week to perform in a fundraiser hosted by tennis ace Andy Roddick. Roddick's established a charity foundation four years ago, even though the boy was only 18 at the time. He won $7 million in 2004 alone, and he's lived in Austin for the last several years.

In an AP story about the fundraiser, Elton wouldn't give out any details about his upcoming marriage to his partner of 11 years, David Furnish. But Elton gave our town some dap for being the coolest place to live in all of Texas:

"Austin is my favorite Texas city because it's so green," John said. "It's a fun town. It's a great music town, always has been. If I was going to live in Texas this is where I'd live."

He performed just down the street from the state's legislature, though, whose House approved a constitutional ban against gay marriage. Gay marriages are already illegal under Texas law, but that's apparently not enough of a statement for the august statesmen from places like Sugarland, Pampa and New Braunfels. That House has already voted to prevent gays from being foster parents this spring. I suppose that orphanages and juvenile halls are a better alternative to loving, caring adults. The way I remember it, pondering your parents' sex habits as a child was more repulsive than rotten egg salad. Elton might think Austin is the acme of Texas living, but he's got more sense than to bring his partner anywhere close to such bigotry. We're still working on that liberty thing down here, Elton.

At least we're not trying to work out the bad math in squirrely research studies about foster home abuse. The big lie being told on this issue: "Children in foster homes with same-sex parents are 11 times as likely to be sexually abused as those with heterosexual parents."

This mistake, based on data from Illinois, made it onto CNN during a debate on the homosexual foster home issues. The Wall Street Journal has a columnist, Carl Balik, who pulled the shaky statistics apart on this big lie. Balik said in his latest Numbers Guy column:

"This required several leaps of logic, some of which I'll discuss later. The biggest is that Dr. Cameron had no data about the makeup of homes in which the Illinois children were abused; indeed, a state DCFS spokeswoman told me the agency doesn't record whether households are same-sex. It's possible that much of what Dr. Cameron calls homosexual abuse occurred in what would be considered heterosexual homes."

Oops. So homosexuals and heterosexuals really have the same makeup, then? We're all so much more alike than different.