[Cross posted over at Truth Wins Out…]

This post is going to repeat a lot of verbiage from a post I made here nearly two years ago, but it’s about a recurring theme I see in our struggle. That theme raised it’s head and laughed at me this morning, while reading a post over at Box Turtle Bulletin. There, poster Rob Tisinai writes about an email he got from Maggie Gallagher…

I got a fundraising email from Maggie Gallagher the other day. It’s unbelievably long (as in, I can’t believe she expects people to read this whole thing). One sentence jumped out at me before I gave up on the piece.

Are two men pledged in a sexual union really a marriage?

Personally I’d answer, No.

Which would be the correct answer from Gallagher’s point of view. Tisinai goes on to rephrase the question in terms that acknowledge same-sex couples might actually be in love, and avers that this is something she knows she cannot admit because it undercuts her entire argument against same-sex marriage.

I don’t think her argument is about same-sex marriage. I don’t think any of them really give a good goddamn about marriage. What they’re adamant about is that homosexuals aren’t really human…that Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. It isn’t about marriage at all. What marriage represents to the homophobes is the final barrier to admitting that homosexuals are fully human and capable of experiencing all the higher emotions of love and devotion and commitment that heterosexuals do…that we are not, as Dr. Laura once famously put it, biological errors, or as you can hear thumped from pulpits all over the bible belt, demon possessed hell bound abominations in the eyes of god.

Patrick Wooden Warns that Gay Men Shove Cellphones, Baseball Bats and Animals up their Anuses, Die in Diapers

North Carolina activist Patrick Wooden has become a favorite of groups like the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, and most recently joined Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality at a rally denouncing the Southern Poverty Law Center. On a recent appearance on LaBarbera’s radio show, Wooden called homosexuality a “wicked, deviant, immoral, self-destructive, anti-human sexual behavior” and should make people “literally gag.” Wooden added that gay men have “to wear a diaper or a butt plug just to be able to contain their bowels” by their “40s or 50s” as a result of “what happens to the male anus.”

When you hear them yap, yap, yapping about the sanctity of marriage, what they’re saying is homosexuals are some sort of sub-human…things…that copulate with just about anything handy whether it’s a person or a horse or a cell phone. To lift what homosexuals do to the level of heterosexual love and commitment then, is a profane act of defilement. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Be it with each other or…cell phones.

Which is to say, we do not love. Love is something fully human individuals experience. The homosexual experiences no such thing. That is an article of belief more central to the faith of modern fundamentalists then the resurrection.

Back in April of 2010, I read this by then newly out Christian musician Jennifer Knapp back in an interview in Christianity Today…

Q: So why come out of the closet, so to speak?

Knapp: I’m in no way capable of leading a charge for some kind of activist movement. I’m just a normal human being who’s dealing with normal everyday life scenarios. As a Christian, I’m doing that as best as I can. The heartbreaking thing to me is that we’re all hopelessly deceived if we don’t think that there are people within our churches, within our communities, who want to hold on to the person they love, whatever sex that may be, and hold on to their faith. It’s a hard notion. It will be a struggle for those who are in a spot that they have to choose between one or the other. The struggle I’ve been through—and I don’t know if I will ever be fully out of it—is feeling like I have to justify my faith or the decisions that I’ve made to choose to love who I choose to love.

[Emphasis mine…] The problem after all isn’t sex, it’s love. But asking people to acknowledge that same-sex couples love is precisely the problem. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… People sitting in the pews side-by-side with their gay neighbors aren’t asking them to choose between their love and their faith. When they look at same-sex couples they don’t see love at all…merely sex. They are “struggling with homosexuality”. The bedrock prejudice insists, absolutely insists, that is all there is to same-sex couples. Empty, barren, transient lust.

As NOM board member Orson Scott Card once said, gay couples are just playing dress-up…

“However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. Nor does society benefit in any way from treating it as if it were…”

“They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won’t be married. They’ll just be playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes…”

-Orson Scott Card, Homosexual “Marriage” and Civilization

However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be… There’s the problem. Look at it if you have the nerve. This isn’t about sex. That empty barren, perverted lust is not what makes them angry. What makes them angry is any suggestion that homosexuals do, in fact, experience love the same way heterosexuals do. And it makes them absolutely livid.

It’s often argued that gay couples cannot rise to the level of marriage because they don’t produce children, and marriage is mostly about family life. But this argument is a sham. And it mirrors another sham argument often heard in conservative religious communities, that being homosexual is not a sin, only engaging in homosexual acts is. If only the homosexuals just didn’t have sex, they could be welcomed into the kingdom of Heaven too…just like the rest of us. But heterosexual couples, medically incapable of having sex, are as welcome to marriage as they are the Kingdom and nobody in either group is saying that same-sex couples can marry as long as they don’t have sex.

The heterosexual couple who stick together even if they are denied a sex life are seen as vindicating the power of love. That is why sterility among heterosexuals is no barrier to marriage. But same-sex couples somehow defile the institute of marriage with their very presence, whether they bring children into it (via adoption) or not, whether they can have sex or not. And that is because homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.

It’s not about children. It’s not about family life. It’s not even about heterosexuality. What homosexuals steal from people like Orson Scott Card is the idea that only heterosexuals love. All arguments to the contrary, what this fight is about, Exactly, is love, and who can be allowed to love and be loved, and who cannot. Marriage is love’s sanctuary, a sacred place where lovers can find shelter, protection, support. Letting homosexuals, who are incapable of love, into it defiles that sanctuary, turning it from a sacred place into a brothel.

However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be… In 1983, Sharon Kowalski suffered severe brain injuries in a motorcycle accident leaving her unable to care for herself. Her lover, Karen Thompson, with whom she had exchanged wedding bands and shared a house, had to fight a long and bitter legal battle with Kowalski’s parents, who refused to allow Thompson any contact at all with their daughter. When Sharon, with difficulty, typed her wishes to go back home with Karen on a keyboard provided by a doctor, her parents took the keyboard away. At one point, Donald Kowalski, Sharon’s father, asked a reporter in exasperated frustration “What does that woman want with my daughter…she’s in diapers!” For almost nine years Thompson fought it out in court with Kowalski’s parents, refusing to let the woman she loved be condemned to life in a nursing home where she would be kept isolated from the world outside and denied any therapy that would have allowed her to communicate her wishes to be taken back home to Karen. When she finally won, Donald Kowalski called her an animal.

What does that woman want with my daughter… A same-sex couple who cannot have sex would be, if unrepentant nonetheless, ineligible for the Kingdom, let alone marriage. It’s not about the Act, if not engaging in the Act makes no difference. Their crime is that they love, and love is not permitted to homosexuals.

We cannot be human beings, we must be animals.

Pastor Ken Hutcherson Compares Marriage Equality to Horse-Fucking

Antioch Bible Church pastor Ken Hutcherson didn’t sit in the same room as two gay people to debate marriage equality. But he did call into the Seattle Channel studio where gay people were present for a debate on same-sex marriage.

And of course, Pastor Hutcherson went there: “If this law is passed, what is going to happen? Now ask your guests in the studio. Do they believe that if they change the definition of marriage being between one man and one woman, what is going to stop two men one woman, two women one man, one man against a horse, one many with a boy, one man with anything?“

We must be animals. Not sinners in need of salvation, but animals. Why? So we can be their scapegoats. The right wing politician who goes hiking the Appalachian trail with his mistress while his wife and children wonder where the hell he went. The religious right preacher who gets caught visiting prostitutes. The conservative moralizer who gets caught gambling. The problem isn’t that we are moral cheats, the problem is acceptance of homosexuality. Homosexuality is destroying the family and society, not our own failures of moral character. Probably it is also responsible for earthquakes and hurricanes.

Jennifer Knapp didn’t choose love over faith, but love over fame because there was no other way. Karen Thompson fought for nine years to free her beloved because their was no other way. The gay civil rights struggle is not a fight over scripture. It has nothing to do with faith. It is not about sex. It is a fight over the right, the essential human need, to love and be loved. Because love can overcome any obstacle, endure any hardship, hold on to any hope no matter how distant and faint. Because love can move mountains. Because the one thing you never want the scapegoat to do is move mountains.

Newt Gingrich says yesterday that same-sex marriage is paganism. Presumably unlike having a wife and a mistress.

A few days ago Martin O’Malley, the governor of Maryland, submitted a bill to the legislature to legalize same-sex marriage. Hate groups like NOM have been preparing for this day. So, in our own way I suppose, have my fellow gay and gay supportive Marylanders.

I do not look forward to the brutal, bitter, torrent of hate mongering that is to come. I sure don’t look forward to having to know, as the signs start popping up on front lawns and the bumper stickers appear, which of the neighbors on my block want to cut my ring finger off. My neighbors are generally a good sort of folk I’ve found in the years I’ve lived at Casa del Garrett. Generous and neighborly…at least to my face. But just because someone takes a somewhat liberal stance on a range of issues, does not mean they can see the people for the homosexuals. Take for example the president of our state senate, Mike Miller…

The Democratic President of the Senate in Maryland is urging “Evangelicals, Catholics, African Americans” to oppose an upcoming gay marriage bill, and to vote against one if it ever came to a public referendum. Senator Mike Miller on a radio program said that while he didn’t want to sound like Republican presidential hopefuls, “I’m a father married for 50 years, I got 5 children, I got 13 grandchildren, I’m a traditionalist.” Miller said he wouldn’t stand in the way of a vote, and if there is a vote, as expected, in the Senate, it would again pass. But Miller’s suggestion to minorities and the religious right to oppose an equal rights measure is patently offensive and divisive, and smacks of a Maggie Gallagher move.

Miller, in explaining his opposition, however, did sound like a Republican presidential candidate, saying, “I’m a historian and I look at civilizations, I study civilizations, I read history every night. And I see it’s an attack on the family, I think it’s an attack on traditional families. That’s the way I see it.”

Dig it. He doesn’t want to sound like a republican, but just so you know, homosexuals are a threat to families and to civilization. This is what we’re in for, for the next year or so if this bill becomes law and NOM fires up its mighty Wurlitzer to insure that Marylanders fear, loath and hate their gay and lesbian neighbors enough to deny them equal rights in marriage. But I have a question: has any nation or civilization ever collapsed because its people loved each other too much?

Behold, the human cesspool of righteousness…

Tennessee Lawmaker Compares Homosexuality To ‘Pedophilia, Prostitution, Murder’

The so-called “license to bully” bill…would allow students to share any “religious, philosophical, or political views” that are “unpopular,” regardless of their consequences to the learning environment, and limits educators’ ability to curb such harassment.

Equality advocates lodged an email protest campaign against the measure, but were particularly surprised by the reaction of state Rep. John Ragan (R). In a long letter to one opponent of the bill, Ragan replied that gay “feelings” can be controlled by “mentally healthy adult human beings,” and concluded by stating, “Should society avoid disapproving of pedophilia, prostitution, murder, etc., because practitioners of those behaviors may commit suicide at higher rates?”

(Emphasis mine) What you have to understand about the human gutter is it has no bottom. Here is a man who wants to enable the very bullying that causes gay kids to kill themselves, saying the fact that gays are more likely to commit suicide is proof that there’s something wrong with them. Nice way to prove a point huh?

No bigot, there’s something wrong with you. Something profoundly, terribly wrong with you. Mentally healthy adult human beings? I’m laughing in your face. What do you call an adult who can abuse kids, can create a climate where kids can be easily abused, and does not see anything wrong with what they’re doing?

In Tennessee they’re now considering two bills that would do little more then put another knife into the hearts of gay kids in the Tennessee public school system. The Don’t Say Gay bill is back again, along with another, even more insidious if that’s possible, which would allow a religious exception to the current anti-bullying codes. A perfect excuse then, for kids to torment their gay peers to death under the guise of freedom of religion. If you can’t make gay kids hate themselves to death, then obviously your religion is being discriminated against…

This cracks me up…

In the current issue of the center-right policy journal, National Affairs, former Bush domestic policy adviser Tevi Troy worries about the decline of Washington think tanks into partisan messaging operations.

Stop…stop…you’re killing me.   Seriously, on what planet were most beltway think tanks, and especially AEI and Heritage, ever not partisan messaging operations?

Yes, yes, liberal “think tanks” exist, but how many global corporations and multi-billionaires are going to fund a think tank that starts from an ideologically liberal economic position?   Right wing and conservative “think tanks” basically rule the beltway discourse and you always know what their conclusions will be, and which party will happily benefit from them.   Their non-partisanship is a farce.   They are think tanks like Intelligent Design is science.

There’s a rule of thumb about think tanks: If you already know what the conclusion is before you pick up the paper and read it, it is not a think tank. Rand is a think tank.   Let me explain by this example from Wiki:

In 1958, Democratic Senator Stuart Symington accused the RAND Corporation of defeatism for studying how the United States might strategically surrender to an enemy power. This led to the passage of a prohibition on the spending of tax dollars on the study of defeat or surrender of any kind. However, the senator had apparently misunderstood, as the report was a survey of past cases in which the U.S. had demanded unconditional surrender of its enemies, asking whether or not this had been a more favorable outcome to U.S. interests than an earlier, negotiated surrender would have been.

See how that works.   They asked a question they didn’t already know the answer to and set about to answer it.   No ideology, just answers. AEI and Heritage, to name two, begin with the answer in the form of an ideological position (unconditional surrender is always the most favorable outcome) and try to figure out a way to message that for the benefits of republicans.

What these organizations do is tactical rhetoric, not thinking.   Thinking is where you search for answers, not fashion attractive political battle flags.   Thinking takes you into undiscovered places.   That’s not allowed in organization like AEI, which Frum found out when he got the boot for not towing the line.   These are party instruments, nothing more nothing less.   They exist precisely to discourage thinking.   You are told what to think.   Or at any rate, what to say that you think.

Witness the decline in American governance.   We can’t confront the real problems that exist because our institutions of government are mired in ideologies which demand fealty over everything else.   Facts don’t matter, only the party matters, and free thinking is treason to the party.   And so our ability as a nation to grow and prosper into the 21st century is limited to what the ideologies in power will allow, and that isn’t much.   We were promised a shining city on a hill.   What we got were factories closed, wages devastated, pensions lost, entire neighborhoods in foreclosure and state and local governments teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.   Yet the ideologies that promised us that shining city are never held to account.   For all the think tanks in Washington, not a whole lot of thinking is actually going on.

Today Gawker reminds me that this whole Gay Community thing is a very iffy concept…

The Secrets Gay Men Don’t Want Straight People to Know

As gay men and lesbians get closer and closer to the mainstream they’ve often traded in their image as the queer radicals who started the Stonewall Riots for the milquetoast assimilationists who want to get married and have kids and put HRC bumper stickers on their cars. That doesn’t mean we’re still not queer radicals. It just means we’re hiding it from you…

If this list amounts to what it means to be a queer radical then my gay friends would say I hide it very well too.   Even from them. No, no…this is a lot of horseshit, and it’s been getting static from…well…gay folk all over the net already.   But the writer could have expected that if he’d ever looked more closely at the lives of gay people then his regular night out with the boys at JR’s (or whatever his city’s equivalent is…).   Here…let me have my swing at it…

Bottoming Is Fun

I suppose it is if you’re a bottom. Some of us are not that however, and what is more some of us are “Versatile” and some of us don’t like the anal thing At All.

This is a very superficial way to look at sex. Yes, yes…getting fucked is supposed to be some sort of dire insult to a guy’s manhood and we all need to push back on that.   Especially since some straight guys enjoy being the bottom to their girlfriend’s Top (I’ll leave you to figure out the mechanics of that. Or just go ask Dan Savage).   The point is what needs to be understood isn’t that some gay men like to be fucked and that’s okay, but that sex isn’t something one person does to another.   It’s something both partners do Together. Active/Passive…Top/Bottom… Seriously, these are kinda useless terms if we’re supposed to take them literally. They don’t really mean anything.

Poppers Are Awesome

And maybe it’s the drugs telling you that.

Cocksucker Is Not an Insult

Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Neither is “Queer” I suppose. See above Re: Bottoming. Also George Carlin’s line about how “Fuck You” should really be “Not Fuck You” because fucking is a good thing.

We Have Our Own Celebrities

I have a question: would you still like your celebrities if I took your poppers away?

We Want to Fuck All the Hot Straight Boys

No. Just…no. Here…let me explain…

“It’s even better when you help…” Best movie line ever. See…straight boys don’t help. Yes, yes…they can be very easy on the eyes. Hot even. But…seriously. They’re straight. They’re not into guys. And I don’t particularly want to be fucked by someone who is weirded out by gay sex. I’d rather not end up after it feeling used and dirty. Perhaps you’re into that sort of thing. To each his own. I don’t want to fuck someone who isn’t as into it with me as I am into it with them. It’s even better when you help.

Not All Gay Couples Are Monogamous

You don’t say? Here…let me tell you a secret: not all heterosexual couples are either. Think about it. What would country music singers have to sing about if their girlfriends were faithful? Oh…right…their trucks…

We Can Have Sex Anywhere at Anytime

So can straight guys. It’s been called the world’s oldest profession. Nowadays its called Craig’s List.

We Don’t Love Drag Queens As Much As You Do

Speak for yourself. But I could have just said that at the beginning of this post and left it at that. Oh look…JR’s is half off on the house tequila. Hurry! I’ll be you can find some poppers there too. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life sober do you?

[Update…] Just so I’m not mistaken for a gay conservative crank because this guy’s list of radical queer baggage is full of crap, let me reiterate something I’ve droned on about over and over again here. You want to be a gay radical? A militant homosexual? Listen: A militant homosexual is a homosexual who doesn’t think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual. A militant homosexual activist is a homosexual acting like they don’t think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual.

That’s it. That’s all it takes. Really. When a gay person loves their other half with all their heart and soul and feels not the slightest shred of guilt or shame over that fact, when the fact of their love lifts them both to a higher place body and soul and makes them both feel that life is good and sweet and full of joy…they have become militant homosexuals in the eyes of the haters. When a gay individual reacts to an attack on their sexuality, on their capacity to feel love and desire the same way as any heterosexual would, they become militant homosexual activists.

Top or bottom doesn’t cut it. Poppers don’t make you anything but high. Oral sex, who you want to fuck, whether you are monogamous or not…it doesn’t matter. What makes you a radical queer is you are fine with yourself. Don’t believe me? Listen to how the haters talk about us a little more closely. They’re not pissed at the sex we have. They’re pissed because we don’t hate ourselves anymore.

And finally…something I used to put on my Sig line back in the Usenet days: I do not speak for the militant homosexual conspiracy. I only work here.