Via Good As You. Orson Scott Card retells Hamlet. Yes. Seriously.
Anyone who thinks they’ve witnessed the heights of bigotry, look…if you haven’t read any of Orson Scott Card’s rants about homosexuality you absolutely Have Not seen the pure unadulterated thing…
A small American press has been swamped with complaints after publishing a version of Hamlet by the science fiction author Orson Scott Card in which King Hamlet is a gay paedophile.
Hymned by the publisher Subterranean Press as a “revelatory” retelling which shows “what’s really going on” in Shakespeare’s play, the story suggests Hamlet’s father wasn’t murdered by his brother Claudius, but Horatio, in revenge for being molested by him as a child.
…
The book is not a new release, having been published twice before, for the first time in 2008, but an explosive review at the Rain Taxi Review of Books has unleashed a wave of criticism.
“Here’s the punch line: Old King Hamlet was an inadequate king because he was gay, an evil person because he was gay, and, ultimately, a demonic and ghostly father of lies who convinces young Hamlet to exact imaginary revenge on innocent people,” writes William Alexander. “The old king was actually murdered by Horatio, in revenge for molesting him as a young boy – along with Laertes, and Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, thereby turning all of them gay … Hamlet is damned for all the needless death he inflicts, and Dead Gay Dad will now do gay things to him for the rest of eternity: ‘Welcome to Hell, my beautiful son. At last we’ll be together as I always longed for us to be.'”
For anyone who has read Orson Scott Card’s The Hypocrites Of Homosexuality and Homosexual “Marriage” and Civilization (the scare quotes are his), this is as unsurprising as the sight of the sun rising in the east. But bear in mind as you are reading all this, the National Organization for Marriage finds him fit enough for its board of directors…a man who once said that if same-sex couples are universally allowed to marry, every pledge of allegiance he ever uttered since he was a child becomes null and void…
“If America becomes a place where the laws of the nation declare that marriage no longer exists — which is what the Massachusetts decision actually does — then our allegiance to America will become zero. We will transfer our allegiance to a society that does protect marriage.” -Orson Scott Card, Homosexual “Marriage” and Civilization.
Perhaps someone should ask Brian Brown if he feels the same way about his allegiance to the United States of America. Oh…and civil war.
I honestly don’t think Card hates homosexuals. Bigotry isn’t always hate. The gutter has no bottom and there is a step down even from hate, where the complete dehumanization within oneself of the hated other is achieved. Did the architects who designed the gas chambers of Auschwitz hate the Jews, or were they simply doing their best to rid Europe of what they regarded as a pestilence? Hate is not the bottom. If your entire concept of “bigot” is such as Fred Phelps who wave their signs screaming that Matthew Shepard is burning in hell and Thank God For Dead Soldiers, it can come as a shock to see a human heart even more depraved, and worse, to see it so matter of fact about it, as if discussing the weather or last night’s baseball game. But the further down in the gutter you go, the more peaceful it seems.
Card doesn’t scream and shout. He doesn’t stand on a street corner and wave the bible and preach hell fire and damnation. If you sit him down to discuss it (ask people who have interviewed him) he will tell you calmly and matter-of-factly that gay rights is a collective delusion… that granting rights for deviant behavior is ridiculous… that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… that when two homosexuals start telling people they’re a couple they are just “playing house” (his words)…that they might think that they have deep feelings towards one another but that’s all that it is…just wishful thinking, just pitiful trying to convince themselves that their deviant sexual urges are something higher and nobler then empty lust. He will tell you calmly and matter-of-factly that a homosexual’s highest allegiance is to the community that gives them access to sex… that homosexuals recruit children into homosexuality by molesting them and that is how everyone or nearly everyone who ever was a homosexual became one.
He will tell you all of this simply, calmly, and matter-of-factly. So matter-of-factly that you do not, simply cannot doubt this man will never be moved from his prejudices, no matter how much evidence to the contrary moves past his eyes. He does not deny the evidence, he simply does not see it. He can’t. He’s a bigot.
Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Homosexuals are a threat to children. Homosexuality must be actively suppressed by force of law, preferably in a discrete, non-confrontational way, brutally if necessary, or the homosexuals will eventually recruit so many others into homosexuality that civilization will collapse.
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. -Orson Scott Card, The Hypocrites of Homosexuality.
Orson Scott Card will tell you this, as if he is telling you the time of day.
Some prejudice is simply misinformed. Some prejudice is cultural…like the song says, you have to be carefully taught. Even in the most vehement of haters of that kind, there is humanity buried somewhere within. It can be reached. Maybe. Then there is the prejudice that is an abyss. You cannot move an abyss, you can only stare into it, while it stares back into you.
Pissing On The Grave Of Edward R. Murrow…(continued)
In my Twitter feed, Think Progress asks, “Is the media going to let Governor Perry get away with abandoning specific positions he detailed in a 9-month-old book?”
Yes.
This has been another edition of Simple Answers To Simple Questions…
When I Use A Word It Means Just What I Want You To Hate
I see from Jeremy at Good As You that NOM is doubling down on the Gay Rights = Pedophilia rhetoric. On the NOM Blog they’re pointing to a post by Joe Carter that babbles that same claptrap about the B4U-ACT Symposium happening in Baltimore Brian Brown was a couple days ago…
Back in June I outlined how to destroy a culture in 5 easy steps.
An academic symposium in Baltimore comprised of just such a cluster of professoriate and perverts is meeting today to shift the acceptance of pedophilia from “unthinkable” to merely “radical”…
With the euphemism “minor-attracted persons” they are also including Step #2: “From Radical to Acceptable — This shift requires the creation and employment of euphemism.”… Remember when conservatives were mocked and derided for claiming that Lawrence would lead to the normalization [of] polygamy and pedophilia? Now some of those same people who sneered at us are using the decision to promote . . . polygamy and pedophilia.
It looks like they’re fixating on the use of the term “minor-attracted persons” by a group of mental health professionals, but you need to understand while you read it that they know their audience. They are speaking to the kook pews…the ones who don’t know and don’t care what words mean so long as they help win the culture war. Words are weapons, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else. And science is the enemy that believes words have meaning. What Joe Carter and Brian Brown know perfectly well, is that “minor-attracted persons” is not intended to obfuscate that meaning, but clarify it. They know this. But they also know their audience.
There is ephebophilia, which is the sexual attraction to mid to late adolescents…teens 15 and up. There is hebephilia, which this symposium seems to view as the sexual attraction toward teens from post puberty to 14 years (I’ve seen this defined to a higher age range elsewhere). And then there is the ever popular (to the gay haters) pedophilia, which is the sexual attraction to children below the age of puberty. All these terms are used precisely and specifically by mental health professionals, whereas your usual right wing nutcase just says PEDOPHILE for all of it. And without a doubt that’s less because they are idiots with small vocabularies, smaller brains and even smaller regard for whether the words they do know mean anything, and more because they understand that screaming PEDOPHILE at gay people rouses passions and short circuits any possibility of mutual understanding. They don’t want understanding, they just want people to hate Teh Gay.
And that means science is the hated enemy. More even, then Teh Gay. It is the first enemy. The enemy that must be brought down before all others, or else the war is lost. Because the practice of science uses words for their actual meaning, not their tactical advantage. Because science lets the evidence speak for itself. Because science acknowledges no higher authority then the observable facts. Let’s take a look once more, at the part of this symposium brochure that the kook pews are screaming bloody murder about:
This day-long symposium will facilitate the exchange of ideas among researchers, scholars, mental health practitioners, and minor-attracted persons who have an interest in critical issues surrounding the entry for pedophilia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. The symposium will address critical issues in the following areas:
Scientific and philosophical issues related to the DSM entry on pedophilia and/or hebephilia
Effects of the DSM entry on stigma, availability of mental health services, and research
Ways in which minor-attracted persons can be involved in the DSM 5 revision process
It is crucial that the DSM be based on the most accurate and complete scientific information available, and on careful consideration of effects on the welfare of patients and society. This is especially true for the DSM entry on pedophilia; it has an enormous impact on the beliefs and practices of mental health professionals, the criminal justice system, the media, and the public. It also has a profound effect on adults and teenagers who are emotionally and sexually attracted to children or adolescents, on the availability of mental health services for them, and on relevant research.
It is crucial that the DSM be based on the most accurate and complete scientific information available, and on careful consideration of effects on the welfare of patients and society. No shit Sherlock. The problem is anything that tells us something real and useful about the human condition is almost certain to drive the kook pews into babbling hysterical fits. Darwin anyone?
It is staringly obvious that the term “minor-attracted persons” in the context of this symposium is clearly intended to be an all-encompassing term for pedophilia and hebephilia together. To the world outside the anti-gay industrial complex, but especially the mental health profession, using the term pedophilia to describe all adults who are sexually attracted to minors is illiterate. And to anyone who has followed the ravings of the gay-fixated kook pews, and especially crackpot wholesale warehouses like NOM and FRC, it would be easy to assume that illiteracy is the functional norm in there. But it isn’t. Not at the top. Not where the money is being collected. Not where the votes are being counted. When Brian Brown and Joe Carter tell their readers that the term “minor attracted adults” is a euphemism signaling a desire to normalize pedophilia they know Exactly what they are doing. They are rousing the mob. And not just because the mob is the only tool they have left, to win the culture war.
The mob is their kinfolk, their kingdom, their shining city on the hill; cleansed completely of the hated Other, where no one rises above the prejudices of the many to remind them of the gutter they’ve turned America into, and which they are all living in.
On August 18, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) posted a “NOM Marriage News” update, written by NOM president Brian Brown, to its blog.
You read that update and you really start believing that NOM desperately wants to be on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate groups list. Because now they’re just about saying flat out that legalizing Teh Gay means your children are going to get raped. Carlos Maza quotes a passage from Brown’s dirty little rant on the Equality Matters blog. I’m going to quote a tad more of it here, because you need to notice something about the organization Robert George Super Genius co-founded…
NORMALIZING PEDOPHILIA
When you knock over a core pillar of society like marriage, and then try to redefine Biblical views of marriage as bigotry, there will be consequences. Will one of the consequences be a serious push to normalize pedophilia?
The Daily Caller raised the question by pointing us all to a high-level academic conference in Baltimore this week, “Pedophilia: Minor-Attracted Persons and the DSM: Issues and Controversies.”
The DSM is the diagnostic manual that defines mental illness. You probably recall that a key moment in the gay rights campaign was the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association, the organization that produces the DSM, to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.
Here’s how the brochure describes the goal:
“This day-long symposium will facilitate the exchange of ideas among researchers, scholars, mental health practitioners, and minor-attracted persons who have an interest in critical issues surrounding the entry for pedophilia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. The symposium will address critical issues in the following areas:
Scientific and philosophical issues related to the DSM entry on pedophilia and/or hebephilia
Effects of the DSM entry on stigma, availability of mental health services, and research
Ways in which minor-attracted persons can be involved in the DSM 5 revision process”
When professors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine get together to discuss ways in which “minor attracted persons” can be involved in the DSM revision process—watch out.
Enquiring people want to know: Will pedophiles become “minor-attracted persons” in our culture? Will courts which endorse orientation as a protected class decide down the road that therefore laws which discriminate against “minor-attracted persons” must be narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest?
Here’s the fundamental truth: Ideas have consequences and so do words—because they contain ideas, because they are the vehicle through which and by which human beings describe reality.
NOM is pushing two old lies here. First, that gays and pedophilia go hand in hand. Anyone who has watched them since Proposition 8 knows that this is a regular song of theirs…The Gays Are After Your Children! Anyone who has studied the gay rights struggle since Anita Bryant knows that this is how the anti-gay industrial complex win elections. They go straight for the GAY=PEDOPHILE attack and the only question is do they do it overtly or do they dog whistle it. But the anti-gay campaigns where that scarecrow isn’t being waved in voters faces is the rare exception to the rule.
The other lie is that homosexuality was removed from the professional psychiatric association diagnostic manual of mental illnesses after a gay rights campaign. It was no such thing. The emerging science on sexual orientation brought about the change, much to the everlasting regret of the bigots in that profession, then and now. The science simply does not support the conclusion that there is anything clinically wrong with gay people. Evelyn Hooker in her her 1957 paper The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual, showed that sexually active male homosexuals were clinically indistinguishable from sexually active male heterosexuals. All the science done since then has confirmed that over and over again. There is nothing innately wrong with gay people. We are simply attracted to our own sex in the same way heterosexuals are attracted to the opposite sex.
The science drove the change in the DSM. The politics on the streets were the inevitable result of both the science, and the fact that gay people were beginning then to come out of a period of intense cultural isolation and persecution and were seeing for themselves that what the popular culture and traditional medicine were saying about them was simply wrong. When the popular culture keeps telling you that you are a monster, and you look around at the others of your community and you don’t see monsters, but fellow human beings, after a while you get angry about being told constantly that you are a monster. Sometimes you even get politically active about it. This is only surprising to people who still believe, who still need to believe, that homosexuals are either dangerous psychotics or contemptible faggots. They’re not human beings defending themselves they’re homosexuals desperately wanting social approval… But that gay anger did not drive the change to the DSM. It was the science.
Anyone who has studied the struggle for gay equality since the change to the DSM knows exactly what happened next, what the ones who could not let science override their cheapshit bar stool prejudices about homosexuals did. They started their own cottage industry of junk science to have something to support their prejudices against what the actual scientists were saying. Paul Cameron being probably the main example of that. But he is hardly alone.
NOM is with them, if not in generating their own junk science, then at least in cheerfully passing it along. But there is more to it. Take another look at Brian Brown’s alarm at this academic conference in Baltimore…
Here’s how the brochure describes the goal:
“This day-long symposium will facilitate the exchange of ideas among researchers, scholars, mental health practitioners, and minor-attracted persons who have an interest in critical issues surrounding the entry for pedophilia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. The symposium will address critical issues in the following areas:
Scientific and philosophical issues related to the DSM entry on pedophilia and/or hebephilia
Effects of the DSM entry on stigma, availability of mental health services, and research
Ways in which minor-attracted persons can be involved in the DSM 5 revision process”
When professors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine get together to discuss ways in which “minor attracted persons” can be involved in the DSM revision process—watch out.
Yes. Watch out. Because science might happen. Note that there is nothing in that brochure or the bullet points he cites even remotely suggesting that this conference has any interest in normalizing pedophilia. But notice also that Brown doesn’t even bother trying to make that case. What Brown is saying there, clearly, sickeningly, is science can’t be trusted.
Science turned our world upside down when they said nothing was wrong with the homos after all. That is proof that science can’t be trusted. Next thing you know they’ll be saying rape doesn’t harm children. How do you know they won’t? Science always turns things upside down. Science can’t be trusted. Next thing you know they’ll be saying humans and apes have a common ancestor. Next thing you know they’ll be saying the earth isn’t at the center of the universe. This is, seriously, how the folks in the organization co-founded by Robert George Super Genius think.
It’s a mindset thing. It’s a worldview thing. Understand this: the attack on science by groups like NOM isn’t motivated by a simple matter of applying the best political tactics to the job at hand. That’s the mindset of a Karl Rove, but not the folks at NOM. NOM is to homosexuality and marriage, what creationists are to biology and evolution. They’re throwbacks to an age before reason and science, that still needs its demons, witches and scapegoats. Behind that mask of dispassionate logic and rationality George assumes, and the others like Maggie and Brown try to, is, demons, witches, and scapegoats.
Demons. Witches. Scapegoats. Homosexuals. That’s their world. When professors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine get together…watch out… If you ever wondered why none of them can bring themselves to simply look at their gay neighbors in this life and see fellow human beings, some good, some bad, some just trying their best, there’s your answer.
Jerry Buell, a long-time Lake County social studies teacher, said during a recent Facebook exchange that he “almost threw up” in response to a news story about legalized same-sex marriage in New York.
Deux…
On the same July 25 Facebook post he said same-sex marriages were part of a “cesspool.”
Trois…
He went on to call the unions a sin.
Quatre…
“It wasn’t out of hatred,” he said in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel.
Cinq…
“It was about the way I interpret things.”
Six…
“I’ve had kids that I’ve known that have been homosexuals,” he said.
I’m stressing more and more lately, and not just about the economy and the future of JWST and my livelihood. Every little thing it seems adds to the stress level, every bit of news I read, every little thing around the house I see that needs fixing or working on…little worries about bills I shouldn’t have to worry about because at the present time I am making more then enough to pay my bills and there is plenty left over to plan the next vacation with…every little ache and pain, even though I just got the best possible result on the colonoscopy…everything.
I am a little tightly wound ball of stress lately. Though nicotine has been a stress blanket I haven’t smoked a cigar in months, worried that my body just can’t take it anymore. Though a drink or two will calm me down I haven’t had anything for days because if I so much as touch glass to lips in my present state I’ll be convinced I’m on the road to alcoholism. So I just do what I have always done when I’m completely stressed out. I sit on it and just wait for it to either go away or kill me. So far it hasn’t killed me. Probably, it is making me crazy. Although some friends from my grade school days would say I’ve always been crazy.
Yesterday I indulged in something I know relieves stress without drugs: I took a drive around the Maryland countryside. I love to drive. I didn’t spend the money on a Mercedes-Benz because I wanted a status symbol. Driving is a favorite pastime. Just get in the car and go find a road I haven’t been down yet and see what’s there. The lovely rolling green hills of the Piedmont are very relaxing to drive through and after some miles of it the stress began to loosen its grip on me. I could feel it letting go. It was nice.
I turned for home and got back on the Interstate, heading back into the city. I wasn’t in a hurry and so I just sat in the far right lane at about the speed limit while to my left everyone else was zooming past me, on their furious way to somewhere. I didn’t care. This was a section of the Interstate I have driven hundreds, if not thousands of times before….in a part of the Baltimore suburbs I used to live in, and still frequently go shopping in because it is so easy to get to on the Interstate. Traffic was light, and I was relaxing.
Suddenly in the rear view mirror I saw a Lexus blasting toward my car and I swear it nearly clipped me on the passenger side rear bumper. It blew past…figure it was doing a good fifty mph faster then I was going and I was doing the sixty-five mph speed limit… and into the deceleration lane of the exit I was coming up on. Scared the steaming shit out of me.
So I catch my breath and…
…and suddenly I don’t remember where the fuck I am. I look around. I don’t recognize anything I see. I’ve been on this section of highway a zillion times before and it feels all of a sudden as though I have never seen any of it before in my entire life. I don’t know where I am. I don’t recognize anything. I don’t recognize anything. I am in a strange place and nothing looks familiar. Nothing. I look around for a reference point. There is nothing here I recognize. Nothing at all.
My logical analytical mind is still functioning enough to get me out of it. I pull a trick I’ve done ever since grade school when a teacher would catch me daydreaming…
…and what would you say the answer to that is Mr. Garrett?
Daydreaming doesn’t cause deafness. You’re still hearing what the teacher is saying, you’re just not paying attention. So, and quickly, I would mentally walk it back to the last thing I remember hearing, and then quickly walk it forward until I get to the question I am being asked, and then give an answer, usually pissing off the teacher who thought for sure that time they’d caught me day dreaming.
Where the hell am I???
So I walk it backward to the last thing I remember, which was getting on the Interstate. The rest pops back into view. Ah…right…I’ve just passed the Padonia Road exit and some jackass nearly hit me… And then it’s like the visual memory suddenly pops back also, and everything looks familiar again.
That has never happened to me before. And so naturally I begin stressing out that I’m getting Alzheimer’s. My brain is going. I can feel it Dave…I can feel it…
I stress about it all night and all morning today. Then while I’m discussing something with my current and former branch managers I do something I almost never do, because I don’t like bothering my co-workers, and especially my bosses, with my private worries, and particularly my private health worries. I tell them what happened. I ask them what they think is happening to me. Has that ever happened to you? Is it time for me to see the doctor about my memory?
And one of them says oh yes, that’s happened to my brother and you hear it happening to people all the time because of stress. Stress does that he tells me. Don’t worry, it isn’t age. A lot of stress can make you loose the zone and you forget where you are for an instant and what you’re doing. It happens. It’s stress. Your brain isn’t rotting…brains just do that when enough stress is applied.
In other word’s it’s expected behavior under certain conditions. I hear this and the worry just melts away. The relief for a moment is overwhelming. Yes…yes, that makes sense! And…I’ve read about that elsewhere. Yes! It’s kind of like when you get smacked in the head hard enough you loose a fragment of short term memory. Stress does adversely impact memory. I’ve read that. The explanation makes sense.
I’m a geek. I’ll probably dig around a bit more and research it some until I’m satisfied and can put it to rest. But in the instant of that worry melting away I saw something else, something I’d seen before often enough, but this one time it really hit me.
Because, really, I”m not under an unbearable amount of stress all things considered. What’s bad is the level even minor things can build up to with me. And that has been the case, for nearly all of my adult life, and particularly since Mom passed away. Stress doesn’t go away for me like it does most other people. I can’t manage it as well as other people can and do. Because nearly every moment of my non-working life I am alone. It’s not the stress, it’s the solitude. It’s a lifetime spent in emotional solitude.
We are not solitary critters…we are social beings. We need our packs, our tribes, our families. We need most of all, in our adult lives, that other half.
It’s not the big issues. It’s all the little day to day ones. All the little minor day to day things that happen and get discussed and hashed out in the casual chit-chat of lovers. All of that just grows and grows inside of me and I can’t really stop it from doing that all by myself.
If only I had friends who cared that Bruce shouldn’t be so alone. If only I’d grown up in a world that understood that some boys like boys and that’s okay as long as they find the right boy. If only.
Oh well… Artists are supposed to be crazy anyway. It’s what makes us creative, and our works valuable long after we have died miserable and alone.
Letter To Fred Haitt’s Pathetic Excuse For An Ombudsman…
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2011 17:12:57 -0400
From: Bruce Garrett
To: ombudsman@washpost.com
Subject: The furor
You write…
Liberals and conservatives don’t talk to each other much anymore; they exist in parallel online universes, only crossing over to grab some explosive anti-matter from the other side to stoke the rage in their own blogosphere.
Followed almost immediately by…
Rubin was hired by Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of The Post, to be an opinion blogger who would appeal to conservatives and people who want to follow conservative politics. She does.
He hired her in other words, to do for the Post readership what you are bellyaching that blogs are doing to their readers. You’d think that the newspaper of record in the nation’s capital would set a higher standard for itself. You’d think.
Maybe your publication should consider the possible consequences of enabling political echo chamber vitriol itself. You are giving it a legitimacy the blogs could never hope to accomplish.
—
Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland.
Haitt hired Rubin because he knew she’d stoke right wing vitriol. And he hired you because he knew you’d make excuses for that.
A default looms, but not the one everyone has on their minds just now. I’m glancing at my Twitter feed, and I see Think Progress tweet: “$2.8T in spending cuts is essentially a quadruple reverse-stimulus.” Yes, but it’s more then the stimulus that’s being drawn back. It’s two-hundred plus years of American democracy that is being drawn back.
The republicans haven’t just screwed our economy, they’ve trashed our democracy by finding and exploiting a fatal weakness in the system of checks and balances our founders created. They’ve found, to use the metaphors of my trade, a bug in the code, and they created an exploit. They have discovered that as long as you have enough votes to sustain a filibuster you don’t have to stop at merely blocking certain specific bills you find particularly odious, you can run the entire ship of state simply by threatening to bring everything crashing down unless you get what you want.
If the democrats capitulate on this, and it’s looking like they will, then we are lost. The American Experiment in democracy will be over. We have simply stopped living in a democracy at that point, and the grip of a bitter, brutal radical cult unlike anything our history has known will have taken its place. And that cult is passionately determined to cut the American Dream down to their liking.
It’ll be an America where women and minorities have no rights a straight white protestant male is bound to respect. Where workers have no right to a safe work environment, let alone the right to organize into unions strong enough to push back against the steady loss of our middle class. Where once again the elderly die alone and in poverty. Where factories can once more dump whatever toxic sludge they like into the water you drink and the air you breath. Where no science that contradicts fundamentalist dogma can be taught to school kids. Where the sale of contraceptives are once again outlawed. Where your gay neighbors can once again be denied a job, a professional license, a place to live, be thrown in jail simply for being what they are.
None of this is hyperbole. The so-called tea partiers say these things time and time again. That they are a movement mostly concerned with small government and not social issues is a convenient fiction of a corporate news media that desperately wants not to be seen taking sides. Yes the tea party sings a mantra of smaller less intrusive government, but one only has to pay attention to see that is simply the means by which they mean to achieve their hard right ends. A government big enough to protect minorities is too big. A government big enough to make the states butt out of people’s private sex lives is too big. A government big enough to protect the environment, the rights of workers, the economy from corruption, is too big. Small government is the oligarch’s friend.
I’ve often wondered if this is how it felt to be living in Europe in the 1930s, as another bitter, brutal radical cult methodically undermined the democracies tentatively rising from the ashes of monarchy. Step by bitterly determined step they smashed what they could, and with every new success came new demands, which were followed by more appeasements that were supposed to finally mollify the radicals. What it did was convince the radicals they had nothing to fear and everything to gain. Everything they said they would do, that nobody believed they would actually do, they eventually did. And afterwards the world wondered at how people could have been so blind to have not seen it coming.
See and share the joy in their faces…and then look more closely at the stunning diversity of us. Remember it next time you hear someone speak of a gay lifestyle or a gay agenda.
Now You Know The Reason They Seemed So Vulnerable To You
Details of the horrific events in Norway will continue to unfold no doubt for weeks, if not months to come. So it is well that we all just take a deep breath and wait for solid information to come out. I understand the impulse to think it was radical Islamic terrorism when the news first hit; it was my first reaction too. But I remembered Oklahoma City and held my peace and waited. And now it seems from the facts coming to light, that this was indeed more Oklahoma City then 9/11…
She did not think the order was strange at the time because the suspect has a farm, but after Friday’s explosion in Norway’s capital, Oslo, she called police because she knew the material can be used to make bombs.
“We are very shocked that this man was connected to our company,” said Estenstad. “We are very sad about what happened.”
That sounds vaguely familiar. But bear in mind there is still an investigation going on and we really still don’t know much. This passage from the suspect’s postings to an anti-Muslim website struck me though…
I dare not even think of how many Norwegian children who have been suicide because of these experiences (assault, robbery, rape, psychological terror committed by Muslim youths). There are probably several hundred in the last 15 years.
….Non-Muslim youth in Oslo aged 12-18 are in a particularly vulnerable situation in terms of harassment [from] Muslim youth.
This from a man who (it is said) methodically killed 80 kids at a youth camp, some while they were swimming away for their lives. Always, the monster the bigot sees in others is themselves. And they are right to fear that monster.
In 1997, the state of Florida made it a felony for someone who is HIV positive to have sexual intercourse without telling their partner. Now…what do you think that means in a state that very specifically defines sexual intercourse only as vaginal sex between a man and a woman.
Last month, the court of appeal overturned a Bradenton woman’s conviction for exposing her female partner to HIV because the sexual acts were between two women. The law “does not apply to her actions,” the 2nd District Court of Appeal said.
The ruling applies statewide, meaning gays and lesbians cannot be convicted of hiding their HIV status from their sex partners, at least for now. Neither can anyone who only engages in sexual acts that do not fit the state’s legal definition of intercourse — “the penetration of the female sex organ by the male sex organ.”
So when Sarasota County authorities arrested an HIV-positive man this week on charges he had anal and oral sex with a 14-year-old boy, the sexual battery charge may stick, but the HIV charge will not…
This reminds me of another case, I think it was also in Florida, where it turned out a man could either not be charged by the state or not be sued by his estranged wife for adultery, because his sexual dalliance was committed with another man not another woman. In this case the oversight was, as the article notes, “…a glitch in the statute that nobody noticed before…” I can’t imagine why.
Well…yes I can. The thinking here clearly is that if we’re written out of the law then they don’t have to worry about some activist judge finding that we have these things called “rights”. So as far as the law is concerned in Florida, only heterosexuals have this thing called sex, and for that matter only when one man’s penis is entering one woman’s vagina. At some point they may also want to specify the missionary position for further clarity.
In a previous post I discussed the ramifications of a bill before California governor Jerry Brown that would add the history of gay people to the textbooks and lessons of California schools. He signed it.
Brown issued a statement in which he called the legislation an “important step forward for our state.”
“History should be honest,” Brown said. “This bill revises existing laws that prohibit discrimination in education and ensures that the important contributions of Americans from all backgrounds and walks of life are included in our history books.”
As I mentioned before, that honestly, not so much about the accomplishments of gay people but more, a factual account of the witch hunts violence and political and social persecution we have endured as a people, is greatly feared by the anti-gay industrial complex. And as expected, they are already moving to do a Proposition 8 on it…
The proponent of the proposed referendum, Paulo Sibaja, filed a request for a title and summary with the attorney general’s office. Sibaja said he acted on behalf of the Capitol Resource Institute, which had officially opposed the bill throughout the legislative process before Gov. Jerry Brown signed it Thursday. Sibaja is the legislative director of that organization.
The Capitol Resource Institute is a hard-line, socially conservative organization that has long opposed efforts in California to expand rights for the LGBT population…
They’ll probably get their signatures too. Whether or not they can wage a successful campaign to erase a minority group from the pages of history in California remains to be seen, but expect more of The Homosexuals Are Coming For Your Children rhetoric in the coming months. And…more anti-gay violence for them to wash, wash their hands of before the multitudes.
One part of that history they never want told is coming to the screen. A documentary based on David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare is now in production…
The Lavender Scare is the first feature-length documentary film to tell the story of the U.S. government’s ruthless campaign in the 1950s and ’60s to hunt down and fire every Federal employee it suspected was gay.
While the McCarthy Era is remembered as the time of the Red Scare, the headline-grabbing hunt for Communists in the United States, it was the Lavender Scare, a vicious and vehement purge of homosexuals, which lasted longer and ruined many more lives.
There’s more at the documentary website, including a trailer. The book it is based on is available in cloth, paperback and ebook form from the University of Chicago Press. I also highly recommend Neil Miller’s Sex Crime Panic (Alyson Books) and David Carter’s Stonewall (St. Martin’s Press). I would also love to hear gay history book recommendations from the readers here.
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