Weird science.

Whoopee! Gals, do not worry if you get an IRS audit! Just plead the "Summers Rationale"--no, not sunstroke--I mean the idea, recently advanced by Larry Summers, president of Harvard, that women aren't succeeding in math and science because they lack the "intrinsic aptitude" of men. Yes! We are so off the hook!

No wonder, what with all that math, that my pretty little head can't make sense out of all the jabbering about the imminent destruction of Social Security. Even if Treasury secretary Snow were to show the little white vials again, it wouldn't compute for me.

No matter. If I'm hearing the president right, the only number I have to worry about is 55. Since I'm just over that age, seems you young uns--you gender queers, trans men and women, tranny fags, tranny dykes, and bois--are going to have to pick up the tab for me. The groceries, the dry cleaning, the lunches. No, here, I'll get the tip. Does anyone have change for this queer-as-a-$5-bill?

With my lucky number 55, I feel like I have won the lottery! I might privatize, I mean, take up ownership of all my money and move into one of those planned so-called gray havens--Encore Hall in Los Angeles, Rainbow Vision in Santa Fe, or Casa de Gay Manana in Puerto Vallarta. Despite the generous support of youth, we gay geezer boomers are going to need all the nonprofit low-income housing we can get. Of course, if those evangelicals would ever get helpful and step off into the rapture--and if they would just hand us the keys to their places during liftoff--our housing shortages could be over. You do the aftermath! Gay Realtors for the rapture! Then, of course, queer-eye makeovers for all those darling little split-level ranches.

And not that I need those pesky science skills I don't have anyway. Abortion causes cancer. AIDS is spread by spit. Evolution is devolution. To look at those dear dueling-banjo Bush twins, scowling into the sun behind Curious George at the inauguration, or at that other royal offspring with the swastika armband, is to hypothesize that perhaps there has been a survival of the shallowest.

The president actually said that the jury is still out on evolution and seems to believe that the Scopes trial is a blind test for mouthwash. The creationists don't say the world was made by God; they say it was created by [wink, wink, nudge, nudge] "intelligent design," which sounds like some Conran catalog or an obit for that big queen Philip Johnson.

In junior and senior high schools throughout the empire, straight teens, emboldened by federally sanctioned homophobia, are now beaning gay teens with science books covered with the traditional hand-drawn hearts encircling the words SUEANN LOVES JIMBOB IN A PLATONIC WAY AND PLEDGES TO ABSTAIN FROM SEX UNTIL MARRIAGE next to school-board decals that disclaim EVOLUTION IS JUST A THEORY. Don't save your filibuster for later. What will they go after next? Gravity? As we gray gays used to say, "There's no such thing as gravity; the earth sucks."

Actually, save Buster. As we know, on her second day at work, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings--instead of denouncing the $240,000 her department had paid to "independent journalist" Armstrong Williams--boldly went after PBS's cartoon bunny Buster, who has asthma and is the child of divorced bunnies. Hasn't he suffered enough? Leave no child of divorced bunnies behind. Spellings accused Buster's video postcard from Vermont at sugaring time, which included kids with lesbian moms, of promoting the dreaded "tolerance and diversity."

And tolerance and diversity are code words for "homosexual agenda," something SpongeBob SquarePants is all too familiar with after James Dobson of Fuckus on the Family caught him holding hands with his friend Patrick the starfish while they watched their favorite video. Along with evolution, the God squad has apparently stopped teaching the difference between Homo sapiens and homo cartoonum. Who needs science when begats and bigots will do?