The Assumption Church, a Catholic congregation in Barnesville, Minnesota, does not mess around when it comes to fighting followers who support marriage equality.
The church’s priest, Rev. Gary LaMoine, told the family of 17-year old Lennon Cihak that he cannot participate in his scheduled confirmation because Cihak shared his opposition to the recently defeated amendment that would define marriage as one man and one woman.
Not only that, LaMoine is now denying Communion to the entire family, including Cihak’s parents, who have attended the church for decades.
It’s something to remind me how glad I am, even at this stage in my life, that I was raised a Baptist, if only for the satisfaction of knowing I’d have been on the pope’s shit list for that fact alone, never mind my homosexuality. The only thing better would be to have been born a Jew.
But more importantly, being raised in a Baptist household meant I was never taught to believe I had to ask permission from the clergy to have a spiritual relationship with my creator. I will probably never really understand how painful this all is for that family, and especially that boy who is now afraid his church won’t allow him to be buried with his parents, simply because he stood up for the human dignity of his neighbors. I want to tell them there is no shame in walking out that door and never looking back. But I know that isn’t their way. You have to let everyone find their own way. That was something else the faith of my childhood taught me.
I’m an atheist now, and I can only watch these things happening to good-hearted people from a respectful distance. Meanwhile the boy inside me who once went dutifully to church every Sunday wonders how anyone would want to take the body of Christ from the hand of someone who is pissing on his cross.
[Edited…there was something else about being raised in a Baptist household that in retrospect I needed to get in here…]
Is Your Problem That You Don’t Get Math, Or You Don’t Get Democracy?
So Romney is complaining that president Obama won because he promised the hoi polloi a lot of gifts. But Romney was no slouch in that department either…promising even bigger tax cuts to the rich, less oversight of Wall Street and the finance industry. So Obama promised gifts to the 47% and Romney promised gifts to the 1%. So the reason Obama won is 47 is greater then 1. Or in other less cynical words, you win elections by appealing to more voters then the other guy does.
I think the complaint here is that elections are still too fair to suit republicans. Or maybe democracy.
The Hudson (NY) Register-Star fired reporter Tom Casey after he refused to allow his byline on a budget meeting story that had two paragraphs inserted by an editor, who apparently wanted to create controversy for an editorial. Here are the inserted grafs:
At the start of the meeting some in the audience were upset over Third Ward Alderman John Friedman’s decision not to stand for the pledge of allegiance. While Hudson City Code does not require council members to stand for the pledge, Fifth Ward Alderman Robert Donahue, who had complained about the matter at a previous meeting and asked Friedman why he did not stand, was visibly upset.
No comment could be reached from either party concerning the matter, and it did not interfere with the meeting.
Sam Pratt reports “Casey had been under pressure by higher-ups at the paper to make an issue of Friedman’s choice, which the Alderman had exercised at some but not all previous meetings. Getting the matter into the body of a news story would give the paper’s management a predicate for writing an editorial about it. The day after the dispute, Casey was reportedly fired by editor Theresa Hyland at the insistence of publisher Roger Coleman.”
So…dig it…Casey’s editor inserted two paragraphs into his story just so the paper could write an editorial, presumably attacking Friedman’s patriotism. The reporter then refused to allow his byline on the story and so the publisher had him fired. Because not standing up for the pledge of allegiance is a greater crime against America then not standing up for honest journalism and freedom of the press.
Hey Roger…you’d be running a much more efficient operation if you just got rid of all that pesky news gathering fluff you really don’t care about anyway and make your paper just one big opinion section. All your opinions of course…
Not going to link to them, but Politico is repeating the babble of some republican nutcase in Maine who can’t figure out where all the darkies were coming from on Election day…
The head of Maine’s Republican Party is claiming unknown groups of black people showed up in the state’s towns and cast ballots on election day.
“In some parts of rural Maine, there were dozens, dozens of black people who came in and voted on Election Day,” Charlie Webster told Portland, Me.’s NBC affiliate on Wednesday. “Everybody has a right to vote, but nobody in town knows anyone who’s black. How did that happen? I don’t know. We’re going to find out.”
Psst…hey Charlie…one of these days why not take a wee stroll outside your little all-white Maine neighborhood over to the colored side of town? Wow…didn’t know all those people were there did ya?
You Knew You Lost When You Started Lying To Yourselves
Dan Savage this morning…
NYT:
“The die is cast on this issue,” said Steve Schmidt, who advised the presidential campaigns of Senator John McCain and George W. Bush and has for years urged Republicans to accept same-sex marriage. “Why should we sign a suicide pact with the National Organization for Marriage?” Mr. Schmidt asked, saying the party should instead endorse the principles of federalism and let the states decide the matter.
Depending on how you slice and dice the electorate, you can make the case that the gay vote was decisive in this election. So what NOM is asking the GOP to do—double, triple, quadruple down on anti-gay hate—really does amount to signing a political suicide pact.
The homophobic pundits and leaders of the anti-gay industrial complex who are saying now that this election does not represent a sudden shift in people’s attitudes about same-sex marriage are right. There’s nothing sudden about the build up of pressure along a fault line either, just the release of it. The trend toward acceptance and equality has been obvious for decades now, and the haters have always known it. Witness the junk science industry they’ve been busy building since the Stonewall Riots and the removal of homosexuality as a psychiatric diagnosis. You don’t wage a bitter scorched earth war on the facts if you know the facts are on your side. The haters have always known that in the end all they had to win on was the passion of their own hate, and that eventually that would not be enough. And they have always known that marriage was the final threshold, and that it would be crossed when more heterosexuals then not would say to each other, and then at the polls, Actually, homosexuals do love.
The Colorado Independent reports that officials from the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) have vowed to make Starbucks (along with other companies that support same-sex marriage) pay a “price” in Middle Eastern countries that are hostile to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights. The statements were made during a Nov. 8 conference call, scheduled as a discussion of the 2012 elections which saw sweeping marriage equality victories in Maine, Maryland and Minnesota, as well as Starbucks’ home state of Washington.
“So for example, in Qatar, in the Middle East, we’ve begun working to make sure that there’s some price to be paid for this,” Brian Brown says in audio recording of the conference call…
And that price will be paid not merely in lost sales, but in the blood of gay people all throughout the middle east, just as they have done in Africa and wherever else they could. And Brian Brown and Maggie Gallagher and Robert George will not shed a single tear over it. Ours was always a struggle for the right to love and be loved, against an immovable need to hate the heart capable of it and all the wonder and joy of life and existence. The fight isn’t over, the sweat and tears and bloodshed go on, but the Rhine has been crossed. Actually, homosexuals do love.
…We Admitted That Our Lives Had Become Unmanageable…
Put the bottle down. Please. For everyone’s sake…
The polls were not skewed. Nate Silver was not making things up. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. He did not raise taxes. The unemployment figures were not faked. Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction. Climate Change is real. Evolution is real. FEMA is not building concentration camps. Christians are not being treated like Jews were in Germany in the 1930s…
I just finished watching Rachel Maddow deliver a smokin’ hot riff on republican shock and confusion, as displayed on Fox last night, that the numbers they were certain were going to go massively in Romney’s favor didn’t. She showed clips from past Fox News predictions of a Romney landslide, showed that stunning live TV moment that’ll almost certainly go down in television history, when Rove got angry that the Fox News vote analysts called Ohio for Obama. Then…brilliantly…she added that no, the polls were not skewed, Obama was born in Hawaii, he didn’t raise taxes, the deficit hasn’t gone up, unemployment figures were not cooked, Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, climate change is real, evolution is real, FEMA isn’t building concentration camps…
…and god I hope I can get my hands on a video clip of it because it really said it all…especially how at the end of that grotesque litany of decades of republican right wing and religious right hallucinations she said that it is profoundly damaging to our democracy when one party is trying to cope with things as they really are and the other is living it it’s own detached insular fantasy world.
We need, she said thumping her pulpit, honest, good faith arguing and debating about policy…real argument not phony crap ginned up just to drive people to the polls or satisfy the pathetic conceits of religious and political fanatics…because it is in that honest debating of the issues that we have the best hope of finding answers that work. By cocooning in their own fantasy world the republicans have made that honest, good faith arguing and debating nearly impossible.
She said she hoped the shock of that collision with real numbers and real reality last night might break the bubble. I’ve heard others expressing this since last night, but I am not so sure. But there is the problem we face as a nation. It’s the problem we need to address before we can really and truly get down to addressing any of the others. The polls were not skewed. The unemployment numbers were not rigged. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Climate change is real. Evolution is real. FEMA is not building concentration camps. Homosexuals are not demon possessed tools of satan. Two plus two equals four. If any of this distresses you be assured that reality does not care about what you believe or about you. It just is what it is. You need to care about reality. If you can’t bring yourself to do that critically, honestly, with your eyes wide open, without letting your cherished preconceptions blind you to simple facts, don’t be bellyaching about the moral relativism, hedonism, nihilism whatever of the world around you. The nihilist is you.
I fell in love, understood myself to be homosexual, in 1971. I was seventeen and I didn’t have to be told in that moment that people like me were officially categorized as mentally ill…I got that feedback from every direction in my culture. It was there in books and magazines, newspapers and TV. When I was fourteen I sat in a sex ed class taught by our gym teachers, who told us that homosexuals were twisted dangerous psychopaths who often mutilated the genitals of the people they had sex with and then killed them. At seventeen the mirror my culture held up to me in TV and movies…even in many of the underground comix..was that of a sick, twisted pervert, sometimes dangerous, other times just a pathetic faggot, but always to be treated worse then even murderers, rapists, even communists.
Even Mad Magazine was telling me a I was a fair object of universal contempt…
Never mind the asinine poem, look at the people in that illustration. This was what my culture told me I was. I knew it wasn’t true, but how do you struggle against such a torrent of disgust, contempt and outright hatred? In the end, it was simply by being brave, and living openly. I’m not saying all the protests and militancy weren’t necessary, they absolutely were. The closet was killing us, we had to break down that door and get everyone’s attention or we would never be free. But once we got that attention, we had to show people that the scarecrow monster that had been made of us simply wasn’t real. Not everyone would be open to that message…as Oliver Wendell Holmes once aptly said, a bigot’s mind is like an eye: the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes. But you had to have faith that a nation that could put human footsteps on the moon was not built by bigots. You had to have faith that the evidence of our lives, as they really were, would prevail.
But never forget how hard and bitter that struggle, simply to be able to live our lives openly, was. I saw the early days of the gay rights movement here in America, the Anita Bryant backlash, the rise of the religious right, and decades of a torrent of venom and hate. Friends died in the AIDS epidemic. And month after month, year after year, I saw the news reports of gay people being killed randomly by gay bashers, many of whom escaped prison simply by asserting the homosexual had made a pass at them.
I wish they could have lived to see this day. All the lost to AIDS, to violence, to despair. Maryland, Wisconsin, Washington state and Minnesota could not have been won with our votes alone. I have lived to see us change from dangerous twisted perverts into neighbors.
And now, I can see something else starting to happen…gazing back on so much of a life lived under such absolute and relentless disgust and hatred; those times are fading away, as if unreal, surreal.
I am a neighbor. How could I have have been not? Did any of that really happen?
On Facebook, Valley Motors (my Mercedes dealer) asks, Who remembers Herbie the Love Bug? Do you have a favorite television or movie car?
Well…I did once upon a time, sure. Mine were, in some sort of order, Supercar…
Well…that one wasn’t really a car as such… James Bond’s Aston-Martin DB5 in Goldfinger…
Amos Burke’s Rolls Royce Silver Cloud…
(it was what I watched the show for), The Monkee Mobile…
…a highly modified Pontiac GTO…legendary car customizer Dean Jeffries did it and I thought it was the coolest riff on a production line car I’d ever seen. I still think that GTO is the coolest looker of all the custom cars California custom shops churned out back in the 60s.
…and finally The Green Hornet’s Black Beauty…
…a 1966 Imperial Crown sedan, also customized by Dean Jeffries.
That was kidhood. I never really saw anything in the movies or TV that caught my imagination after the sixties. I liked the look of the Batmobile in the 1960s TV series, which was built by the legendary George Barris from a Lincoln concept car, but hated the TV show so much I couldn’t separate it from the god awful camp of that show.
Back in those days most of my favorite celebrity cars were actually quarter mile funny cars like The Little Red Wagon…
…and the Hemi Under Glass…
…not exactly something you’d drive to the grocery store in, which is not to say that wouldn’t be fun. I had an eye for exotic cars too, like the Rolls Royces and Lamborghinis. But when it came down to serious dreaming, somehow in the latter part of my teenage days, when a driver’s license in my wallet was on the cusp of becoming a reality, the dream machine…the one I would actually own someday…maybe…I hope…was always a Mercedes diesel sedan. So I guess that really says it all about me and cars.
And last December I finally did get my teenage dream car after all…
It’s not an Aston-Martin DB5 with an ejector seat and tire flattening wheel knockoffs, but there’s a difference between having a dream and having a fantasy. Which isn’t to say the ability to flatten someone’s tires wouldn’t come in handy every now and then.
So this morning before leaving for work I see one of the bird feeders needs topping off and as I bring it down off the tree I see the calico watching me from under my car. She’s seen me get into and out of it often enough now to have associated it with me and I guess that makes under my car a safe space. Fine. But now she’s staring at me as I’m bringing down the bird feeder and next thing I know up the stairs she’s coming and I can see where this is going: she wants fed in the morning too.
I thought we had a routine going; she gets food from me but only in the afternoon. I am the afternoon meal. You’re feral lady, you don’t want human companionship. You’re on your own for the rest of the day. That’s the bargain, right? But of course the bargain is whatever the cat wants it to be.
Now playing in four states, virtually identical ads designed at heading off marriage equality at the ballot box. These ads are merely a retread of the template created to defeat marriage equality in the Proposition 8 ballot referendum of 2008 in California.
They are all produced by the kingpin of anti-gay politics: Frank Schubert. They are all premised on the foundation of one basic lie: that a state implementing marriage equality will compel the state to teach children in public schools all about gay marriage.
It won’t
But…no. That is not the foundational lie. The bedrock here is Homosexuals Will Rape Your Children…
If it was just about teaching school kids that some couples are same-sex then where could the venomous hysteria possibly be coming from, the bottomless rage? These people are spending millions all over the country, the couple in this ad appearing in one state after another, just to darkly warn that Dick and Jane might learn about Adam and Steve…?
No…just…no. First of all, these people don’t even believe that homosexuals are capable of forming stable long lasting relationships. The possibility that same-sex couples might get married and form households, and that school children might learn that this happens in human societies does not concern them and that is not the warning they are broadcasting in these ads. The sly implication in all of them is the schools are now going to teach children how to have gay sex. And, to the degree same-sex marriage normalizes homosexuality, that the entire motivation for it is to leave children open to the idea of having sex with homosexual adults, thereby recruiting them into homosexuality. This is what the homosexuals want. Not to be married, but to have access to your children.
That is what’s being said, between the lines but well heard all the same, in every single one of those ads.
There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to anti-gay propaganda. Ever since Anita Bryant it’s been predatory homosexuals want to recruit your children because that’s the only way homosexuals can reproduce. The packaging of the lie changes, but it’s always the same lie.
She’s an adorable little calico and she’s feral so she won’t let anyone get too close. But for several years now she’s been lurking around my street and occasionally visiting Casa del Garrett, to check the menu around the bird feeders, and every now and then catching something. I keep the feeders well off the ground, in part to keep city rats from getting into them and in part to keep little calico cats away from the customers, though I suppose she, and the occasional hawk, also consider themselves that. I’d rather she left my birds alone. But she is the most amazing hunter I’ve ever seen and part of me respects professionalism in every endeavor.
And bravery. I watched one day as she stalked up to the edge of a fenced in yard that usually contains two very large dogs. She would have been a bite sized snack for either one but cat sense must be far superior to spider sense as she seemed to know even though she could not see the entire yard from street level that the dogs weren’t in there. But a small flock of birds was, feeding on some seed that had been put out. I watched her suddenly leap over the fence, run up the hill, run back down and back over the fence and across the street with a small bird in her mouth. It happened that quick. Another time I was serenely watching the birds at my feeders from just inside my front door and she suddenly leaped over the top step (where you see her sitting in that photo) and tried to snag one of the birds that were inadvisedly ground feeding there. What caught my attention was when she made her sudden leap her front claws were striking in the air above the sidewalk, not where the birds were, but where she knew they would be. That time she missed but was close…one of those birds must have felt the whiff of air as a claw passed by. I have seen the occasional feathery left overs scattered around my walkway. Usually it was a pigeon. She can have all of those she wants.
In a heartbeat I’d take her in, but as I said she’s feral and those cats will never accept human companionship. But somebody has been watching out for her because her coat is usually very clean and well kept and one ear is clipped (you can barely see it in this photo) which means at some point someone scooped her up and took her to the vet to be spayed and given her shots). I’m guessing the city doesn’t mind at least some feral cats prowling about, provided they’ve been spayed/neutered and topped off with anti-rabies, as they’ll help keep the rodent population in check. And at least until recently someone must have been feeding her. Good as she is hunting, I don’t think that’s enough to account for the her overall good condition. Most ferals I’ve seen looked pretty tattered. He coat is always shiny and clean. Or at least it was until recently.
In the weeks before Sandy hit I noticed she seemed a bit…disheveled. Her coat had started to look a bit…worn. And she seemed tired all the time. She’s been around the neighborhood for some years now and I thought perhaps age was beginning to set in. Or maybe one of the other ferals around here had bullied her out of her place wherever she was getting food and shelter. Or maybe the crazy older lady everyone in the neighborhood suspects is feeding the strays had stopped for some reason. I hadn’t seen the woman around her house for a while. She’s easy to spot when she goes for her walks. She’s the one who always wears a heavy winter coat when she goes for her walks, even in a brutal heat wave. She has family that stops by regularly and I began to wonder if maybe they’d finally taken her away.
So I began to worry about the little calico. Then Sandy barreled in. During the worst of the storm I caught a glimpse of the calico huddled in the basement window sill and I felt frustrated I couldn’t just bring her inside. But any move I might have made toward her just then she would have bolted into the storm which would have only made matters worse. So I let her be, afraid the next morning I’d find a little dead kitty in front of my basement window. But somehow she survived it. Maybe she moved on to wherever it is she normally beds down for the night. There are crawl spaces under some of the houses, and somewhere under one of those maybe there would be shelter and heat. I have no idea. All I know is after the hurricane she was gone, but later the next day she showed up again. And the next day I did something I swore I wouldn’t. I put some food out for her. I knew the moment I did that I was making a commitment I wasn’t sure I wanted to be making. But I did it. It was the sight of her huddled wet in the basement window sill and I couldn’t do anything but hope she wasn’t going to die of exposure.
A couple days later after work I got a distinctively colored and shaped bowl out of my kitchen cabinets and put it on the basement window sill where I’d seen her during the hurricane. It had one of the cans of tuna from my winter pantry. I had about a half dozen of them I knew I wasn’t going to finish by the sell by dates on them, so I figured they weren’t going to waste if I gave them to the cat. The next morning I saw the bowl had been eaten from, and I hoped it was her and not a city rat that got into it. I brought it inside and cleaned it out. I had a plan.
The next day when I came home from work she was there on my front steps. The front steps are one of her usual perches where she stalks my birds. I spoke to her and she moved away, but not too far. I went inside, got the bowl out, put another can of tuna in it and walked outside to where she could see me. When she saw the bowl her face lit up. There was a reason I picked that particular oddly shaped and colored bowl. Seeing me holding it she could make a connection between it and me. I put it down on the basement window sill, and nearby on the front porch, a smaller bowl of water. Then I went inside, walked down to my basement art room and peeked under the curtain in front of the basement window. There she was, eating. When she was done, she moved away and I came back upstairs and took the bowl back inside. I don’t want to be feeding all the neighborhood cats, let alone the city rats. Just her.
A few minutes later I walked back outside. It was Halloween night and I wanted to put up some decorations and attract some goblins. As I was stringing some lights on the front steps rail, she came out from under one of the cars parked on the street, walked closer to me on the sidewalk then she ever did, still well out of arm’s reach…sat down…and stared right at me for a time, never taking her eyes off me, like she was sizing me up. For a good five minutes she did that, as I tried talking a calming patter to her while I was stringing lights. Then she seemed to shrug, and walked away. The next day, promptly after work, she was sitting on my front steps, waiting.
So now we have a routine going. And her coat is looking nicer again and she seems to have more energy. I have no idea if that’s me or her other source of food is back online too. But it’s good to see. I’m too single to have a pet and this is in many ways an ironic echo of the story of my life. It seems no matter who I take a fondness to I always get kept at arm’s length. So in a way this is a relationship I’m used to. But she’s lived on the city streets for years now, and the other side of that coin is I probably don’t have to worry about her too much if I go away for a while. I might be able to talk one of my other neighbors into putting some food out for her while I’m gone.
The other day I bought some nice stainless steal cat bowls, one for water and one for food. And some cat food. Today she ate from both. She actually seemed to like the cat food better then the human food. And thus Bruce, walking the stations of life, steps into that crazy old man who feeds stray cats stage. Oh well. I guess I don’t mind.
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