Who Knew The Wedding Altar Was Also A Sacrificial One…(continued)
Joe Jervis over at Joe.My.God posts what looks like the cover of NOM’s current mailer…
So it looks like NOM is doubling-down on their The Homosexuals Are After Your Children card that worked for them so well in California. How…unsurprising…
When you have reduced your neighbor to the status of a scarecrow that drives voters to the polls, or a scapegoat for every failure of moral character you would rather not be held accountable for, when you cannot see the people for the homosexuals, then threats to their lives become meaningless abstractions. They’re not your neighbors, they’re not people, they’re things…and the safety of things isn’t something that often crosses the mind. It’s not hate exactly…it’s what hate does to the heart eventually. That may look like a photo of a cute little boy with his daddy’s glasses on, reading a book about two kings who fall in love, but look closer. That is a photo of human souls in free fall. To win elections, to prevent loving same-sex couples from having access to marriage, NOM is belly flopping into the gutter, and they know it, and they don’t care. Not honor, not morality, not any shred of basic human decency left within them matters to them any more. All that matters is striking out at the Homosexual Menace. This is what hate does to the heart, eventually.
The Homosexuals Are After Your Children!!! It’s a message that gets attention and, for now, wins elections. The trump card you can play when it looks like too many voters are starting to view the homosexual as their neighbor. It also gets people killed. But for that to weigh on your conscience, you have to see gays as people, not things. You have to be able to see the people for the homosexuals. Bigots can’t.
Who Knew The Wedding Altar Was Also A Sacrificial One?
Apparently Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown believe that gay people have to die so that marriage can be sacred.
Joe Jervis over at Joe.My.God has a post up containing a video of Brian Brown speaking at Sen. Ruben Diaz hate rally in the Bronx this afternoon. It’s worth a look to get a feel for the heated atmosphere Diaz, Brown and company feel is appropriate for addressing the place of their gay neighbors in society. At the 2:55 mark, Brown shouts the following out at the crowd:
“It changes what is taught in the schools. Kids as young as kindergarten are taught in Massachusetts that their parents are bigots because they believe marriage is the union of a man and a woman.”
It just isn’t possible by now, that Brown and Gallagher don’t know their claim that the curriculum of kindergarten in Massachusetts has anything to do with same-sex marriage is false. But the smear that The Homosexuals Are After Your Children has a long history, even before Anita Bryant embodied it with her Save Our Children campaign, which was not so much about saving children (certainly not any gay ones at least) then it was making sure gay citizens could loose their jobs simply for being gay. But if it’s not possible that Brown and Gallagher don’t know that Massachusetts isn’t teaching kindergarteners about same-sex marriages, it’s also not possible that they don’t know how useful it is to say that it is.
So here is Brown doubling-down on it. Not only is Massachusetts teaching kindergarteners about same-sex marriage, but their teachers are telling them that their parents are bigots. And he’s doing it in a community that’s already had some pretty spectacular anti-gay violence recently…
Eight gay-hating Bronx gangbangers accused of one of the city’s most savage crimes in years appeared in court Sunday to face charges in what Mayor Bloomberg called an act of “pure evil.”
They stand accused of torturing and terrorizing a gay man, his older brother and two teenagers over the course of many hours Oct. 3 in Morris Heights.
“Is it true you’re a fag?” ringleader Idelfonso (Cheto) Mendez allegedly demanded of his bound victims before punching them in the face.
Prosecutors said he repeated the query and the punch over and over again.
Anti-gay bias attacks don’t always target gays. Sometimes violent perpetrators screaming anti-gay epithets target straight men instead. Such may have been the case in the March 12 beating death in Queens, New York, of 18-year-old Anthony Collao, a heterosexual recent high school graduate, reported the New York Daily News on March 15.
Several young men who reportedly broke windows, scrawled on the walls with red markers, and made hand gestures associated with gangs invaded a party hosted by two gay men. The men also reportedly attacked and beat Collao while hurling anti-gay epithets, the article said.
The news account said that Collao tried to avoid violence by leaving the party once the four intruders entered. The gang chased him down, the article said, threw him up against a car, and pummeled him mercilessly. Collao was reportedly was reportedly punched, kicked, and stomped. One assailant was said to be carrying a pipe.
Four suspects were later placed under arrest. One of the young men was wearing Collao’s baseball cap, and the other three were “covered in blood.”
Do you really think that Ruben Diaz doesn’t know about any of this? Or Brian Brown?
“Kids as young as kindergarten are taught in Massachusetts that their parents are bigots because they believe marriage is the union of a man and a woman…”
The homosexuals are coming for your children!!! This is the kind of thing that gets people gay bashed and killed. And NOM’s utter indifference to the climate of violence this sort of rhetoric can enable speaks volumes. Perhaps it’s true that Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown do not hate gay people. Perhaps. Clearly they regard hate as a useful tool. It gets people to the voting booth. It gets their checkbooks opened up.
A few months ago Maggie, you asked, rhetorically, “Do I have blood on my hands?” And you know, I’ve been wondering why you didn’t bother wearing your wedding ring to the DOMA hearings a few weeks ago. They say the wedding ring embodies the continuous flow of love, a never-ending circle symbolizing eternity, where there is no beginning or end, the gold symbolizing purity…gold being one of the noble elements that are said to be incorruptible. But the spilling of innocent blood corrupts everything it touches. That simple, elegant and beautiful symbol of eternal love…you’re turning it into a thing of shame Maggie. I don’t think very many couples want their wedding vows sealed with a ring of blood.
The thinking is that it’s the religious right pushing more and more young people into questioning their faith. But some poisons require much smaller doses…
For Mother’s Day, an interfaith social justice group created this ad urging churches to be accepting of gay families. But one Christian website wasn’t so accepting of the ad. According to the Huffington Post, the group Intersections International pitched the ad to the progressive Christian organization Sojourners, hoping to place it on their website and e-mail list. Sojourners turned it down, issuing a statement reading, “I’m afraid we’ll have to decline. Sojourners position is to avoid taking sides on this issue. In that care [sic], the decision to accept advertising may give the appearance of taking sides.”
This prompted some outrage…
I can’t imagine why. The article goes on to mention Tim King, Sojourners public spokesdroid, blogging the issue…roundaboutly, in a post titled “Love Comes First”….
God worked in my heart. I realized that my primary job as a follower of Christ wasn’t to try and answer the question, “Is it okay to be gay?” and then enforce my answer on others. My job was to love my neighbor as myself. I knew I didn’t want to be a part of those actively hurting or “accidentally” ostracizing anyone who identified as LGBTQ. My time was much better spent hearing the stories, listening to the struggles, and learning from those in that community. My responsibility was to speak out on issues of civil rights for the LGBT community and actively work to make the church a more welcoming place. I learned that “How do I love?” must come before, “Who is okay?”
If you listen carefully you can hear the mantra of the religious right: love the sinner, hate the sin. What King gives us here an example of the liberal version: Love the sinner, let’s agree to disagree about the sin… It is every bit as indifferent to the humanity of gay people, just more cowardly, less willing even then the outright hater to examine its own evasiveness. How seriously do you speak out for the civil rights of your gay neighbors when you don’t under any circumstances want to have to answer the question of their being “okay”? How deep is the love that doesn’t care one whit whether the homosexual is your neighbor or an abomination in the eyes of god? If homosexuality is the love that dare not speak its name, Sojourners is the Christianity that dared turn love into an empty slogan.
When people ask me these days how I, raised in a pretty strict Baptist household, could have become an atheist, I tell them that it wasn’t because I have a grudge against religion. Since I am a gay man and gay people are somewhere between human garbage and handy stepping stones to heaven in a lot of churches, you would expect I have some pretty bad feelings about the faith of my childhood, but it isn’t so. I have some pretty bad feelings towards certain kinds of fundamentalism, but there are still a lot of things I value deeply that I learned sitting in the pews of my childhood, chief among them respect for the soul competency of others. I came to this place simply because belief in god stopped making sense to me. But I do not begrudge others who ask that same question honestly and get a different answer from mine. The better part of both science and religion councils humility when asking the Big Questions. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the Earth…? If we knew what it was we were doing it would not be called research…
But it is also a fact worth reflecting on, that had I lived in a less prejudiced time I might not have felt the need to pursue the big questions so intensely. It wasn’t just the bottomless hatred of others that pushed me out of church and into the world. It was seeing the cowardliness of those who knew perfectly well that there is nothing wrong with their gay neighbors, but who could not bring themselves to challenge the hatred of others, lest they themselves became hated too. It was seeing so many, so horribly many, who could not bring themselves to challenge their own deeply rooted prejudices, lest they come face to face with their part in the persecution so many innocent people, so many couples whose only crime was to fall in love. We have nothing against homosexuals as fellow human beings…but the Bible Clearly States…
Not the bottomless hatred of bigots, but the seeing with my own two eyes how quickly even good men and women of reason and faith would toss overboard their honor, their good name, and their sense of basic human decency when it came to their gay neighbors. What is truth, asked Pilot. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes, asked Marx. While you’re wash, washing your hands of your gay neighbor’s struggle for a place in this world that doesn’t demean their humanity Messrs. Wallis and King, here is some truth: if love between a man and a woman is “okay” but love between same-sex couples isn’t then what comes first isn’t love.
As Elie Wiesel said, the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. Strangers can gay bash you, but only family can tear your heart out and eat it, simply by not caring. Likewise, it’s the ones we think of as friends, who we trust, whose indifference cuts deepest. Hate you can overcome, but betrayal you never forget.
It’s Such A Different World From The One I Grew Up In…
So…yes…I Twitter. I’m coming to find that the running Tweet list is a really great way to stay informed and pick up on interesting conversations. Of course, it all depends on who you’re following. Follow a bunch of vacant celebrities and you get nothing but vacant celebrity babble. But follow people like Atrios, Ezra Klien, Rachel Maddow, Krugman and such and you get a really absorbing mix of real time chatter. And there are celebrities who are worth following: George Takei, Eddie Izzard, Christopher Walken (Although he doesn’t tweet much anymore…)
So…anyway…I tweet. And I watch. Mostly I watch. And during last night’s nightly bout of insomnia I saw this from Myth Buster Grant Imahara…
…and the first thing that crossed my mind was Who are Lanikai and Mahalo and why haven’t I read their stories? I have tons of yaoi here at Casa del Garrett and I have never heard of these characters that are supposedly so popular. However, the concept of “starter ukes” is…intriguing…
What a starter uke might look like…
What I don’t get is why Shuichi didn’t make the list. In my opinion he’d make an excellent starter uke, provided you could handle his mood swings…
Very sad to read Sean Avery’s misguided support of same-gender ‘marriage…
Deux…
Legal or not, it will always be wrong…
Trois…
To clarify. This is not hatred or bigotry towards gays…
Quatre…
It is not intolerance in any way shape or form…
Cinq…
I believe we are all equal…
Six…
But I believe the sanctity of marriage is between one man and one woman…
Sept…
This is my personal viewpoint…
Huit…
I do not hate anyone.
Le Curtian…Applaus a vous…
Le Update Encore un Père skunk de pew…
“It’s sad. I mean, my personal position is that I do not support gay marriage, and I think it’s wrong, as well. It’s not politically correct to, I guess, give your opinion about a thing like that. It’s politically correct on the other side, for people to say, ‘sure, I support gay marriage.’ But the majority, I think, of Canadians would say that they don’t agree with gay marriage – that man and woman were created to be married, not man and man or man and horse, you know?” -Don Reynolds, father of Todd Reynolds, original tweeter and vice-president of Uptown Sports Management, as quoted in The National Post
Le Yikes!Le kittee quel terrible odeur!! Scram a vous!!!
The only thing that leaps out at me upon viewing President Obama’s “long form” Hawaiian birth certificate, is it looks structurally a lot like my California one. I’m guessing they all used the same ready-made government forms company back then. Oh…you want our Form 417B rev-c62-1011-A product. We have a special on that this week…purchase a million and you get a handy desk calendar embossed with your initials free of charge…
Well…I for one was expecting a sheet of paper at least five or six feet in length given all the fuss. Some progressive commentators are alternately wondering why Obama gave in to the kooks and why he would want to put this particular republican clown show to rest. Hahahaha…you can never shut up the kooks. This is beautiful actually. Here’s what’s going to happen: the kooks will, as they always do, simply reinvent their conspiracy theories, come up with new ones that explain why the old ones were right all along, babble even more loudly that Obama isn’t an American, is really a secret Muslim, is bringing atheism and shara law to the U.S., and thereby drag themselves even further into insanityland and the republican party with them since that’s essentially their base now. What’s the RNC going to do…them them to STFU? They can’t…they’ll loose a critical part of their base they can’t win elections without: the lunatics.
What Obama just did was poke a stick at the kook nest while acting all presidential and everything and all the democrats have to do now is pass the popcorn and sit back and watch. Bet he does it again right before the GOP convention too.
[Update…] On Twitter, Atrios shouts “Huzzah…the kerners are back.” Yes…they’re questioning the typewriter lettering. See…I told you…
Atlanta-based law firm King & Spalding won plaudits Monday from gay activists for backing out of an agreement to argue to uphold the federal ban on gay marriage. But a day later the reviews were a bit more bruising in the legal community.
Top lawyers and law professors, with some notable exceptions, called it an embarrassing blunder by the prestigious firm or a betrayal of a client and legal principles. Others think King & Spalding, whose clients include General Electric and Coca-Cola, may have backed out because the firm fears the fallout from leading an anti-gay legal fight.
You say that like it’s a bad thing…
King & Spalding’s announcement it would not represent congressional House Republicans in their quest to defend court challenges to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the subsequent decision of Paul Clement, the lawyer in the case, to quit the firm and take it elsewhere was the talk Tuesday among Yale University Law School faculty, said Lawrence Fox, a Yale professor and expert in legal ethics. DOMA defines marriage “for federal tax, Social Security and other purposes” as only a union between a man and a woman.
“We really go down a bad road if we say law firms can’t take on (controversial) matters or people will assume you have those views,” said Fox. “I’m going to walk into my class today and I’m going to use this. I’m tearing up my lesson plan … to talk about this case.”
The nice thing about working in an ivory tower is what you do doesn’t have to have any relationship to the world outside. Tenure. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who have to live there, in the world of the commoners, it’s only they who remember the panic that set in back in 1993 when the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples could not constitutionally be denied the right to marry. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember how the party of Lincoln and Fred Phelps pushed through congress the Defense Of Marriage Act to protect American heterosexuals from the damaging effects of having to live in a world where the sordid, brief and barren sexual assignations of homosexuals had the same legal standing as their noble unions of male and female. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember how the man who stood in front of them and said “I have a vision for America and you’re part of it” signed that bill into law in the dead of night, somewhat less then three years after he folded on his promise to let gay servicemen serve openly and with dignity. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who watched as the new republican majority in congress, elected on campaign pledges of jobs, set about immediately to work reassuring their base that the meager gains gay Americans had made while the democrats were in control would not stand, and that they would be steadfast in opposing president Obama’s plan to impose The Gay Agenda on America.
It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who read the steady stream of news reports of same-sex couples beaten down and destroyed by this nation’s abject capitulation to bigotry, month after month, year after year.
A gay Long Island couple who have played by the immigration rules for more than a decade are stuck in a Catch-22 that could tear them apart just when they need each other most.
New Yorker Edwin Blesch, 70 and his South African husband, Tim Smulian, 65, have been spending six months on Long Island and six months abroad to comply with Smulian’s tourist visa.
But Blesch, who has HIV, suffered several mini-strokes and other complications and is now unable to travel safely.
Smulian is his primary caregiver – but has no way to stay here permanently.
It’s unclear what will happen to the couples already profiled by major news sources, like Monica Alcota and Cristina Ojeda. The one thing that is clear is that this is a sad day for binational same-sex couples, and for everyone who values America’s tradition of being a place where people can come from anywhere in the world to make a home. Like so many other things, that seems to be a privilege reserved for straight people.
It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember their names…names like Laurel Hester. Not law professors in ivory towers.
Here is a law firm that proudly touted its support for gay Americans in their struggle for equality. Suddenly it is, in a very high profile way, part of the republican party’s DOMA circus. Suddenly every attorney, every clerk, every secretary, every intern working for this law firm is under a gag order…not simply to refrain from speaking about the case, but never to breath so much as a word against DOMA. Imagine that instead of Teh Gay this case was about defending a congressional ban on Jewish ownership of businesses. How many eyebrows would be raised when a law firm that touted its opposition to antisemitism, suddenly took on the congressional defense of that law, and gagged its partners and staff from ever speaking a word against the segregation of Jews? Who would complain when the law firm withdrew and the jackass antisemitic partner who dragged them into that despicable case left to pursue it on his own, that the Jews had gone too far?
But conscience, and a sense of basic human decency wanders in a lot of people, even now, when it comes to the persecution of gay Americans. Suddenly persecuting minorities becomes some abstract thing, less important, less real, then the right of republicans to conduct a great circus show of defending marriage against the forces of Obama and Satan, and demonize a segment of America for votes. The constant rain of gay blood on the streets isn’t even on their moral radar…
HRC is right to fight vigorously to overturn DOMA, which deprives gays and lesbians of many of the rights enjoyed by their heterosexual counterparts. But it sullies itself and its cause by resorting to bullying tactics.
On February 22, around 11:00 p.m., Shortell was walking home to his apartment on Kent Avenue and North Fourth Street, a walk that never felt unsafe to him before, when he was brutally attacked by a group of four teenagers. The details were fuzzy after that and as a result of the incident, Shortell suffered a fractured chin and nose; eye sockets and cheekbones, requiring ten hours of immediate surgery, several days in the hospital, and a month of recovery since.
Bullying tactics? Bullying tactics? Here’s the problem: the scapegoats aren’t taking it anymore. They’re fighting back. Where is the outrage in the corporate news media…the comfortable McMansion in the rich white suburbs corporate news media? Once again, it’s directed at gay Americans. For standing up for their human dignity. For defending themselves against hate. For fighting back. Republicans inciting hatred for votes is just Business As Usual. Gays asking businesses to walk the walk not just talk the talk on civil rights is front page news! How dare they. Don’t they know their place anymore? What is this world coming to, when even homosexuals demand to be treated with respect? Who told the them they had a right not to be bullied? It certainly wasn’t us.
After consulting my iPhone’s weather radar app, I take a quick trip over to a nearby deli to grab some diet ice tea drinks. Figure I can get there and back again before the next wave of drizzle hits. On the way back inside the Institute building, a young woman with her iPhone ear buds plugged into her head, is chatting loudly with…some disembodied somebody. She is oblivious to everyone and everything around her, talking very loudly to the person at the other end of the digital network connection. Did I not know about cell phones I might think her a lost crazy person talking to the voices inside her head. In the lobby I walk quickly past her and to the stairwell down to my office, where I nearly collide with another co-worker whose eyes on fixed on the LCD display of his iPhone.
The trope is all our little computer devices are making us somehow less human, less able to interact with each other as humans beings. And it’s a false one. These devices don’t subtract from our human identity, they are a consequence of it. We made these things, and then took a sudden passionate fondness for them, because we are what we are. As a matter of fact, yes, millions of years of adaptive evolution made us into smart phone consumers. It created us to eventually build the cell phone and text messaging and computer information technologies and online social forums just as surely as it put the color in our eyes.
Robert Ardrey, in his book African Genesis, took note of our species long preoccupation with weapons. How long, he asked, would the first human have survived on the African plains, were they not born with a weapon in their hand? Nothing, he said, in our long history has ever stopped the slow steady progression and refinement of the weapon. We are the species, he said, whose instinct is to kill with a weapon. But we are something else besides, something probably even older then the weapon in our hands, something that had to have played just as critical if not an even more critical roll in our kind’s success on planet Earth, and to this day I’m surprised that a writer of all people didn’t see it too: Language. We are the species that talks. We are a chattering breed. And nothing in the long difficult history of the human kind has ever stopped the slow steady progression and refinement of human communication.
It is the nature of tools to change what they touch. So the plow changed the earth, but also the farmer. The mistake is thinking the plow made the farmer less human. It made him more human. It made him better at being the thing that millions of years of life on Earth created him to be. And we are the species that talks. We communicate with one another. By whatever available means at hand, by whatever way gets it across the best, we will communicate. It’s what we do. It’s why there are libraries and opera and art galleries and weather radar apps. So we refine our tools and so our tools refine us. That inconsiderate moron in the restaurant babbling loudly into his cell phone hasn’t been dehumanized by the digital revolution. Look at him. He is simply obeying a very old and very ancient and powerful urge to communicate it…whatever it is…to someone. Birds sing. Humans babble away. Smile kindly upon him, before you take that cell phone out of his hand and smack him over the head with it.
“The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods
but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods.”
-Theodor Reik, Of Love and Lust, 1957
I thought loving someone deeply, strongly, absolutely, I’d finally understand how it might feel to be jealous. Instead I discovered how incomprehensible jealously is. It makes no sense. How can everyone not love you?
“Why stop at transgender identity? Why not species identity — someone wants to get in touch with their inner horse.”
-Matt Barber, speaking at The Awakening
Lest you think it was all bile and venom at The Awakening, they also discussed ways of approaching homosexuals from a Christian perspective. “We have to reach out to those trapped in lifestyle that ultimately leads to death,” said Cynthia Dunbar, assistant law professor at Liberty University. Ryan Sorba, chairman of the Young Conservatives of California who threw a fit at gay participation at last year’s CPAC, offered these helpful insights for Christians wishing to reach out to homosexuals:
“‘Gay’ is a left-wing socio-political construct designed to create grounds for fundamental rights [based on] whimsical capricious desires. Gay identity does not exist.”
According to the article he then proposed several alternatives to “gay” including, “same-sex attraction”, “same-sex intercourse”, “unnatural vice” and the ever popular “sodomy”. Later it was proposed that gays also be called “anti-Christian.” But in a reaching out kind of way.
Whatever they were awakening there at Liberty University it wasn’t their conscience. Perhaps they should have held a seance instead.
Considering the state of the economy, it should come as no surprise that the ranks of the child-free are exploding. The Department of Agriculture reports that the average cost for a middle-income two-parent family to support a kid through high school is $286,050 (it’s nearly half a million dollars for couples in higher tax brackets). Want him or her to get a college education? The number jumps to nearly $350,000 for a public university, and more than $400,000 for private. Though if your kid’s planning to major in Male Sterilization, it could wind up being a good investment: The vasectomy business seems to be one of the few in America that is booming. In the past year, the Associates in Urology clinic in West Orange, New Jersey, has seen a 50 percent jump in the procedure. So you could stress over starting a college fund, or you could consider that you can get a vasectomy at Planned Parenthood for less than the cost of a Bugaboo Cameleon stroller. Unless you’re among the less than 2 percent of Americans who farm for a living and might conceivably rely on offspring for free labor, children have gone from being an economic asset to an economic liability.
But for the child-free, the benefits go beyond dollars and cents. There’s less guilt, less worry, less responsibility, more sleep, more free time, more disposable income, no awkward conversations about Teen Mom, no forced relationships with people just because your kids like their kids, no chauffeuring other people’s kids in your minivan to soccer games you find less appealing than televised chess.
In his best-seller Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes, “Couples generally start out quite happy in their marriages and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives together, getting close to their original levels of satisfaction only when their children leave home.” No wonder so many are choosing to spend their entire marriages as empty-nesters. A 2009 University of Denver study found that 90 percent of couples experienced a decrease in marital bliss after the birth of their first child. And in a 2007 Pew survey, just 41 percent of adults stated that children were very important for a successful marriage, down from 65 percent in 1990. Meanwhile, nearly one in five American women now ends her reproductive years without children, up from one in ten in the 1970s.
Growing up I used to get odd looks from people, friends and adults both, whenever I expressed my utter disinterest in raising a family. It marked me as weird as far back as elementary school, probably long before anyone began to get a clue that Bruce wasn’t the sort you’d ever see holding hands with a girl to begin with. But it wasn’t that I thought the married life wasn’t for me, or that I harbored some deep seated disgust at the thought of having children around. I would hate to live in one of those adults only communities where everyone is just old and tired. As you get older especially, you really appreciate the cheerful anarchy that happens around kids. It keeps you thinking. I just never saw any personal need within me to do the parent thing and I reckoned early on that if you were going to raise a kid right, you needed to really want to have kids. I knew almost right from the start that I didn’t.
To a lot of people apparently, that makes me defective somehow. I guess the thinking is it doesn’t matter what you do for your community or your country or the good of humanity if you don’t also produce children. But…that’s bullshit. And I’m happy to say that finally some heterosexuals are standing up for their life choices here.
For Heather McGhinnis, a married 35-year-old marketing specialist in Elgin, Illinois, motherhood is simply a lifestyle choice that’s not for her. “The job of being a parent doesn’t interest me,” she explains. “Just like I don’t want to be an accountant, I don’t want to be a parent.”
This is the case for nearly all of my straight friends, who were all theoretically lead to believe growing up that being parents was their natural destiny. They didn’t go there for the same reasons I, a gay man who could nevertheless adopt if I really wanted to, didn’t either. No interest.
That’s not to say I have no interest in the welfare of kids. I care very much care about their welfare, about the world they must grow up in. I care they all get a good education. I care that they grow up safe and sound and healthy and strong. I care about that very much. That’s a natural adult thing, whether you have any of your own or not. If you need to have kids of your own to care about the welfare of kids then there is something wrong with you, not me.
Now at last folks like us are finding our voices. And for once I am so very, very glad to see heterosexuals taking the lead here because a gay guy like me can’t plausibly be standing up for the virtues of childlessness with any sort of credibility. Of course you’re childless, you’re a fucking homo and homos don’t reproduce, they recruit… It’s sad but there it is. Not that childless couples are going to get a break from the culture warriors simply because they’re heterosexual. Oh no…they’re easily as much the Enemy as we are, if not more so. If you think the culture wars are only about homosexuality you really need to look more carefully at what right wing lunatics think of contraception. And no, it’s not about sex being only for having children either.
According to Laura S. Scott, who surveyed 171 subjects for her book Two Is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice, that kind of attitude is linked to a specific personality component. “A lot of introverts, thinkers, judgers—these are people who think before they act,” she says. “They’re planners, and they’re not the kind of people who can be easily led into a conventional life just because everyone else is doing it.”
[Emphasis mine…] How unsurprising that it’s mostly my fellow introverts who are going the childless route. No doubt the culture warriors will say this is all the fault of Teh Gay. We’re setting a bad example.
Well…yes. We are. And happy to be of service! We’re showing heterosexual couples that you can have a happy and contented love life without kids if you are not really into the parent thing. That you can contribute to your community and your country and to the future of humanity in many ways besides childbearing. That you don’t have to follow orders.
Especially orders from louts who are waiting with bated breath for the end of the world.
Yes, yes…blame Teh Gay. We showed our heterosexual brothers and sisters what you never wanted them to know: that you can make the world a better place for everyone…kids included…and that’s fine, you’ve done your part, you’ve left your mark, you’ve borne your share of the burden of civilization more nobly then anyone who ever added souls to a world they didn’t give a good goddamn about.
Chambers: We’re being portrayed as group of people making judgments on peoples’ lives whereas I and thousands of others like me, who experienced same-sex attraction, are trying to live out our lives through the filter of our faith, not through the filter of our sexuality…
…he said, making a judgment not just on gay people (they live their lives through the filter of their sexuality), but also on gay Christians (they place a higher value on sex then they do their faith). Yes, yes…it’s all about sex with homosexuals, isn’t it, Alan.
You manipulated Cooper so deftly there. I’m impressed. That what years of talking parents into throwing their gay kids into your soul grinder has done for you?
On Monday, the State Department issued a joint statement in the UN’s Human Rights Council opposing the criminalization of homosexuality. Currently, well over 70 countries impose criminal penalties for gays and lesbians, and the statement has the support of 84 countries. According to the Family Research Council, however, the US is committing a great injustice by condemning the criminalization of people because of their sexual orientation. The FRC dubs it “Operation International Tolerance,” complete with a picture of Obama wearing a rainbow helmet
And here comes the double-speak…
Obviously, FRC believes that homosexuals and transgenders shouldn’t be subjected to violence. But this resolution goes well beyond that to endorsing a behavior that dozens of member nations oppose. No binding document of international law has ever recognized a universal “human right” to engage in sex with a person of the same gender. And although even the U.N. admits that “resolutions” like this one “aren’t legally binding,” they do help to create a legal norm.
[Emphasis mine] As though rounding up gay people and locking them behind bars isn’t an intrinsically violent act. But pay attention to that business about legal norms. In his 1990 essay The Hypocrites of Homosexualty Orson Scott Card acknowledges what most other right wing culture warriors only soft peddle in public: that sodomy laws exist mainly to create a climate of fear among gay people…
Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.
The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place…
This can’t be emphasized enough: right wing culture warriors really do want homosexuality criminalized. This fight isn’t just about marriage, hospital visitation rights, the ability of gay Americans to hold down a job, get a professional license, or walk into a restaurant and expect the same service anyone else gets. It’s about fear. Gay people must be afraid. Every minute of every day, we must be afraid. And we are not. And that makes them angry. They are angry that we can live our lives openly, that we don’t have to worry about being turned into the police by some neighbor or co-worker with a grudge and get thrown in jail. They hate it that we don’t have to be afraid.
Because a fearful homosexual is a good homosexual. A fearful homosexual isn’t merely one who does not agitate for civil rights. We must be afraid just to live our lives openly. The closet must be our world. It must go back to this, all over again:
“If only we didn’t hate ourselves so much…if only we could just not hate ourselves quite so very much…” -Michael, The Boys In The Band
We must hate ourselves, at least as much if not more then they hate us. Because then we will never know the one thing we must never be allowed to know: what it is to be loved, and to love another… wholeheartedly… joyfully… body and soul.
Because love stays the course. Because love can move mountains. Because the one thing you never want the scapegoat to be able to do, is move mountains.
Drew Call, 32, a returned missionary who is gay, was a supervisor in the church’s printing department until March 7. At a February private meeting with his Salt Lake City stake president—who declined to be interviewed—Call says he was asked to abandon his gay friends as a condition for renewal of his temple recommend. Surprised and fearing people may not believe him, Call surreptitiously made an audio recording of the follow-up meeting in March so there could be no doubt about what happened.
…The recording makes clear that Call’s association with gay people was the problem.
Call is gay, but celibate as the church (sic) requires. His sexuality wasn’t the issue here…it was his gay friends.
On the recording, the stake president expresses concerns that Call recently had taken his daughters to “gay bingo,” a monthly charitable fundraiser hosted by the Utah Pride Center and the drag/comedy troupe Utah Cyber Sluts. “I think it’s inappropriate to take children, and I really think it’s inappropriate for you to go, myself, to this gay bingo,” the stake president says on the recording. Later, the stake president says of the gay community, “They are conducting themselves in a manner that is definitely in opposition to teaching and practices of the gospel. I’ve talked to you about this, about your association with [gay people]. Last time you left here, you were willing to give up your four, or so, individuals.” Call responded that he’d thought about it, but wasn’t willing to give up his gay friends after all.
To receive or maintain a temple recommend, Mormons must answer certain standardized questions. The stake president says on the recording that the question Call could not answer honestly asks, “do you support, affiliate with or agree with any group or individuals whose teaching or practices are contrary to or opposed to those accepted by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?” The stake president goes on to say that that question applies to Call’s gay friends “because of the moral decay that is going in the world and that’s part of it. The church opposes the relationship between a man and a man and a woman and a woman, and you’re associating with those individuals. I don’t know how to get around that.”
“So what are you going to do?” Call asked.
“You’re going to have to look for a job,” the stake president replied.
Read this carefully. The prohibition against having gay friends, as outlined by this “stake president”, is unconditional. Clearly it applies to Everyone. Mormon or not, gay or straight, it matters not. Anyone can be fired from LDS employment simply for having gay friends.
This is how serious this organization is behind the scenes about its anti-gay kulturkampf. It’s not just a matter of Insular Cult Administration 101, which says you mercilessly punish those who shake hands with people on the other side of the barbed wire fence because once they get the slightest taste of the world outside the compound next thing you know they’re out of there. Beyond that aspect of it there is this: when the scapegoat becomes human, persecuting them becomes immoral.
There’s the bottomless fear. Not of the moral decay of the world, but that the world begins to see, clearly, sickeningly, the moral decay within. That can never come to pass. The people must never be allowed to reach out to the scapegoat, the hated other, for once they do the scapegoat becomes human, and then the questions start. Oh my god…what have we been doing to these people all this time…? So much pain we’ve inflicted on so many for so long…and for what? For what?
Today the subjects in the LDS pews fear the judgement of their leaders. But the reality is the leaders are much more afraid of the judgment of the pews, and that day is coming.
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