RUSH: So I got some e-mails. “You just make this stuff up, don’t you? The gay guy and his son want to get married. Right.” No. I’m not making it up. You people on the left, you have to understand something: We don’t lie here. I don’t have to. There’s nothing in it for me to lie. I don’t win or gain a thing by turning people to my point of view if I’m lying to ’em, ’cause it isn’t gonna hold. You gotta stop this projection business. I don’t have to lie talking about you. You people are weird. You do strange things.

Now, the Drive-Bys don’t refer to it as oddball, kooky or strange, but we do. Here you go. This is from Washington Post: “These Gay Men Became ‘Father and Son.’ Now They Want to Get Married But Can’t. — For 45 years, Nino Esposito and Drew Bosee have been married in almost every sense of the word,” except in the sense of the word that has been in use for the last few thousands of years they haven’t been married. Only in this new cockeyed, cockamamie world where words don’t mean anything have they been essentially “married” for 45 years.

That’s how screwball this is.

“For 45 years, Nino Esposito and Drew Bosee have been married…” No, they haven’t. It’s not been possible. But who’s to quibble. Let’s move on. “Both retired, they spend their days in the garden and the kitchen, where Esposito kneads his own Italian bread.” Oh, what a guy! What a guy, he kneads his own bread. “There isn’t a day that one will leave the house without the other, not for doctor’s appointments or groceries or anything else.” They never strand each other alone, even if it’s at home.

Well, that right there tells you that they’re not really married. (laughing) Just kidding! Lighten up. Smile, Dawn. She’s laughing. She knows. She got it. No, they’re just perfectly well adjusted, normal people. They knead their own Italian bread. They’re two guys who’ve essentially been married for 45 years. We haven’t even gotten to the big crux of this yet. Just hang in there. Be tough, folks. “Together … the two men have long had every assurance that theyÂ’re family. Every assurance, that is, but a legal one. Esposito…”

That would be Nino Esposito. He’s the one who likes to knead his own Italian bread in the kitchen. He’s 78. And Drew “Bosee, 68, sought to change that in 2012 — before Pennsylvania legalized same-sex marriage in 2014, before the Supreme Court did the same for the entire country last summer. … So Bosee allowed his partner to adopt him. As both of their pairs of parents were deceased, they had no issues with legal guardianship, and they chose to make Esposito the ‘father’ by virtue of him being 10 years older.”

See how easy it is to change the definition of “father”? All you have to do is knead your own Italian bread in your own kitchen and be ten years older than a guy you adopted. It’s easy. And so was, it says here, the adoption process. Silly old me! I’ve been thinking all these years that it’s against the law to have sex with your adopted children. (interruption) Well, am I wrong about that? (interruption) Am I wrong about it? (interruption) What, is that…? (interruption) What’s that got to do with this? (interruption) Well, come on. Woody Allen, at least… Well, there is no “at least.” You’re right.

Let me just continue here with the story. I thought there was a legal prohibition against it. Anyway, three years later, Nino Esposito — 78 years old who kneads his own Italian bread in his own kitchen — and Drew “Bosee have found that claiming their newfound right to be husband and husband is a lot trickier. Pennsylvania is one of 25 states and territories that considers relations between adoptive parents and their adult children within the definition of incest.” (Gasp!) Oh, no! “And anyway, Esposito and Bosee thought it wouldnÂ’t be right to get married without having their adoption annulled first.”

That’s a new one on me.

Did you know that adoptions can be annulled?

I’m not… Folks, I’m not saying they can’t be. It’s just I hadn’t heard of this. Do you call the Vatican on this? Where do you go to annul an adoption? “So they were excited to go before Allegheny County,” that’s Pittsburgh, “Judge Lawrence O’Toole this June. O’Toole had a reputation for being progressive on LGBT issues; he signed one of the first same-sex marriage licenses to be legally recognized in [Pennsylvania]. But in this case, O’Toole’s … chose to defer to the appellate courts, scrawling ‘Denied’ across the order. The couple was shocked. They had brought along $80 to pay for a marriage license as soon as the proceedings were over. Now that cash would go unused.”

(chuckling) Really? Buy some bread — or buy the dough to take back home to knead in the kitchen. Anyway. The tears, I’m sure, are streaming from your eyes over this story by now. “‘The ACLU is hopeful that the Superior Court will apply established legal principles to allow annulment of adoptions by same-sex couples so that they can finally partake of their constitutional right to marry,’ ACLU Pennsylvania legal director … said.” So don’t send me notes and tell me I make things up. Here you have a same-sex couple with one of them adopted, and they want to get married. And they’re being told no.

And they don’t understand it.

And, frankly, I don’t, either.

Because once you open the door and break down the whole definition, why can’t they get married now? What’s the deal? Is it this little technicality on the adoption? So what? What should that matter? What’s in their hearts is what matters, right? They’re in love. That’s all that should matter here. Which takes us to Houston. “LGBT Bathroom Ordinance Losers Ask NFL Cancel 2017 Super Bowl in Houston.” It’s in 2017, not the upcoming Super Bowl. The Super Bowl in 2017.

“Losers in the Houston bathroom ordinance election are saying that they’re gonna boycott Houston’s economy and are asking the NFL to move the Super Bowl. Houston has got it in 2017. A hashtag campaign on Twitter has begun called #BoycottHouston. On the day after the defeat of the bathroom ordinance, a Change.org petition was unfinished to call upon the NFL to boycott Houston. Sites like Raw Story also criticized the methods used by the opponents of the ordinance and reported that sites such as Out Sports were asking the NFL to move the 2017 Super Bowl.”

We’re talking about one-tenth of 1% of the population doing a boycott? Anyway on this Houston bathroom story, there’s a story in the Houston Chronicle today, headline: “Ad Man Relishes Success in Anti-HERO Campaign,” and they’ve got a screen grab here of the ad and it’s of a little girl — six-, seven-year-old little girl — in the bathroom looking up at what is obviously an adult male, looking a little frightened, a little unsure, a little curious, as in: You’re not my daddy. What are you doing here?

“The faceless man in plaid — clearly masculine and menacing — was deliberate. The little girl’s attire of black Mary Jane shoes and bobby socks — utterly innocent and vulnerable — was a happy coincidence. They were the central characters of a 30-second ad with one message: No men in women’s bathrooms. The commercial, with its stark black and white images, ominous soundtrack and spine-chilling graphics, galvanized the opposition to Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance. The day after voters rejected HERO, the ad man who created the television spot was celebrating.

“‘It always feels great to win,’ said Jeff Norwood, a longtime Republican political consultant based in Austin. Even before Campaign for Houston leaders brought Norwood in to create the ad, they had decided to make ‘bathroom safety’ the focus of their campaign to repeal HERO, said spokesman Jared Woodfill. Norwood’s job was to hook voters on a gut level. The ad did that.” And I just gave you a description of the frame of the ad, but you can imagine how it looked, and it was very effective. “The ad, said Norwood, shifted the narrative of the election away from equal rights to bathroom safety. He brushed off criticism that the commercial was misleading and unfairly characterized transgender people as sexual predators.”

I don’t know why anybody would say that. Why would you call men that want to go into the girls’ bathroom predators? Why would anybody say that? Do you have any clue? “The only misleading campaign was the pro side that tried to make this about other issues and denied the fact that bathroom safety was the real issue in the campaign,” Norwood said. “I think it correctly portrayed the dangers women and girls would face had the ordinance passed.”

Now, when you get down to all of it, here’s the real crux of it here. Story in the Daily Signal: “Why LGBT Advocates Think They Lost in Houston Election — Failing to pass the Houston Equal Rights Protection Ordinance Tuesday night came as a blow to LGBT advocates, who have won recent victories at the US Supreme Court and beyond. ‘We are disappointed with todayÂ’s outcome,’ said a coalition of partners that make up Houston Unites, the group behind the sexual orientation and gender identity measure. … The biggest hurdle LGBT groups say they failed to overcome was the branding of the Houston Equal Rights Protection Ordinance as ‘the bathroom bill.'”

But what it really boils down to, they admit in this story, the leftists, the LGBT people admit they cannot win in the arena of ideas. They tried to change the minds of voters, and they couldn’t. What they are going to do next is work on nonelected government officials, such as people in the federal bureaucracy who can write phantom regulations. They’re not elected. They don’t have to go through Congress. They’re appointees or what have you.

“Convincing large numbers of people driven by fear and religious beliefs simply will not happen,” said one of the advocates. We’re never gonna overcome that. “The people who matter are policy-makers who have the ability to change the regulations which make life difficult for transgender people on a day to day basis. Bureaucrats, administrators, judges, HR benefits, directors, school superintendents, police chiefs: these are the kinds of people who need to be courted, convinced, and motivated to action.”

So they’re admitting that what they want to do to get this thing passed is screw the voters. We’re gonna lose every time because we know that we’re one-tenth of 1%. We’re a minority that you can barely see. So to get what we want, we’re gonna get phantom regulators, nonelected public servants to simply write regulations permitting what we want to happen. And thereby they are admitting exactly how much of liberalism finds its way woven into this giant fabric of deceit nationwide. It’s exactly how they do it, and it’s exactly how we end up thinking that we are being governed against our will. This is another reason why the left is not all that panicked when they lose elections, ’cause they’ve got people like this hidden away in every cabinet level bureaucracy and in the judicial system, judges and you name it.

But another point to make. This is a temporary setback. It is not a defeat. They don’t go away. Think back wherever you were, however many decades ago it was when you first heard somebody pitch the idea of gay marriage. And remember your first reaction. You pooh-poohed it, you laughed, you thought odd, kooky, whatever, but the point is, there is no way, that is never. And now look. They never, ever stop and go away.

So you people in Houston, you might have, in your mind, temporarily beaten it, but you are going to have to stay vigilant and continually oppose this for the rest of your lives ’cause they are not gonna stop, and they are now really energized knowing they can’t persuade you to agree with them. Now they’re mobilizing to get it forced on you behind the scenes in ways you won’t even see it happening.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, don’t forget, I predicted to you that the next focus of attention for the left is gonna be the transgender bunch. They think they’ve overcome, accomplished their objectives here with homosexuality, gay marriage, but they have to keep the same rabble-rousing going. Remember, nothing’s ever achieved. They’re constantly agitating, constantly trying to transform, constantly trying to overthrow the existing order, and so now the transgender community is the recipient of all this new energy. And we’re talking, I mean, what, it’s such a minuscule portion of the population, but it’s being made to look like it’s significant and major, just like the gay population was made to look.

You’ve seen the polls, how many Millennials thought the gay population was 30, 35%? And you couldn’t blame ’em. I mean, you turn on the television, you read the news, you think half the country’s gay. You find out it’s 3% max. And the transgender percentage is not even a full 1%. It’s not even a half of 1%. But they are simply the vehicle whereby the left’s protest movement continues to agitate, community organizers and what have you.