Introduction.

Hafer begins the comic book with a brief introduction to get his main characters on the stage, and establish the plot of what is to come. He begins with a page that warns us thusly:

WARNING
This book has been written as a basic primer of the homosexual movement for those who do not know the FACTS.

Hafer warns us his facts are not pretty facts. We shall see in the chapters to follow how remote Hafer’s relationship with Facts is, pretty or not. But as a kindness to the reader he tells us he’s chosen to present them in an easy-to-read illustrated style. That’s one way of describing it.

We shall see that throughout the book Hafer keeps having trouble deciding whether to illustrate his facts as locker room jokes or as seriously awful truths. This repeated switch in perspective, from ha ha isn’t that funny, to darkly serious, and back again is jarring. But also…well…illustrative. The reader quickly begins to feel  as if Hafer doesn’t really believe half of what he’s saying, and Hafer’s problem with facts begins right away, almost at the very beginning of Chapter One. But first we have to get through the Introduction.

He ends his warning by praying that many young people will be diverted from “experimentation” by the facts presented in this book. But any gay kid living in the sort of fundamentalist household likely to hand this book to them is already living in terror of being outed. All reading Hafer is likely to do for them is push them closer to suicide.

So now we’re done with the WARNING. The Introduction opens with the character Chester sitting on his porch steps fuming about a newspaper article about the opening of a school for gay kids in New York City. 

I have a first printing of Hafer’s book and its print date is January 1986. So he’s complaining about the first Harvey Milk School which opened in the East Village of Lower Manhattan in 1985. Given the time it probably took for Hafer to get his comic book drawn, edited and sent to the printer (it was published by the Paradigm Company of Boise Idaho) he probably started work on it right after the school was founded. Maybe that was the match that lit his fuse.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:

The school was originally run by the Hetrick-Martin Institute (HMI), an organization that provides social support to at-risk LGBT youth. After becoming a fully accredited public school in 2002/3, the high school is now administered by the New York City Department of Education, separate from HMI. The school and the non-profit still share space in the same building, with the HMI providing a majority of the school’s arts and culture programming.

The school was founded in 1985 as a small, two-room program with just over a dozen students by HMI in collaboration with the New York City Department of Education’s Career Education Center. The Department of Education administers the school and is responsible for admissions. Harvey Milk was created as an alternative education program for youth who find it difficult or impossible to attend their home schools due to threats, violence, or harassment.

The school was opened to give gay kids a safe place where they could get an education. Hafer takes no notice of this Fact. In fact, throughout the book, Hafer takes no notice at all, gives no hint that he even knows or cares one whit about violence toward gay and lesbian adults, let alone to schoolkids. That’s not hard to understand, given the book is intended to be a warning that the very existence of homosexual people constitutes a danger to everyone. It’s right there on the cover:

What consenting adults do in the privacy of their homes CAN hurt you!

So presumably those gay schoolkids at the Harvey Milk School are endangering everyone just by going to class where they’re safe and not letting themselves get beaten up every day. Given that, Chester is justifiably angry.

Chester is one of the two foils for Larry, who is presented throughout as the voice of reason. Chester, initially, plays the part of the uninformed cranky crank, which allows Larry to recast what would otherwise be Chester’s knee jerk prejudices as reasonable truths. Chester is furious. “They opened a School for those people” he fumes. And Larry walks over to ask him what he’s grumbling about. Chester growls that “New York has a high school for Fags!”

Larry, taking on the mantle of the calm, measured, voice of reason, replies noncommittally. “The homosexual community has really made huge strides in the media and public opinion in the past few years”, he says. Chester isn’t having it. “I don’t want a bunch of homos living around me!!” Pay attention here…Chester is calling them fags and homos. Larry talks of “the homosexual community”. Hafer is pulling a fast one.

Now the other foil enters, stage left. A deliveryman cames along with a package for Chester, just as Chester is telling Larry he “liked ‘em better when they were in the closet.” The deliveryman tells them he couldn’t help but overhear them talking, and asks how many gays do you know? “I can’t imagine one would want to live near you.” When he reveals himself to be a homosexual, as if the way he’s drawn doesn’t telegraph it, Chester freaks out. “Larry! He’s one of them! Did he touch me?!!”

You have to have read the entire book and then come back to this introduction to see how shifty Hafer is being there. Chester is playing the part of the knee jerk ignorant bigot, which allows Larry to be the calm, measured voice of reason. “Easy Chet,” He says. “He might just have a point. How much Do you know about homosexuality?” And then “I think you’re both off the mark. Are you willing to learn what homosexuality is Really all about?”

And with that, Hafer has sprung his trap. Now the reader sees Larry as an impartial giver of the facts, as opposed to the ignorant knee jerk reactions of a guy like Chester. But by the end of the book, the distance between Larry and Chester is nonexistent, and they are both ganging up on the homosexual foil…because his role in the story is to be the two dimensional militant homosexual stereotype who really hates being a homosexual deep down inside. Because that’s what homosexuals are for in these tracts.

Another of Hafer’s devious little ploys is dressing the homosexual foil in a uniform. He appears on stage as a deliveryman, so naturally he’s in his work clothes…right? Hahahaha… Hafer clothes the foil in a uniform…because he’s a militant homosexual! Get it? Get it? 

The only name Hafer gives his homosexual foil is Sodomite. That comes in Chapter One.

So now we have our main cast of characters: Chester, Larry, and Sodomite. And we know that Larry is the giver of impartial facts, unlike the Archie Bunker character named Chester, and the militant homosexual named Sodomite. So when Larry says “Let’s start with what is a homosexual”, the readers is ready to uncritically accept whatever Larry tells them about homosexuality, because Larry is the sensible middle ground between two extremes.

And now we are about to discover that a homosexual is…starting in Chapter One. 

Stay tuned…

Back in December of 2019 I promised in a blog post to review the Hafer comic book. Back then I wrote:

Soon after this arrived in the mail, I began flipping through its pages. I’d already seen many of them posted here and there in the Internet tubes, but I was unprepared for the unabridged wholeness of its contempt and hate. If Orson Scott Card was a cartoonist this would probably have been the comic book he’d have produced on homosexuals and homosexuality. It’s deeper in the dark night of the soul than even R. Crumb or S. Clay Wilson ever went. All the feelings of growing up gay while hearing this crap thrown at me over and over and over again came rushing out as I began reading it.

Which is probably why I never got around to doing my chapter by chapter review, a’la Fred Clark’s takedown of the Left Behind books. It was just too damn depressing, too many old wounds being reopened. 

But in working on the “final” episode of A Coming Out Story I had occasion to revisit this comic book for quotes to illustrate the climate of hate I grew up in. And once again the unabridged wholeness of its contempt and hate managed, even now, to shock me. But this time I dug a little deeper.

Hafer helpfully provides an appendix to back up his “facts”. It only took me a couple glances at it to see how much he was bullshitting his readers. I’d seen this kind of thing back in the USENET days and it’s why I have my “gay studies” bookshelves. 

And I thought…I really need to do the review I’d intended…if only to get it out there.

As I said in a previous post, these things, like the Chick tracts, are basically Tijuana bibles for prigs, allowing them to ogle their neighbor’s sex lives, indulge their own sexual fantasies, and feel righteous about it. We are the sexual scapegoat they need, so they don’t have to reckon with the empty wasteland they’ve made of their own sex lives. But that doesn’t mean turning a critical eye on it is pointless. 

They posture as defenders of godly truths and moral values, and these things, truth and morality, are emphatically not theirs. Like the swords of myth and legend that refuse the hand of the unworthy, time and again when confronted with reason and morality, the hate pews flee back into their chapels of fantasies, lies, and superstition. It is worth exposing them, the better to see that the moral high ground is ours.

Let’s begin in the next post.

Working on A Coming Out Story and looking for quotes for the “last” episode eventually drags me back into Dick Hafer’s noxious swamp. Sigh. I ordered his Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle some years ago for the gay studies bookshelves after seeing some of its jaw dropping panels online. If Growing Up Straight: What Every Thoughtful Parent Should Know about Homosexuality is a veritable encyclopedia of homophobia, the Hafer comic is it’s Classics Illustrated version.

And it’s a real doozy. But instructive. Think of it as an extended Jack Chick tract, even including the repenting sinner at the end, plus several pages of instructions as to what to say and what to do to get right with god. All that’s missing is the checklist.

Here’s the thing, and I’m really only noticing it more now due to Fred Clark’s recent posts about the mindset that joins into satanic panics, Q-Anon conspiracies, and suchlike. He writes: “It is always possible to recruit new members to join our cause by telling horrific lies about some group of Other People. But doing so makes those Other People themselves – the ones we’re telling nasty lies about – immune to recruitment.” And he points out the obvious: that’s because those Other People know the truth of their own lives first hand.

The first time you read Hafer’s comic book all you see is that guttural howl of unabridged bigotry and hate. All through the book he refers to gay people as sodomites. You see laughably cheapshit stereotypes of yourself and everyone you know that would be hilarious if you’d never read news headlines about gay bashings and murders all your adult life. But Hafer is at his most energetic when he’s describing our sex lives. The bulk of the comic book is this.

Vito Russo put it best when he said that “It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance.” Years ago I blogged about the time I had to walk a gauntlet of hard core heterosexual pornography just to get a current copy of my local gay community newspapers, because back in those days the only place you could find anything gay whether it was pornographic or not was in “adult” bookstores. I got an eyeful. But to read Hafer’s comic book you’d think our sex lives were nothing But hard core pornography.

Hafer begins his descent into gay sex hell by starting with…I am not kidding…kissing.

“Not only are their habits disgusting, but they are incredibly harmful and damaging”

“Such as?”

“Kissing”

“Ugh!!”

-Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle, page 50

This is followed up with descriptions of commonplace sex that most heterosexuals enjoy but which is somehow made disgusting when same sex couples do it. Following that, every extreme sex practice is laid at our feet as though that was all there is to us. He’s very meticulous about it. But the tell is he can’t resist presenting it like it’s one great big comic book joke. The scenes of gay sex acts are presented as much for laughs as for shock value. He can’t resist doing that even when it comes to the routine accusations of homosexual pedophilia. On page 126 he quotes Paul Cameron’s (now regrettably named ) Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (ISIS) that 80 percent of student teacher molestations are by homosexuals, next to his drawing of a deranged older man dragging a small boy by the arm and telling him that it’s time for his sex ed class, while the boy says “During recess?!!”. Ha ha ha.

It’s telling that Hafer doesn’t even bother with religious sermonizing in his comic book until near the very end when, like in a Jack Chick tract, the militant homosexual finally repents, followed by several pages of boilerplate step by step instructions on how to be saved. But the lies in the sixty plus pages preceding the sermon are so glaring, the dehumanized scarecrows representing those Other People so shockingly empty of any shred of humanity, what it’s likely to provoke in the gay reader is more shock, anger, and outrage than repentance. It does not hold up a mirror to them that they might be saved, it spits in their faces.

That is its purpose.

If I wasn’t actively collecting hate literature my first reflex would have been to throw it in the trash less than halfway through it. But Hafer’s comic book, like the Chick tracts, isn’t meant for gay people. That scene at the end, like every scene at the end of every Chick tract, is theater. It’s not meant to save anyone because long before they could get to it, the redemptee has become angered at all the insults thrown in their face and has already thrown the tract away.

No. The audience for these books and tracts is the true believer. These are Tijuana bibles for prigs, allowing them to ogle their neighbor’s sex lives, and indulge their own sexual fantasies, while feeling righteous about it, so they don’t have to reckon with the empty wasteland they’ve made of their own lives.

I think the one quote from Hafer that I have in the final ACOS episode is enough. I was sorely tempted to add another panel with that part about kissing though.

“A bigot’s mind is like the pupil of an eye. The more light you shine on it the more it contracts.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Many years ago when I was a guest blogger on another website, I got into a wee kerfuffle (not very badly) over an opinion piece I wrote saying that it really did not matter to bigots whether our sexual orientation is chosen or biological. Nobody doubts that skin color is biological and that hasn’t stopped racists from being racist. Homophobes, when they finally can’t deny the science any longer, will simply pivot to acknowledging we can’t change and that makes it even more imperative that society keep us separate and marginalized. Ex-gay therapy then becomes not a way of forcing change on us, as a way to shame us into self hate and celibacy and isolation. And also, to validate and exalt their own cheapshit prejudices, like it always was anyway. We have seen, since the collapse of the big ex-gay outfits, that drift into celibacy over change.

I think back then people mistook what I was saying as I thought the nature versus nurture argument didn’t matter at all and I have never believed that. Firstly, facts matter, and by that time all the science was saying our sexual orientation was a biological fact, and the only question remaining was is it determined in the womb or by way of genetics or some combination of the two. But on a personal level, ever since I came out to myself I just knew intuitively that my being drawn to guys had to be an innate part of my makeup, not something I drifted into because of family life or fear of the opposite sex. I could look back all the way to my preschool days and see that it was always there.

All this came back to mind as I was reading this May 2021 article in Baptist News Global about Southern Baptist theological dictator Al Mohler’s defense of conversion therapy. Here then, is Mohler’s current stance, being essentially what I’ve been telling people for decades now that it would be:

In We Cannot be Silent, Mohler argued that even if same-sex orientation is innate and immutable, it remains sinful. Even the discovery of a “gay gene” wouldn’t change his thinking. If the Bible calls something sin, that’s what it is. The fact that it might be “natural” changes nothing. Because we live in a fallen world, what is “natural” still may be wrong. The natural world, he says, is “tainted by sin.”

Therefore, if the case for banning conversion therapy implies that gay is good, Mohler’s against it.

See the pivot? Okay, yes, it’s natural and immutable, but so what? We live in a fallen world. Science only proves that, not that we have to stop tormenting them over something they cannot change. It remains our godly duty to keep sticking knives in their hearts. With love of course.

Because at bottom whether it is nature or nurture does not matter. And I tell you this: the bible does not matter either. If the day ever came they’d have to admit the “clobber passages” did not mean what they’ve been saying they mean, the pivot would be to other passages that they’ll say still uphold the godly duty.

Because what matters, the only thing that matters, is the mindless knee jerk prejudice. Nothing else. They’ll dress it up however they have to.

“An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.” -Eric Hoffer

This is bouncing around on the schadenfreude channel…

Go read it Here. You wouldn’t need to have Mentor of Arisia’s visualization of The Cosmic All to know this was going to happen eventually. But you would have had to know where Dreher was getting his money from. Now we do. We can adjust our visualizations accordingly.

Seriously…what’s really significant about this article is something the public really needs to be more aware of. A good many of these high profile right wing republican pundits are funded entirely by a single hyper rich benefactor. Usually those benefactors stay behind the curtains and the pudit is seen to be paid for their work by the publications their columns appear in. But…no, and Dreher’s case is instructive. Most if not all of the right wing swamp publications operate at a loss. They get funding in various discrete ways from those same hyper extreme, hyper rich benefactors. Now we know those same benefactors also pay the columnists they love outright as well. Dreher’s columns appeared in The American Conservative, but his paycheck came exclusively from the hyper rich and hyper extreme Howard Ahmanson.

Ahmanson came across my radar long ago as a source of funding for anti-gay and religious extremist politicians and political action groups. Back then he was a supporter of R.J. Rushdoony’s “Christian Reconstructionism” movement, an offshoot of Calvinism, which holds that the second coming doesn’t happen until after God’s kingdom is established here on earth, neatly reversing what evangelicals believe the end times timeline to be. Reconstructionists intend the world to be governed by Mosaic law wherein blasphemers, adulterers, homosexuals and disobedient children, among others, would be stoned to death. Ahmanson almost never gives interviews…apparently he suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome…but as I recall, in one he averred he had moved on from Rushdoony. But who really knows?

That Ahmanson found joy in Dreher’s writing is highly unsurprising. That the breakup came when Dreher couldn’t stop himself from talking about black men’s dicks is also in its way unsurprising, given the rumors surrounding Dreher which I won’t repeat here. It You could say it was preordained.

I didn’t bother with Alfie when it was released because in 1966 I would have been 12 and that sort of movie just wouldn’t have appealed to me. And given the sexual content in it I would probably not have been allowed in the theater anyway.

So I looked at the Wikipedia entry and…wow…Alfie was a real dick wasn’t he. This is a comedy? But what struck me even more was that it seems on the surface to be the sort of morality story that American evangelicals would applaud. Especially the part about Alfie having a breakdown after he arranges for one of his lady friends with benefits to have an abortion…

…Lily informs him that she is pregnant from their one encounter, and they plan for her to have an abortion. Lily comes to his flat to meet the abortionist. During the procedure, Alfie leaves Lily and walks around. He catches sight of his son Malcolm outside a church and witnesses the baptism of Gilda and Humphrey’s new daughter. He watches as they exit the church as a family. The abortion traumatizes both Lily and Alfie, with him breaking down in tears when seeing the aborted fetus, the first time he confronts the consequences of his actions…

That almost reads like a Made For Evangelicals movie. The Jack Chick sermonising at the end of it right before the  back panel sinner’s prayer almost writes itself. But no…this is not a movie Evangelicals would like. 

It’s the song sung at the end of it. What’s It All About Alfie?  It gets to the heart of the movie and it’s stuck in my thoughts ever since Valentine’s Day. Bacharach and David understood the story better than most of its reviewers of the time. It’s a perfect rejoinder to the life Alfie was living.

What’s it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give?
Or are we meant to be kind?

And if only fools are kind, Alfie
Then I guess it is wise to be cruel
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie
What will you lend on an old golden rule?

As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie
I know there’s something much more
Something even non-believers can believe in

I believe in love, Alfie
Without true love we just exist, Alfie
Until you find the love you’ve missed, you’re nothing, Alfie

When you walk, let your heart lead the way
And you’ll find love any day, Alfie
Alfie

And there’s why evangelicals hate it: The movie is about Alfie’s inability to love anyone but himself (if that). That is the moral center of the story. Not that Alfie had sex out of wedlock. Not that he got one of his lady friends an abortion. It was this

Without true love we just exist, Alfie.

That is Not the message evangelicals want us to hear. Here’s a passage from the tribute to Burt Bacharach up on Roger Ebert dot com…

But when I think of Burt Bacharach and film music, my mind goes first to an earlier movie. For years, I had the notion that “Alfie” was a comedy, and in 1966 I guess it played that way to a lot of people, including lead actor Michael Caine, who said he knew “Alfie” would be a hit when he heard laughter floating out of the cinema during dailies. By the time I saw it, imagine my surprise. “Alfie” is incredibly sad, the tale of a man who can’t love or be loved in return, a damaged character who does nothing but damage other people. Such jokes as there are fall squarely in the “wry chuckle” range.

Listen to Bacharach and David’s title song, and see if you don’t think they perceived the film the same way I did. Cher sang the version that plays over the end credits of the American release, and it was Dionne Warwick whose rendition became a hit. Myself, I prefer Cilla Black, who sang “Alfie” for the British release. She wasn’t as good a singer as Warwick, which Bacharach later acknowledged, but Black’s version is the most haunting. Maybe the emotion in her voice came from her familiarity with London, with the scene, with men like that. Maybe it was exhaustion. Black recalled doing almost 30 takes of the recording, until George Martin, in the studio as producer although Bacharach was running the show, said gently, “Burt, I think you got it in take four.” I don’t know which take is here on YouTube, but Black was right, they all look done in, even the dapper Bacharach, clad in one of his signature turtlenecks. But Bacharach was also right, whatever he was doing, because this song will rip your heart out…

I had to go buy a copy of the Cilla Black version of this song and Farran Smith Nehme who wrote this tribute is absolutely right. Black’s version is the one.

Without true love we just exist, Alfie.

This is exactly what evangelicals don’t want us to hear. Time and time again what they say during arguments over same sex marriage is that marriage is not about love.  They’re being completely serious. It’s some sort of duty…to god, to society, to raise children, to model gender roles…but it is not primarily about love. Of course love is a good thing to have in a marriage, an important part, but not the most important part, not the critical part. It’s just…nice to have. But not necessary. That really is their thinking.

I have had it said to me over and over: Marriage is not about love. We’ll all be hearing it again when the Trump supreme court decides to review Obergefell. Marriage is not about love. But without true love we just exist.

So I let myself get dragged into a Twitter thread about same sex marriage. It started with a friendly post by a religious guy who said “Imagine thinking that allowing gay people to get married somehow diminishes heterosexual marriage.”

He gets instantly swarmed by right wing religious nutcases telling him he’s leading people to hell and so on and so forth. Okay…so much so as usual. But the yapping takes a turn I’m familiar with from the USENET days: that marriage is and can only be about procreation and children. I wait for the obvious rebuttal to that from the other gay friendly posters and it never comes. Instead the arguments swirl around secular society versus theocracy and how same sex couples have families and can raise children too, with one poster in particular doggedly sticking to the premise that only procreation matters to marriage, not any of that love stuff, because that’s how god ordained it.

And…unable to sit on my hands anymore, I jump in like it’s 1995.

But there’s a couple things I think the rest of you need to know about all this.

It took me a while to see it, but the head nutcase in the right wing infotainment cocoon, Matt Walsh, had just post election pivoted from demonizing transgender folk to demonizing same sex marriage. So that’s the topic de jour in the howling monkey tree now. But there is also this…

A new book making the case for “Christian Nationalism” has hit the streets, and it isn’t saying the quiet parts out loud, it’s writing them in neon lights. I guess they’re all done with that finally.

It’s “The Case for Christian Nationalism” by Stephen Wolfe, and it is not exactly fringe material, having been in the top 2000 books on Amazon for weeks, and charting in the top 500 ever since it’s November 1 publication. It argues for ethnic purity as a necessary condition for our, or any other nation’s survival. It argues that imprisoning, and perhaps even executing heretics, is a good and necessary thing. The book presents itself as a theological justification for White ethnonationalism. Or in other words, white supremacy…at least here in the United States.

But more fundamentally than that, Wolfe argues that even if Adam and Eve had not sinned and been cast out of Eden, humans would have congregated in separate communities on the planet and developed their distinct ways of life. This he says, is why there are nations.  And so following that, Christians have the right to do everything in their power to institutionalize Christianity, make government structured according to God’s vision for human life, creating a national government in which civil authorities direct the citizens to the “true religion” to the “fullest extent of their power.” 

Including executing heretics. But only if that becomes necessary. If you don’t know where that leaves sexual minorities message me, I’ll fill you in.

I Repeat…This Is Not Some Odd Little Fringe Tract. It is now a best seller and it has energized the howling monkey tree. The usual response to criticism of it is oh you just hate Christians.

I hate every moment of having to fight this fight. But I’m a gay man and I remember the first time I fell in love, and for the honor and the dignity of that moment, and every moment of love I ever felt for another man, I will not remain silent. Furthermore…I am an American. The flag waving doesn’t run very deep in me, but the belief in that American dream of liberty and justice for all does and I will not remain silent.

We are living in very dangerous times, and as was once said, and is still true today, Silence = Death.

“…It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead…with stories. In these stories it doesn’t matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is who is to blame.”

This. All this.

Anti-LGBTQ threats, fueled by internet’s far right ‘machine,’ shut down trans rights and drag events

Inundated with threats during Pride Month, LGBTQ+ rights advocates and allies have been forced to cancel events and involve local law enforcement authorities after a group of white nationalists were arrested outside a Pride event in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho.

You could say this is nothing new because the republican machine has been ginning up fear and hatred of gay people to drive their base to the polls, ever since Anita Bryant showed them back in 1977 how well it worked. I have examples of republican hate pamphlets mailed out in critical races and swing states for almost every election cycle since the 90s.

What’s different now is the overt threat of violence, coming against a background of multiple mass shootings in recent years, the violent January 6 storming of the United States Capitol, and a president of the United States that didn’t merely condone political violence, but actively employed it. And he had every reason to believe he could get away with it, because he did it all throughout his campaign in 2016 and instead of rejecting him republican voters flocked to him and he won. With Donald Trump a Rubicon was crossed.

Now we have open carry laws in states already deeply hostile toward LGBT Americans. Now we have mass shootings in places of work, churches, grocery stores, elementary schools. Now we have republican state governors and legislators openly inciting religious and social passions against us, and writing laws allegedly to protect children from us, threatening businesses that treat us with respect, calling out everyone who opposes their hate-mongering as “groomers” and pedophiles, all deliberately calculated to incite fear and hatred toward us. For votes. There is no other reason.

Then come the violent street gangs. Our blood on the pavement, their votes on election day.

There is a political machine behind the targeting of Pride events by this element. A right wing political machine. A republican political machine. What you see there in the photo taken in Coeur D’Alene is no more spontaneous than January 6 was. And just like with the Big Lie, the respectable republican cloth coat establishment is fine with it, and with whatever bloodshed it may bring. So long as it stays far enough away from them personally that they can maintain their aura of establishment respectability, and it delivers them more votes from the mob than it costs them with decent Americans.

I’m surprised this case from his past isn’t getting more attention now. This man has a stunningly congenital indifference to the humanity of women and children, and nowhere was that indifference more evident than in his decision and his behavior in Doe v. Groody, which came out during his confirmation hearing in 2005. From WikiPedia…

The Doe v. Groody, 361 F.3d 232 (3d Cir. 2004) lawsuit concerned a strip-search of a 10-year-old girl and her mother despite the fact that neither were criminal suspects nor named in any search warrant. In applying for a search warrant, officers requested the right to search whoever was in the house and were refused that request.

The Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania Drug Task Force suspected the husband and father of the plaintiffs of selling methamphetamines so they procured a search warrant for him, the house, his car and anyone customers that were present. The wife and daughter were not listed as suspects. When the police were executing the warrant, they had a female parking enforcement officer take the wife and daughter to the bathroom and perform a strip search but no drugs were found on them. When the pair sued, the police officers claimed qualified immunity.

They had no warrant to search the mother and daughter, but they strip searched them anyway. The district court and the appeals court held that under “…any reasonable reading, the warrant in this case did not authorize the search of the mother and daughter, and that the search was not otherwise justified.” 

But the appeals court decision would have been unanimous save for one judge who didn’t think the cops had done anything wrong. Guess who. 

Judge Samuel Alito wrote a dissenting opinion saying that police officers did not violate the Constitution when they strip-searched the mother and her ten-year-old daughter. Alito stated in section I of his dissent that the affidavit accompanying the warrant “…seeks permission to search all occupants of the residence…” and argues, again in section I, that “The warrant indisputably incorporated the affidavit…”

Judge Michael Chertoff’s majority opinion asserted that Alito’s position would effectively nullify the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement and “transform the judicial officer into little more than the cliché rubber stamp.”

But there’s more the Wiki article doesn’t mention. During arguments Alito peevishly asked the lawyer for the girl “Why do you keep bringing up the fact that this case involves the strip search of a 10-year-old child?” His defenders at his confirmation hearing said that simply reflected his strict approach to law and order issues, and giving the police the widest possible (and then some) latitude. But the fact is the case Did involve strip searching a 10 year old girl, and it plainly irritated him to be reminded of that fact, as if it should have had any bearing on what happens when police take the law into their own hands.

And it is probably the exact moment when right wing culture warriors knew they had a winner in Sam Alito. He eventually replaced Sandra Day O’Connor. 

Let me repeat: the man who was irritated over being reminded that the case before him involved strip searching a 10 year old girl, wrote the draft opinion we are now seeing that says Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start,” and that also quotes approvingly from a 17th century English jurist who had two women executed for witchcraft, wrote that it isn’t rape if a husband forces himself on his wife, and believed capital punishment should extend to kids as young as 14.

Strip search a 10 year old girl…what’s your problem with that…why do you keep bringing that up..?

If all this resurfaces now, in light of Alito’s words in the leaked draft, expect the same chorus now vilifying anyone who objects to DeSantis’ Don’t Say Gay law as “groomers” and pedophiles to rush to excuse Alito’s peevish bewilderment as to why, in the context of police abusing their power, it might matter that a 10 year old girl was strip searched. Save Our Children…from anyone who might give a damn about their welfare, and the future of the human race.

During his confirmation hearings in 2005, it was reported that Alito’s wife broke down in tears over how mean some senators were to her husband. I did a cartoon…

I was born into a world in the midst of a Cold War. When imminent nuclear annihilation was a fear most of us felt on a daily basis. Black Americans were still living in a state of segregation. Women needed their husband’s permission to have their own credit cards. I’ve been trying to document how it was for a gay kid back then in A Coming Out Story.

And yet…and yet…it was a world that held so much promise. And that was largely because we needed the hard sciences, and a good public school system, to stay economically and militarily secure from Russia. The jet age had arrived. Communication satellites made it possible to see televised news from anywhere in the world (on this side of the Iron Curtain). We were going to the moon. We were being taught science in the classroom, and to read and explore, and ask the difficult questions and seek the truthful answers. Because the future depended on us. There really was a great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day.

I was born into a world that was, despite everything, full of promise and hope. I am spending my old age in a world dominated by stupidity and the petty grudges of mean people.

People who like to torment the different kids. Bullies. Creeps. The same ones back when I was a schoolboy, that were always waiting for some smaller kid to let their guard down by looking up at the stars.

Some days I just gotta thump my pulpit. But this is why I blog I suppose…

I’m slogging through a New Yorker profile of Dan Bongino, the new extra strength Rush Limbaugh, whose YouTube channel was recently taken down (more of that please!) because Bongino tried to do an end run around a previous YouTube timeout. The New Yorker often goes into deep detail about its subjects and that makes the articles quite long at times, but they’re almost always worth the read. New Yorker and Consumer Reports are the only two magazine subscriptions I’m going to keep when I transition into living on retirement money.

I want to talk…okay, vent…about this exchange with Bongino and the New Yorker reporter that caught my eye the other day:

For Bongino, the policies of the pandemic – mandates for masks and vaccines, admonitions against experimental treatments – have always rested on a dubious expectation of trust. When I asked him why he challenged the science, he cut in: “Time out.” He fed my words back to me: “’You challenge the science’ No! That’s not the way science works! Science is a process of challenges.” He went on, “What are you, a lemming? Just because people tell you to do things doesn’t mean you should automatically do it. Pregnant women took thalidomide for morning sickness. That was the consensus of the time. Look how that worked out.”

This is such a perfect example of how these wingnut talk radio babblers manipulate not just the facts but also, and slyly, the language, that it takes your breath away. It is pure gold. And the reporter, unless he covers it later in the article that I haven’t read yet, does not push back on any of it. But I can cut this reporter some slack for that because without a doubt your typical New Yorker reader can see through this multilayered bullshit. 

But let’s us take it apart…

Science is a process of challenges. Well…yeah. Jacob Bronowski talked in The Ascent of Man, about the newly arrived students at Göttingen University bringing to their studies “…a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.” And in that same episode, titled “Knowledge or Certainty”, he argued passionately against arrogance and dogma, what he called “the despot’s belief that they have absolute certainty.” 

All knowledge he insisted, is confined within an area of uncertainty, or as he preferred to call it, an area of tolerance. Science is what we do to sift out the facts from the fictions, however passionately hoped for. The physicist Richard Feynman once said that science is just a way we have of not fooling ourselves. But there is more to it than that. In Science and Human Values Bronowski wrote that “When you discard the test of fact in what a star is, you discard with it what a man is.” It is the search for knowledge, the habit of truth Bronowski spoke of, that makes us human.

But that is precisely what Bongino discards here. You challenge science, with more and better science. Not with theology, not with strongman politics, not with a lot of half assed goofball conspiracy theories, not by calling anyone who follows the science lemmings. For one thing, lemmings don’t hurl themselves off cliffs in mass suicides. That’s a myth, popularized here in the United States by a Disney nature documentary that was…well…lacking in science.

Just because people tell you to do things doesn’t mean you should automatically do it. See how deftly he shifts the focus from science tells us, to what “people tell you to do”? Now he’s not challenging the science, he’s quite reasonably not blindly letting “people” tell him “to do things”. What people? What things? No need to be specific, the point is to derail the question. If crazy uncle Batsinthebelfry tells you to go jump off a bridge you wouldn’t do that would you? So don’t listen to Dr. Fauci unless you’re a lemming. And as it turns out…unsurprisingly…Bongino doesn’t know any more about Thalidomide than he does about lemmings.

Pregnant women took thalidomide for morning sickness. That was the consensus of the time. Look how that worked out. Notice he doesn’t say it was the consensus of the science of the time. Because the science wasn’t quite all there. And to get the full story on that, you need to look up Frances Oldham Kelsey, who in 1960 was a reviewer at the Food and Drug Administration. It was Kelsey who kept the thalidomide tragedy in Europe from becoming one here in the US. Because…

Kelsey had the power to prevent a drug from going to market if she found the application to be lacking sufficient evidence for safety. After a thorough review, Kelsey rejected the application for thalidomide on the grounds that it lacked sufficient evidence of safety through rigorous clinical trials. -Smithsonian Magazine, May 8, 2017, “The Woman Who Stood Between America And A Generation Of Thalidomide Babies”

That “consensus of the time” Bongilo casually throws out there, was in fact careless marketing of a drug initially as sedative, that was never tested on pregnant women, but was marketed to them for morning sickness after the drug maker discovered it could also be used for that. There was no “consensus of the time”, there was only marketing and tragically superficial approval based on nothing more than the drug maker’s own testing. And Kelsey didn’t think that was entirely honest either.

Reports of the side effect peripheral neuritis—painful inflammation of the peripheral nerves—were published in the December 1960 issue of the British Medical Journal. This raised an even bigger red flag for Kelsey: “the peripheral neuritis did not seem the sort of side effect that should come from a simple sleeping pill.

She asked for more information from Merrell, who responded with another application merely stating that thalidomide was at least safer than barbiturates. Kelsey then sent a letter directly to Merrell saying that she suspected they knew of the neurological toxicity that led to nerve inflammation but chose not to disclose it in their application. Merrell grew increasingly upset that Kelsey would not pass their drug, which had been used in over 40 other countries at this point.

The science was not there. It was only Kelsey demanding to see the science before she’d sign off on it that prevented a bigger tragedy in the US than happened. 

Eventually, after reports of birth deformities began appearing overseas, Merrell withdrew the application. But samples of the drug had been distributed to more than 1200 physicians and from these to tens of thousands of their patients. That resulted in 17 reported cases of congenital deformities here in the US. It could have been thousands “…had the FDA not insisted on the evidence of safety required under the law (despite ongoing pressure from the drug’s sponsor).”

For Bongilo to use this as an example of why not to trust the scientific evidence of the effectiveness of vaccinations is stunning in its brazenness. But these people are nothing if not brazen about it these days. What Trump taught them is not to hold back. Don’t just fudge the facts. Go ahead and brazen it out. Everyone knew thalidomide was safe until it wasn’t. Now they’re telling you the COVID vaccinations are safe. We all know how that’s going to turn out… Bongilo isn’t merely challenging the science, he’s challenging the very thing that makes us human…our rational facility…short circuiting it with tactical rhetoric and disinformation.

So his side can win the culture war. But what, exactly is the prize? Ends and means are not separate and unrelated items. To paraphrase Bronowski, when you discard the test of fact in how effective a vaccine is, you discard with it what it is to be human. Also, you get people killed. People. Not lemmings. People with lives. People with families and friends who loved them.

Is Donald Trump really worth dragging yourself down into that abyss? Is he really worth discarding everything inside of you that could have been noble and decent? If the devil is still out there trying to buy souls, he must be really pissed at the downturn in quality lately.

In the fury to come about the Rittenhouse verdict, and how it gives right wing terrorists license to hunt and kill people protesting racist police violence, spare a moment of thought about the reporters covering those protests.

We have seen since Ferguson how the police actively target reporters on the scene. It got to the point during that unrest, that police would suddenly charge a protest line and drag away a specific person their intelligence thought was an activist leader. They would also arrest and detain news camera crews and reporters. Over time since Ferguson, it escalated to shootings of reporters and video crew with rubber bullets which were later justified as “confusion” as to whether the camera was a gun or not. 

We have seen over and over how police shootings often end up being justified by the cop saying they thought the person they shot had a gun in their hands. “I thought it was a gun”. But it turned out to just be a wallet or a cell phone.  

I thought it was a gun. Now add armed right wing civilians into the mix, lax to non-existent local firearms regulations, and local police affinity with right wing terror groups. The protests that night in Kenosha were about the Kenosha police shooting of Jacob Blake, yet another police shooting of an unarmed black man…in the back three times, and in the side twice…and clearly the Kenosha police that night appreciated the company of that squad of white militia. In fact, as the ACLU reports, they herded the protestors toward them…

“His acquittal comes after our investigation exposed how Kenosha law enforcement used violence against protesters and drove them toward white militia groups, in ways that escalated tensions and almost certainly led to these shootings…”

The white militia were on the side of the police. Against the protestors. Who were there to protest the police shooting, in the back, of an unarmed black man.

I used to go to every news event in DC with my cameras, wander among the crowds and document what was happening. Sometimes I got my photography into a local newspaper. More often it was just to capture the history I was living through for myself. I have quite an archive now of that history. I’ve put some of it up on my website.

But lately I’ve been more hesitant to do that then I ever was, even during the worst of the riots of the 70s. Partly it’s age. My legs just don’t hold up as long as they used to. Partly it’s opportunity. The job I have doesn’t always keep regular business hours. But mostly now, right now, it is this: It’s going to be very easy going forward, for some armed right wing thug to shoot dead anyone with a camera and claim, even laughingly, that it was self defense. They will absolutely do that to commercial news reporters. Street photographers will absolutely be targets too. In Ferguson they were merely arrested and held in jail for doing their jobs. Now they can be shot. Not by the police, but by friendly white militia.  

I thought it was a gun…I thought it was a gun…I thought it was a gun…hahahahaha…I thought it was a gun…

As a gay man who came of age in the late 1960s, endured every filthy lie the righteous could throw at us, which only got even worse when AIDS began killing so many of us, this is from Digby is…just amazing…to read about…

Conspiracy theories in the pews

…there have always been conspiracy theorists among us and one of the most likely groups to fall down a rabbit hole are conservative evangelicals many of whom are ready to believe that liberals are satan worshippers and that abortions are being used as a form of genocide.

Considering their fealty to Donald Trump, it isn’t surprising that they would be among the most vaccine resistant…

She quotes from this New York Times article…

White Evangelical Resistance Is Obstacle in Vaccination Effort

Millions of white evangelical adults in the U.S. do not intend to get vaccinated against Covid-19. Tenets of faith and mistrust of science play a role; so does politics.

As I said…for a gay man of a certain age this Times article is absolutely fascinating reading. Let me just quote this one passage…

The deeply held spiritual convictions or counterfactual arguments may vary. But across white evangelical America, reasons not to get vaccinated have spread as quickly as the virus that public health officials are hoping to overcome through herd immunity.

The opposition is rooted in a mix of religious faith and a longstanding wariness of mainstream science, and it is fueled by broader cultural distrust of institutions and gravitation to online conspiracy theories. The sheer size of the community poses a major problem for the country’s ability to recover from a pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of half a million Americans. And evangelical ideas and instincts have a way of spreading, even internationally.

There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.

“If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to,” said Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois.

As vaccines become more widely available, and as worrisome virus variants develop, the problem takes on new urgency…

Wariness of mainstream science?? I think the word you’re looking for is hostility. They’ve been waging an all out war on science ever since Darwin at least. And on any form of government and public education that does not bow to their peculiar institution. It makes them perpetually antagonistic toward the rest of the country that isn’t part of the tribe. And indifferent, completely and utterly indifferent, to the harm the practice of their beliefs may cause others. The teenage girl sexually assaulted by an older male. The gay kid thrown into an ex-gay camp. The gay couple beaten by young thugs hopped up on the righteousness coming from the pulpit. Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven. They’re the right hand of god almighty, and gods don’t feel shame.

But never mind that. It is an old, very old, anti-gay trope of the religious right propaganda machine, that homosexuals spread disease…often deliberately.When HIV was killing us they not only turned their backs on us, and insisted so should everyone else, they accused us of spreading it willfully, to the rest of the country. We were a threat to the family, to civilization itself. What had come down on us was merely the fruits of our own abominable sin. We had it coming, the bible said so. Their propaganda war on The Homosexual Menace took a darker, and bloodier turn.

I remember those days. I remember how we took care of each other, and made the country take notice, and doing that discovered a strength and dignity within ourselves that we had been told since childhood was not ours to have. I remember.

Now look at who is spreading disease. Deliberately.