Valentine's Day is a big day that gay-left advocates expect their love to be honored as just the same. The Washington Post's Valentine story today made sure to include gay couples, and so does today's Google doodle, at the end of an animated video about a boy and a girl jumping rope.
The animation’s finish includes a half-dozen tiles featuring various ”couples,” including an astronaut and an alien; a dog and a cat; and a frog and a prince, reported the Post's Michael Cavna. "Some early viewers of the Doodle wondered whether the tile featuring two tuxedoed men holding hands would stir any controversy." Says the animator, Michael Lipman: “I think Google was pretty aware of everybody in those final squares and they decided [them] with purpose.”
Gay advocates would likely claim that the cartoon before the end is awfully "heteronormative." Perhaps they'll complain that they don't like to be compared to love between an astronaut and a space alien.
The Post's Style section has a Joel Achenbach essay on the front page on the "sweet mystery" of romantic love, and at bottom, below a photo of Shirley and Arthur Siden on their 70th wedding anniversary, is a photo of a carving in a tree in Rock Creek park saying "TED N DARYL.'
Inside the section, at the very top of the essay continuing is a photo of two black men embracing, with this caption: "James Blehr, left, and partner D'Anthony White embraced on Sunday; the way they put their heads and arms together forms, for the viewer, a perfect valentine. They have been together for more than two years." The headline of the essay as it continued on C9: "Enjoying love's infinite variety."
Achenbach repeats this in the essay:
A valentine is shaped like a heart, which, oddly, is not shaped like a human heart at all. The valentine shape is symmetrical, two halves perfectly conjoined in the middle. It’s not just a metaphor: One of our accompanying photos shows two people in love. They’re both male, but that’s not what’s striking. The way they put their heads together and their arms: They form, for the viewer, a perfect valentine.
