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Democracy

Pete Buttigieg told Marco Rubio why the Respect for Marriage Act isn't a 'stupid waste of time'

“If Rubio’s got time to fight against Disney, I don’t know why he wouldn’t have time to help safeguard marriages like mine."

marco rubio, pete buttigieg, respect marriage act

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, eliminating federal abortion protections, Democrats are scrambling to protect same-sex marriage from being reversed as well.

Supporters of same-sex marriage are concerned after Justice Clarence Thomas called for other rulings to be revisited in the wake of the Roe decision. "In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell," Thomas wrote, referring to decisions on contraception, sodomy and same-sex marriage.

To ensure that same-sex marriage won’t be overturned by the aggressive court, the House of Representatives passed the Respect for Marriage Act (RMA) bill last week. It won by a 267-157 vote, with 47 Republicans joining a unanimous Democratic caucus in supporting the legislation.


Now, the bill has to be approved by the Senate where Majority Leader Chuck Schumer hopes to get 10 Republicans to support the bill to overcome the Senate's 60-vote filibuster hurdle.

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio called the bill a “stupid waste of time” after being approached by a reporter at the Capitol building on Wednesday, July 20. Rubio says he wouldn’t participate in a vote when it comes to the Senate, saying that it’s a “fake problem.”

Rubio clearly hasn’t considered the fact that the United States has 980,000 same-sex households, of which 58% are married. Repealing same-sex marriage would severely impact the rights of hundreds of thousands of American families.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg pushed back against Rubio’s suggestion that it was a waste of time by explaining how important the issue is to his family. He also made note of the fact that Rubio was part of Florida’s Republican Party’s petty culture-war-driven fight against Disney.

If the thought of someone mentioning the word gay in a public school setting is a threat to Rubio then surely considering the legality of same-sex marriage is far from a waste of his time.

“If [Rubio’s] got time to fight against Disney, I don’t know why he wouldn’t have time to help safeguard marriages like mine. Look, this is really, really important to a lot of people. It’s certainly important to me,” Buttigieg said on CNN’s State of the Union this weekend.

Rubio has also recently got really worked up about UFOs.

As the first openly gay person confirmed to a U.S. cabinet position who is married and has two children, Buttigieg is in a unique position to point out how out of step Rubio is with reality. Buttigieg went on to explain why the legislation was on his mind as he fed his twin babies breakfast over the weekend.

“That half-hour of my morning had me thinking about how much I depend on and count on my spouse every day, and our marriage deserves to be treated equally,” he said. “I don't know why this would be hard,” he added.

“I just don’t understand how such a majority of House Republicans voted ‘no’ on our marriage as recently as Tuesday,” he continued.

Rubio responded to Buttigieg on Twitter.

“I’m gonna focus on the real problems,” Rubio said. “I’m not gonna focus on the agenda dictated by a bunch of affluent elite liberals and a bunch of Marxist misfits who sadly today control the agenda of the modern Democratic Party.”

Rubio is wildly out of touch with that statement as well. Buttigieg isn’t parroting the agenda of some elitist class, but the average, everyday American. Polls show that 71% of Americans support same-sex marriage, so it’s Congress’s job to step up and protect a cornerstone of the American family from being overturned by an activist court.

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ACUVUE launches a new campaign to inspire Gen Z to put down their phones and follow their vision

What will you create on your social media break? Share it at #MyVisionMySight.

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If you’ve always lived in a world with social media, it can be tough to truly understand how it affects your life. One of the best ways to grasp its impact is to take a break to see what life is like without being tethered to your phone and distracted by a constant stream of notifications.

Knowing when to disconnect is becoming increasingly important as younger people are becoming aware of the adverse effects screen time can have on their eyes. According to Eyesafe Nielsen, adults are now spending 13-plus hours a day on their digital devices, a 35% increase from 2019.1. Many of us now spend more time staring at screens on a given day than we do sleeping which can impact our eye health.

Normally, you blink around 15 times per minute, however, focusing your eyes on computer screens or other digital displays have been shown to reduce your blink rate by up to 60%.2 Reduced blinking can destabilize your eyes’ tear film, causing dry, tired eyes and blurred vision.3

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Karlie Smith shows the meal she's bringing to the restaurant for her son.

A mom who admitted she packs her 2-year-old a meal when they go out to dinner has started an interesting debate on TikTok about restaurant etiquette and how it applies to young children.

The video posted by Ohio mom, Karlie Smith (unbreakablemomma on TikTok), has received nearly 600,000 views and has over 1,850 comments.

“Call me cheap, call me whatever, but if we’re going out to a restaurant, I’m packing my kid a meal," Smith, 21, said in her post. "I do this for many reasons. On Friday nights, my family and I get together, and tonight, we’re getting food out. My son is not getting food out.”

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Pop Culture

Man rewatches shows from his childhood and his recaps of the bonkers storylines are priceless

Rob Anderson's hilarious recaps of shows like "Mighty Ducks," "Beethoven," and "7th Heaven" might make you wonder how they got made in the first place.

@hearthrobert/TikTok

These plots makes zero sense.

While there are no doubt some timeless classics from our childhood that remain every bit as amazing as we remember, many are straight-up cringey upon a later viewing. Really, it’s to be expected as societal viewpoints change…sort of a marker of how far we’ve collectively come.

And so, what do we do with these problematic pieces of old-school pop culture? Well, we can certainly update them to better reflect a more modern attitude, but that also comes with a set of potential problems. Or we could simply never watch them again. Certainly an option given all the content out there. But then we might miss an opportunity to better understand what seemed to work for the mainstream then, and why it doesn’t work now.

And then there’s the third option—allow ourselves to be entertained by their cringiness.

That’s certainly the route taken by Rob Anderson. Over on TikTok, Anderson has taken ultra-popular movies and television shows from his childhood and given them hilarious recaps capturing how absurd some of the storylines are.
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@Steve_Perrault/Twitter

Some moments never get old.

On November 19, 1999, a man named John Carpenter made game show history and quite possibly gave us all the greatest game show moment of all time.

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Carpenter had impressively not used a single lifeline for any of his questions. That is, until question 15. The million-dollar question, to be exact.

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Woman decides that she is the love of her life and marries herself at her retirement home

“I said, you know what, I’ve done everything else. Why not?”

77-year-old woman decides she's the love of her life and marries herself.

We joke about marrying ourselves or a platonic friend if some arbitrary amount of time has passed without a proposal from an imaginary suitor. And sure, some people do wind up marrying a friend in more of a business arrangement, but it's not very common that someone follows through with marrying themselves.

Dorothy "Dottie" Fideli, decided that she was going to break the mold. The 77-year-old sat down and thought about all of the things she had done in life and who was with her the entire time cheering her on. It was an easy answer: herself. She was her biggest cheerleader, the person who always showed up and the love of her life, so Fideli made the plan to marry herself.

On a beautiful May day, friends and family gathered in the O’Bannon Terrace Retirement Community, where Fideli is a resident, to witness the ceremony.

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12-year-old Texas girl saves her family from carbon monoxide poisoning

She knew something was wrong with her mom and brother, which wound up saving her whole family.

Fort Worth 12-year-old helps save family from carbon monoxide poisoning.

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A little girl in Fort Worth, Texas, experienced a terrifying encounter with the deadly gas, but her quick actions saved her entire family. Jaziyah Parker is being held up as a hero after she realized something was wrong with her family members and called for help.

The girl called 911 after she noticed her mom pass out. On the call with the dispatcher, Jaziyah says she thinks her mother has died before explaining that there was something now wrong with her baby brother, who was just 5-months-old.

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Drew Barrymore speaks during the FLOWER Beauty launch at Westfield Parramatta on April 13, 2019, in Sydney, Australia.

Drew Barrymore, 48, has been in the public consciousness since she starred as Gertie in 1982’s mega-blockbuster, “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. So, it makes sense that many people of a certain age feel as if they’ve grown up with her.

Barrymore has consistently starred in hit films and movies that are rewatchable cable-TV staples, such as “Charlie's Angels” (2000), “Never Been Kissed” (1999), “Scream” (1996), “The Wedding Singer” (1998), “50 First Dates” (2004) and “Fever Pitch” (2005).

Now, she’s an even more significant part of people’s lives as the host of “The Drew Barrymore Show,” which runs every weekday on CBS. So far, the show has been a big success, attracting an average of 1.21 million views per show, and ranks as the #4 talk show in syndication. It was recently renewed through the 2024 season.

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