Back in the day, there was a saying about hallucinogens, and I would argue that it applies to any recreational drug, that what they do to you, depends on what you do to them. That is, things like that don’t give you courage, don’t make you more creative, don’t give you profound insights into the Cosmic All, don’t in short, make you anything you’re already not. They just bring things out of you, that were always there to begin with.
As we ‘re inundated with quotes from Robert Draper’s revealing book on Bush, I kind of enjoyed this one, on drinking:
Discussing his past battles with alcohol, he says he would never be able to make decision on war if he was still drinking.
“Exercise helps. And I think prayer helps,” he says. “I wouldn’t be President if I kept drinking. You can get sloppy, can’t make decisions. It clouds your reason, absolutely.”
Wasn’t the War on Terror modeled after the struggle against Nazism? And didn’t Sir Winston Churchill make a resounding re-entry in the daily lexicon after the events of 9/11? What would the world have looked like if Sir Winston had applied the same rigor to his alcohol consumption as GWB? Here’s a clue:
His drinking habits were admirably fetishistic – preferably Pol Roger, served at precisely the right temperature (he was delighted when the gift of a refrigerator from Beaverbrook in 1926 obviated the need to dilute it with ice) and interspersed with much brandy and port.
The papers of Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s lend-lease administrator, contain several good examples of the war leader’s zealous interest in his own consumption. For instance, Hopkins describes finding Churchill in January 1943 ‘in bed in his customary pink robe, and having, of all things, a bottle of wine for breakfast’. Viscount Alanbrooke made the same observation, and Eden’s diary mentions Churchill taking a ’stiff whiskey and soda, at 8.45 a.m’.
A Foreign Office official described a dinner with Churchill as ,a varied and noble procession of wines with which I could not keep pace – champagne, port, brandy, Cointreau: Winston drank a good deal of all, and ended with two glasses of whisky and soda.’
As one of his commenters noted, if drinking heavily was all that it takes to win a war, the Russians would have won the cold war because the Kremlin alone probably consumed enough vodka to float a battleship.
I like to think that my Baptist upbringing, combined with Dad’s side of the family’s cheerful hedonism, gave me a sensibility toward the pleasures of the flesh that isn’t so much neurotic, as reasonable. But my friends would probably disagree. I was a very inhibited little dweeb growing up, but by the time I was out of college I could let my hair down a bit and enjoy getting all stoned and silly with my friends and, as John Steinbeck said in Travels With Charlie, take my hangovers as a consequence and not as punishment. But my comfort zone with alcohol exists only to the degree that I feel I don’t really Need it in order to enjoy myself. It’s when I find myself feeling like I need a drink, that I absolutely won’t touch it.
There’s a practical, as well as self-righteous side to that: if I’m already miserable, then getting high will only make my misery grow to exalted proportions and I don’t need that when I’m having major life problems. Also, no matter how high I get, some part of my brain, probably the Baptist part, never stops nagging me about whatever it is that’s making me miserable, that I need to take care of. So I might as well fix whatever the problem is first, before I can even think about letting my hair down and enjoying myself. In Vino Veritas…and the truth is that drink can’t make you anything that you’re already not. The only thing that comes out of a bottle, is you.
And the thing is, a stinking drunken crawling on the floor blasted Winston Churchill is still Winston Churchill and drunk or sober Bush is still Bush. And given my druthers I’d rather be completely wasted in company with Churchill and Grant and Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken and Ben Franklin any of dozens of famous historical drinkers then in the company of a stone cold sober George Bush, even if I had a big bottle of Kahlua to take refuge in. There is no salvation in drink. It does not make life better. It does not improve morons. It does not unblock a blockhead. It sure as shit won’t put a conscience in an empty hole, let alone grow someone a brain.
After the plane filled, and the flight attendants began their safety spiel, Ebbert was asked to step off the plane by a customer service supervisor, identified by the airline only as “Keith.”
They walked out onto the jet bridge, where Keith told Ebbert her clothing was inappropriate and asked her to change. She explained she was flying to Tucson for only a few hours and had brought no luggage.
“I asked him what part of my outfit was offensive,” she said. “The shirt? The skirt? And he said, ‘The whole thing.’ ”
Keith asked her to go home, change and take a later flight. She refused, citing her appointment. The plane was ready to leave, so Keith relented. He had her pull up her tank top a bit, pull down her skirt a bit, and return to her seat.
There is a photo of the women to go with the column, and I’m a tad amazed there was any fuss at all made over what the lady was wearing. It’s not like Southwest is the Queen Mary of airlines where formal attire may be required. It’s the goddamned Greyhound Bus line of air travel. You want a better class of clientèle, raise your prices, make your seats bigger, serve champaign and compete for the first class crowd. Otherwise, don’t complain if your passengers are dressed for shopping for the blue light special at Target, let alone dining at Hooters (the lady in question was a Hooters waitress, but she was not in uniform. And considering what Stewardesses in the old Pacific Southwest Airlines company used to wear not all that long ago, I don’t see that they need to be bellyaching about their passengers wearing miniskirts).
What interested me was that the discussion on Fark.Com immediately focused on the woman’s looks, as being a factor in whether or not her dress was appropriate. It reminded me of a Scott Adams cartoon in Dogbert’s Clues For The Clueless. Titled "Public Displays Of Affection", it begins with Dogbert saying that, "depending on how attractive you are, people will experience varying levels of revulsion at your PDA…" What follows are three panels of a little old granny lady beholding various couples smooching. She looks on fondly while the beautiful couple embrace, scolds the average looking couple for getting too close, and tries to whack the ugly couple over their heads with her cane for even considering a kiss in public.
Which is to say, beauty has its own rules. Sometimes that gets really annoying, hence the popularity of blond jokes. And sure enough, someone in that thread posted a joke about a blond getting on an airplane.
When I first started hearing them, ages ago, I thought blond jokes were a tad cruel and a bit misogynist. But I soon realized that, with very little effort, you can translate blond jokes into Twink jokes…
A twink gets on an airplane and immediately sits down in the first class section. A stewardess asks to see his ticket and it’s a coach ticket so she tells him that he has to go back and sit in coach.
The twink winks at her and says "No. I’m young, I’m hot, and I’m going to California First Class."
So the stewardess gets the captain, and the captain walks over to where the twink is sitting and says, "Look young man, you buy a coach ticket, you sit in coach."
And the twink rakes the captian’s body over with his eyes, gives him a friendly smile, leans back in his seat, stretches indulgently and says "I’m young, I’m hot, I’m going to California First Class."
Then a steward walks up and says to the captain, "I’ll handle this." And he walks over to the twink and says "Honey, you’re young, you’re hot and you’re going to California in coach." And the twink looks up at him very annoyed and says "No, I’m young, I’m hot, and I’m going to California First Class." And then the steward leans over and whispers something in the twink’s ear.
The twink immediately jumps up and runs back to the coach section and sits down. The captain gives the steward a puzzled look and asks, "What did you just tell him?"
And the steward says, "I told him First Class wasn’t going to California."
This sort of thing is how the intelligent get revenge on the beautiful.
Ex-Gay Watch follows up on a previous post that…er…Questions PFOX…
As a follow-up to our previous post on this matter, we have gathered more information in our investigation of claims made by Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX) here.
Yesterday, we spoke with Jackie Abrams, Vice Chair of the Arlington County Fair. According to Abrams, no physical altercation occurred, police were never called and no one was ejected from the fairgrounds – she was emphatic and certain. “I was in radio contact with the other board members during the Fair, and definitely would have known if the police had been summoned. It did not happen [her emphasis],” said Abrams. She added that her calls to PFOX, and specifically to PFOX president Regina Griggs, had gone unanswered.
They got it out there…why on earth would they want to help anyone prove that it was bullshit? The faithful now have something to bark about…that some wicked militant homosexual activist had attacked their peaceful respectful effort to educate people about the truth of homosexuality…and just you never mind that it never actually happened. Since when does an organization that was born on lies, built on a bedrock of lies, and does nothing but lie through its teeth about homosexuals and homosexuality constantly, meticulously, relentlessly, suddenly stop lying?
???
Of course they lie. Does a bear shit in the woods? Is the pope Catholic? Does PFOX lie? Yes…it’s good, it’s necessary, to expose their lies whenever, wherever they pop up. But on the other hand if by now it’s surprising you that someone from PFOX would make such brazenly false accusations about something involving homosexuals, then I guess it must also be a constant surprise to you that the sky is blue and water is wet.
Meanwhile…via Ex-Gay Watch, Truth Wins Out has some food for thought for all you parents out there, thinking about sending your gay kids off to ex-gay camp…
Truth Wins Out is reporting that Chris Austin, a longtime ex-gay counselor from Irving, Texas, was convicted today of sexually assaulting a client. Austin, a previous speaker for both Evergreen International and the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), has been accused of sexual assault on a client before. In 2001, Mark Hufford made similar accusations:
Hufford accused Austin of engaging in improper sexual behavior that included “oral copulation and fondling” during counseling sessions that spanned more than a year. The psychologist, who also teaches in the church’s Sunday School, had convinced Hufford to participate in “touch therapy.” The therapy gradually progressed to nude sessions and physical intimacy, he said.
I’m assuming the victims in both cases were legally adults, but it’s worth bearing in mind that outfits such as Evergreen and Exodus and Love In Action all claim to be ministries so they don’t have to submit to the licensing and oversight regulations that real hospitals and doctors must. Literally Anyone can claim to be a professional in the treatment of Same Sex Attraction Disorder. It’s like being a palm reader, only you get to make your customers tell you their sexual fantasies and participate in touch therapy…
The Pentagon is investigating how a B52 bomber was mistakenly armed with six nuclear warheads last week and allowed to fly 1,500 miles across America before anyone noticed the weapons were missing.
Barksdale Air Force Base is being used as a jumping off point for Middle East operations. Gee, why would we want cruise missile nukes at Barksdale Air Force Base. Can’t imagine we would need to use them in Iraq. Why would we want to preposition nuclear weapons at a base conducting Middle East operations?
His final point was to observe that someone on the inside obviously leaked the info that the planes were carrying nukes. A B-52 landing at Barksdale is a non-event. A B-52 landing with nukes. That is something else.
Now maybe there is an innocent explanation for this? I can’t think of one. What is certain is that the pilots of this plane did not just make a last minute decision to strap on some nukes and take them for a joy ride…
Ya Think…? And in the comments at TPM Cafe’…
A mistake? To fly with any ordinance requires sign-offs from ground crew, chain of authority, etc. And nukes are far and beyond other ordinance.
The claim they accidentally forgot to remove the warheads and didn’t notice, after it was leaked they were moved, not plausible. It’s not like nuclear warheads are disassembled on the runway and left beside the fuel trucks. Removal of a warhead is going to set gears into motion, any number of which are sure to notice they don’t have the warheads.
Presuming these were nukes as alleged and this info was leaked, either by a whistle blower or a deliberate propagandist sending a message to someone, the probability of movement by mistake is close to zero.
…
The official story is that the missiles were decommissioned ACMs. Why they were mounted under the wings instead of being transported inside a cargo plane with the warheads removed is an interesting question. Pretty hard to believe it was all just an accident.
This could be saber rattling. But consider the man holding the saber.
The Fine Art Of Inciting Violence While Preaching Decency
Of course you knew that it isn’t only gay folk that the mayor of Fort Lauderdale is contemptuous of…
"Atheists and Criminal Lobbying Union" regarding the meaning of the acronym ACLU.
New Times, October 26, 2000
"I’m supposed to subsidize some schlock sitting on the sofa and drinking a beer, who won’t work more than 40 hours a week?" (On a proposed affordable housing ordinance)
Sun-Sentinel, May 20, 2006
Regarding a proposal to reduce greenhouse gases, calling it "hate-America stuff" concocted by "a bunch of scientists meeting in Paris who’ve had too much wine.”
Sun-Sentinel May 9, 2007
“The Scum-Sentinel is an advertising tabloid newsblog. They hire reporters and they make them churn out stories without making them get into anything in depth. They do that to feign a resemblance to a real newspaper so that they can sell advertising. And the Sentinel tries to lecture me about affordable housing? I tell people that the day I take advice from a company that has vagrants selling their products in the middle of the street, we’re all in trouble."
New Times, April 21, 2006
“I think a strong rope and a stiff tree would be better than wasting all that electricity.”
New Times (Broward Palm Beach Edition), October 26, 2000
As they say, scratch a homophobe and you find a rat’s nest of assorted other prejudices and cheap bar stool conceits. And given his steady and sure record of flipping the middle finger to his critics, I sorta figured he’d make some aggressive asshole comeback to the county commissioners act last week, of voting him off the tourism board. What I didn’t expect was that he’d surround himself with men dressed in paramilitary uniform, calling for a cleansing of sin from Fort Lauderdale…
Anti-gay Mayor Jim "250K robo-potty" Naugle has so polarized matters in Fort Lauderdale that press conferences and demonstrations are getting tense, according to Jeff Black of UNITE Fort Lauderdale, which is sponsoring a Faith Press Conference today, will feature speakers from many denominations and religions to discuss unity, inclusiveness, and acceptance.
Inclusiveness was not on the agenda on Tuesday as members of homophobic black churches, stood with Mayor Naugle at City Hall preaching they are going to take back the city, removing the sin and sinners. Religious men — in paramilitary gear — were also standing aside the mayor bleating that "the depth of sexual sin in Broward County necessitates an old-fashioned spiritual revival." From Jeff’s email to me:
They escorted me from the front door to the elevator when I entered the building today for this press conference, and stood ‘post’ at the elevator lobby. The video is frightening, worse was I was standing in the room with these people and worried what was going to happened next.
An initial check into who or what the Koinonia Worship Center is, turned up only a MySpace page…
I tried to find out information on the group but was only able to find a MySpace profile which included an audio track. The audio track is of a military leader talking to a subordinate and explaining how they are in the battle to take back what they have lost for the black man while in the background you hear gun fire and battle sounds.
What I’m hearing on this page is scary. "Special OPS (operations) Units" of the church. References to "Exercising Spiritual Authority"?
Nice. Until today I thought Naugle was just another homophobic barstool buffoon. But no…he’s a thug; a grown man with a schoolyard bully’s sense of justice and the moral scruples of your average drug syndicate gangster. Watching that video, there is no mistaking what he’s doing in it for what it is. Bracketed by men in paramilitary uniform calling for spiritual warfare, saying they will "take back the land" and that "God hates the act of homosexuality" and telling the mayor "we will fight with you", James Naugle stood in the mayor’s office and made a threat. He said to the Gay community, and to any heterosexuals who might be thinking of standing in solidarity with us, get off my back faggots…or you’ll be sorry.
How To End A Telephone Conversation Before It Even Begins…
…with Me at any rate. Once again I am expecting a phone call on the land line, and once again I don’t have my glasses handy when the phone rings, to check the caller ID…
Me: Hello?
Oh-So-Friendly Telephone Voice: Hello…am I speaking to Mr. Garnet?
Me (warily): Are you with the landscaping company…?
Oh-So-Friendly Telephone Voice: No…I’m calling on behalf of…
Me: CLICK!
Garrett. Garrett.gar-it . Two ‘r’s, two ‘t’s goddamnit.
An individual’s body motion and body type can offer subtle cues about their sexual orientation, but casual observers seem better able to read those cues in gay men than in lesbians, according to a new study in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
…
"We already know that men and women are built differently and walk differently from each other and that casual observers use this information as clues in making a range of social judgments," said lead author Kerri Johnson, UCLA assistant professor of communication studies. "Now we’ve found that casual observers can use gait and body shape to judge whether a stranger is gay or straight with a small but perceptible amount of accuracy."
Johnson and colleagues at New York University and Texas A&M measured the hips, waists and shoulders of eight male and eight female volunteers, half of whom were gay and half straight. The volunteers then walked on a treadmill for two minutes as a three-dimensional motion-capture system similar to those used by the movie industry to create animated figures from living models made measurements of the their motions, allowing researchers to track the precise amount of shoulder swagger and hip sway in their gaits.
Based on these measurements, the researchers determined that the gay subjects tended to have more gender-incongruent body types than their straight counterparts (hourglass figures for men, tubular bodies for women) and body motions (hip-swaying for men, shoulder-swaggering for women) than their straight counterparts.
In addition, 112 undergraduate observers were shown videos of the backsides of the volunteers as they walked at various speeds on the treadmill. The observers were able to determine the volunteers’ sexual orientation with an overall rate of accuracy that exceeded chance, even though they could not see the volunteers’ faces or the details of their clothing. Interestingly, the casual observers were much more accurate in judging the orientation of males than females; they correctly categorized the sexual orientation of men with more than 60 percent accuracy, but their categorization of women did not exceeded chance.
Emphasis mine. Why am I not asked to participate in experiments like these? This is the one area where my weak gaydar seems to work most reliably. I love to watch beautiful guys walk. There’s just something about the sight of the male body in motion. And in the gait, sometimes, I can just see it. Some guys just have a more beautiful, or at least a more attractive to my my eye, gait then others. The gay ones. Makes my heart beat.
There’s this Bob Segar song… I realize that, according to the story, he’s singing about about a specific person…but ever since it started playing on the radio, whenever I hear it I just mentally flip a pronoun and rock to it…
But oh, they love to watch him strut…
The play on words about how they all respect her, but…doesn’t quite work with the male pronoun so I end up mentally adjusting the lyrics further as the song goes on. But I seldom pay that much attention to the lyrics of a rock song anyway…it’s about the music, and the music of that particular song is just about right for watching beautiful guys walking. And sometimes you just find yourself following along…er…you know…to the rhythm of it…
But there’s a disquieting side to all this, that you also need to pay attention to…
The findings build on recent research that shows that casual observers can often correctly identify sexual orientation with very limited information. A 1999 Harvard study, for example, found that just by looking at the photographs of seated strangers, college undergraduates were able to judge sexual orientation accurately 55 percent of the time.
"Studies like ours are raising questions about the value of the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy," Johnson said. "If casual observers can determine sexual orientation with minimal information, then the value in concealing this information certainly appears questionable. Given that we all appear to be able to deduce this information to some degree with just a glance, more comprehensive policies may be required to protect gays against discrimination based on their sexual orientation."
The findings also are part of mounting evidence suggesting that sexual orientation may actually be what social scientists call a "master status category," or a defining characteristic that observers cannot help but notice and which has been scientifically shown to color all subsequent social dealings with others.
"Once you know a person’s sexual orientation, the fact has consequences for all subsequent interactions, and our findings suggest that this category of information can be deduced from subtle clues in body movement," Johnson said.
A lot of gay guys,,,myself included…just assume most of the time that we’re not really all that "obvious". In particular, those of us who grew up being fed a lot of stereotypes about swishing and limp wrists and lisping and that kind of crap, tend to assume that to the degree we don’t fit the stereotype, we’re probably passing. Well guys…it looks like they can see right through us anyway.
And in a world that’s been so relentlessly polarized, gays so relentlessly demonized by this kind of republican party crap…
…that can have, as the article points out, consequences.
Have you ever had a business interaction that all of a sudden just turned negative and you couldn’t quite put your finger on why? You’re talking to a clerk at a store somewhere, or trying to arrange to have some professional come and do some work on your house, or your car, or whatever, and suddenly they turn all cold and contemptuous and suddenly find a million excuses why they can’t sell you what you were looking for, or do the work for you that you need done? I’ve had that happen over and over again and usually I put it down to being a longhair in bluejeans and sneakers, and the lingering resentment some folks still feel toward the 60s counter-culture. But what if it really is homophobia?
It’s all too easy to fall into the suffocating trap of putting every negative reaction down to prejudice against gay people. But there’s another side to that coin and it’s called denial. I don’t think I have any obvious effeminacy to me, I’m no macho guy by any means, but I’ve always pictured myself internally as pretty much an average middle class, suburban American guy. Okay…so I don’t much care for sports. I love fast cars, firecrackers, and hard rock. I am a stereotypical male in so many ways, some pretty embarrassing. No…I don’t ask for directions. I hate shopping for clothes. Weekends when I’m cleaning house, I am always scolding myself for not picking up after myself like I should.
But maybe none of that matters anyway. Maybe none of it ever mattered. The clues are subtler, and they’re hard wired into us. The way we talk, the way we move, even according to this 60 minutes article, the way we sit…
Bailey and his colleagues set up a series of experiments in his lab at Northwestern University. In one study, researcher Gerulf Rieger videotaped gay and straight people sitting in a chair, talking. He then reduced them visually to silent black and white outlined figures and asked volunteers to see if they could tell gay from straight. The idea was to find out if certain stereotypes were real and observable.
Based on physical movement and gestures of the figures, more often than not, the volunteers in the study could tell a difference.
You can be flaming and you can be quiet and reserved and it doesn’t matter. You can be fabulous and you can be a geek whose clothes never seem to fit quite right and it doesn’t matter. The people we interact with on a daily basis may never even be aware consciously what it is they’re picking up on. They just know, somehow, that they’re dealing with a homosexual. And that can have consequences. Especially after so many elections where gay people were painted as the demons who were going to take over America, prey on children, spread AIDS and destroy marriage and family if the democrats won.
Uhm…I Don’t Think That Was God Telling You To Do That
Imagine a world where the major religions didn’t teach everyone that sex itself was innately wicked and sinful…that sin was only in hurting and taking advantage of others. Imagine a world where preachers didn’t teach people that their bodies are evidence of their fallen status, objects of shame, and not beautiful in their own right, to be taken care of and treated with respect.
SALAMANCA – A man cut off his own penis and threw it in a toilet ‘so he would stop sinning’.
The 30-year-old was recovering in the Hospital Clinico Universitario in Salamanca in western Spain.
…
The local newspaper La Gaceta reported when relatives called emergency services, he told ambulance workers he did it “so would not sin any more”.
…
He was bleeding heavily.
The newspaper said it was not known if the man’s penis could be sewn back.
There was also a suggestion he may be suffering from psychological problems.
I read crap like this and I just find myself shaking my head and wondering how the hell it ever came to this. What other creature on this good earth, besides us humans, punish themselves for feeling desire? I can’t believe that just having rational thought capable minds does this to us, because behavior like this just isn’t rational. If you could, in some imaginary laboratory, start the history of the human race over from day one, and run it as a simulation, would you still end up with the major faiths of the world teaching us to fear and loath our sexual nature, to the point where some people even mutilate themselves?
Trinity Preparatory School canceled its opening-night performance of La Cage aux Folles on Friday at the request of Bishop John Howe, head of the Diocese of Central Florida.
"His request was not to stage the production, and we decided to honor his request," said Headmaster Craig Maughan, who called off Friday’s and tonight’s planned performances. "I met with the cast and all the people involved in the production and announced the decision and explained it to them."
…
Howe, a leader of conservative bishops in the Episcopal Church, USA, has been vocal on issues of sexual orientation and in 2003 strongly opposed the election of an openly gay man as bishop of New Hampshire. That election, and the issue of blessing same-sex unions, has created a rift in the Episcopal Church.
I can appreciate Howe’s position regarding La Cage. The play has two central and very flamboyant gay characters in it. But the play is not about homosexuality. It’s about what happens when people are forced into pretending they’re something they’re not, to appease the cheapshit prejudices of others. It’s about the hypocrisy of the self righteous bigot. And even more unforgivably…it’s a comedy. It laughs at hypocrites. And as every pinched faced autocrat knows, it’s dangerous to allow students to laugh at hypocrisy.
I don’t know where, exactly, my copies of The New Yorker are printed, but I imagine it’s pretty far away. Yet somehow, each week, the magazine travels from the printer, to the warehouse, to the post office it is shipped from, then to my post office and, finally, to my personal mailbox. And then always, each week, as I take the new issue out of my mailbox, two subscription blow-in cards fall out onto the floor of the lobby.
I cannot figure out whether: A) the cards somehow know they’ve arrived at their final destination and refuse to fall out before then, or B) The New Yorker initially stuffs my magazine with dozens of these blow-in subscription cards and the others have all fallen out en route.
They aren’t stapled into the magazines of course, because the marketing departments figured out that when they fall out it makes you pay attention to them. Which really annoys me when they’re falling out of magazines I’m already subscribing to. And doubly so when it’s my monthly copy of Consumer Reports.
Warning…Fred’s blog post there also contains major earwormage. As you value your mental peace and quiet, Don’t Start That YouTube Video! Ask me how I know…
BROOMFIELD – It started with a simple question and ended with at least one student chanting "white power" in a classroom.
It happened Tuesday in a classroom at Holy Family High School, the Catholic school that sits at the corner of 144th Avenue and Sheridan Boulevard in Broomfield.
The classroom discussion started with the question: Why do students need to learn Spanish?
According to the Archdiocese of Denver, the conversation soon became about immigration and it turned ugly.
"It became a heated discussion and some rhetoric was used that was inappropriate for the classroom," said Jeanette DeMelo, spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Denver.
At least one e-mail sent to 9NEWS said that at least one student started a chant of "white power" and some said that all Mexicans should go back to Mexico.
There were Hispanic students in the classroom at the time. They asked to leave the classroom when the bigot explosion erupted. The school says they were allowed to leave. The students say they were forced to stay in the classroom and endure being trashed by the other kids.
The Archdiocese says they did not expect something like this to happen in their system, which has embraced its Hispanic students. Archbishop Charles Chaput has come forward several times in support of the Mexican community.
Right. Like you’ve embraced your gay students too I’ll bet. You teach contempt for one group of people, and next thing you know contempt just takes wing and flies wherever it damn well pleases, doesn’t it? Who’s your Jesus Charles…the one that loves all the children, or the one that loves some of them more then others?
Disgraced pastor Ted Haggard won’t be fundraising for a Monument nonprofit run by a sex offender, won’t be ministering to anyone and needs to get a job, his overseers said in a statement released this afternoon.
"Mr. Haggard’s solicitation for personal support was inappropriate," his church supervisors said in the statement.
The statement came one day after the four-member team of ministers responsible for overseeing the spiritual restoration of Haggard met with him in Phoenix.
Last week, Haggard had e-mailed a KRDO-TV reporter in Colorado Springs, asking that supporters send contributions to Families with a Mission, a Monument non-profit run by Paul Huberty…
Who upon further investigation, turned out to be…
…a twice convicted sex offender.
In his fundraising solicitation, Haggard said he was looking for people who would be willing to support him and his wife, Gayle, monthly for two years while they sought to obtain their counseling degrees from University of Phoenix.
Haggard had also told KRDO that he and his family were planning to move into the Phoenix Dream Center, a halfway house, where he and his wife, Gayle, would minister to the "broken people" there.
The overseers said Wednesday that Haggard will not be moving into the Dream Center.
"It was never the intention of the Dream Center that Mr. Haggard would provide any counsel or other ministry," wrote the overseers.
"Mr. Haggard will not be moving in or working with the Dream Center. He will not be doing any ministry. He will be seeking secular employment to support himself."
Take a bow, Dave Coffman. It was Coffman who discovered that Haggard had had directed his supporters to send him money via a convicted sex offender, and it was this revelation—which we broke here on Slog—that brought the wrath of Haggard’s overseers down on his head. Good work, Dave!
Oh, man. What a great day. I fucking live for the day when every asshole out there bilking gullible Christians out of their hard-earned dough—from the Nazi pope on down—is told the same damn thing: Get a fucking job, you parasite.
I’d just like to add that goes double for the folks who run PFOX, Exodus, Evergreen, and other assorted ex-gay ministries everywhere…and…especially you John Smid. Get A Fucking Job, You Goddamned Parasite!
Ninth Commandement? What Ninth Commandment…? (continued)
Oregon Magazine, they of such informative and thoughtful jourmalmalism like Hippies History Channel History is a Bad Trip ("They (the hippies) were all Leftists. Teenagers, young adults, old folks driving a spray-painted VW van — they were all the same."), the hard hitting online magazine bearing a picture of John Wayne standing in front of an American flag with the quote, "Now, just why in the HELL do I have to press ‘1’ for English?", brings us this alarming news about the Vast Homosexual Conspiracy…
Florida Mayor Jim Naugle has been under rapid fire assault from homosexual activists and liberal media for asking people simply to obey the law and to be responsible and respectful to families and children.
No shit…this crap showed up in Google News. And not just buried somewhere in the "all 3791 news articles" link, but right on the fucking news home page. I’ve noticed lately that whatever algorithm Google uses to determine what stories actually make the front page, it’s tracking a tad to the right…particularly when it comes to news regarding the gay community. Next thing I know I’ll be seeing press releases from PFOX. Oh…wait…I have. But more on that later…
Naugle, you may recall, is the prize jackass who in his last term as Mayor of Fort Lauderdale Florida, decided to go on an anti-gay jihad, accusing gay folks of making Broward County the nation’s AIDS capital and having public orgies in the beach toilets, despite being inconveniently contradicted on both counts by the Largest HIV/AIDS Healthcare Provider in the United States and his own police department. The Broward County Commissioners voted unanimously last week to remove the mayor from his seat on the tourism board for the damage he’s been doing to the attractiveness of the oceanside city to tourists, that they’ve worked so hard to cultivate since Naugle decided that Fort Lauderdale didn’t need to be a Spring Break destination anymore.
But the man has his defenders, at least in the "Now, just why in the HELL do I have to press ‘1’ for English" crowd, and Oregon Magazine would like us all to know that, in fact, having sex in public is just what the militant homosexual agenda is all about…
Members of the activist community in Fort Lauderdale and elsewhere are actually coming out in defense of public "gay"
sex. The homosexual legal group, LAMBDA Legal calls such public sex a civil right in their "little black book," and encourages such behavior.
The lousy formatting on that paragraph is theirs because I wouldn’t want to be accused of altering any of their breathless prose. And don’t bother clicking on the link they’ve provided because like the paragraph formatting and a lot of everything else that’s on the pages of Oregon Magazine, it’s a tad fucked up. But if you go to the Lamba Legal web site, and search for it, you can find the pamphlet they’re talking about, Here.
While Lambda Legal and other groups are fighting against the ways police target men who have sex with men, having sex where others might see you and take offense can subject you to arrest, publicity and other serious consequences. If you feel unsafe, you should leave.
Nowhere in that document is having sex in public called a civil right. The document is full of warnings about the risks involved, both legal and to your health, and the low probability of successfully fighting the charges.
Be aware that undercover cops may be “cruising” to arrest you. A cop doesn’t have to tell you he’s a cop, even if you ask. If you’re cruising for sex and an undercover cop hits on you, what you do can still be a crime. Don’t count on proving the cop “entrapped” you (which is difficult). Talk to your lawyer if you think you were set up.
How you can read the words "what you do can still be a crime" and think they say "public sex is a civil right", I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it has something to do with wondering why you have to press ‘1’ for English. And it doesn’t sound very encouraging to me either. On the other hand if you’re the kind that thinks that just telling the accused that they still have…you know…constitutional rights…amounts to encouraging crime then maybe your mileage varies. Or maybe you’re just a dickwad. Say…what was that you folks were saying about hippies ….? Oh…yeah…
Hey, hippie. You want to see an authoritarian style, regimented, intolerant government? They’re all over the place. One type is dedicated to the ideas of Marx. The other is dedicated to the ideas of Islamic extremism.
Oh heaven forfend America should become anything like a Marxist dictatorship where people don’t have…you know…the right to talk to an attorney or anything…
And speaking of lying conniving dickwads…over at Ex-Gay Watch, it looks like they’ve caught PFOX telling another whopper giving people the facts about militant homosexuality…
This past Tuesday, PFOX posted some disturbing news. While innocently offering “materials on same-sex attraction and tolerance for the ex-gay community to a hungry public” at the Arlington County Fair, Arlington Va (Aug 15-19), they claim their representatives were viciously attacked, both verbally and physically, by “gay activists” who had also set up a booth at the fair.
Wow…that’s just so…so Wrong! Damn those militant homosexuals!
Since PFOX stated that the police were “summoned” and that they “ejected the gay man off the fairgrounds” we decided to check with the Arlington County Police Department. Focus on the Family reports through CitizenLink that “Officers kicked the gay activists out of the fair and encouraged the PFOX volunteer to press charges, but he chose not to.” So depending on the account, we have one or more officers responding to a complaint of assault, recommending that the victim file charges, and then ejecting one or more “gay activists” from the fairgrounds. Surely the Arlington PD would know if one or more of their officers participated in such an action. What good would it do to eject them if others in charge were not also made aware so they could make sure they didn’t come back?
We contacted the Arlington PD and ended up speaking with John Lisle of the Media Relations/Legislative Affairs Office. He had no initial knowledge of such an incident. After checking briefly, he again said that no one was aware of such an incident. So we sent a copy of the PFOX statement to him at which time he agreed to check more thoroughly. After over two days of research, there was nothing he could add to his statement; no report exists and no one recalls such an incident.
Whoops!
Ex-Gay Watch was also rude enough to check with Denise Marshall Roller, the Event Manager for the fair, who said that their call was the first she had heard that there were any problems of that sort at the fair…and she was there. Most of the time she said, near the officer in charge. So it would appear that not only do militant homosexual activists go around attacking decent people who only want to expose the sordid truth about homosexuality, they can also warp the space time continuum to conveniently hide their evil deeds after the fact. Or maybe they have the power to cloud men’s minds…
You will remember nothing of this incident…there was no vicious attack…
the PFOX booth was not disturbed…no homosexuals were at
the PFOX booth…there is no such thing as a homosexual…
Next thing you know they’ll be bitching about Why The Hell Do I Have To Press ‘1’ For Heterosexual…?
The best time for a telephone solicitor to catch me is when I’m expecting a phone call and I’m busy in the kitchen and the phone rings and I don’t have my glasses handy to look at what the caller ID is telling me…
Me: Hello…?
Oh-So-Friendly Telephone Voice: Hello…I’m I speaking to Mrs. Garrett?
Me: There’s no Mrs. Garrett here.
Oh-So-Friendly Telephone Voice: Oh…am I speaking to Mr. Garrett?
Me (icily): Who’s calling?
Oh-So-Friendly Telephone Voice: I’m calling from the American Diabetes Association…
Me(interrupting) : Oh….right…I still get those mailings… My mom passed away several years ago.
Oh-So-Friendly Telephone Voice: Oh. I’m so sorry. I’m just calling to thank you for your past support and to ask…
Me: CLICK!
The problem with cordless phones is you can’t slam them down when you hang up.
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