In April, it was officially announced that Melissa Etheridge and her partner Tammy Lynn Michaels had separated and would be applying to the court for a dissolution of their civil partnership.

And they have.

The gossip blogs are going nuts; it’s like Christmas to them. Headline joy:

Cold! Melissa Etheridge Will NOT Be Paying Tammy’s Legal Fees!

Melissa Etheridge gets nasty in divorce. Shame on her.

Tammy: Melissa Left Me With $4 To My Name

The game? Slate the celebrity. This time, made all the more easy by the ex who publishes a barely-readable blog that I hope disappears before her children are able to read.

It seems to be cool to side with Tammy on this. And I have to say, when the rumours first started up, I was very sympathetic to what she must have gone through.

i still love that damn woman so much, i’m still trying to stop. i had a dream last where honey and i were fighting and going to get a divorce, and i woke up sobbing…. then i realized. oh. it’s true. and then what do you do? when the horrible feeling in the dream gets to stay even after you wake up?
Hollywood Farm Girl 20.05.2010 (Tammy’s blog. Note: she regularly deletes posts)

It’s hard to dismiss that kind of emotion and it’s harder to not empathise with the person expressing it. When I read that I was near tears.

Apparently everyone else was too. Even lesbian favourite pop culture blogger Dorothy Snarker appears to be on “Team Tammy”, joining ever classy Perez Hilton in his condemnation of Melissa Etheridge.

Despite my vunerability to emotional rants, the facts just don’t add up. Tammy and her lawyer claim she is destitute:

Knowles tells TMZ Tammy has a grand total of $4 to her name … adding, “Melissa has not been treating Tammy or the children as if they are a wife and children, financially and otherwise.”

Knowles says Melissa has not given Tammy or the kids a penny since the breakup … and she is now destitute.
TMZ

But when she applied to the court to force Melissa to hand over $25,000 and pay Tammy’s legal fees, the judge disagreed on the grounds that Melissa’s lawyers were able to prove that Tammy’s living expenses which (according to Melissa’s lawyer) total “tens of thousands of dollars per month,” are being covered by Melissa. She is also providing Tammy $2000 a month in addition to covering housing/child care/car lease/ living expenses.

Now I’m not sure why everyone thinks that the judge is in some way biased towards Melissa on this. Surely the judge would have required some evidence. In this case, I’m going to go with the judge, and not the crazy lady rants on Tammy’s blog. Dorothy, Perez, why do you think the judge wants Tammy and the children destitute?

Ultimately even Tammy’s lawyer admitted to People Magazine that Tammy and the children were being supported by Melissa.

Melissa is applying for joint custody. Tammy is applying for full custody. I know which appears reasonable and in the interests of the children to me. Tammy is blatantly using those children as a bargaining chip to get money from her wealthy ex. Unless a parent is abusive, no reasonable person would try and separate their children from their other parent. To even attempt to do so is wrong wrong wrong.

I’m not saying I think anyone was blameless in this break up. I’m not saying Melissa didn’t withdraw from family life. I’m not saying her cheating is a total impossibility. Nobody but Melissa and Tammy really can know those things. But what I’m saying is that Tammy  is already making clear her lack of a deep, abiding relationship with reality. She’s lying. She’s trying to permanently separate her children from their mother.

“Team Tammy” is just another symptom of a dumbed down pop culture that elevates feeling over facts.

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