Last night, it struck me that every single statement on gay rights by the GOP candidates, however brutal, could have been leavened by some small concession that gays are serving their country honorably, that gays are a part of many families and indeed the American family, that they should not be demonized by the majority, etc. But none of the candidates could say a single positive thing. Or rather they believed they could not survive a GOP primary by saying anything even vaguely positive about gay Americans. In some ways, that’s more telling.
If in the process of conducting your political campaign you give a silent consent to hate then you are just as much a part of the mob as if you had born one of their torches yourself and screamed for blood. Anyone who cannot muster the moral backbone to denounce hate is unfit to be director of public parking, let alone president of the United States. It is that simple.
In case you missed it, yesterday was Harvey Milk Day in California…
The Catholic Daily goes on to note the proclamation of Harvey Milk Day issued by Governor Jerry Brown. Of course they couldn’t let all this pass without denouncements of “sexual brainwashing” from the usual gang of bigots and political thugs posing as “Pro-Family” advocates. I’m putting scare quotes around pro-family because…seriously…you really can’t claim to be pro-family while at the same time trying your damnedest to rip to shreds families that don’t conform to the model that’s actually in the minority of family types these days. It’s like saying you love the human race except for all those people who aren’t straight, white and male.
Among those participating in the news conference…were [SaveCalifornia.com] president, Randy Thomasson, several parents and retired teachers, and Dr. Benjamin Kaufman, co-founder of NARTH…[who] called on “mothers and fathers to warn their children’s public school teachers not to honor” Milk.
I see. Randy Thomasson and NARTH want mothers and fathers to warn their children’s teachers about…what was it again…?
“Children are being led down a wrong road by the glorification of Harvey Milk,” Thomasson said in a statement following Gov. Brown’s proclamation. “An official ‘Harvey Milk Day’ promotes the unnatural and unhealthy homosexual, bisexual, and transsexual lifestyle to minors. Just as Harvey Milk ignored the health risks of homosexual behavior, his legacy will be to pull even more young people into this disease-prone lifestyle. Just as he advocated for openly homosexual teachers as role models, ‘Harvey Milk Day’ will train boys and girls to follow a worse role model — Milk, a predator of teens who knew no sexual boundaries or sexual danger.”
Okay…I have a question. Is the Catholic Church really going to go after Harvey Milk day on the basis that he preyed sexually on teenagers? That the game plan?
Sexual boundaries. Yes. Do let us know when you’ve found some.
So somebody who just didn’t know that Bradlee Dean thinks homosexuals are responsible for the Holocaust, will molest 117 people before they’re caught, and that if American does not begin enforcing biblical law against homosexuality God will rise of a foreign enemy to do it, invited him to give the opening prayer for the Minnesota House of Delegates on the day republican speaker of the house Sam Zellers was ready to bring a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage to the floor…
The decision to allow anti-gay preacher Bradlee Dean to give the opening prayer before the Minnesota House on Friday sent shockwaves through the Legislature, and the reverberations from that decision continued over the weekend. Democrats filed a complaint on Sunday after House Speaker Kurt Zellers moved to strike Dean’s name from the official record…
They were shocked, shocked, that Dean would stoop to questioning President Obama’s Christianity…
Zellers, R- Maple Grove, restarted the House session and brought in a chaplain to redo the prayer. He also condemned Dean’s prayer in a floor statement.“Members, I can only ask for your forgiveness. That type of person will never ever be allowed on this House floor again as long as I have the honor of serving as speaker,” Zellers said.
Rep. Ernie Leidiger, R-Mayer, confirmed that he invited Dean to give the House prayer. He said it was “an honest mistake” that Dean was invited on the same day that the constitutional amendment to ban same marriage could have been debated.
He [Dean] said it wasn’t right to call him “anti-gay,” but he spoke admiringly of the time when homosexuality was illegal.
“We don’t enforce those laws anymore, and we wonder why we are going backwards,” Dean said. “If you were to ask me my position as far as enforcing the laws of sodomy in the state of Minnesota, I would say absolutely yes. Yeah. Yeah.”
Honest Mistakes…
I’ve told this story before, but those of you who’ve heard it will just have to bear up. In the 1992 election when I was making volunteer calls for Clinton, Mary Matalin made a major gaffe she had to apologize for quite publicly. (Doesn’t matter what it was.) I was riding down in the elevator with a high level political consultant (who didn’t know me from Adam, of course) and I smugly mentioned that Matalin had really stepped in it. He looked at me like I was a moron and said, “she got it out there, didn’t she?”
Zellers brought up the anti-gay constitutional amendment the following day. It passed. And that type of person will never be allowed on the floor again, until the next time an honest mistake needs to be made.
I just have one comment to make on the unfolding story of Kirk Murphy. This can’t be shouted out loudly enough: The subject of this study, which formed much of the basis for the ex-gay movement’s claim to scientific legitimacy, killed himself and his therapy so deeply wounded his family they are still, decades later, suffering from it.
The Ex-Gay movement was born in the blood of innocents. In his book, Anything But Straight, Wayne talks about the formation of the very first ex-gay ministry, Love In Action, its first clients, and how one of them, Jack McIntyre, chose to end his life rather then keep failing at becoming heterosexual.
In 1973 John Evans, who is gay, and Rev. Kent Philpott, who is heterosexual, co-founded the original “ex-gay” ministry, Love In Action on the outskirts of San Francisco. Philpott soon wrote The Third Sex?, the first ever “ex-gay” book which touted six people who supposedly converted to heterosexuality through prayer.
Although time eventually revealed no one in his book actually had changed, the people reading it had no idea the stories were fallacious. As far as they knew, there was a magical place in California that had figured out the secret for making gays into straights. Inspired by his book, a few enthusiastic individuals spontaneously began their own “ex-gay” ministries.
Evans, however, denounced the program he co-founded after his best friend Jack McIntyre committed suicide in despair over not being able to “change”…
McIntyre wrote a suicide note. If the ex-gay movement could be said to have a heart and soul, here it is:
TO: Those left with the question, why did he do it?
I loved life and all that it had to offer to me each day.
I loved my job and my clients.
I loved my friends and thank God for each one of them.
I loved my little house and would not have wanted to live anywhere else.
All this looks like the perfect life. Yet, I must not let this shadow the problem that I have in my life. At one time, not to long ago, that was all that really mattered in my life. What pleased me and how it affected me. Now that I have turned my life over to the Lord and the changes came one by one, the above statements mean much more to me. I am pleased that I can say those statements with all the truth and honesty that is within me.
However, to make this short, I must confess that there were things in my life that I could not gain control, no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed.
It is this constant failure that has made me make the decision to terminate my life here on earth. I do this with the complete understanding that life is not mine to take. I know that it is against the teachings of our Creator. No man is without sin, this I realise. I will cleanse myself of all sin as taught to me by His word. Yet, I must face my Lord with the sin of murder. I believe that Jesus died and paid the price for that sin too. I know that I shall have everlasting life with Him by departing this world now, no matter how much I love it, my friends, my family. If I remain it could possibly allow the devil the opportunity to lead me away from the Lord. I love life, but my love for the Lord is so much greater, the choice is simple.
I am not asking you to sanction my actions. That is not the purpose of my writing this at all. It is for the express purpose of allowing each one who will read this to know how I weighed things in my own mind. I don’t want you to think that, ‘I alone,’ should have been the perfect person, without sin. That would be ridiculous! It is the continuing lack of strength and/or obedience and/or will power to cast aside certain sins. To continually go before God and ask forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and all He stands for in my life.
Please know that I am extremely happy to be going to the Lord. He knows my heart and knows how much I love life and and all that it has to offer. But, He knows that I love Him more. That is why I believe that I will be with Him in Paradise.
I regret if I bring sorrow to those that are left behind. If you get your hearts in tune with the word of God you will be as happy about my ‘transfer’ as I am. I also hope that this answers sufficiently the question, why?
May God Have Mercy On My Soul.
A Brother & A Friend.
And as Wayne writes…
Still, Love in Action survived because many people who read The Third Sex? came to California in hopes of changing.
And George Rekers was still citing his success at fixing Kirk years after Kirk had taken his own life. When reporters caught up with him recently Rekers dismissed the idea that Kirk’s suicide could have had anything to do with the experimental gender identity therapy he’d inflicted upon the child. Oh no…that was years ago…
“That’s a long time ago, and to hypothesize, you have a hypothesis that positive treatment back in the 1970s has something to do with something happening decades later. That would, that hypothesis would need a lot of scientific investigation to see if it’s valid…”
More apparently, then the initial therapy got according to Jim Burroway who writes of his surprise that there was little to no independent verification of Reker’s claims. But according to his family Kirk was a troubled soul the rest of his life, though he had moments when it seemed he had made peace with himself. And it bears noting that the therapy deeply disturbed then, and continues to this day to disturb, his mother and his straight older brother, his sister being too young at the time to remember any of what happened.
“I do grieve for the parents now that you’ve told me that news. I think that’s very sad.” – George Rekers
Look carefully at this: Kirk was the patient who made Rekers’ career and he only just now learns of his suicide when CNN reporter tracked him down? Yes. Of course. He never stayed in touch, clearly and sickeningly never felt the slightest curiosity about how his most famous patient was doing. This is not science, it is politics. The client is not important. The client’s family is not important. It’s the message, that that there is no such thing as a homosexual only broken heterosexuals, that is important. Because inside that message is another: that homosexuals bring their own persecution upon themselves, since they can choose whenever they want to not be homosexual.
…no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed… The Ex-Gay movement was born in the blood of innocents. It continues to destroy lives and wreak families with no more tangible regard from its leadership for the human toll now then in the moment of its birth. Their allegiance is to a higher agency. No…not God. The culture war. Failure is not a bug, it’s a feature. The scapegoat must hate themselves too.
I’ve been on a roll fixing up and beautifying the front and back yards here at Casa del Garrett. Among other items, I bought four solar powered Tiki torches for the backyard. They’re pretty simple devices consisting of a solar power cell and two led lights that flicker alternately inside a plastic cup. The effect mimics a lighted torch well enough and I think they add a nice touch to the backyard. The other day one of them failed.
It was always the last one to come on at night and I wondered if the rechargeable batteries in it just needed replacing. So the first thing I did was put some alkalines in it as a test. Nada. I checked its internal wiring. The things were Very inexpensive to buy and inside it showed why. Just a postage stamp sized circuit board, a double-a battery compartment, a nice looking solar power cell and a smaller cell that looked as if it were a CDS light sensor for switching the torch on and off. The parts were simply hot glued into place and the wires connecting everything were a gauge somewhere between hair and paper width. I got out a magnifying glass and looked the connections over with some difficulty as it was hard to see how good they were under the hot glue globs. But nothing seemed obviously broken.
As I said, they were cheap. So I figured I’d go buy two more (they come in pairs) and then I’d have one spare in case one of the others failed. Having bought the last two boxes of these on the shelves at the Lowes in Cockeysville, I figured I’d need to try one of the other stores. So this evening after work I drove to the one in White Marsh so I could swing by Costco for some gasoline. But that Lowes was out of stock on those particular Tiki torches. So I began to wonder if each store only got a couple boxes of those at the start of the season and was I chasing an item that was sold out all over the area by now.
I came back home and considered ordering new ones online. But the ornery techno geek in me nagged at me to look inside the broken torch one more time. It’s a simple device dammit…I ought to be able to fix it… So I brought it in and took it to the art room drafting table and opened it up. I got out the multi-meter (you have one of those…right? Every home should have a multi-meter…) and fairly quickly determined several things.
First, the rechargeable batteries were in perfectly good shape, as I’d expected since replacing them with some stock alkalines didn’t make any difference. Second, the solar power cell in those things, cheap as they are, are Very Nice and were putting out more then enough voltage to keep the batteries charged. After the batteries, my suspicions fell on the other small cell that looked like a light sensor. Here was where I reached way back into my past for knowledge of how camera light meters work. It looked to my eye like your basic CDS cell…Cadmium-Sulfide…a photo-resistor. Unlike the older selenium cell meters, which generate a precise voltage based on the amount of light falling on them, CDS cells change in resistance. Their advantage was they worked better and more precisely in lower light conditions. What was extra nice about them back in the day was if you forgot and left the camera’s light meter on, putting the lens cap on or just putting the camera away in darkness somewhere would protect the battery because a CDS cell goes to maximum resistance when there is no light falling on it, so it’s basically turned the circuit off.
…which is pretty much what makes them useful as light sensors for turning off and on stuff when night falls. They can act like a simple on-off switch. The leads coming off the CDS cell in my Tiki torch were buried under a glob of hot glue so I traced the wires back to the circuit board and took an ohm reading there with a piece of black electricians tape across the cell blocking the light out. It should have read max ohms but it read like a short. So the cell was defective.
I clipped the wires leading to it and the torch lit up. I stripped the ends and touched them together and the torch turned off again. So now I can either put a micro-switch in place of the CDS cell or see if I can find another CDS cell to replace the failed one with. This thing is so cheaply built you just know the concept it represents is throw it in the landfill when it breaks or you get tired of it whichever comes first. Had I found a replacement I’d have probably just scavenged the solar cell and the LEDs and tossed the rest out. The solar cell is a nice one. But fixing it leaves me with a degree of geeky self-satisfaction. In a world of cheap mass-market throw it away goods I am not completely helpless.
[Edited a tad…]
[Update…] I see from their online catalog I can buy little CDS cells in packs of five for a little less then four dollars at Radio Shack. So tonight I’ll check the one in my neighborhood.
That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane –
Lenny Bruce is not afraid…
-REM, It’s The End Of The World As We Know It
So according to both REM and our latest End Of The World prophet Harold Camping, the end of the world will start with an earthquake. The scriptures agree! As I write this, Raw Story is currently live blogging the rapture…
At 6 pm local time on the International Date Line, Harold Camping of the Family Radio Network believed the Rapture was supposed to begin with a tremendous earthquake and destruction the likes of which humans have never seen. Rolling westward, it was set to hit Tokyo — which has already witnessed its share of destruction this year — at 6 pm local time, or 5 am ET. Since that’s the most reasonable unreasonably early hour I was willing to get up, that’s when this liveblog began.
I feel as if I should take time out of my busy day to relax and enjoy this once in a lifetime spectacle, since according to Camping it’s folks like me who made it all possible…
Q: Why May 21?
A: Camping calculates May 21 is exactly 7,000 years from the date of the Noah’s Ark flood. In his book “Time Has an End,” Camping writes. “The year 391 B.C. is the year when the Old Testament was finished, and 2,011 + 391 – 1 = 2,401, or 7 x 7 x 7 x 7.” There you have it.
Q: Any other reason?
A: Yes. Gay Pride and same-sex marriage. Camping says God will punish America and the rest of the world for Gay Pride and same-sex marriages, just as Sodom and Gomorrah were punished with fire and brimstone in the Old Testament.
Of course, the gays are responsible. The gays are always responsible. A friend of mine in Kansas suggests we all leave articles of clothing here and there on the streets of our towns to mark the occasion. Perhaps instead, it’s time for The Rapture to be reclaimed.
I have a scenario: Instead of rapturing the one or two percent of the world’s right wing christianist nutcases, suppose God really does rapture His Own on that day and hour no man knows, not even the Angels. Suppose He takes all the good people away. No…the Good people. The Really Good people. The ones who gave a damn about this good earth, and their neighbors…all the ones who cared enough to struggle, give their lives even, to make this world a better place for all of us…all the ones who couldn’t let an injustice go past without raising their voices…all the ones who never let a friend down, even if it meant taking some personal risk…all the ones who were trustworthy, who wouldn’t cheat a stranger, let alone a friend…all the lovers…all the dreamers of a better tomorrow. Whether they were Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or Atheist. All the good people…which would be a pretty large portion of the human population, but alas not hardly all of it. Suppose in one sudden instant God snatched them all away. What would be left behind?
Why…all the assholes.
And there’s your Tribulation right there. Never mind the seven seals and judgement day….every day is judgement day. The antichrist isn’t a person, it’s a mindset. It’s living for what you hate instead of what you love. It’s cheating someone weaker then you just because you can and assuring yourself that the weak deserve it. It’s bullying your way though life and then whining that you don’t get the respect you deserve. It’s scapegoating your neighbor instead of taking responsibility. It’s looking at life with zero-sum glasses that are always telling you that whenever someone else is happy it’s because they’re taking something away from you. It’s resenting human joy so much you just have to strangle it wherever you see it in the eyes of others. Suppose the world was suddenly left with nothing in it but people like that.
Seven years of tribulation? Oh, no…my guess is less then one or two months before they’ve all managed to slit each others’ throats. Judgement. The joy we bring into the world, or the pain and suffering we inflict upon others, is our judgement upon the world, and ourselves, and this good earth, and some people hate everything so much they pray for the world to end soon, and some of us wish it never would. Some live in rapture, and some in tribulation and every day is judgement day.
To paraphrase Jesus of Nazareth, the jerks will always be with you…try your best to deal with it. Later today I’ll pour a little glass from my bottle of Don Julio 1942 and toast the rapture that happens whenever I am happy and realize that for all its pain and struggle, life is good. And when 6:30 comes along and the universe is just going on about its usual business I’ll be sitting on my front porch savoring a very nice tequila, and listening to the birds in my maple tree chirping like they don’t believe the world will ever end.
So it occurs to me while having to restart both the iPad and iPhone this morning to get them responsive again, that either Murphy’s Law applies to software systems too, ie: software increases in complexity to its level of incompetence, or the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to software, in a sense: with every upgrade, chaos always increases…
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.
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