…So many things I could tell you about, without breaking security. I know exactly where the lines are. Hubble, James Webb, I could talk your ears off about it and for once know that I wasn’t boring you. The starry nights are something we have in common. Something else. Why is that not surprising? Google WFIRST. I know tons of stuff…I live and breath all the stars in the sky, and the light from near the beginning of time, every day I come to work. I could tell you about it. I could see the stars reflected in your eyes.

But there is never any time. Not now, not when we were kids, not ever. There will never be any time for our generation. So it goes. Maybe someday the work I do will make a difference for somebody. Some astronomer maybe. Or some other kid like the one I was once, entranced by the starry night. But not for me. I could be washing dishes for a living, and still have the stars to look up at, and no one to give them to.

LG
-Bruce

It seems the militant homosexual conspiracy has caused some feelings to be hurt…

A 23-Year-Old Gay-Marriage Opponent Explains Herself

Correspondence from a reader with traditional Christian beliefs

One of the sophistries you encounter early on when you walk (or are shoved) into the fight for gay equality, is that treating bigots like bigots just makes you a bigot too.  And sure as the rising sun they were canting it loudly after Brendan Eich resigned as CEO of Mozilla.  Conar Friedersdorf, took to the pages of The Atlantic to wag his finger at all the militant homosexuals that wouldn’t gracefully forget the multi-million dollar child molester smear campaign Brendan helped to finance, and just let bygones be bygones.  And low and behold, he gets fan mail from someone with sincerely held beliefs…

It’s so rare for me to see gay marriage supporters saying the things you have said, and I desperately wish more gay marriage supporters would say those things. You understand that being opposed to gay marriage does not necessarily stem from hate. Very few people seem to understand that, and I am so sick and tired of my beliefs always being misunderstood. It seems like gay marriage supporters never actually take the time to understand traditional marriage supporters. We’re all automatically labeled as “homophobes,” and that’s an excuse they use to stop listening to anything we have to say.

If only they listened, they would understand that we’re not the evil, hateful bigots they think we are…

Sick and tired are you lady?  This graphic came across my Facebook stream just now…here, let me show you sick and tired…

I was fifteen when the Stonewall riots happened. This man would have been maybe 5. You’d think the world he grew up in would have been better to him than mine but it wasn’t all that much. And for those gay kids growing up in strongly fundamentalist homes still have this same life ahead of them.

But then, homosexuals don’t love they just have sex…so Friedersdorf’s starry-eyed fan doesn’t have to feel badly that the knife in that man’s heart has her name on it too.  God made sex just for men and women to have in the context of a godly marriage and if homosexuals have their own special burden to bear…well don’t we all?

Everyone sins. Everyone has an innate desire to sin, unfortunately. Some people’s innate desire is for homosexuality. I understand when gay people say that they can’t help having those feelings. I understand that hearing “you can change if you pray and try hard over time” is extremely difficult. Maybe we Christians haven’t talked enough about how we believe that everyone is a work in progress, including ourselves.

This is arrogance disguising itself as humility. The wolf in sheep’s clothing telling itself that it really is one of them and just happens to have a taste for lamb chops every now and then.  Lady, if you really thought you were no better than the rest of us you wouldn’t be treating your neighbors lives like they’re your stepping stones to heaven. Your Gay Neighbor Is Not Your Work In Progress! 

So many desperately lonely people in this world.  But if gay people aren’t lonely, love lorn and despairing then the righteous aren’t being righteous enough.  Jack McIntyre, one of the first clients of the first ever ex-gay ministry, Love In Action, wrote the following just before he killed himself…

I am not asking you to sanction my actions. That is not the purpose of my writing this at all. It is for the express purpose of allowing each one who will read this to know how I weighed things in my own mind. I don’t want you to think that, ‘I alone,’ should have been the perfect person, without sin. That would be ridiculous! It is the continuing lack of strength and/or obedience and/or will power to cast aside certain sins. To continually go before God and ask forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and all He stands for in my life.

Sick and tired are you lady?  Look at that…a gay man kills himself rather than make another promise god he knows he can’t keep and you are sick and tired of being called a bigot are you?  You wish gay people would just listen to you do you?  We listen all right. Jack McIntyre listened. The roll call of the dead is full of gay adult and teenagers that have listen to the likes of you. Perhaps it’s time you shut up and listened to us. We are not your work in progress. We are not your stepping stones to heaven. Listen to us if your conceits can stand to hear another voice besides your own. Your kind have been killing us for centuries. When you haven’t killed us outright than through that living death prison of the heart you demand we make of our lives so you can go to heaven. Stop. Just stop. The only thing being compromised by letting us live our lives is your hubris. Stop mistaking it for righteousness, it is turning innocent people’s lives inside out, it is killing people and it is dragging you deeper and deeper into the gutter.

Your work in progress needs a lot more work.  Cutting your neighbor’s ring finger off isn’t getting you any closer to being a better person.

This has been bouncing around the Internet Tubes today…

TX-Gov: Abbott (R) Advisor Charles Murray, “No evidence that women are significant thinkers”

Murray you may recall, is the guy who wrote “The Bell Curve” which among other things argues that black people are genetically inferior to white people intellectually. The thing about bigotry is it may look tightly focused on one particular object of contempt and loathing but it isn’t. It’s a superiority complex, and usually they’re fine with the inferior beings provided they know their place. It’s when the inferior beings assert their equal humanity the snarls and rage come blasting out. So Murray, the white man, knows that black people are inferior to white people.  So Murray, the man, knows women are inferior to men.

I’ll just bet he knows a lot more too. At some point you have to figure The American Enterprise Institute will eventually end up with a collection of Charles Murray books and papers, each individually making its case that one particular branch of the human family just doesn’t cut it, which when taken together prove conclusively that only white Aryan males are civilization builders.

Oh shoot me now…

What is the statute of limitations for donating to support Prop 8 before that individual can no longer be fired from his job?

As though nobody in a position of leadership has ever lost their job because some skeleton came laughing out the closet door. Lord have mercy. Ask Pete Rose what the statute of limitations is on sports gambling.

But it’s worse than Pete Rose. This, you need to understand, is a little like Dexter asking what the statute of limitations is for all the murders he hasn’t committed yet, and besides who we kill on our own time is our business. Read the damn post Eich made when the controversy blew up in his face and tell me this man isn’t still willing to put his money where his bar stool prejudices are. He not only states flat out that he won’t discuss the matter, but very deftly let’s someone else speak about diversity for him, and that only by way of  saying “Mozilla’s diversity is a success condition.”  Yes, yes…success condition.  Every time you think you’ve heard the worst mangling of the English language the IT profession can manage they find a way to mangle it a little more.  Success condition.  Success condition.  What he’s saying there is it’s about the money.  Like that store I read about some years ago…can’t recall just now if it was an ice cream store or a little boutique cookie shop…in a liberal neighborhood that had a little welcoming rainbow sticker in its window, and the owners were busy giving money to anti-gay politicians.  Let’s put it another way…

Mozilla’s diversity is a success condition that will allow me to donate even more money to fight the homosexual agenda!

What he did say for himself was, “Ignoring the abusive comments, I’m left with charges that I hate and I’m a bigot, based solely on the donation. Now “hate” and “bigot” are well-defined words. I say these charges are false and unjust.”  Well that’s the first time I’ve ever heard someone who stuck a knife in our hearts say that they don’t hate us.  I’m sure Jim Burroway’s never heard that before either.  Blessed are they who love the sinners, and only hate the sin.

It’s as though Eich’s transparently evasive response to the revelation that he’d dropped a thousand bucks on the Proposition 8 fight had nothing to do with the rising tide of anger that followed. It’s as though the reason he was stonewalling about his beliefs was some sort of impenetrable mystery of the ages and not staringly obvious.  And now that it’s over very few it seems are taking note of the fact that his ducking out the exit came almost right after The Guardian posted its revelations that Eich has a long history of giving money to the gutter. Ask a survivor of the holocaust what the statute of limitations is for giving money to Pat Buchanan. You have to figure Eich saw the skeletons were about to conga line out of his own closet and he figured playing the role of right wing martyr to the Militant Homosexual Thought Police was the better part of valor.

Burroway says on the other hand, we should do unto others as we would like them to do unto us…

We say that LGBT people shouldn’t be fired for something that has nothing to do with their job performance. I think that principle is good enough to apply to everyone, including Eich.

That is not the principle.  The principle is we are not child molesting disease spreading nation destroying abomination in the eyes of god monsters, we are human beings, stop persecuting us simply for existing. Look at this…

For gay Catholics, a trip down the isle means job loss

Last summer, McMahon, 62, was fired as music director at St. Agnes Catholic Church in Arlington after news of his marriage reached the pastor, the Rev. Lee Roos.

McMahon said his meeting with Roos was less than half an hour. Church employees had verified that McMahon had married his partner in February, and he could either resign or be fired, McMahon said Roos told him. He opted to be fired and was told the dismissal from the part-time position was effective immediately, he recalled recently.

“He called HR and asked them to walk him through what he had to do. Then we walked over to the church where my stuff was. We walked to the parking lot, he gave me a hug and that was it,” McMahon said of the exchange with Roos.

A hug…oh how sweet!  And the reason for his dismissal…why of course it was…

“This public act is unmistakable and verifiable and serves to cause scandal in the church and confusion among the laity,” said Michael Donohue, the spokesman. “The church can’t let a diocesan employee, especially one who has a significant and public role in the liturgy of the Mass, and other ceremonies, to stand in open defiance of church teachings.”

Yes, yes…freedom of religion and all that. Being gay not only had nothing to do with his job performance, it had nothing to do with his being fired. It was about defiance of church teachings. You know…that freedom of religion stuff…

Governor Bryant Signs Senate Bill 2681 Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act

“I am proud to sign the Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act today, which will protect the individual religious freedom of Mississippians of all faiths from government interference,” said Gov. Bryant.

And especially from having to employ let alone serve a homosexual. We can work to pass anti-discrimination laws from now until the heat death of the universe and they will simply slither in some other direction, turn it around, and figure out a different way of accomplishing the same thing.  Now it’s we’re discriminating against them for not letting them discriminate against us. Who knows what it will be tomorrow.  And we’ll be dancing that waltz forever if we’re not willing to drill down to the root of it.  We are not monsters, we are human beings, stop persecuting us.

What’s the statute of limitations on contributing to Proposition 8? How’s this for one: you stop kicking gay people in the face and we’ll stop fighting back.  There is no truce here, no live and let live possible absent our oppressor’s willingness to let us live side by side with them in equality and peace.  Hell, they don’t even see it as persecution, they keep yapping about how much they Love us right after they’ve twisted the knife in our hearts one more time.  They’ll show us the door and give us a hug on the way out.  But it’s all an excuse, a way for them to look in the mirror and not see a bigot staring back at them.

They need to see that bigot, or they will never stop finding new ways of putting in the knife…and perhaps giving us the occasional hug to let us know they’re sorry it hurts.  Please don’t hold this against me…and if you do that makes you the bigot not me…

No stream as Frank Lloyd Wright once said, rises higher than its source. The problem with Burroway’s principle good enough to apply to everyone is someone’s beliefs about gay people, religious or otherwise, are not equally as valid as the reality of our lives. The problem with Burroway’s principle good enough to apply to everyone is you can’t elevate a lie to the level of a fact. The problem with Burroway’s principle good enough to apply to everyone is you can take the prejudice out of the gutter, but you can’t take the gutter out of the prejudice. What has to happen is we stop being monsters and we start being neighbors. We can’t be both.  It’s ridiculous on its face to suggest we can make a workable social contract on the basis of our being both neighbors and monsters. Brendan Eich in his public statements never said anything about why he donated, what his beliefs regarding same-sex marriage are, or even whether he’d not throw more money into campaigns against our rights in the future. How hard is that to fucking understand?   

Via Dan Savage this morning, I get a link to this excellent article by Mark Joseph Stern over at Slate…

Just a Reminder: The Campaign for Prop 8 Was Unprecedentedly Cruel

The view that Eich was just expressing his opposition to marriage equality, a common stance at the time, strikes me as naive. Because Prop 8 is now dead, and because its passage was largely overshadowed by President Barack Obama’s election victory, it’s easy to forget the vicious tactics of the pro-Prop 8 campaign. Or, I should say, it’s easy to forget them if you’re not gay—because almost every gay person I know remembers the passage of Prop 8 as the most traumatic and degrading anti-gay event in recent American history.

(Emphasis mine)  On the one hand, you can look at this and say the bigots are merely counting on the short memory of the American voter. But it’s more likely that Eich and his comrades in arms didn’t figure that the wounds over that fight would still be so fresh in the minds of the gay community, because after all they’re homosexuals and homosexuals don’t have normal feelings like the rest of us. When you hear them babbling about political correctness that’s not them attempting to trivialize our feelings about what they did to us, it’s them telling everyone they can’t see the people for the homosexuals. When you run a multimillion dollar smear campaign and you don’t expect the objects of that campaign to remember what you did to them, it’s because you don’t think the people you smeared have any human feelings at all, or you simply can’t be bothered to care.

Stern’s Slate article helpfully refreshes the public’s memory of what kind of campaign the Proposition 8 folks ran by showing everyone the ads they used to get people to vote yes. Look at them and tell me it’s time for gay people to forgive big money donors like Eich and put it all behinds us…

The tactics used by pro-Prop 8 campaigners were not merely homophobic. They were laser-focused to exploit Californians’ deepest and most irrational fears about gay people, indoctrinating an entire state with cruelly anti-gay propaganda. Early on, Prop 8’s supporters decided to focus their campaign primarily on children, stoking parents’ fears about gay people brainwashing their kids with pro-gay messages or, implicitly, turning their children gay.

Oh but it was a tad more than that. The eternal trope of the bigots is that to be gay is to be a child molester. You’re gay because you were molested and now you’re out to turn other kids gay by molesting them. That’s what homosexuals are, that’s what homosexuals do. Homosexuals don’t reproduce, they recruit… That’s what was being dog whistled in Each And Every Proposition 8 Ad. And Brendan Eich bought a thousand dollar share in that ad campaign.

And when his one-grand contribution came back to haunt him, instead of even making a minimal effort to distance himself from that massive, slick, professional The Gays Are After Your Children smear campaign he just clammed up and said it was his personal business. Well, when you throw a multi-million dollar smear campaign at me and thousands like me, designed Specifically to arouse the most primitive fears adults could have about their children and make us a target for violent passions…well…that’s my personal business too.

In his one and only public statement about the affair, Eich bellyached…

There is no point in talking with the people who are baiting, ranting, and hurling four-letter abuse. Personal hatred conveyed through curse words is neither rational nor charitable, and strong feelings on any side of an issue do not justify it.

This is such a hoot. The Gays Are Coming For Your Children message is Exactly what you trot out when you Don’t want a rational discussion, you just want to push people’s buttons.

Forgive and forget? At least say you’re sorry. Not that you’re sorry we got angry, not that you’re sorry we felt hurt, but that what you did was wrong. And if that’s too much to ask of you then, let’s face it, you’re still in the fight aren’t you…you’re still waiting for your next chance to arouse the old hatreds, the mindless passions, against me and other’s like me, and what you want isn’t for me to put it all behind me and let’s have a fresh start and all be fellow Americans again, but for me and others like me to let our guard back down so you can kick us in the face again.

What happened in California in the summer and fall of 2008 will go down in history in the annals of anti-minority hate mongering. Gay people have been brutalized, jailed, medicated, lobotomized, tortured, burned at the stake, beaten to death, murdered, for so terribly, terribly long, all the way back to when the first scribe wrote that god hates fags in what was to eventually become the bible. And the lies spread by the Proposition 8 campaign have been the tools by which hate has traditionally excused itself, and incited even more hate. They say that history is written by the victors, but the history written in blood never forgets. If you don’t want your name written in the roll call of hate, the time to make amends is always now, not tomorrow, not some day.

My cartoon for this week’s Baltimore OUTLoud…

I’ve been paying so much attention to my AAEC presence I’ve woefully neglected my own political cartoon pages.  I will be working on bringing them back up to date soon.

This came across my Facebook stream the other day…

I think I’ll name mine The Network That Dare Not Speak Its Name…

I got this link to a blog post from someone working at Mozilla…

What’s Happening Inside Mozilla

This came across my Facebook stream just now…

Comparing Gays To Abortion, Pat Robertson Sad Christians Don’t Stone Gays Anymore

700 Club Host And Christian Evangelical Leader Compares Gays To Abortion, Laments Gays Aren’t Stoned To Death Anymore Because Homosexuality ‘Denies The Reproduction Of Human Species’

You had to sorta figure that the TV preacher who told his viewers gays have secret rings that cut people who shake their hands and infect them with the AIDS virus would be sad gay people aren’t being stoned to death anymore.

So are a lot of them. Sit down and total up everything you know about religious conservatives, let alone right wingers, and you discover that you know volumes about who and what they hate and nearly nothing about who and what they love. Charles de Gaulle once said that patriotism is when love of your own people comes first and nationalism is when hate for other people comes first. So if religion is where love of god comes first what is it when hate for other people comes first, because it isn’t religion.

Death only closes a man’s reputation and determines it as good or bad. -Joseph Addison

I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.  -Mark Twain

I’ve lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they’re more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they’re burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children – they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s just the animal. I don’t know if it’s not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough. It’s so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life. -Tony Kushner, “Angels in America”

In his book African Genesis Robert Ardrey wrote one of the more eloquent analogies for the grandeur of time and the curtain death places between us and the past, so often overlooked when pondering the origins of life. He asks the reader to place themselves on a lonely narrow California beach where foggy mountains slope down into the sea…

…let us make two assumptions. The first, not difficult, is that the visible horizon is just ten miles away. And secondly, we must assume that our sea is death, and that it is rising. This is not too difficult an assumption either, thanks to the lonely beach with the muted cries of a few distant gulls, and no other living thing. It is a sea of  death that we face, stretching beyond the visible horizon to the other end of the once-living world. The death-sea rises, slowly and eternally as it has always been rising, covering all things that it touches. It laps now quietly at our narrow beach, the present.

Where the little waves fall back not twenty feet across the shining sand, we see revealed the rotting, moss grown, Spanish hulks of the Great Armanda…A gentle trough between two incoming swells reveals for an instant not a hundred feet from where we stand a cross…Hammurabi’s Babylon is lost beneath the water amidst shifting sands. We cannot see it, for the sea has risen too high. Eighty yards from our little beach, however, what seem to be three rocks break the incoming swells and make white water. They are, of course, the pyramids at Giza.

Nothing breaks the surface of time’s ocean beyond the pyramids…Had we the courage to wade out into this sea of no return, and to swim out a few strokes, we should find a sandbar just below the surface. These are the fields and pastures of those Middle Eastern peoples, nameless and forgotten, who domesticated wheat and barley and cattle and sheep… All that we call civilization stands between the sandbar and the shore…

…the beach we stand on is the precarious present. It will be swallowed before long as other beaches have been swallowed, and a new one will form just behind us…

I think of this image often when confronted by death. In Ardrey’s sea the ten mile horizon becomes a million years, and each one after that another million, and not many horizons do we travel before the short distance between the sandbar at the beginning of civilization and the shore seems almost laughably, terrifyingly small, let alone our lonely little beach.  The joke I heard once is that it isn’t that life is so short but that we’re dead for so long.

I strongly doubt there is an afterlife and the concept seems awkward anyway. If you’re still there then there is no after, only metamorphosis of some sort. And even then the question becomes, of what sort. Do we still have anything left of us that can be thought of as human?  In the end, what Tony Kushner said is true; what we want is not so much an afterlife as more life. But I don’t think there is even that.

But there is something. Our lives are as though little pebbles tossed into Ardrey’s sea of death. At the moment they hit the water and disappear we are gone. But there are ripples that fan out and away from our lives: The reputation we leave behind. The things we did to our neighbors in this life.  The good and the bad.

There is no point in doing unto Fred as he did unto the rest of us because he won’t be bothered by it, he’s gone. You could think of picketing his funeral as a poke at the little tightly wound church of hate he left behind, but the point is without Fred that little ball of bile would not be. Fred was the problem and now Fred’s gone and he won’t care what you have to say about him now. His last chance of earthly redemption is gone. He done passed the Last Chance station and now it’s too late to get off. He will always be Fred God Hates Fags Phelps. Perhaps that was how he wanted it in the end anyway, to be remembered for what he hated, not what he loved.  But at the end, could he even remember anything he had once loved?

There is nothing wrong with being angry at Fred. There is nothing wrong with that feeling of contempt for the man.  He earned it, worked hard for it, and probably right up to the very end was immensely proud of it. But stand quietly at his grave, respectfully because this is your destination too someday, and let the life that once was be a warning. Hate does not share power within a heart. It will systematically kill every other thing you have in there, everything fine and noble you ever were or ever could have been, and take from you all the smiles and all the laughs and all the love you might have shared, until there is nothing left inside of you but hate itself. To picket a grave is pointless, there is nothing there anymore, only the ripples of what once was spreading gently across the sea of death. For all his picketing of the dead, and all the obscene hatred he vented at the mourners, he was powerless to stop or alter the ripples of their lives, and all the smiles and all the laughs and all the love that were shared, gently spreading outward in time.  All Fred had within his power was to change the nature of his own reputation, his own life’s ripples and he did not. He hurt a lot of people, but he destroyed himself.

Stand quietly. Say a prayer if you have one in you. Will this world be better for your having walked in it? Then let him go. Don’t bury yourself along with him.

[Edited a tad for clarity...and some additional thumping...]

The story, as passed down to me, is that several generations back on mom’s side of the family, an Irish man fell in love with an English woman who also loved him very much. And against the wishes of both their families they married. And were promptly disowned by both their families.  So they came to America, and that is why mom’s side of the family tree became Americans.

I could see it…the lovers wanting to come to the New World instead of settling down somewhere in England or Ireland away from their respective families.  Even at a young age I understood that the English and Irish didn’t get along very well.  It wasn’t until I scratched below the surface of the history the books like to call the Great Potato Famine that I began to grasp why it was such a hard history to put to rest, why the old hatreds kept boiling over.  What I never got was why the Irish kept facing ignorant discrimination here in America too. Wasn’t this the Great Melting Pot? Wasn’t this the land of the Golden Door?  Some years back, while perusing the stands at the big Labor Day Flea Market in the little Virginia town mom had retired to, I saw a No Irish sign for sale along with other signs from ugly days gone by.  White Only.  Colored Entrance.  No Indians Served.  They made my skin crawl, yet I hoped someone was preserving all that. I’d been out of the closet for about two decades by then, and had experienced over and over how bigots could be alternatively proud of their cheapshit prejudices, righteous even, and then suddenly turn on a dime and deny they had a prejudiced bone in their bodies.

We don’t discriminate against homosexuals…we are moral people who believe that open sexuality has no place in public…  The double standard being of course that an opposite sex couple holding hands in public is but a simple little display of their mutual love and affection that should put a smile on everyone’s faces, whereas when a same-sex couple does exactly the same thing they’re flaunting their sexuality in everyone’s faces.  We don’t care what you do in the bedroom…just keep it there…

I don’t think in my entire life I ever saw a No Gays sign, or a want ad that said Gays Need Not Apply. But you always knew what would happen to you, the moment you stepped out of the closet. Our struggle was about the closet.  It was always about the closet.  As long as we had to stay in the closet the only things people would know about us was were the lies.  I grew up with those lies.  I knew how they were killing us, how they would always keep killing us, until we could live our lives openly, without fear, and people could see us for the human beings we were, not the monsters they were constantly being told we were.

This came across my news stream this morning…

‘Diversity float’ will be part of St. Patrick’s Day Parade

Foster and his friends and neighbors are not marching Sunday as part of a gay organization. They are marching as South Boston residents who have coalesced around building a park in a corner of the neighborhood known as the Lower End. Many of the people working on the float just happen to be gay. And they have been embraced by the Allied War Veterans Council, the parade’s longtime sponsor.

That would be the longtime sponsor that took their right to discriminate against their gay Irish neighbors all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and won a pyrrhic victory.  Every year now the breadth and depth of notable people, politicians and companies boycotting these No Homo parades grows.  But Boston Globe reporter Andrew Ryan would like us to know that diversity is afoot this year in South Boston.  Yes…a Tolerance Float built by gay south Bostonites has been accepted into the parade.  No..embraced.  And I can see exactly why they were embraced too…

“They know us as their neighbors first and as gay second,” said Foster, an Air Force veteran who served in Desert Storm and who has lived with his husband in South Boston for seven years. Of outside gay groups coming in and hoping to march, he said: “How in the world do you ever get compromise if the first statement out of your mouth is, ‘I’m different than you?’ ”

Compromise.  Yes, quite.  And the compromise between staying in the closet and being out is you pretend you aren’t being pushed in and they pretend they didn’t push you.  Such a deal.

“The only way for this to work was to keep quiet. We had to wait it out and prove what we said when we first started, that we’re not here to make a big statement,” Foster said last Saturday, taking a break from float construction. “We all thought, if we just show up on parade day and we march and have a cool float, people will understand.”

There was a time I thought I was working toward this “understanding” myself.  I kept it low key among certain friends…I figured by giving their sensibilities breathing room I was giving them time to work out for themselves how everything they thought they knew about homosexuals was wrong.  I could be the living example that taught them to see past their assumptions and prejudices.  But prejudice is by definition irrational, and in the end I discovered all that was happening was they thought they were teaching me to keep it quiet.

Never doubt, that this is what the Allied War Veterans Council thinks they’re teaching the gays.  The compromise from their point of view is they’re willing to let people they know to be homosexual into the parade.  As long as they…you know…keep it quiet…

Lead parade organizer Philip J. Wuschke Jr. acknowledged that the inclusion this year of two groups with gay marchers represented “a little bit of a step,” but he pushed back against the assertion that the parade is intolerant.

“Gay people march in this all the time. Every year. This isn’t the first time,” Wuschke said. “We don’t ban gay people. We ban groups that are trying to make a statement.”

This is the sort of convenient circumlocution people use to prevent themselves from looking in the bathroom mirror and seeing a bigot staring back at them.  It’s also pathetic.  Does this man truly know nothing of the history of Irish people in the United States that he can honestly believe the St. Patrick’s Day parades do not now and never did have a political overtone to them?

Celebrating a people and their history is making a statement.  So is excluding a people. Being proud of who you are is making a statement.  So is telling someone to hide what they are in exchange for acceptance.

And when gay people willingly closet themselves in exchange for acceptance they are also making a statement. They may think it’s a statement about building bridges, but in reality it’s a statement of self worth. That is what Allied War Veterans Council is happy to have finally taught them.  The Irish have a long and hard history they can be proud to have endured and overcome. Gays…well…they just have sex.  And Irish gays are best not spoken of in public.

This came across my Twitter stream the other day…

No Nugent Is Good Nugent
GOP weeps over Nugent comments, but are these crocodile tears?

There’s been hand-wringing and eye-rolling among the Texas GOP this week over Ted Nugent calling President Obama a “subhuman mongrel.” The real question is, why now?

Because the rest of the country started taking notice, that’s why.  But as usual the corporate news media only looks at it superficially, lambasting republicans for hitching Ted Nugent to their wagon while focusing almost exclusively on his “subhuman mongrel” crack at the president.  Yes, yes, it’s telling in its in-your-face racism.  They’re not even dog whistling at the base anymore.  But that was hardly all there is to find in the catalog of Nugent’s wit and wisdom.

Christ almighty you’d think the Family Values party never bothered to listen to his music, hear the lyrics, or even just glance a second or two at the album cover for “Love Grenade”?

And then there’s this lovely little ditty…

Well, I don’t care if you’re just 13
You look too good to be true
I just know that you’re probably clean…

Jailbait you look fine, fine, fine…
It’s quite alright, I asked your mama
Wait a minute, officer
Don’t put those handcuffs on me
Put them on her, and I’ll share her with you

Now get back to me about how you’re all against the gay agenda because homosexuals prey on children.

What were they thinking you ask?  Oh I know what they were thinking.  They were thinking inside that comfortable cocoon that Fox News and Talk Radio and their right wing billionaire money teats built for them.  That gentleman’s club at the edge of town where they can let the masks come off and say all the things they really mean without decency and humanity getting a word in edgewise.  Sometimes they forget the cocoon they live in is not the world they live in, and then the rest of the country sees them hugging the likes of Ted Nugent like he’s their soul brother.  But that’s only because he Is their soul brother.

Take advantage of a 13 year old girl for her body…take the food out of her mouth because you wanted another yacht…the difference between the Wall Street men and the duck dynasty boys is the cost of their toys…

…but then I’m hardly the only one.  This came across my Facebook stream a little while ago…

Count your blessings straight boy, and be nice to the one you can’t love back. Painful unrequited love is probably waiting patiently for you too, somewhere down your road…

By Ella Wheeler Wilcox. So much win in that poem…

But she also wrote, Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes. How I hope that is true…

There was the guy I met on the path in Rock Creek Park. I was bicycling to work in those days because I didn’t have a car, and the path through the park was a good shortcut that allowed me to stay off the main roads. It was also a peaceful ride through the woods early in the morning. No busy buzz of traffic, no early morning commuter noise. I saw a cat laying on the side of the path and as I got close noticed it wasn’t moving. At first I thought it was dead, but as I slowed down next to it the poor thing raised its head and looked at me. It was in distress.

Another guy about my age comes bicycling up and together, me gently carrying the cat and him walking both our bicycles, we get the cat to his house, which was nearby. By the time we get there the cat has perked up a bit, but still isn’t moving much. It was a longhair of some sort, there was no blood anywhere on it and its coat was in good condition. But there was no collar so no way to tell who its owner was. Nothing seemed broken but you couldn’t be sure. The guy and his dad agreed to take it to a nearby vet. I went off to work.

After work I stopped by their house to ask about the cat. But I had nefarious motives. The guy who helped rescue the cat was beautiful, and had set even my dull gaydar ringing. On the walk back to his house we began chatting about this and that. There was an air of sadness to him. He spoke in soft, quiet tones as though he was sitting in church. His mother he said, had passed away some years ago and he and his dad lived together. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life but for now he was working part time and in school part time and hoped to get his degree soon. Somehow we begun talking about books we’d read and I’d thrown in a couple trolling comments about Lambda Rising bookstore, which he was familiar with enough that he knew where it was and where it had moved from, and when he mentioned he often used the path for an early morning jog I mentioned Billy Sive, the main character in the novel The Front Runner, and he replied that he was a vegetarian too and it was a better diet not just for runners but everyone.

So there I was at his front door, and his dad answers and invites me in. The guy I’d met was there and the three of us sat in the living room and chatted for a bit, first to assure me that the vet had said the cat would be okay and they were going to take care of it until its owner could be found. Then the talk turned oddly to me…what did I do for a living, how long had I been living in Rockville, what were my interests, and so on. I didn’t mind the inquisition, which came almost exclusively from his dad. In fact I was wanting just then to make myself seem interesting enough to the guy who knew who Billy Sive was that he’d want to see more of me.

Oh yes…I work at a custom plastic shop over in Kensington, and in my spare time I paint landscapes and and draw cartoons. Plus I do photography work for a couple local newspapers and I’m working on a book of my art photography. I emphasized as I usually do when I’m trying to get someone’s attention, my creative side. As his dad chatted with me about my photography, I noted that I had his son’s absolute attention, and from the occasional sideways glances I could tell that his dad saw it too.

His dad asked about my political views and then, as casually as he could manage, asked how I felt about gay rights. And with all the nerve I could manage I replied that I was completely in favor of gay equality. At this point I almost expected to get shown the door, but his dad nodded his head and…smiled warmly. “That’s good,” he said, “that’s good.”

Dad…approves?! This was unknown territory for me, but I was more than willing to explore it. His son seemed very uncomfortable. Shortly after that his dad excused himself, saying he had work to do. When we were alone, his son set me straight.

Dad was a happy agnostic apparently, but when the mother died the son converted to Catholicism. And to be homosexual was a very grave sin (it later became a mere intrinsic disorder…). I could have argued it with him, but there’s a point where you just see it in someone’s eyes that it’s going nowhere. Perhaps he saw it in mine too. He didn’t try just then to get me to believe it too, just to make sure I knew he believed it. 

So we shook hands and I left. Years later I experienced for myself the bottomless grief of my own parent’s deaths…dad first and then many years later, mom…and have never doubted since how despairing and vulnerable it leaves a person. And I have wondered ever since if that gay guy’s dad had been trying, not so much to set his gay son up with a nice boy, but trying somehow to awaken him out of grief. Life goes on…find someone to share it with… But there are those who prefer gay people pass the hours of our lives alone, and in despair. I have no idea if, absent one life hating priest somewhere anything might have come of it between us, but a even a brief walk in the garden might have done wonders for both of us just then. Which, of course, is exactly why he had to believe that love between men was a grave sin, and I had to believe he believed it