There Is No Morality That Stands On A Bedrock Of Lies
Via Dan Savage… I’ve been railing online since the early 1990s about how essentially immoral the anti-gay religious right is. How the scorched earth take no prisoners war they’ve been waging against gay people demands absolute renunciation of everything fine and decent a human being can possibly be, systematically strips away any human nobility they might have possessed, any aspiration to honor and justice and truth, any higher emotion then simple, relentless, pure as venom hate. The culture war leaches out of them anything decent they might ever have been, leaving behind a pathetic caricature of a human being, whose only purpose in life is hating someone a little more today then they did yesterday.
The Moral Majority. Family Values. Traditional Values. Christian. God Fearing. Bible Believing. I grew up in that milieu, and the people waving those flags today have utterly no relation to any of that. None. Morality, virtue, values, these are not things they aspire to, they are masks they hide behind. Time and again back in the Usenet days, I would find myself arguing with a bigot who told me with easy confidence that I didn’t want to get into an argument about morality, so thoroughly had they co-opted the meaning behind the words. Time and again I would beat them over their pathetic heads with their own cheapshit failures of moral character. I was raised in a Baptist household, and I know how fire and brimstone are done. Often I wished that I could see others doing the same, rather then conceding the moral argument to a bunch of gutter crawling louts. Listening to James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, William Bennett, Lou Sheldon, et. al., yap, yap, yapping about morality is like listening to Al Capon bellyaching about crime.
These are not moral people. They are thieves in the house of human virtue, leaching off the efforts of better men and women who have tried over the ages to lift humanity from the caves to the stars. They steal from those of us who love life, and love humanity, and love this good earth and want to leave it a little better for our having walked upon it, the tools we have uncovered over the centuries for testing right from wrong, true from false, good from evil, and turn them against us, to drag us down into their gutter, so that they will shine. They have preached for so long that they are the keepers of civilization’s essential virtues that many of us have come to believe it. They are vampires, feeding on them, never to be nourished by them.
If I’m grateful for anything, it’s that I lived long enough to see the moral crusade being brought right back to them. Here’s a video from YouTube user robtish that shows in neon lights how horribly warped the moral compass is over at the Traditional Values Coalition. What do you call a people who claim FBI statistics show only a small number of violent crimes were committed against homosexuals in 2007, while omitting, among other violent crimes, the category of murder from the tally? Moral? Virtuous? Christian?
This is what the culture war does to its soldiers. It strips them of everything within them that could have been fine and noble and decent. No higher virtue then hating the enemy is allowed to live within you. Not honor, not reason, not any sense of right and wrong is allowed. Hate does not share power with anything else a human heart might be capable of. You let it in, and it will consume you. There is the evidence…right there, laughing in your face.
April 30th, 2009 at 6:05 am
It’s disheartening to see what people are capable of. Virginia Foxx lying about the circumstances of Matthew Shepard’s death IN FRONT OF HIS MOTHER would have seemed the last straw for me…until I read about the Showenherdts. Have you had a chance to read about their anti-gay crusade? I couldn’t bring myself to watch the video, but what I’ve read of their testimony…am, I terrible person for thinking they’re flat-out lying?
April 30th, 2009 at 7:47 am
I saw the Showenherdts video, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve seen something like it. In their blaming the gay community for their son’s death, they’re almost spitting images of Carolyn and Lowell Groff, parents of Russell Groff. They actually responded to a post of mine about their fight to deny Russell’s spouse the right to bury his other half. Fortunately, Russell made it abundantly clear in his will that he didn’t want his parents deciding that issue. The posts are Here and Here.
There are probably lots more bitter, angry, venomous parents out there like the Groffs and the Showenderdts ripe for the religious right to employ. Don’t assume that because we are winning this fight that the religious right can’t make it more bitter, sink even lower, then they already have. There is no bottom to the Pit they live in. None. The way we fight back is the way we have always fought back. By telling our own stories, about our lives, in our own voices. All the Showenherdts and the Groffs of this world can do is tell the world how much they hate us. We can tell the world how much we loved one another.
May 2nd, 2009 at 8:23 am
Oh, yeah. I remember them.
When I look at that photo above of those two young men, I see sweetness and beauty in them. It boggles my mind that another person could look at them and feel outrage…revulsion even.