Kevin-Douglas Olive responds to this post and to all your comments and mine, and he implores us all not to hate the Groffs. Quakers are some of the most decent people I’ve ever met in my life.
I’ll post my own response later…I want to take some time to think over what he wrote. But in the meantime you should go read his comment, and remember that a Christian wrote it, the next time you hear the kook pews hollering out for war and vengence and hate in the name of Christ.
A Little Friendly Advice From The Great Unchurched…
Here’s a remarkably sane bit of commentary about the Anglican schism-in-progress over at the London Times Online: Pray Lift Your Eyes Above The Belt. The author, Libby Purves, notes that this isn’t the first time there has been outrage in the pews over inclusiveness.
We have seen this crab-scuttle towards Rome before. When the Anglican Synod accepted women priests in 1992 numbers of high-profile Anglicans turned Catholic in disgust. The other theological differences — the Real Presence in the Eucharist, Papal infallibility, priestly celibacy — seem suddenly no longer to matter, compared with the horrible prospect of women priests.
The following is the sound of a nail being squarely hit by a hammer…
It would be refreshing if the Churches would step back from this stance, and make it clearer that the evil in adultery is not the sexual act but the betrayal of trust, the cruelty, the endangering of children’s happiness. The deep wickedness of rape and paedophilia is not about desire but about misuse of power, invasion, oppression and injury. The sinfulness of promiscuity and prostitution is not about sex but about using another human being for transient pleasure without caring for the physical and emotional damage you do. The Church’s ministry to gays could preach only honesty, gentleness, and commitment, rather than agonising about genital practices. Christianity could just grow up, and stop treating sex as if it were innately toxic or radioactive and yet irresistibly interesting.
Yes.
Let the Churches concentrate on condemning promiscuity, infidelity, exploitation, predation — whether gay or straight. Nobody asks them to go the full Gay Pride, bathhouse-culture route; but let them recognise kindness and mutual support as virtues, and bless all honest unions. Let them condemn proselytising from either side, making it clear that there is nothing cool or clever about random sexual tourism, any more than there is anything evil in being born gay. It just happens. Being gay can, without doing any violence to the Gospels, be accepted as a potential route to holiness.
It won’t be. They’ll squabble and fudge and cling to their hierarchies and their terrors, and some will scuttle to Rome and Rome will feel smug. And the rest of society will sigh and turn away, thinking that Christianity has nothing to offer. Howl, howl, howl!
Yes, yes, yes. Go read the whole thing. This has been your morning dose of Yes There Is Sanity In This World Now Go Get On With Your Own Life…
Friends who betrayed me with their votes for George Bush while the republicans were busy waging one of the most vicious anti-gay campaigns in American history. Family members who love the sinner while hating the sin. They smile in your face, and they stab you in the heart. In the wake of Tim Hardaway’s very public bellyaching about much he hates gay people, Arthur Silber posts a first-rate fire and brimstone sermon up on his blog titled, We Are Not Freaks. It’s addressed to all the ersatz liberals and progressives out there that Truman Capote was talking about when he said that "A faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room", but he could just as well have been speaking for me on the day after I watched a gay teenager being shoveled into an ex-gay program simply for liking himself just as he was. That day I turned my back on all the people in my life who graciously extended their tolerance to me, but not, not really, their friendship and love.
My emailers agreed with my outrage, and they understood, at least in general terms, the source of my anger. Still, they wondered: "But, Arthur, why are you so angry? Do you think expressing that kind of anger will help to change anyone’s mind, or encourage others to try to look at these issues from a different perspective?" To explain my answer in part, I reposted yesterday an essay from two years ago: Living on the Inside…and Living on the Outside. In that piece, I detailed how and why it is undeniably true that those who enjoy the most privileged position in our culture — those who are white, heterosexual and male — cannot possibly understand, not completely, what it is like to be one of those who is shut out in different ways, and to varying degrees.
But even that essay is written from a perspective of some distance. It doesn’t fully capture the emotional reality of being marginalized, being excluded, and very often being ridiculed, and even demonized. This realization hit me once again with great force as I read a comment recently added to that lengthy thread at TAPPED. Here it is:
oh this is tedious, yet as mortally debilitating as any of the thousand cuts. what i feel, down to the core, is that i have again been brought to the fore of the class, denuded, so that the students can point and discuss the freakish example that i am, as if this were the anatomy class of In Human Bondage. except you are the freaking freak, pal. it makes me sick to hear you confess your elastic confusions, because i suffer them daily, but the primary sickness is your entitlement, your entitlement to be a jiving idiot, to muse in public about me, that I am expected to stand here as you cheerfully enumerate the social failings you participate in, do not regret, and therefore have no intention of changing. do you imagine that i live in any state of happiness because you have found room for me in your untested world view, or that I don’t know, every day of my life, that when push comes to shove you and your joshing buddies would shove me? do you somehow think, because a gay man describes your haircut, it somehow balances the force with which an entire being is declared revolting, and violently threatened, beginning with his very first memories? For your information you have not described me in any respect that is insightful, you have simply corralled me into a cage, whereby rudely pointing at me you demonstrate your limited understanding of the human heart and mind: I promise you that you are far from original in that enterprise. In fact, by so doing, you have described yourself. It is one thing to be ignorant, as we all are when it comes to fully understanding the prejudice that minorities we are not members of endure, but it is another to brag of it, which is the essence of your tone.
When you strip away all the verbiage, all the intellectual tap dancing, and all the efforts to "understand" and be "tolerant," that is the inescapable, the terrible bottom line: many of you think we are Freaks. Speaking for myself with regard to these issues, I don’t want you to "understand" me or to be "tolerant" of me. I don’t want you to "study" me, and try to graph all the various points of similarity and difference between us: I want you to recognize that I am completely and entirely a human being, just as you are. And I want you to understand fully what that means, and to genuinely mean it.
It is one thing to be openly hated and despised, as gays and lesbians are by many on the right. We’re used to that, and we got used to it a long time ago. As was required, we manufactured intellectual and emotional armor to protect ourselves. In the current climate, we have to put it on every single damned day. It weighs a great deal, and it exacts an awful price. But without it, we would suffer injuries too grievous to be borne.
But how much worse it is to be cajoled into taking off that armor — to hear you tell us that you understand we’re "just like you" in all the ways that matter, and that we’re really "just the same" — and then to read or hear about "how easy" you think it is to "make fun" of us, especially when our status as Freaks is too obvious. How much worse it is when we believe you, when you tell us you think we’re all equal — except that you can get married, while almost every leading Democrat will say, well, no, we can’t get married. But we can have "civil unions." Because, you see, Freaks don’t get married.
But we had believed you, so we took off the armor — and then you plunged the sword deep into our guts. You revealed that many of you actually do think we’re Freaks. Many of you don’t believe we’re really "just like you."
If you want to know exactly where I’m coming from these days, go on and read the whole thing. We are not freaks. We are human beings. What should have been the most wonderful, magical, life affirming moments of our lives…falling in love…finding that soulmate…making a life together…has been turned into a brutal nightmare for some of us, and a difficult, heartbreakingly painful experience for most of us, and I’m beyond asking why. The promise of love has been systematically ripped away from us for generations, and there are those who would take it away from us still, when we’ve only just begun to take it back for ourselves. We can cut your hair. We can decorate your house. We can be the butt of TV jokes. We can even have sex now. But we can’t love.
We can’t so much as kiss or hold hands in public without danger to our lives. This from a New York Times article on the controversy following the Snicker’s Superbowl ad…A Kiss Too Far?
Yet gay-bashing still occurs routinely, Mr. Patton of the Anti-Violence Project said, even in neighborhoods like Chelsea in Manhattan, where the sight of two men kissing on the street can hardly be considered a frighten-the-horses proposition. “In January some men were leaving a bar in Chelsea,” saying goodbye with a kiss, Mr. Patton said. “One friend got into a taxi and then a car behind the taxi stopped and some guys jumped out and beat up the other two.” One victim of the attack, which is under investigation by the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, was bruised and shaken. The second had a broken jaw.
“The last time I was called a faggot was on Eighth Avenue,” said Joe Windish, a longtime New Yorker who now lives in Milledgeville, Ga., with his partner of many years. “I don’t have that here, and I’m an out gay man,” said Mr. Windish, whose neighbors in what he termed “the reddest of the red states” may be fundamentalist Christians who oppose gay marriages and even civil unions, but “who all like me personally.”
Tolerance has its limits, though, as Mr. Windish found when he and his partner took a vacation on a sleepy island off the coast of Georgia. “I became aware that if I held my partner’s hand, or kissed him in public, the friendliness would stop,” he said.
Imagine living in a world where you could not so much as hold the hand of the one you love without being attacked.
(Scottsdale, Arizona) The reward for information leading to the arrest of a gang of men who attacked a gay couple outside a Scottsdale restaurant last December has been raised to $12,000 thanks to a donation from PFLAG.
Andrew Frost and Jean Rolland were set upon by as many as seven men as the couple walked out of the restaurant hand-in-hand.
Frost, 19, needed more than a dozen stitches to close wounds on his head and face. Rolland, 28, suffered many bumps and bruises.
Frost said that as he and Rolland exited the restaurant he heard someone yell "fag". He said he turned and saw two men.
Frost said that he replied to the slur and one of the men punched him. He said that at least five others rushed from the restaurant and joined the attack.
Frost and Rolland have filed a police report, but no one at the restaurant seems to have seen anything. The couple said they had never seen their attackers before.
…but no one at the restaurant seems to have seen anything. And that’s why I am not speaking now to a lot of people in my life that I used to speak to on an almost daily basis. Lovers are viciously attacked for daring to love openly and joyfully and as a warning to the rest of us not to even attempt it. It happens on the streets, it happens in the courtrooms, it happens behind the pulpit and in the pews, it happens on the campaign trail, it happens on the floor of congress and in the Oval Office and you don’t seem to have seen anything. May you be dammed.
This Is Either Good News For Gay Listeners, Or Very Bad News…
My first thought upon hearing this was, Okay…what happens to OutQ…?
To: SIRIUS Subscribers
Today is a very exciting day for SIRIUS customers. As you may have heard, SIRIUS Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio are merging to form the nation’s premier audio entertainment provider.
This combination of our two offerings will benefit you – our loyal listeners. As a single company, we’ll provide superior programming to you every day with the best of both SIRIUS and XM. Currently, XM and SIRIUS broadcast a wide range of commercial-free music channels, exclusive sports coverage, news, talk, and entertainment programming. Howard Stern. Oprah and Friends. The NFL. MLB. NBA. ESPN. CNBC. Fox News. Additionally, the combined company will be able to improve existing services such as real-time traffic information and rear-seat video as well as introduce new ones.
You see what’s missing from that list. No, no… Not just OutQ, but any indication that they’ve been providing something for people to listen to, who are sick and tired of all the right wing pap being broadcast out there, posturing as non-partisan news and information. Fox News? They tell us about Fox News (sic) and not Talk Left? But Clear Channel owns a major stake in XM.
I have a Honda Accord, and since it came with a factory installed XM radio, the first thing I did was bellyache to XM about their lack of a gay channel like Sirius had. I could have been shouting my complaints up at one of their satellites for all it mattered. So shortly after I bought the Accord I yanked the factory radio out and spent $180 plus the cost of a new radio plus the cost of installation so I could listen to OutQ on Sirius.
At the time Sirius had two other channels going for it that XM didn’t: Swing Street and Air America. But then Air America defected to XM and Sirius dropped Swing Street when they picked up Howard Stern, merging it’s programming into the god awful American Standards channel, which I think they call the Old Fart’s Channel internally. Now it’s a sickening combination of big band swing and 1950s lounge music and I hate it.
The Trance channel is now more a electro-pop channel except some evenings when it gets back to being hard core trance. The only thing that hasn’t changed for the worse since I subscribed to Sirius is OutQ. Well…and the 60s channel and the New Age channel (elevator music for my generation). Basically I’m paying their subscription fees now just to listen to Michelangelo Signorile and Sunset Cruse and a couple other channels I wouldn’t have yanked the old radio out for since XM carried them too. Actually, XM’s 40s channel is much better then Sirius’ god awful American Standards channel.
For me the promise satellite radio wasn’t so much that you could drive from one end of the country to the other without having to constantly retune your radio all the way, but that niche content that wasn’t profitable regionally, could work on a national scale. Radio that actually spoke to gay audiences only happened in some large cities, and then only for a few hours at week at most. But with the ability to reach the entire country from a satellite, my hope was that we’d finally have something that regarded us as its primary target audience, instead of "oh…yeah…and you gays too."
Ironically, there’s not a lot I actually like on OutQ. Derek & Romaine are way too crude for my liking. I just won’t listen to that. OutQ in the Morning is almost as bad sometimes. But I can forgive any gay channel that kind of crap that broadcasts Signorile and Sunset Cruse. Especially Sunset Cruse…which is a lovely gay dedicate-a-song-to-your-sweetheart program. I just love it. After a long week of reading about one goddamned attack on the gay community after another in the news, Sunset Cruse is just the thing I need to remind me that love still has a chance in this world.
My fear right now in this proposed merger is that all that will simply vanish just like my Swing Channel did when either the bean counters decide it isn’t pulling in enough listeners, or the stock block that belongs to Clear Channel (they own a major stake in XM), decides they don’t want any of that faggot stuff on their airwaves. The reason competition is a good thing isn’t to drive down prices, but to encourage producers to exploit markets their competition isn’t, and to keep the top dogs responsive to All their customers.
From The San Francisco Chronicle… An evangelical Christian minister from Missouri, has come to San Francisco to teach gays and lesbians how to become straight. And how to lie for Jesus …
The Brodeurs — who do weekly outreach in the Castro to encourage gay people to re-evaluate their sexual orientation — said they invited Desert Stream to use their church for the seminar. It cost $35 and drew participants from congregations around the Bay Area.
"Their message is about bringing the love of Jesus into people’s hearts," she said. "It’s not ‘Don’t do this. You’re evil, you’re going to hell.’ "
Well that’s certainly a welcome change from the usual hellfire and damnation spew isn’t it?
Not…
But a workshop handout written by Desert Stream founder Andy Comiskey ticked off a list of "wickedness," including lesbianism, sexual violence and child molestation, and stated: "For those who overcome the darkness, a rich and eternal inheritance. For those who refuse to overcome, eternal judgment."
Feel the love. One of the protesters outside the seminar related his story of how he’d been in an ex-gay program for eight years and it nearly drove him to suicide. But what you have to understand about these ministries is that what happens to the people in them doesn’t matter.
"I went through depression, major anxiety, panic disorder and attempted suicide."
They didn’t take him in to cure him. They took him in to use him in their little dirty war on the ability of people to freely love and be loved with or without the permission of the tribal witch doctor. There is no reverence for the sacred that begins with a lie. That seminar wasn’t about letting love come into a human heart, whether it’s the love a same sex couple find in each other or the love of Christ or the love of God Almighty. Love knows no authority but itself. That’s the problem with it. That’s why they want it out of our hearts altogether. Our hearts have to be emptied. So that they can fill them with their will. If it kills a few of us…so what?
A gay Baltimore man who’s fighting to keep his late partner buried in rural Tennessee may have to sell his car and home to fund the legal battle.
Kevin-Douglas Olive said the parents of his late partner, Russell Groff, have appealed a court ruling that granted Olive an early win in the case. The appeal effectively restarts the case, making progress a costly proposition.
Olive said he’s committed to continuing a case in which he’s already invested $8,000 — but fears his legal bills may demand another $20,000.
"I’ll do what I gotta do," he said, "but they’re telling me to expect to spend a lot more than I spent before."
Read more at the Washington Blade’s site Here. The article references the comments from the Groffs to this post on my blog that I’m pretty certain are genuine, and which if they are they show just how far into the gutter hate has led them. They’ve lied through their teeth pretty consistently throughout about the condition of Russell’s gravesite and the events that led to their lawsuit, claiming that it was neglect when it was the removal of their cheapshit insults to the man Russell loved that provoked them into going to court.
Olive said Groff became so weak that he couldn’t leave his bed to urinate. To best help the man he loved, Olive would hold the bedpan for him.
“This is my soul mate, so I just did it,” he said. “You don’t even think about it. You just do it.”
Eventually, a staph infection that originated in Groff’s gall bladder spread throughout his body, and on Nov. 23, 2004, he died.
"I just collapsed on the floor of the hospital, face down and shrieking," Olive said. "Part of me knew that was entirely inappropriate, but part of me didn’t care.”
And how does an all-American God fearing family treat the man who cared for their son in his last hours. Well…like dogshit of course…
In keeping with the burial instructions signed Nov. 18, Groff was interred in the West Knoxville Friends Cemetery outside Knoxville, Tenn.
Olive said the grave, located about 30 minutes from Groff’s childhood home, was to remain simple and clean. But Groff’s mother, Carolyn, made changes.
"She made it into this shrine that really offended the sensibilities of the Quakers," he said, "because we’re all about simplicity."
Olive said Carolyn routinely decorated the grave. At one point, she posted a picture of Groff with his female prom date, plus a poem Carolyn wrote wherein her son essentially apologized for being gay.
"I was so insulted by seeing this,” Olive said. "She was trying to paint him as this repentive person who was heterosexual, really."
After seeing that picture and poem, Olive said he could tolerate no more and cleaned his husband’s gravesite.
"When I cleared the grave, that was the final straw for her,” he said. “She filed the caveat and challenged the will."
Without a doubt Russell knew what was coming after he died, and that was why he had that will drawn up. He loved Kevin, and he didn’t want him to go through the kind of hell he knew his parents were going to bring down on him. And without a doubt, the reason why the homophobes want to deny same sex couples not just the right to marry, but Any legal rights whatsoever, is Precisely so they can twist the knife in our guts, just like the Groffs are twisting the knife in Kevin’s. There is no other plausible reason for the all-out assault on any and every possible legal status for a same sex couple, other then to facilitate this kind of grotesque scorched earth warfare where even our lover’s graves aren’t safe. None. When they talk about fighting to preserve the sacred institution of marriage, what they mean is they’re fighting to preserve the right to dig up your spouse’s grave.
A Maryland judge upheld the will, on the staringly obvious grounds that Russell knew what he was doing when he made it. Russell saw it coming. He did the only thing the law in Maryland allows a gay man do, to to protect the man he loved from it. But the Groffs are bound and determined to bleed Kevin as much as they can because now all they have in their lives is how much they hate him. He’s having to sell off possessions now, and perhaps even his house in order to pay the legal bills over this continuing fight.
I want to ask everyone reading this blog to help him out in any way they can, however much. Do you believe in love? Did it make a difference in your life? Do you remember the first time someone you loved took you into their arms? Do you remember that first kiss? Does it make you angry that some people feel as though they have a god-given right to spit in your face whenever moments like those bring you joy and peace and contentment? Kevin-Douglas Olive watched the man he loved and was loved by die, and now he’s having to fight over the ground he laid his body to rest, and I think even more then money to pay the legal bills, it would help him now to know that there are people out here who Care.
Donations can be sent via mail to the Kevin Olive Defense Fund, c/o C.W. Hardy, 715 Park Ave., Apt. B, Baltimore, MD, 21201.
As a point of interest, it looks like Kevin’s lawyer is Mark Scurti. In fact some years ago I had his law firm, Scurti and Gulling do my own will, and Medical Directives document. They’re good people, known and respected in Baltimore’s gay community for their work fighting for our legal rights.
ABC News’ Jonathan Greenberger Reports: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney offered a new explanation today for why he supported a Democrat in 1992.
That year, Romney, then a registered independent, voted for former Sen. Paul Tsongas in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary. He told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, in an interview that will air Sunday on "This Week," that his vote was meant as a tactical maneuver aimed at finding the weakest opponent for incumbent President George H.W. Bush.
"In Massachusetts, if you register as an independent, you can vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary," said Romney, who until he made an unsuccessful run for Senate in 1994 had spent his adult life as a registered independent. "When there was no real contest in the Republican primary, I’d vote in the Democrat primary, vote for the person who I thought would be the weakest opponent for the Republican."
But 12 years ago, the Boston Globe reported that Romney was giving a different explanation for his vote for Tsongas.
"Romney confirmed he voted for former U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas in the state’s 1992 Democratic presidential primary, saying he did so both because Tsongas was from Massachusetts and because he favored his ideas over those of Bill Clinton," the Boston Globe’s Scot Lehigh and Frank Phillips wrote on Feb. 3, 1994. "He added he had been sure the G.O.P. would renominate George Bush, for whom he voted in the fall election."
(Emphasis mine) Some folks unaccountibly find this a bit hard to believe…
Romney’s contention that his vote for Tsongas was a vote for the weakest opponent for Bush – a phenomenon that political scientists refer to as "raiding" – surprised Professor William Mayer of Northeastern University in Boston.
"That would have been a strange election to have done that in, in the sense that Paul Tsongas was obviously going to carry his home state" of Massachusetts, said Mayer. Tsongas won the Massachusetts primary with 66 percent of the vote.
Doubter. What’s not to trust in this fine upstanding man of God? See…he voted for the hometown candidate, whose ideas he liked. Except he didn’t. And that was then and this is now. I’ll say this for Romney…you seldom see a politician so blatantly telling the public that his word doesn’t mean a goddamned thing.
Buying a greeting card for someone’s birthday, anniversary or if they’re feeling under the weather is pretty straightforward. But what if they’re undergoing chemotherapy or struggling with depression? "Get Well Soon" probably won’t cut it.
Likewise, most cards lining the store shelves don’t work on occasions as someone leaving an abusive spouse, undergoing drug rehab or declaring their sexual orientation.
Hallmark Cards Inc., which has built its $4.2 billion empire on sentiments for life’s happier times, is releasing a new line of cards that will speak to those and other situations that the company says have either been ignored by greeting card companies or received only a smattering of attention from niche players.
Well I just know I’m going to enjoy reading the "declaring my sexual orientation" card that’s somewhere between the So Sorry You Have Cancer and Congratulations On Your Drug Rehab cards…
No topics were off-limits, said company spokeswoman Rachel Bolton, noting two cards that could be sent to gay people who have disclosed their sexuality. The cards don’t directly refer to homosexuality, only extolling the person to "Be You" or "This is who I am" or featuring a rainbow, a symbol of gay pride.
Bolton said the writing is general enough for other uses, however, with one focus group member saying they would send it to a friend starting a new job.
"Our findings determined that people didn’t want to be labeled or identified,’’ Bolton said. "We want to be inclusive and not exclusive."
Coming from the company that was protecting the sanctity of stuffed bear family life a few years ago (more about that Here), I’m probably expected to regard this as progress of sorts. Except it isn’t. Hallmark isn’t merely trying to grab a piece of the gay dollar here, they’re trying to position themselves as "inclusive and not exclusive". That card isn’t for gay customers. You don’t market a card that’s too scared to utter the word "gay" to gay people who’ve taken that difficult, nerve wracking, terrifying step of coming out to family and friends. Who the hell sends a card that can’t even utter the word "gay" to a gay person, congratulating them on coming out of the closet? Be Who You Are…Just Don’t Say It… That’s crap. The card is PR, nothing more. Here’s what’s going on…
The $7 billion greeting card industry already brims with tiny niche players who make and sell cards dealing with such things as serious illness or thanking caregivers, said Barbara Miller, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based Greeting Card Association.
But she said none of them have the ability to reach customers searching for those types of cards across the country.
Oh yes they do, if they want to exploit it. It’s called the Internet lady. It’s been four years since a Hallmark store had security escort a same sex couple out the door for trying to buy a pair of boy bears they’d discovered kissing, even though the magnets weren’t supposed to allow that, and now all of a sudden the company is a tad concerned that all those little niche players are going to run away with a big chunk of their market while they’re busy appealing to the lowest common denominator. Having a Hallmark store in shopping malls from one end of the country to the other won’t keep the piles of cash coming, in an age where people can make or buy their cards online and print them out at home. Yet even in the face of that, Hallmark can’t bring itself to reach out to that potential market, to actually be "inclusive and not exclusive". On the other hand, that’s probably exactly why Hallmark gets it so right with their core market.
This isn’t progress, it’s window dressing. Cheap, insincere sentiment from your one stop shopping center for all-purpose cheap, insincere sentiment. What you send when how you feel about yourself is more important then what the person you’re sending it to is feeling. Why is it not surprising that it’s a Hallmark moment.
Looks like Peterson Toscano has been a busy guy lately. Last Monday a piece in the NY Times on reparative therapy in NYC quoted him. Then on Wednesday Susan Campbell in The Hartford Courant wrote a column that mentioned him. The newest February 26 edition of People Magazine had a two page story about the ex-gay movement, and in it they quoted him and told some of his story. Then on Tuesday Feb 20 he’ll be appearing on the Montel Williams Show. He says they asked him to be the guest on their podcast for the program. There’s more at the site http://www.montelshow.com/. He goes back to the Montel Show at the end of the month to tape another segment. Then there is the Interview in Portland Mercury.
I don’t know why so many people seem so surprised about this…
The Enemy At Home – Dinesh D’Souza
Publisher Comments:
Whenever Muslims charge that the war on terror is really a war against Islam, Americans hasten to assure them they are wrong. Yet as Dinesh D’Souza argues in this powerful and timely polemic, there really is a war against Islam. Only this war is not being waged by Christian conservatives bent on a moral crusade to impose democracy abroad but by the American cultural left, which for years has been vigorously exporting its domestic war against religion and traditional morality to the rest of the world.
D’Souza contends that the cultural left is responsible for 9/11 in two ways: by fostering a decadent and depraved American culture that angers and repulses other societies — especially traditional and religious ones — and by promoting, at home and abroad, an anti-American attitude that blames America for all the problems of the world.
Islamic anti-Americanism is not merely a reaction to U.S. foreign policy but is also rooted in a revulsion against what Muslims perceive to be the atheism and moral depravity of American popular culture. Muslims and other traditional people around the world allege that secular American values are being imposed on their societies and that these values undermine religious belief, weaken the traditional family, and corrupt the innocence of children. But it is not "America" that is doing this to them, it is the American cultural left. What traditional societies consider repulsive and immoral, the cultural left considers progressive and liberating.
Taking issue with those on the right who speak of a "clash of civilizations," D’Souza argues that the war on terror is really a war for the hearts and minds of traditional Muslims — and traditional peoples everywhere. The only way to win the struggle with radical Islam is to convince traditional Muslims that America is on their side.
(emphasis mine) Note the appeals to traditional cultures scattered throughout. There’s a glaring problem at the core of the book, and what’s remarkable to me is that so many people see it, and yet they don’t. D’Souza’s book, which places the blame for the 9-11 terrorist attacks squarely on Liberals and western liberal democracy, has been disturbing the comfortable clubhouse atmostphere on the right ever since it came out. That’s not surprising. Here’s Stanley Kurtz, dancing around it…
Not only does D’Souza downplay and deny the profound influence of Islam on our current dilemma, he ignores an array of non-religious, or only marginally religious, factors that his own explanation is (or ought to be) directly tied to.
With all the post-9/11 attention to Islam, for example, we’ve given short shrift to Middle Eastern kinship structures-like the Muslim preference for marriage to the father’s brother’s daughter (see “Root Causes”). These marriage and family patterns inhibit political and economic development, block immigrant assimilation, and are indeed directly threatened by the sort of cultural productions D’Souza decries. Yet, while Islamists may seize upon Hollywood films and international productions of the Vagina Monologues as symbols of their underlying objections to modernity, the more important sources of conflict are the distinctively Muslim social practices that generate such complaints to begin with.
In other words, if immigrant British Muslims weren’t secluding their daughters in hopes of preserving family honor and protecting an already promised marriage to a cousin back in Pakistan, they’d be far less upset with Western movies in the first place. What’s driving the distress is less the movies that a daughter sees at college than the fact that British daughters go off to college at all, freely meet men there, and freely choose their husbands from among those men. Other British immigrant communities, with less restrictive family practices, may occasionally grouse about cultural depravity. Yet the complaints are less frequent, less deeply felt, and far less deadly. It’s the marriage practice, not the movie, that counts.
To give us insight into the Jihadist loathing for American culture, D’Souza relies on the writings of the father of modern Radical Islam, Sayyid Qutb. Qutb spent two years in America and then returned to the Middle East thoroughly disgusted by American culture. He spent the rest of his life chronicling his hatred for America’s decadent society.
Here’s where D’Souza is dishonest or careless: He informs the reader that Qutb died in 1966. He fails to inform the reader that the time Qutb spent in America was between 1948 and 1950.
Since D’Souza blames our culture for much of the Islamic world’s animus towards America, this is no small matter. The culture of the 1940’s wasn’t what it is today. Perhaps Qutb was scandalized by pop culture products of the time like the overt raciness of “The Best Years of Our Lives” or the raw sexuality contained on the typical Bing Crosby record; the man was after all a lunatic. But the culture of the late 1940’s contained none of the things that D’Souza so obviously deplores and that he postulates are inflaming the Muslim world. The 1940’s had no filthy hippies, no gangsta rap, no gay weddings.
D’Souza may think it would be a swell thing for us to turn our cultural clock back to 1949. No big deal there – to each his own. The point is that even if D’Souza were able to wave a wand and pull off such a trick, the Jihadists wouldn’t care. Qutb briefly immersed himself in our late 1940’s incarnation and emerged full of hatred.
To his everlasting credit, Hewitt specifically denounces D’Souza’s central claim:
Second, and this is also no small thing, it’s not liberals’ fault. Radical Islam hates a respectable Church-going Presbyterian family man every bit as much as it hates a spoiled libertine like Paris Hilton. As far as radical Islam is concerned, the two are in the same basic class; they’re both infidels. Short of conversion or surrender, there is nothing our society can do to appease radical Islam.
This is all true…but the problem civilization faces today isn’t specific to radical Islam.
I think the best review of The Enemy At Home I’ve read so far is Bruce Bower’s over at The Stranger. But Bower, while conservative, isn’t a winger, and he is willing to name the nature of the betrayal that D’Souza’s book represents…
D’Souza (who says he is Catholic) invites us to “imagine how American culture looks and feels to someone who has been raised in a traditional society… where homosexuality is taboo and against the law…. One can only imagine the Muslim reaction to televised scenes of homosexual men exchanging marriage vows in San Francisco and Boston.” Let it be recalled that D’Souza is referring here to a “traditional society” in which girls of 13 or 14 are routinely forced to marry their cousins, and in which the groom, if his conjugal attentions are resisted on the wedding night, is encouraged by his new in-laws to take his bride by force. Such are the sensitivities that, D’Souza laments, are so deeply offended by the American left…
He’s quick to warn, moreover, that in discussing potentially troubling aspects of Muslim culture, “we should be on guard against the blinders of ethnocentrism.” In short, while inviting conservative Christians to buy the idea that Muslim family values are essentially equivalent to their own, he wants them to overlook the multitudinous—and profoundly disturbing—ways in which they aren’t. He labors consistently to minimize this value gap—and thereby reinforce his argument that today’s terrorism (far from perpetrating a centuries-long tradition of violent jihad) is, quite simply, a reaction to America’s post-’60s moral dissipation. He would have his readers believe that if only the U.S. returned to the values of the Eisenhower era, our Muslim adversaries would let us be. But he deliberately obscures the mountains of evidence that for “traditional Muslims,” even small-town 1940s America wouldn’t do.
The question is, would it even do for D’Souza and his neighbors in the kook pews. I’m not being melodramatic here.
For those who cherish freedom, 9/11 was intensely clarifying. Presumably it, and its aftermath, have been just as clarifying for D’Souza, whose book leaves no doubt whatsoever that he now unequivocally despises freedom—that open homosexuality and female “immodesty” are, in his estimation, so disgusting as to warrant throwing one’s lot in with religious totalitarians…the book he’s written is nothing less than a call for America’s destruction. He is the enemy at home. Treason is the only word for it.
Yes. Yes it is. And yet…how many times have we heard the pulpit thumpers of the religious right calling down God’s wrath on America for it’s sins? Didn’t Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwall state flatly, while the rubble that was once the World Trade Center was still smoldering, that America, specifically American immorality, was to blame for 9-11? Isn’t there a traveling preacher named Fred Phelps running around the nation hoisting signs at the funerals of dead American soldiers (like he did the funerals of gay people like Matthew Shepard), that praise the terrorists for killing them? The threat America, the threat civilization itself faces today, isn’t radical Islam, it’s religious fundamentalism. But you can appreciate why Kurtz and Hewitt are loath to say so…that’s a key part of the republican base nowadays after all isn’t it.
Critics on the right dance around one of the key distinguishing features of that fundamentalism, preferring to refer it delicately a reaction to "immodesty", but note that it isn’t the immodesty of males that’s the issue. Kurtz nearly says it when he talks about the culture of arranged marriages in Middle eastern cultures.
…for D’Souza, it’s enough to note that the virtues praised by most traditional cultures make up “pretty much the same list.” D’Souza goes so far as to equate “the traditional morality that holds sway in all traditional cultures” with the “virtual moral consensus in America prior to the 1960’s.”
That would certainly have surprised the 1878 Supreme Court, which unanimously rejected the practice of polygamy on the grounds of its incompatibility with democracy. (See “Polygamy Versus Democracy.”) Polygamy, the court said, embodies a “patriarchal principle” characteristic of societies in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa — a principle incompatible with the American system of government.
Now polygamous relationships where they’re entered into freely by both men and women don’t necessarily embody that patriarchal principal. But where it becomes an enforced polygyny that regards women as the property of men then it isn’t just incompatible with our system of government, it is anathema to the principals of individual liberty and equal justice that is its philosophical bedrock. You simply cannot sustain a democracy where people are literally regarded as property, as the United States found out during the horrors of our civil war. That includes women. And where you find this deeply entrenched religious fundamentalism, you inevitably find a bedrock of hatred toward sexual freedom. Fundamentalism hates all freedom, but in particular, it absolutely despises the sexual freedom of women.
After his 1983 graduation from Dartmouth College, D’Souza moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked for Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a conservative organization strongly critical of coeducation, affirmative action, and campus access to birth control. As writer and editor-in-chief for Prospect, the organization’s magazine, D’Souza wrote a March 1984 cover story identifying a Freshman undergraduate who had begun a sexual relationship with another student against her mother’s wishes. D’Souza offered details of the woman’s sex life, and criticized Princeton University for paying the student’s tuition fees after the student’s mother withdrew financial support.
The ensuing scandal was reported in The New York Times. D’Souza claimed that the woman’s name had been published as the result of a "proofreading error" and that he "care[s] about the girl; that’s why [he] wrote the story."
No, no…I strongly doubt that was any kind of accident. What D’Souza was doing there was little different from what the Saudi morality police do every day when they see women who, in their considered opinion, are behaving immodestly and smack them upside the head if they’re feeling good, or cut it off altogether if they’re feeling…well…traditional.
If you want to know where someone stands in the war between civilization and fundamentalism, their attitudes toward the dignity and equality of women is a good place to start looking. The fundamentalist hatred of modernity points back, time and again, to its core contempt for women. And the republican base is just brimming with it.
A few days ago I posted this cartoon about Bill Donohue (he of of the Catholic League) bellyaching that the Edward’s campaign had hired two "trash talking" bloggers, who in his esteemed opinion were anti catholic bigots. What had apparently set him off was the writing of one of them, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, about the Catholic Church’s war on contraception and abortion. Well…you can see where this is going…right?
Because I had the nerve to be critical of the Catholic church’s stance on birth control and abortion—nevermind their political opposition to distributing condoms to fight HIV, a stance that has helped usher thousands and possibly millions to their untimely deaths—I’ve gotten a number of letters from people who call themselves “Christians”, as Bill Donohue also calls himself.
Bill managed to get his faithful up in arms over what this woman wrote. Here is a sampling of what they wrote back…
Andy Driggers from Dallas, TX was also so moved by my criticisms of religious anti-choicers, that he wrote:
Problem with women like you, you just need a good fucking from a real man! Living in Texas myself, I know you haven’t found that real Texan yet. But once your liberal pro feminist ass gets a real good fucking, you might see the light. Until then, enjoy your battery operated toys b/c most real men wouldn’t want to give you the fucking you deserve b/c the shit that would come out of you ears.
An example, from Paul Bernard of Scottsdale, AZ:
i like the way you trash talk i don’t particularly want to have sex with you but i would like a blow job.
Bud Phelps, another person who opposes "bigotry", as defined by right wing shill Bill Donohue.
It’s just too bad your mother didn’t abort you. You are nothing more than a filthy mouth slut. I bet a couple of years in Iraq being raped and beaten daily would help you appreciate America a little. Need a plane ticket ?
Romanco De Leone was also moved by Donohue’s poignant claims about insulating the Catholic church from legitimate criticisms.
YOU RACIST WHORE. FAT UGLY BITCH. SUCK MY LONG COCK ASSHOLE I HOPE YOU KIDS NEVER LIVE AND YOUR PARENTS DIE A TRAGIC DEATH YOU ASSHOLE BITCH!
I HOPE YOUR WOMB IS BARREN AND YOUR CAREER PLUMMETS TO HELL YOU BITCH
Whore. Bitch. Slut. You just need a good fucking from a real man. There’s the enemy civilization is facing today. There’s the enemy civilization has always faced. And there’s the burning core of hatred it feels for it. We’ve taken their wimmin away from them. And with that comes all the primitive instincts for survival and aggression of the cornered savage. They despise civilization, because it frees women from obedience to them; and with that goes the only way they know how to sire children, and acquire status.
You can argue that American fundamentalists aren’t as violent as Islamic radicals in the grand scheme of things, but I would argue that’s because they don’t feel quite so powerless against their own societies as the Islamists do against the west. A decisive victory in the culture wars by liberals and moderates against fundamentalism, particularly in the struggle against the independence of the courts, a decisive shift in power toward the democrats and against the republicans, and I believe we’ll all be singing a different tune about that.
And Hewitt, perhaps, is more right then he knows. The church-going Presbyterian family man, provided he has even a vaguely live and let live attitude, is hated every bit as much, and regarded as no different at all, from the spoiled libertine in the eyes of the Fundamentalist. He could be opposed to abortion, and yet if he does not object to contraception then he might as well be an abortionist. He could be opposed to same-sex marriage and if he is willing to grant gay couples Any kind of legal status, even merely hospital visitation rights, then he might as well be a homosexual himself. If he is willing to grant people any kind of sexual freedom, no matter how limited, then he is the enemy, and he must be destroyed.
You can argue that the entire religious right mindset is one of assumed priviledge and status over others. That, we are the people of God and the rest of you are the devil’s tools attitude. Nationalism. Racism. Homophobia. But I am convinced now that it all reaches its climax in its need to dominate women. Reading the rhetoric and watching all the flag waving going back and forth between the middle eastern radicals and our own home grown ones since 9-11, I am convinced now that at its core the war between civilization and fundamentalism is a fight who owns women’s bodies. Everything else about it springs from that one central obsession. The attacks on science, the attacks on liberal democracy, public education, science, contraception, sexual license, pop culture…anything that enables a world where women might even want to choose for themselves is the enemy, and must be destroyed.
Even I think, the war on homosexuality. Notice how it’s almost always male homosexuality that they bellyache the most about. People smirk that it’s because lesbians titulate them, but in the kook pews lesbians are thoroughly destested too, because they reject men. But with gay males the hatred seems to burn a tad hotter, and I think it’s more then their regarding us as traitors to our gender. We’re the ones whose sexuality demonstrates that males can take their lovers as equals, that a male doesn’t have to be dominant, that he can be taken and well as take, can give themselves wholeheartedly to their mate as well as recieve, can…well…be fucked after all…and still be gloriously, assertively male. How do you beat into a woman’s head that men were created by God to be the head of the household, to which they must Gracefully Submit, when that kind of thing is going on? We are males whose sexuality completely denies the theology of natural male dominance. The street punk may feel his brittle manhood threatened by the sight of two guys holding hands and lash out, but this is why the mullahs say we have to be stoned to death. We break the sexual pecking order.
At the core of its hatred, with all it’s higher principles stripped away, fundamentalism is about women, of that I am currently convinced. Western civilization and its liberal democracies have taken their wimmin away. For that they have to be destroyed.
Is it really so surprising that a man who plastered the intimate details of a female college student’s sex life across the pages of his magazine because she was defying her parents, that rails against birth control, co-habitation and women who find fulfillment outside of the home, would write a book essentially siding with terrorists from a "traditional culture" that views rape as a legitimate means of controlling its women? No. Not really. What’s surprising is that more of them don’t say so outright like he did. I’ve been waiting now, pretty much since 9-11, for someone on the far right to write the book D’Souza did. If I’m surprised about anything, it’s that it’s taken so long.
I got a phone call a few moments ago from a local newspaper concerning one of my posts and the follow-up comments to it. I’m at home, telecommuting today because the roads here in Baltimore are in pretty bad shape after all the sleet and freezing rain we had last night and this morning. I heard the answering machine pick up and a voice ask if they’d called the guy who runs this blog. There seemed to be some slight confusion over what kind of a blog this is and I just want to take a moment to clarify that for some of you who may have tuned in late. I can understand the confusion. Blogging isn’t what it was back when I started doing it. It’s becoming it’s own big business now. But that was never what I intended with mine.
My name is Bruce Garrett and I live in Baltimore, Maryland. I’m a 53 year old single gay guy. I’m a senior software engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins here in Baltimore. I paint and draw, have an insatiable camera bug, and spend too much time in front of a computer, or at my drafting table, and not nearly enough out looking for a boyfriend. But I’m a deathly shy sort, and probably that’s why I do a lot of my socializing on the Net. I’ve been addicted to the online world since the mid 1980s, and the first PC BBS systems. As a gay man especially, this technology has always appealed to me. I am certain in my own mind, that PC networks have been a powerful force in the struggle for gay civil rights ever since the Reagan years. They allows us to see ourselves, to see our lives, in our own words, in our own stories straight from the source and not second hand, filtered through the media of the heterosexual majority. When I was a teenager back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the only things I knew about gay people, was what I was told by heterosexuals. But we no longer have to see ourselves through the eyes of heterosexuals anymore. I thank the personal computer for that. But then, I’m a bit of a computer geek too.
This is my blog. I started it way back in 2000 as a personal online diary of thoughts and stuff going on in my life that my scattered-all-across-the-country family and friends could tune into whenever they wanted to know what was up with Bruce. Back then, blogs were still a pretty new thing, and mostly the kind of personal online diaries that I started here. And that’s basically how I still think of this one, except it’s become a tad more political now then I’d thought it ever would be. Chalk that down to the times we live in. I had one other thought in mind when I started it, and that was by putting my day to day life out there for strangers to see, I might make some small difference in how they saw gay people, and perhaps how some gay folk might see themselves. The more openly we all live our lives, the less effective the hate monger’s tales about us are.
At first I my site was just a basic web site account I got with my yearly Newsguy Usenet News account. It was located at extra.newsguy.com/~bgarrett. In December 2001 I was talking with my friend Jon Larimore, who used to run the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS in Arlington Virginia. He was running the Zzapp Internet Service at the time, and I asked him how hard it would be to set up my own web site with my own domain. Not hard at all says he, and there and then he offered to host me free of charge on his servers because he felt my words should have a place of their own on the web. We sat down together and checked the domain registry at Network Solutions and lo and behold brucegarrett.com and brucegarrett.net were available. I was surprised and delighted that nobody had taken them yet, and I snapped them up. Then Jon set me up with space on his servers and I moved my pages from Newsguy to their new home at brucegarrett.com.
I started my blog fresh the following January, because I wanted a better look to it then the bare text file that it was previously. And I added a cartoon page. In my high school years, my political cartoons about Nixon and Vietnam were all over the school. I decided to take up political cartooning again, in part for something to set my web site apart from the others, and in part because it’s an art form I love, and I’d been very disappointed that the mainstream political cartoonists were so skittish about tackling the gay civil rights struggle (though some of them have become more willing to lately). I figured I’d add a photo gallery and some of my fiction later. Some of you poking around here may occasionally see references to The Skywatchers of Aden. That’s a fantasy/Alternate Earth series I’d created some years ago. At one time I had about a half dozen short stories in the series, and two novel length stories posted here. I’ve since taken them down for some major re-writes, and to add illustrations when I manage to find a few more hours in a day.
Jon has since retired, and Zzapp was sold, and last year I moved my web site to Winters Web Works, the folks who also host This Modern World. Jonah Winters runs a great web hosting service, I’ve been with him a year now, and I would recommend him to anyone.
Apart from the cartoon page, I never intended this blog to be primarily a political thing. It’s just sort of turned out that way, because there is so much in the news nowadays that makes me angry and I need a place to vent. For years that place was the Usenet newsgroup alt.politics.homosexuality. I was a regular participant in that newsgroup from 1992 to 2002, and then my online venting pretty much took up residence here. I think the reason for it is that I can more easily link to stuff on a web page then in a Usenet posting, which ideally should be plain ascii text only. I can’t for example, easily include images of crap like this…
…in a Usenet post. But it’s the sort of thing I think people need to see to understand what’s happening to their gay and lesbian neighbors in this country now, and why we fight. So now I pretty much vent exclusively on my blog. Occasionally I vent in the comments of other people’s blogs.
So that’s it. This is the personal online space of one middle aged (there…I said it) gay guy. That’s still really all I visualize it as being. It isn’t topical, in the sense that Eschaton or Daily KOS or Pam’s House Blend or Box Turtle Bulletin or Ex-Gay Watch are topical. This is my soapbox, my message board to the world and my art gallery. I have a fairly small, but it seems very regular set of readers here, judging from my server logs, most of whom don’t email or leave comments but keep coming back all the same and I am just amazed and gratified by that (thank you!). My brother in Oceano pings this place regularly. Some old classmates and friends do also. My regular traffic here seems to break down mostly between folks who come to read the blog, and folks who ping my cartoon page. I keep trying to nudge folks from the one to look at the other with cross links but it seems that some people just want to look at the cartoons, and some just want to read the blog. That’s fine. I’m pleased and amazed that complete strangers can come here and find something they like enough to keep coming back. I don’t advertise this blog like some others are doing now. I doubt I ever will. If I ever get around to producing cartoon books or photo books I’ll probably advertise those.
You gotta love this technology. Once upon a time the only way we had of seeing ourselves was through the news media and commercial pop culture. Now we can talk to each other, listen to each other, firsthand. Via other people’s blogs I’ve discovered so many things about my world I would never have discovered otherwise. I’ve found new music. New artists to watch. Books and essays I would never have heard of otherwise. Places to visit. Things to think about. Often, when news is breaking somewhere, I can find local bloggers and get the local take on things firsthand. These are amazing times to be living in. They say the world is a much smaller place now, but I can remember when my world pretty much ended at the horizon line. If I wanted to know what was going on beyond it, I had to wait for the evening newscast, or the morning paper. Now I just go find out. My world, and yours, is bigger now. Much, much bigger, and vastly more engaging. Lets hear it for blogs.
There are those who do not believe that the institution of marriage is under assault. There are those who do not believe that same-sex marriage is a knowing attempt to undermine the nature of marriage. There are those who do not believe that many homosexuals bear a particular animus for heterosexual marriage, and have designs beyond mere tolerance.
Then there are those of us who live in the real world.
You need to pay attention to what Shapiro is saying because it’s all there, plain as day. Gay people in his reckoning want the right to marry Specifically in order to destroy marriage. And because we hate it so much we’re willing to throw our very selves at it to destroy it. Dig it. According to Shapiro, our ultimate weapon of choice for destroying marriage is…us. Shapiro isn’t merely saying in his Human Events article that we want to destroy marriage, not merely that we hate the institution of marriage because we know that it represents a spiritual state that only heterosexuals can enter into, he’s saying that we know just how depraved and unfit our relationships are, so we want to have our relationships embraced by it, in order that our depravity will destroy it. If you still have trouble believing how thoroughly the gutter has demonized homosexual people in their own minds, read that article. It says it all. When Ben Shapiro looks at gay people, he simply does not see human beings. He can’t. He sees only monsters. This is how bigots think.
What provokes him is the initiative filed in Washington State recently, in the wake of the supreme court ruling last year that the state had a legitimate interest in restricting marriage to opposite sex couples for the welfare of children. Activists in the state have simply called the heterosexual majority on it, by filing a referendum of their own to make having children mandatory in order to be married. No children, no marriage. Of course no one expects it to pass, but that’s not to say there won’t be a lot of fun to be had watching the religious right argue that the ability to bear children is only a barrier to marriage for same sex couples.
Shapiro sees the weakness here. Basing the arguments against same-sex marriage on children makes no sense if you’re going to let opposite sex couples who will not or can not have children marry anyway. The exception disproves the rule, and makes it clear that the issue isn’t children at all, but homosexuality. The problem for Ben and his kind, is that in defending the exclusion of same sex couples from marriage simply because they are same sex couples, the argument then becomes chillingly honest in its core bigotry.
Shapiro’s article rises to almost Orson Scott Card levels of contempt for the inner lives of homosexual people in its matter-of-fact exaltation of heterosexual coupling as something sacred and divine. But as usual with the right, the rhetoric of the sacred is merely excusing not devotional. A squirt or two of Righteous Men Of God perfume sprayed over the stench of that open sewer they call their conscience, in the hope that it will be a tad less obvious to anyone with a nose…
Advocates of same-sex marriage argue that gender is literally meaningless. It is for that reason that they compare gender to race in legal contexts…
Well I don’t know anyone supporting same-sex marriage who thinks gender is literally meaningless, only that in this particular context, a legal, secular covenant of marriage, it’s irrelevant. There is just no factual basis for asserting otherwise.
It isn’t children…
If gender is meaningless, children do not need both mother and father; a father and a father, two mothers, six fathers and a mother — any or all may suffice. To homosexual marriage proponents, the fact that only the sexual union between men and women produces children is an unfortunate accident of nature.
But, this is exactly what Washington State referendum throws back in the faces of crackpots like Shapiro. In fact, children have no bearing whatsoever on the ability of a couple to marry or not. You are not required to have children, you are not required to be fit to raise children, you are not even required to be Capable of having your own biological children. All you have to be, is an opposite sex couple. And here Ben illustrates perfectly the reason why that’s purely an animus based form of discrimination…
Gender is not meaningless, of course. The radical individualism that denies all distinction between men and women is deeply pernicious. It denies the spiritual in mankind. It denies the obvious physical and spiritual bounty springing from traditional marriage…In one sense, Washington’s same-sex advocates do us a favor: They make clear that in order to deny homosexual marriage, we must uphold the beautiful and natural distinctions between men and women. They also make clear that we must uphold the value of heterosexuality over homosexuality. We must take up the gauntlet and, in doing so, vindicate the possibility of a higher spiritual elevation through the deepest possible human relationship.
(emphasis mine)
And there it is: Homosexuals don’t love…they just have sex…
Shapiro’s position is that marriage is a sacred institution that same sex couples are simply incapable of entering into, not merely because they don’t have the right combination of genitals, but because they do not, Can Not, love one another as deeply, as wholeheartedly, as devotedly as heterosexuals do. Heterosexual love is spiritual. What homosexuals do is merely carnal.
This isn’t exactly the first time I’ve heard this argument. I’ve had people tell me to my face as far back as my teen years that they flat-out didn’t believe that a same sex couple could possibly be capable of loving each other as deeply or as wholeheartedly as a heterosexual couple. And this is the unspoken (sometimes spoken outright) premise behind ever dolled up statistic you’ve ever read about how promiscuous homosexuals are. Homosexuals don’t love…they just have sex… Now…re-read that first part I quoted you…
There are those who do not believe that the institution of marriage is under assault. There are those who do not believe that same-sex marriage is a knowing attempt to undermine the nature of marriage. There are those who do not believe that many homosexuals bear a particular animus for heterosexual marriage, and have designs beyond mere tolerance.
Then there are those of us who live in the real world.
A particular animus for heterosexual marriage… So…follow the thinking here: Homosexuals are depraved. So depraved they cannot possibly enter into the kinds of loving and devoted intimate relationships that heterosexuals do. To even consider putting their dirty, brief, barren sexual assignations on the same plain as heterosexual love amounts to a despicable attack on the very human capacity to love and cherish, body and soul, ’till death do you part. Heterosexual love is spiritual. Homosexuality is just empty lustful rutting, utterly devoid of any deep spiritual meaning for the people involved.
But here’s the problem with all this: if homosexuals are incapable of feeling that kind of tender, cherishing human love, then why are they so damn insistent about having the right to marry? What is all this crap about securing their relationships, providing for one another, hospital visitation and all that? Why would homosexuals even care about all that? Why aren’t they all just laughing it off that they can’t get married? Oh…look at all those silly heterosexuals, going on about that love thing again…how boring and pointless… Why do they fight for their sterile relationships so fiercely? What could their cheap tricks, their empty, barren assignations, possibly mean to them?
It must be envy. It must be envy turned to hate. Homosexuals must be so utterly depraved that they want to drag everyone else down into their gutter too. Because they can’t bear to witness the sight of that higher spiritual elevation, that deepest possible human relationship that they can never enter into themselves.
Next time someone hears this little gutter crawling maggot use the phrase "Love the sinner, hate the sin", or something like it, please laugh in his face. If any side in this fight is incapable of experiencing the emotion of love, it’s the one that keeps insisting that love is something you feel for a gender, not a person. No Ben…lust is what you feel for a gender. It’s how we’re wired as sexual beings. And yes…most people mate to the opposite sex. But some of us mate to the same sex. Love is what transcends all that, and takes it to that higher plain that you know absolutely nothing whatsoever about, because you can’t see the person, for the gender.
Advocates of same-sex marriage argue that gender is literally meaningless.
That’s simply ignorant. What the right asserts is that gender is everything. What anyone with half a brain knows is that there is more to a person then their gender. But this kind of thinking past surface appearances has always been hard for right wingers to get their minds wrapped around. Consider the difficulty they’ve always had comprehending that there is more to a person then the color of their skin. Get one of these drooling morons started on The Bell Curve sometime. Go ahead. It’ll be fun.
It’s probably somewhat easier for a gay person to see the confusion here then a straight person. Because heterosexuals mate to the opposite sex, it’s all too easy for them to mistake the intimate and spiritual complementary nature of two lovers for their gender. But the complement isn’t the gender, it’s the person. Otherwise, any two random opposite sex pairs must be equally capable of experiencing that same spiritual intimacy and clearly that just simply isn’t true. Some people are not only incompatible, but explosively so. And most of us know all this from our day to day experience in that real world right wingers can’t bear to look at because their cheapshit conceits wouldn’t survive it. Some people just plain don’t get along. And some people…just can’t live without each other.
If homosexual sex wasn’t rewarding and satisfying to homosexuals then we wouldn’t do that. So much so goddamned obvious…right? Yes you babbling idiot, the parts fit. And I’m here to tell you they work very well in that configuration thank you. The first time I put my hands on a guy I desired, felt the muscle and bone under his skin, something deep down inside of me Just Lit Up. I had no idea what the word ‘passion’ meant before that. I sure as hell knew what it meant afterward. If homosexual sex wasn’t rewarding and satisfying to homosexuals then we wouldn’t do that.
But it takes more then sex to make a marriage. It takes more then a sexually compatible gender. Any couple, gay or straight, whose only common ground between them is sex, isn’t likely to last long. Sex can seal an intimate soul-to-soul bond between two people. It can join a couple together where there is love, and lift them both to that higher spiritual plain. But it cannot put love someplace where it isn’t. You cannot make sex the basis of a marriage, it simply won’t work. What makes it work, is the way two people complement each other deep down inside. It is the people, not their gender, that make a marriage.
It doesn’t take a radical individualist to see how this works, just someone with even a meager regard for the essential beauty and dignity of the human race. We are not ants in an anthill, or bees in a beehive, each of us predestined to live out the measure of our lives according to our biological caste. We are human beings, each of us endowed with our own unique personality and consciousness. That diversity among individuals is what has made us so successful as a species. But it also means that we have somewhat complicated love lives. It’s easy to jump in the sack for a one night stand with a willing date…that’s just an instinct that’s older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates. It’s much, Much harder to find a soulmate and make a life together with them. If gender was all there was to it, that wouldn’t be true. The country music singers would have to find something else besides broken hearts and lonely nights to sing about.
But human cultures for generations and even today some cultures still, have tried to behave as if it Were true. Arranged marriages. Strict rules on marrying outside your faith, or your class, or your race. As if the human heart knows these things more then it knows the beloved person within. If anything destroyed marriage the way the Ben Shapiros of the world knew it, it was the Enlightenment, and Democracy. But then religious fanatics and secular totalitarians have long despise both of these human events.
The ironies here are monumental. You have a political movement that ostentatiously stands for individual freedom against big government and the so-called nanny state, that categorically rejects the fact that the most spiritual and intimate of all human relationships is between two individual people, and not a couple of faceless gender stereotypes. You have them arguing in all seriousness that this most intimate and spiritual of human relationships only exists to benefit society, rather then the two people whose lives are at the center of it. You have a political movement that stands squarely against Darwin, and puts on a really swell show of moral outrage at the very idea that human beings are part of the animal kingdom too, arguing that a biological fact we share with nearly every other vertebrate species on this good earth counts for more then the unique humanity of the individuals who make up a couple. And, most amazingly of all, here is a political movement that avails itself of every excuse it can grab to bellyache about the sexualization of America, telling us that it’s the sex a couple has that makes a marriage, not the love they feel for, and give to, each other. How much more of this do people have to see before they finally get it, that the religious right and their American conservative enablers are to marriage, as brothels are to chastity?
They don’t give a good goddamn about marriage. They care about power. They care a Lot about power. Here’s their spirituality: They want to tell us how to worship, what churches we can go to, and when and what God to believe in and how to pray to it. They want to tell us who we can marry, and why, and when we can have sex with them, and when we can’t and why. They want us to understand that how much we may love someone it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether or not we get their permission. Their permission to worship. Their permission of have sex. Their permission to love. And above all else they want us to understand that our fulfillment in life isn’t to be found in the arms of the one we love, but in how well we serve them.
Think I’m being overwrought here? Two Words: Radical. Individualism.
That’s not just how Ben is putting it these days, that’s a catch phrase now all throughout the kook pews. Radical Individualism. And a radical individualist is someone who holds…
…these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
It is not merely the human rights of gay people that are at stake here. It is not merely the intimate lives of gay people that are on the chopping block if these people get their final way.
Take one last look again, at how completely certain in his own mind Ben is, that same sex couples are incapable of loving as completely, as wholeheartedly, as opposite sex couples are. There is the unmovable prejudice. But you have to understand, it’s not just about homosexuals. We are not human beings in their regard. But most people who walk this earth aren’t either. Ben and his tribe are the True Humans. The rest of us are the mud people. Only True Humans feel. Only True Humans have needs. The rest of us have our place. That is what they believe. That is the world they inhabit. That is why appeals to basic human decency do not reach them.
The forecast for Tuesday evening From NOAA just now…
.TUESDAY NIGHT…FREEZING RAIN. RAIN POSSIBLE AFTER MIDNIGHT. ONE
QUARTER OF AN INCH OF ICE ACCUMULATION POSSIBLE. LOWS IN THE UPPER
20S. NORTHEAST WINDS 10 TO 15 MPH. CHANCE OF PRECIPITATION NEAR 100
PERCENT.
Ice is the worst. I’d rather have three feet of snow then a quarter inch of ice. Snow you can shovel. Ice you practically have to take a pick axe to. And that much of it will start bringing down branches and powerlines for sure and leave a lot of dead trees behind come spring. We could be in for a bad week in February here…
NEWS ITEM: Bill Donohue Demands The Edwards Campaign Fire Two Liberal Bloggers For "Trash Talking"
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League demanded this week that presidential candidate John Edwards fire two liberal bloggers his campaign had hired. In a statement on Tuesday, Donohue accused Amanda Marcotte, a regular contributor to the blog Pandagon and Melissa McEwan, of Shakespeare’s Sister, of expressing "anti-Catholic opinions". "John Edwards is a decent man who has had his campaign tarnished by two anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots", said Donohue.
"Name for me a book publishing company in this country, particularly in New York, which would allow you to publish a book which would tell the truth about the gay death style." [MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, 2/27/04]
"The gay community has yet to apologize to straight people for all the damage that they have done." [MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, 4/11/05]
Addressing former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) in a press release, Donohue said: "[W]hy didn’t you just smack the clergyman in the face? After all, most 15-year-old teenage boys wouldn’t allow themselves to be molested. So why did you?" [10/4/06] "We’ve already won. Who really cares what Hollywood thinks? All these hacks come out there. Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? And I’m not afraid to say it. … Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism. We have nothing in common. But you know what? The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost." [MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, 12/8/04]
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