There has been much discussion concerning my decision to replace state Rep. Scott Lipke of Jackson as a committee chair. Legislative leaders in our region have urged me to explain my actions and clarify the situation.
The problem centers on Jessica’s Law that we passed last year. As chairman of the Committee on Crime Prevention and Public Safety, Lipke sponsored and handled this bill as it moved through the legislature.
Jessica’s Law was a great bill, which we needed to pass to protect our children from sexual predators. Regrettably, Lipke chose to use the bill to delete 14 words from our laws in order to repeal the gay sex ban in Missouri.
Thanks to that deletion, it is now legal to engage in deviate sexual intercourse with someone of the same sex here in Missouri. This law had been on our books for decades.
Well…yes…except the U.S. Supreme Court nullified all the state sodomy laws, so it’s not enforceable. But Jetton holds out hope for a brighter tomorrow…
After being confronted about his actions, Lipke told us it was "no big deal" because the Missouri law was unconstitutional. Unfortunately, it is a big deal, because now it is easier for gay couples to adopt children in our state.
Several members told Lipke how upset they were that he didn’t tell them about the gay sex ban and let them make up their own mind about repealing it.
Judges come and go, and Supreme Court decisions change back and forth. Who knows? These new judges may reverse that decision.
Yes…clearly Lipke had to go because now Missouri legislators would have to go to all the trouble to make it legal again to throw same sex couples into jail if the supreme court decides to let them start doing it again. And besides…this is also an issue of profound Moral importance…
I’m disappointed nobody caught those 14 words. But I think I know why. We all trusted Lipke and Jessica’s Law was a good law we needed to pass. We all wanted to vote for a good bill that would protect our children. In our rush to make a positive difference, we didn’t look over the 46-page bill close enough because we trusted Lipke.
That’s why I had to make a change in the committee chairmanship. The members of our Republican caucus have lost their faith in Lipke. They expect me to appoint chairmen who will keep them informed of controversial details that could cause problems.
I have fought attempts by liberals to repeal the gay sex ban for years, and I am now embarrassed to say that I unknowingly voted for the very thing I have been fighting against.
Lipke was removed as chair because his fellow legislators no longer trusted him…
After all…we just wanted to do something good for the children. And then we had to vote to treat the gay once decently too once they grew up and only liberals want to do crap like that and I’ve been fighting against gay loving liberals for years. I am married with three children and attend Methodist church regularly. I am a man of high moral values…
…former Missouri House Speaker Rod Jetton is facing assault charges for allegedly beating the shit out of his mistress while having sex. His ladyfriend had not uttered the “safe word,” probably because Jetton was beating her unconscious.
The Scott County court clerk confirms a felony complaint has been filed against former Missouri House Speaker Rod Jetton for an incident that allegedly took place Nov. 15 in Sikeston, Mo. […]
The complaint alleges Jetton “recklessly caused serious physical injury to ——- by hitting her on the head, and choking her resulting in unconsciousness and the loss of the function of part of her body.”
UPDATE, 3:50: The affidavit attached to the probably cause statement alleges Jetton went to the home of the victim Nov. 15, where he and the victim drank wine and watched a football game. The victim claims Jetton hit her on the face and choked her, leaving bruises that the police department photographed.
The affidavit claims the assault occurred during the night and into the morning of Nov. 16. It says Jetton and the victim agreed on a “safe word” “to use as a stop word during intercourse.”
The “safe word” is hard to utter when you’re being CHOKED TO DEATH.
Jetton and wife agreed earlier this year to a divorce settlement. So I guess her safe word was "DIVORCE". I have a hunch why…
Jetton went to the woman’s residence in Sikeston, Mo. with two bottles of wine, according to the report.
"(The woman) said she did not see him pour the wine because she did not follow him into the kitchen, but he returned to the living room and handed her a glass of wine. (The woman) remembers watching a football game and said once she finished the glass of wine, she began ‘fading’ in and out and remembered losing consciousness several times during the evening," wrote Detective Bethany McDermott in her report.
McDermott reports that Jetton and the woman agreed on a safe word of "green balloons" to use as a stop word during intercourse.
"(The woman) recalls Jetton hitting her on the face very hard. She then remembers waking up, lying on the floor and Jetton was choking her. (The woman) said she did not know what happened with her memory because she had been drunk but had never had the blank spots in her memory," McDermott reported.
"(The woman) said Jetton stayed the night with her and when he woke up he gave her a kiss and said, ‘You should have said green balloons.’ Jetton left the woman’s residence and had not returned," McDermott added.
McDermott reported that a Sikeston police officer reported seeing bruises on the woman, including on the outside of both thighs and around her breast.
The police officer observed the bruises to the woman and took photographs for evidence on November 18th.
Okay…all snarkiness aside…this is sick. How completely twisted up inside do you have to be to want to beat up the sex you are attracted to? How can you even think to take a fist to that which you desire? Yes…yes… I know that some folks are into S&M and B&D and all that. But couples who do that sort of thing do it together and they’re both into it and they’re both getting off on it. This wasn’t that. It was an attack. It was hate. Hate toward the woman…maybe toward all women…and maybe even toward his own sexual desire for them. The more he desired her, the more he hated her.
But among the culture warriors you see a lot of this sort of thing. The pathologies of hatred. Hatred of sex. Hatred of women. Hatred of minorities…foreigners…any smaller, weaker, Other. And fear. Fear of loosing power. And perhaps that is one reason why desire is the thing they hate most of all. The object of your desire has power over you, and it frightens them to loose control…frightens and disgusts them how easily others are willing to share power, give and receive, take and be taken, in the dance of desire. The author Mary Renault once said that politics like sex is a reflection of the person within. If you are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your politics and it will come out in your sex life when what matters is you aren’t the sort of person who behaves like that. Case in point: Jetton’s knuckle dragging prejudices against gay people are the least of his issues.
Wherein The Children Of Rand And The Children Of Marx Commiserate With One Another And Then Have A Round Of Drinks…
Smokin’ hot essay in this month’s GQ by John Ritter on Ayn Rand’s influence on college students, bankers, financiers, chairmen of the Federal Reserve, and other people who need to have their certainties smacked out of them from time to time for the good of the rest of us. I know, because I used to be one of them…
A weirdly specific thing happens with the books of Ayn Rand. It’s not just the what of the books, but when a reader discovers them—almost always during the first or second year of college. Rand grabs a reader at a time of maximum vulnerability and malleability, when he’s getting his first accurate sense of how he measures up in the world in terms of intellect and talent. The longing to regard oneself as misunderstood and underrated can be powerful; the temptation to project oneself as such, irresistible…
Sort of. Not everyone likes thinking of themselves as misunderstood. I sure didn’t. But I never blamed being taken for a weird little geek on being misunderstood because I knew I was one. Being raised in a Baptist household the first person you always blame for just about everything, let alone not fitting in, is yourself.
It was after leaving my church and coming out to myself as gay that I first read Rand. But in retrospect, clearly, all those days spent in church listening to fire and brimstone pulpit thumping had left their mark on me. I craved moral certainty, and admired the firebrand moralist who spoke to those certainties. If I have a weakness to this day that’s it. But at 20 the bible had long since lost its power as a moral instrument. It was still interesting in its echo from a distant time kinda way, but no longer authoritative. I wandered aimlessly in a kind of existential stupor, unwilling to rest my moral values on religious absolutes that I knew perfectly well were nothing more then the bar stool prejudices of various pulpit thumpers, but unable to find another moral compass to guide my way. Reason and morality it seemed, were two different things.
Two books shook me out of my moral fog then, almost one after the other. In retrospect, both were terribly flawed teachers. And yet they left me with concepts I still value to this day. The first was Robert Audrey’s African Genesis. I found a tattered copy of it in a corner of a warehouse I once worked in, wrinkled and discarded, and picking it up and reading the first page of it…
Not in innocence, and not in Asia was mankind born…
…I had to take the thing home. I absolutely devoured it. And from Audry I gleaned the idea that the forces that move within our consciousness actually are understandable and manageable…but only if we seriously study our evolutionary past. To construct workable human societies, and moral codes that actually and really benefit us, we need to undertake an almost brutal, unromantic, understanding of ourselves and that means looking also to the past which brought us forth. Not to do so would be akin to trying to build a bridge with no understanding of the nature of the materials you’re constructing it from…
We are not so unique as we would like to believe. And if man in a time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march.
Yes. Yes. And Yes. I still passionately believe this is true. Let it be said that a lot of naturalists and anthropologists really hate Audrey for his overwrought image of humans as killer apes. But you can discard that part of it…our understanding of the human ancestors is much improved since he wrote that book…and still respect the basic idea. We are, each of us, in body and consciousness, living histories of millions of years of life on earth. To make a better life for ourselves in the here and now, we need to understand that history.
The second book was Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. As John Ritter writes…
The days during which that 19-year-old has Rand’s worldview vectored into his cerebral cortex are feverish and sleepless. Days of beautiful affliction during which the intransigence of others—roommates, a coed the patient has been hitting on, professors, parents, everyone—are shown to be the product of their shortcomings, their idiocy and sublimated envy of the patient’s intelligence and talent… One day you’ve got a bright young kid dutifully connecting the dots of his liberal-arts education; the next, he’s got Roark and Galt in the marrow and has become…an insufferable asshole.
Well…kind of. I never thought of my friends as idiots. But I suspect I did turn into a bit of a jerk because that’s what happens to people when they become True Believers. Suddenly everything made sense! The world was powered by the rational human intellect! Everything that denied the mind was anti-life! Capitalism wasn’t merely the most productive economic system ever invented, it was the only Moral one! To take possession of your own life and live it for the good of your Self was the highest virtue! Here was an ideology that appealed to my inner geek and my inner pulpit thumper both. I am certain there was a period in my life when I couldn’t speak two words without going off about Randian ideology. It’s amazing I still have friends from that period.
People wonder how it is that so many gays become Randians since Rand herself was a vitriolic homophobe. But Rand’s morality of sex, that enjoying sex for its own sake was not only moral, but was morally validated by a couple’s mutual pleasure in each other’s bodies, is very appealing to a people who are taught to feel ashamed of any hint of sexual desire in themselves the moment puberty hits them. I saw Rand’s morality as a reasoned and high minded rejection of the notion of original sin drilled into me all throughout my Baptist childhood, that our bodies, that our feelings of sexual desire, were evidence of humanity’s fallen state. And it seemed to validate any sexual relationship, gay or straight, that sprang from mutual appreciation of the best within each other, body and soul. Rand declared that sexual joy for its own sake, taken between two people who wholeheartedly and completely desire each other was a righteous thing. And a lot of gay people, myself included, said ‘Amen!’
But therein, for me at least, lay the seeds of discontent as well. Rand taught that human emotions were the unconscious sum of the workings of our rational mind. This led her to view homosexuality as the result of bad thinking…faulty premises as she liked to put everything that didn’t fit into her philosophy. It led her acolyte and lover Nathanial Brandon to suggest in one essay that gay men were gay because they’d been subconsciously made afraid of women from being taught to idealize them but not desire them. Huh? As any gay person knows, and especially any gay person who ever tried to psychoanalyze themselves straight, your sexual orientation isn’t something you think yourself into. Or out of. And here was Rand and her "collective" dispensing pop psychology crap about homosexuality that not only gay folk themselves, but actual researchers, had known for decades was claptrap. We don’t think ourselves into our sexual orientations, they just are. But that kind of thinking about human consciousness was anathema to Rand.
How I managed to embrace an ideology that regarded human consciousness as entirely the province of the rational mind after reading and embracing Audrey I cannot explain. But there it was. Eventually the ideas I gleaned from Audrey did come back to me. I think it was while reading a statement of Rand’s that she was neither a supporter nor denier of the theory of evolution. Well of course, because evolution throws a great big monkey wrench into her model of human consciousness which acknowledged only the human capacity for rational thinking. Rand’s human being was every bit the separate creation that Adam was in Genesis. And that is not what a human being is. The moment I read her statement on evolution it got me to thinking about all the other ways I’d had to forgive Rand for making pronouncements about this and that which just seemed…well…stupid.
And that was how I found my way out the door to her church. The one thing I took from her that I still keep close to my heart to this day is the idea that morality must be reason-based. It must withstand the test of truth, conform to the evidence, logically and objectively work to benefit our lives. Oh that Rand herself had held to this idea, when championing her notion that unfettered capitialism is the only moral system.
Unfortunately…for all of us…she didn’t. And neither have her intellectual heirs…
This is because there are boys and girls among us who have never overcome the Randian infection. The Galt speech continues to ring in their ears for years like a maddening tinnitus, turning each of them into what next year’s Physicians’ Desk Reference will (undoubtedly) term an Ayn Rand Asshole (ARA). They constitute a relatively small percentage of Rand readers, these ARAs. But they make their reading count. Thanks to them, the Rand Experience is no longer limited to those who have read the books. It’s metastasized. You, me, all of us, we’re living it. Because it’s the ARA Army of antigovernment-antiregulation puritans who have spent the past three decades gleefully pulling the cooling rods out of the American economy. For a while, it got very big and very hot. Then it popped. And now the rest of us have to spend the next decade scaling the slippery slopes of the huge suppurative crater that was left behind.
Feeling fisted by the Invisible Hand of the Market lo these past fifteen months? Lost a job lately? Or half the value of your 401(k)? Or a home? All three? Been wondering whence the too-long-ascendant political and economic ideas and forces behind Greenspanism, John Thainism, blind Wall Street plunder, bankruptcy, credit-default swaps, Bernie Madoff, and the ensuing Cannibalism in the Streets? Then you, sir, need to give thanks to Ayn Rand Assholes everywhere—as well as the steely loins from which they sprang.
Reading Ritter’s GQ essay gave me a feeling (yes Ayn…a Feeling…) reminiscent of that moment gay folk experience when they discover they’re not the only ones like themselves. Well…if even Alan Greenspan can admit now, while standing there in the center of the wreakage of our ecomony, that perhaps he was wrong about all that deregulation stuff, maybe we’ll see some other big names come out of the closet as ex-Randian. We could be in for lots more fun denunciations of Randian claptrap.
There is a third book I discovered well after Audrey and Rand, which I still hold dear to my heart. Jacob Bronowski’s Science and Human Values. Bronowski clarified for me how knowledge, being a Process of discovery and refinement of models, was also at its core a deeply personal and creative act. He brought me to an understanding I really needed, about how the work of both scientists and artists had the same creative root, thereby bringing my inner techno geek and my inner art geek finally to some degree of peace with one another. But more importantly, he showed me how to get past my need for certainty. There is no perfect God’s eye view to be found, either in the bible or in Atlas Shrugged. Our knowledge exists in an area of imprecision we can never fully eliminate. Call it the Uncertainty Principal or, as Brownoski suggested in The Ascent of Man, the Principal of Tolerance if you like, but there is no God’s eye view. Quantum physics has proven that literally. But that does not mean we can never really know anything. It means we have to always bear in mind that area of uncertianty always tied up in our understandings, and that knowledge is a process of test and refinement, and not a thing we can safely stop questioning. We have to always take care to ask ourselves what we know, and how we know it. Always.
If I had to point to one thing that sums Rand up in her entirety for me it would be this: She wrote in Atlas Shrugged, "I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. FIRE, a dangerous force, tamed at his finger tips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come out from such hours. When a man thinks there is a spot of fire alive in his mind – and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression." Thereby turning cigarettes into a symbol for fans of her and her philosophy. It is a beautiful, eloquant image…the act of thinking, the hand holding fire. In 1974 Rand underwent surgery for lung cancer, quit smoking at that time, and never once for the rest of her life warned her readers about the dangers of cigarettes. When someone gives you, the artist, their love wholeheartedly, you need to love them back.
Several months ago I had an absolutely horrible visit from of some kind of stomach virus and I have never spent six hours of my life sicker. It was awful. I won’t go into detail because you might be eating as you read this.
So this flu season, never mind the Pig Flu that’s scaring everyone, I’ve been especially wary. Every time I get the urge to rub my eyes I flash back a couple months to when I was collapsed on the floor of my bathroom wondering if I was going to die and I try to remember when I last washed my hands.
Where I work we typically get offered a flu shot every year around this time. Considering we work on a university campus with students coming here from all over the world it’s a good spiff. They have signs posted at the doors to the student union eatery telling the kids to stay the hell out if they feel sick. But this year our flu shot is delayed because the vendor can’t get enough of it. Swell.
I’ve been washing my hands like crazy, and keeping a hand sanitizer spray with me everywhere and trying to keep my hands from complaining too much by using a moisturizer at night. Every time I pass by one of the hand sanitizer stations they’ve installed at work I spritz my hands with some of it. Then I’m reminded of the taunt from the IRA that the British Government had to be lucky every day while they only had to be lucky once. I don’t mean to trivialize horrible acts of terrorism, but the relentless logic of germ warfare is like that. The damn germs only have to be lucky once.
It has been fascinating watching the response, city by city, where the advertisement that says "Not religious? You’re not alone" has gone up. We’ve seen bus drivers refuse to drive buses with that ad on them (and get fired for it). In Cincinnati, death threats forced the removal of a billboard with that message.
And now in Nashville, the local yokels are up in arms about an identical billboard. And offering the usual brilliant reasoning to support their position:
"It just absolutely wrong place, wrong town, wrong timing," said Green Hills resident Donnie Cude.
Something about the phrase "Not Religious, You’re not alone", doesn’t sit well with Cude.
"It’s a slap in the face to the Nashvillians and the people who have a strong foundation and do so much good for this town," said Cude.
It has become quite clear that the mere existence of people who don’t accept their religious views is considered a terrible offense to the most reason-impaired of the righteous. I just can’t imagine why anyone else should really care what offends them.
Brayton, let it be said, is also a principled advocate for gay equality pretty regularly on his blog. So it’s a safe bet he knows perfectly well how a story like this would resonate with his gay readers. But I have to say that my hunch is that atheists probably get it worse nowadays.
I can think of a lot of cities where those bus ads would…yeah…draw some notice, but not a whole lot of bellyaching had they read "Gay? You’re Not Alone."
I remember a passage from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Catch Trap where one gay character tells another ruefully about the unspoken rule in Hollywood, that there are two things you can’t be and keep working in this town and one of them is a communist. But back in the day communism and atheism were tightly joined together in the political rhetoric of the cold war, and more often then not what you got was the sense that the problem with Communism wasn’t it’s totalitarian nature but that it was godless. "Godless communism" was what they called it. Now it’s just godlessness. Probably in the hierarchy of evilness, Atheists are worse then homosexuals…homosexuals being merely the interior decorators of Satan’s evil one world empire, atheists being its sinister architects.
Penn Jillette wrote a simple, lovely piece about being an atheist for an NPR series titled, This I Believe. It reads in part…
Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.
The problem, as a lot of gay folk already know painfully well is that the more you come out of the closet, the more people can see you for the human being that you are, the more the bigots will hate you for the human being that you are.
I’m Right…And If I’m Wrong That Just Makes Me Even More Right…
Sullivan, on a tear lately about Sarah Palin, tries to plumb the depths of this particular corner of the human gutter…
The lies of Sarah Palin are different from any other politicians’. They are different because they assert things that are demonstrably, empirically untrue; and they are different because once they have been demonstrated to the entire world that they are untrue, Palin keeps repeating them as if they still were true or refuses to acknowledge that she was wrong.
Yeah. And I’m reading this and flashing back to my early years on the Internet, and a place called Usenet, and a little corner of Usenet called alt.politics.homosexuality. APH it was (is) an unmoderated forum, created to divert arguments about gay civil rights and the validity of homosexuality away from the gay social forum, soc.motss. It is basically a place where bigots and gay folk can argue to their heart’s content, about any damn thing, as civilly or profanely as they like.
I spent years there arguing with bigots, and it didn’t take long for me to notice exactly the same behavior Sullivan describes above in a lot of them. A good example of that kind of thing is the bogus figure for average gay male lifespan Paul Cameron cooked up. Some bigot would cite it as proof that teh ghay lifestyle was inherently dangerous. About two or three dozen gay posters would quickly post the backstory on how Cameron got this figure (he averaged the ages in the obituaries of two gay newspapers during the worst of the AIDS epidemic deaths in America). Said bigots would then either a) agree that the figure was wrong and then the next day cite it again anyway, or b) keep citing it and add to it that Cameron’s figures had been proven to be correct, or c) keep citing it and add to it that Cameron’s figures had been proven to be correct and that most gay people will tell you so.
I keep saying this but it’s true: your gay and lesbian neighbors have been seeing this behavior on the part of the kultar kampfen for decades now. It’s not simply that they lie, or even that they’re so brazen about it. It’s that digging in of heels even when the lie has run its course and isn’t fooling a single solitary soul anymore. The game seems to be that as long as you can’t get them to admit they’re wrong they win.
Over at Pam’s House Blend, poster Louise relates getting one of those chain emails the sheeple like to send around to those of us who aren’t with the program. It begins on a familiar (if you’ve ever gotten one of these yourself) note…
I found this to be very truthful and interesting. We need to stand up for our beliefs instead of letting the more vocal become the majority.
…and ricochets right into tea-bagger fantasy land with a missive purportedly written by winger buffoon Ben Stein…
I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees, Christmas trees…
Two sentences into it and you just know where it’s going. But further on down it takes a turn I wouldn’t have credited even Stein with taking…
Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn’t spank our children when they misbehave, because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock’s son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he’s talking about. And we said okay.
Now we’re asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don’t know right from wrong, and why it doesn’t bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.
Pay attention to that "why our children have no conscience" part. As it turns out, the Stein didn’t say half of what the chain email says he said. Most of it was tacked onto a transcript of a commentary he gave on CBS Sunday Morning some time ago. And the tacked on part is full of bogus "facts" like the one about Dr. Spock’s son committing suicide. it didn’t happen. A grandson who was schizophrenic did. But there is no family tragedy too painful for the kultar kampfen to glorify themselves with it.
Conscience? Conscience? If a conscience that won’t even politely suggest you shouldn’t belly flop into the gutter has any use I can’t imagine what it would be. Actually, your children probably do have a conscience. You just can’t tell because you don’t know what one looks like.
Pastor Joe Fuiten, who at first seems to be among Washington’s more sane Christian fanatics, concedes that the campaign to reject Referendum 71 has "fallen short of the glory of God." In a statement posted over at the Tacoma News Tribune in response to an editorial (posted in full after the jump), Fuiten blames his former brothers-in-bigotry—Gary Randall and Larry Stickney—for disappointing the Lord and for failing to oppress the gays.
Fuiten dives into a tirade against his former cohort Randall for being exactly what The Stranger exposed Randall to be long ago: a greedy bigot who takes money from naive evangelicals and puts little of their contributions into the campaign. Today, Fuiten writes, "On August 28th, Mr. Randall promised ‘All income is spent directly on printing, mailing, Internet promotion and going forward, media ads and expenses, rather than salaries or consulting fees.’ We were promised ‘Radio ads are running and more are on the way.’ As it turned out, according to the PDC reports, virtually nothing was spent on media ads and precious little on anything else."
What caught my attention reading the right reverend’s rant was he asked something in it I’ve just about Never heard any of these gutter crawling bigots for Jesus ask themselves in the aftermath of any of these anti-gay electoral battles:
Randall claimed the referendum was a miracle from God, but I have to wonder at that. In the Bible, the miracles of the loaves and fishes fed 5,000 with 12 baskets left over. In this "miracle" we didn’t have enough money to fund television ads but the gays had millions.
In the Bible, a miracle raised one who was sick. In this "miracle" our strategy was sick and then died in the election. I suppose such miraculous claims are made to hype up the faithful to work harder and give more. It just seems like the "miracle" that Randall claimed fell a bit short of its biblical counterparts.
Was the referendum an effort blessed by God? Did the Kingdom of God advance because of the effort? I have not heard of people giving their lives to Jesus.
[Emphasis mine…] This is a question I used to hear so often asked by the Baptists I grew up with that seeing it there in that bigot’s rant startled me. I don’t think I’ve ever heard any anti-gay crusader ask that question after gay bashing a few hundred thousand or so of their neighbors at the ballot box. Did people come to Jesus? Were souls saved?
It’s been decades since I’ve heard preachers talk like that. Not just that taking their measure by the goal of winning souls to Christ, but to even question one’s actions in that light in the aftermath of battle…it’s startling in its utter abnormality. I don’t think I’ve ever heard one of these knuckle-draggers question whether or not they did anyone or anything any damn good beyond putting the homos back in their place and seldom even that since The Homosexual Menace usually just dusts itself off and gets right back to attacking the sanctity of marriage and family and morality.
Did we do anyone any damn good? Who’s asking? Yes, it’s true, for the moment same-sex couples aren’t entirely strangers before the law in Washington state. But gay folk and their families…their parents, their sons and daughters, their brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts, and all their friends, and all their loved ones, know that nearly half of the people who bothered to cast a ballot wanted their ring fingers cut off and I have a hunch that making homosexuals into scapegoats for every one of their straight neighbor’s cheap failures of moral character hasn’t done a whole fuck of a lot to bring anyone to Christ.
But it sure has made the sorry lot of you feel so fucking righteous though, hasn’t it? Until all the dust settles and the Homosexual Menace lays quietly on the floor nursing its wounds and you catch a glimpse of something that looks like a human being in it and everything gets quiet for a little while until you can work yourselves back up into a righteous frenzy again, so you don’t have to see that glimpse of something human in the Homosexual Menace again. Did anyone give their life to Jesus? Hahahahaha! Since when did that matter?
I did hear from a non-Christian friend commenting about one of his friends. He wrote, "I noticed the anger building in him, and tried to soften his approach, but he’s fed up. Referendum 71 has turned him against Christians." Neither is a Christian.
Well then I guess they’re not your neighbors then either, are they reverend?
In 1989, Juan Navarete came home to find his beloved Leroy Tranton lying bloody on the concrete driveway to their house. He’d fallen off a ladder while doing work. What happened to Juan next is the stuff of nightmares. Or…righteous devotion to Godliness depending on your point of view…
Juan and Leroy lived together in Long Beach for eight years. One day, Juan came home from the grocery store and found Leroy, who had fallen off a ladder, lying on the concrete patio. Leroy was rushed to the hospital where he stayed in a coma for several days. Although Leroy regained consciousness, he remained hospitalized for nine months. Juan visited Leroy once or twice each day, feeding him and encouraging him to recuperate.
Leroy’s estranged brother, who lived in Maine, filed a lawsuit seeking to have himself appointed as Leroy’s conservator.
When Juan accidentally found out, he showed up at court in Long Beach. Although Juan, who was not represented by counsel, stood up and protested, the judge refused to consider Juan’s plea because he was a stranger to Leroy in the eyes of the law.
The brother subsequently had Leroy transferred from the hospital to an undisclosed location. When Juan finally discovered that Leroy was being housed in a nursing home about 50 miles from Long Beach, he attempted to visit Leroy there. The staff stopped Juan in the lobby, advising him that the brother had given them a photo of Juan with strict orders not to allow him to visit Leroy. Unfortunately, no one else ever visited Leroy there.
It took Juan about two weeks to find an attorney who would take the case without charge. The attorney filed a lawsuit seeking visitation rights.
A few hours before the hearing was scheduled to occur, the brother’s attorney called Juan’s attorney, informing him that Leroy had died three days before.
Since the body had already been flown back to Maine where it was cremated, Juan never had an opportunity to pay his last respects.
Juan had no, absolutely no legal standing to do anything other then grieve, and there are those (I’m coming to you in a minute Jeff…) who would likely say that he was lucky to have that, and not be tossed into a jail cell for admitting he had engaged in homosexual conduct. In the eyes of the law, he and Leroy were strangers. Some people to this day think that’s more then we deserve, considering that in the eyes of the law we used to be criminals.
Same sex marriage is allowed in a few states now, and you can call that progress if you wish. But the chilling truth is that in most of the land of the free and the home of the brave, a same sex couple can be legally ground under foot by the local justice system, to the sound of loud hosanna’s from the righteous. It’s not enough that our wedding rings mean nothing. It’s not enough that our love isn’t seen as meaningful to us, let alone to anyone else. Even our grief must be unreal…a cheap imitation of the real grief heterosexual couples feel when one becomes gravely ill, or dies.
Because to permit us even our grief is to erode the sacred institution of heterosexual only marriage…
In his veto message, Republican Carcieri said: "This bill represents a disturbing trend over the past few years of the incremental erosion of the principles surrounding traditional marriage, which is not the preferred way to approach this issue.
"If the General Assembly believes it would like to address the issue of domestic partnerships, it should place the issue on the ballot and let the people of the state of Rhode Island decide.”
At a hearing this year on one of the stalled bills to allow same-sex marriage, Mark S. Goldberg told a Senate committee about his months-long battle last fall to persuade state authorities to release to him the body of his partner of 17 years, Ron Hanby, so he could grant Hanby’s wish for cremation — only to have that request rejected because "we were not legally married or blood relatives."
Goldberg said he tried to show the police and the state medical examiner’s office "our wills, living wills, power of attorney and marriage certificate" from Connecticut, but "no one was willing to see these documents."
Homosexuals don’t love…they just have sex…
He said he was told the medical examiner’s office was required to conduct a two-week search for next of kin, but the medical examiner’s office waited a full week before placing the required ad in a newspaper. And then when no one responded, he said, they "waited another week" to notify another state agency of an unclaimed body.
Homosexuals don’t love…they just have sex…
After four weeks, he said, a Department of Human Services employee "took pity on me and my plight … reviewed our documentation and was able to get all parties concerned to release Ron’s body to me," but then the cremation society refused to cremate Ron’s body.
"On the same day, I contacted the Massachusetts Cremation Society and they were more than willing to work with me and cremate Ron’s body," and so, "on November 6, 2008, I was able to finally pick up Ron’s remains and put this tragedy to rest."
When will it occur to supporters of same-sex marriage that they do their cause no good by characterizing those who disagree with them as haters, bigots, and ignorant homophobes? It may be emotionally satisfying to despise as moral cripples the majorities who oppose gay marriage. But after going 0 for 31 – after failing to make the case for same-sex marriage even in such liberal and largely gay-friendly states as California, Wisconsin, Oregon, and now Maine – isn’t it time to stop caricaturing their opponents as the equivalent of Jim Crow-era segregationists? Wouldn’t it make more sense to concede that thoughtful voters can have reasonable concerns about gay marriage, concerns that will not be allayed by describing those voters as contemptible troglodytes?
Why of course you’re not a contemptible troglodyte Jeff…you’re perfectly capable of looking at your gay and lesbian neighbors and seeing human beings…aren’t you…
I can sympathize with committed gay and lesbian couples who feel demeaned by the law’s rejection of same-sex marriage or who crave the proof of societal acceptance, the cloak of normalcy, that a marriage license would provide.
Because of course, all Juan Navarete wanted when he saw Leroy lying in a pool of blood on their driveway was societal acceptance…a cloak of normalcy.
If you knew what it was your gay and lesbian neighbors wanted, you wouldn’t be a bigot Jeff. But you can’t see the people for the homosexuals, so you don’t. You can’t. You never will. Even a troglodyte knows his neighbor is capable of grief.
They say sex is a powerful force for human bonding. But…no. It isn’t sex. It’s touch. I wrote this back in 2007, when I was going through another bad patch of missing Keith…
Alone
A few moments spent in the arms of someone you love can bring you back. Even if a few moments is all you get, it can bring you back. At least, for a while.
This wasn’t as intimate as it sounds. I was on my way to Key West, and stopping by Hilton Head I’d taken him out to dinner on the island that night. We shared a hug in the parking lot. A very, very long hug. He knew how unhappy I was. So he gave me that long, goodbye hug. But that was all it was. And it lifted my spirits considerably, given how depressed I was after I’d caught that glimpse of his happy domesticity earlier the previous day…
How To Make Your Ex Bleed In One Easy Step…
You want to make someone you dumped bleed? I mean, really, really bleed? I mean, Profusely…? Here’s my little tip: Don’t tell him about all the great sex you’re having now that he’s out of your life. Don’t bother telling him that your new boyfriend is so much better in the sack then he’ll ever be in his wildest wet dream fantasies. Don’t tell him how much your new boyfriend understands you so much better then he ever did. That’s amateur stuff. Really. You want to give him a hurt he’ll take to his grave, and hopefully sooner rather then later, just mention in passing some small bit of domesticity that you and your new main squeeze are currently enjoying…
Me: So I’ll probably be in town in an hour or so…you want to go grab a bite to eat somewhere after I get settled in…
He: Um…well actually (XXX) and I are about to go grocery shopping in a bit… Why don’t you call when you get in. If you want…there’s some good British comedy shows on TV later tonight you can watch at the hotel.
And, so on. If there wasn’t at least one major heart wound it wouldn’t be Christmas…
It was right after that I wrote a post about how depressed I was that alarmed a bunch of people. Interestingly enough, it was also shortly after that I got my first nastygram from an anonymous AOL poster.
A few months ago I was overjoyed that Keith was coming up for a visit. Finally. I’d been trying for years to coax him to come up here and see the house I’d bought for myself, and the life I was living up here in Charm City, and maybe even meet some of my friends, particularly the group of gay guys I regularly do a Friday night happy hour with in Washington D.C. And…deep down inside…I wanted to have him here under my roof for a few days, just to picture what it would have been like for us to have been lovers after all. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.
As the day of his arrival up here in Baltimore approached, that old twitterpated feeling took hold once again, and for days I wore a great big smile and my attitude went way, way positive. It affected everything. I spent weeks beforehand, cleaning and tidying up everything around Casa del Garrett so it would be perfect. My energy levels at work jumped a hundred fold. I was polishing off work items one right after the other like they were nothing. I felt Good, in a way I hadn’t felt since I was a teenager in love for the first time. Everyone at work and in my personal life noticed it. I was happy. Content. Blissful. Life was good. Life was sweet. So very, very sweet. And he hadn’t even arrived yet. But somehow, something deep inside knew what was coming.
My body sang. My energy levels soared. The day he came, he called first and said he was in Baltimore and on his way. And I immediately got this familiar knot in my stomach, just like I did years ago, when I was a teenager, and in love, and expecting any moment now to see the object of my affections. And when he left after a few days, I dropped into a deep grey funk the likes of which I’ve never experienced before. Ever.
When he came here and I was showing him around Casa del Garrett for the first time (he’d never been here before…) and I was showing him the upstairs and the bathroom which had a lot of remodeling done by the previous owner…and he gently mocked how technical I was getting when I described the improvements and I laughed with him and say "Hey…I’m a techno geek…okay?" and he laughed and put his arms around me and hugged… And…and… For a moment I saw how my life could have been had I been loved…even for a short time. But he doesn’t want to be that person in my life and all I have ever been able to do is just imagine how it would be. Now I can remember how it feels to have someone put their arms around me while we’re laughing together at some foible of mine. But he doesn’t love me and it seems I will never have love except in my imaginings and my dreams.
Thing of it is, I Knew I was going to experience a funk after he left Baltimore. Logically at least. I Knew it. I thought I would get through it like I always have. But it was worse then anything this time. It wasn’t just I was heartsick. My body Ached. I lost energy…it was like the floor had been pulled out from under me. At the office I was reasonably fine…I was able to get my work done and interact with my co-workers almost like nothing had happened. But at home I wandered around my little rowhouse in a daze. Like I’d fallen down the stairs. Like I’d been hit by a car. Like I’d just had my arms cut off.
And in a sense, I had. Now that I’m settled a bit, I think I understand it better. It’s something like this…
A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated or missing limb (even an organ, like the appendix) is still attached to the body and is moving appropriately with other body parts. Approximately 5 to 10% of individuals with an amputation experience phantom sensations in their amputated limb, and the majority of the sensations are painful…
Although not all phantom limbs are painful, patients will sometimes feel as if they are gesturing, feel itches, twitch, or even try to pick things up…
That moment we shared while I was geeking out in the bathroom…I kept feeling his arms around me in that moment, over and over again throughout my misery, well into the next month. It wasn’t just my heart. My body kept insisting that something was missing. It was dreadful.
How many times do we hear broken hearted lovers say that loosing that lover, that other half, felt like they’d had an arm cut off? In 1982 I picked up a copy of Howard Cruse’ Gay Comics and saw a story by French Cartoonist Patric Marcel titled, One For Sorrow…
Imagine having your arm torn off… There would be pain of course…but more important would be the sudden lacking, and the futile urge to have it back on…
I was well aware of what he was talking about by then. And imagery like that exists throughout the landscape of lost love. It’s more then just a metaphor I am convinced now. It really is something like that phantom limb phenomena. I’m a geek…okay? Bear with me here…
We have all these little ways of expressing sociability, fraternity, via various kinds of ritualized touch. Moments where we are permitted to cross the physical boundary between us. Handshakes are the most common one I can think of right now. I’ve heard it said they evolved as a way of letting a stranger know your intentions are friendly. Look…I’m unarmed… Some cultures allow for a bit more. A formalized kind of greeting kiss. A pat on the shoulders. Greeting hugs have become more common in American culture in my lifetime then they were when I was a kid. They serve to introduce and reinforce social bonds. But these are more, it turns out, then simply acknowledgments of social regard. Operating below the levels of rational consciousness, below even the lower primate and mammalian brain, is the platform it all rests upon.
We understand, if incompletely, that touch is a powerful thing, and we need to be careful how we let others do that to us. Not just as a matter of physical security, but emotional security too. To get close requires a cultivation of trust. It’s not just that someone within arm’s reach can take a swing at you so you have to be careful. It’s when you permit someone’s touch, you are making them a part of you. I mean that literally. The more intimate that touch, the more intimately they become a part of you. It really is that powerful a thing.
Our bodies map themselves, and remap themselves constantly. We have to learn how to do things like walk, run, ride bicycles, dance, hammer nails, brush teeth. The alien feel of a new tool becomes, after many hours of use, as if part of the hand and arm. And to our mind now, to the body’s inner map, it is. You pick it up, it’s There. Even something as complex as an automobile becomes an extension of the body, once its behavior has been mapped by the brain. Accelerate…back off a little…flick up the turn signal stalk…turn the wheel a bit… It’s not the car moving through traffic, it’s you. And when you get behind the wheel of a different car, it feels strange for a while, until your body has had a chance to map that one out too.
But the car doesn’t touch back. A favorite tool lost or stolen can make you angry, but you caress the world with the tool, it doesn’t caress you back. People (and pets) are different. They touch back. And our bodies map that touch to itself. And more…
Research suggests that if a love potion does in fact exist, the mammalian hormone called oxytocin is likely the key ingredient.
Oxytocin is a hormone produced naturally in the hypothalamus in the brain. Studies have shown that oxytocin is associated with our ability to mediate emotional experiences in close relationships and maintain healthy psychological boundaries.
In studies with non-human mammals, oxytocin has been shown to promote nest building and pup retrieval, acceptance of adopted offspring, and the formation of adult pair-bonds.
This important hormone is naturally released in response to a variety of environmental stimuli including skin-to-skin contact, uterine or cervical stimulation during sex, nipple stimulation in lactating women, and as the result of a baby moving down the birth canal.
[Emphasis mine] They say it’s sex that bonds a couple. Not…exactly. It’s touch. Which happens during sex of course. But everywhere else in a couple’s relationship too and those ways, I am convinced now, are much more meaningful and fundamental. Your lover can touch you in ways even a dear friend cannot, and not simply in sexual ways. Your lover can ruffle your hair, stroke your neck, rest a hand on your cheek. It’s a private language every couple invents for just themselves. This touch means one wordless thing…that touch another. Your lover can reach a hand out and lightly touch yours with just a fingertip, and send a tremble through your body. And your body knows that person’s touch, has it mapped out and stored in its mindless subconscious automatic understanding of what it itself is.
And when that touch isn’t there anymore, it’s a shock the body refuses to accept for a time. Like a phantom limb, you can still feel those arms around you, that hand inside of yours, and it is a torment. One that broken hearted and jilted lovers aren’t really being taught how to cope with, because everyone keeps telling them that it’s all in their mind. But it isn’t. Not entirely. It’s in their bodies too. They have, in a very nearly literal sense, lost a physical part of themselves.
Sorry that my last post alarmed some of you, but this isn’t a political blog, it just looks like one sometimes. It’s just one guy’s little life blog…my small corner of the Internet when I can put up my cartoons and photography and write about this and that so family and friends can see what I’m up to. Life isn’t all wonder and joy, and I was very depressed when I wrote that. Thank you, those of you who write, for your kind words of encouragement. I think I’m over the worst of it now.
And I believe I understand better now, why I got so terribly down, and I’m working on a post about that. But for the record I took a brief weekend trip back down to Epcot a couple weekends ago and managed three things. First, I enjoyed the Epcot Food & Wine Festival immensely. Really…the food at all the little nation kiosks was fabulous. Second, I managed to drive past Hilton Head without so much as phoning my ex. I’m not over him so much as I understand better now why I need to keep my distance from him. It’s worse when they still want to be friends. There was no lover’s quarrel…I just got dumped but he still wants me to come around his way whenever I’m down there and it isn’t good for me to do that. I’m fifty-six years old and I’m only now learning lessons about dating and boyfriends I should have learned when I was a teenager.
Thirdly, I got to see a certain someone down in Florida this time around, that I didn’t last time. It cheered me up a lot.
As I said, I have a post I’ve been working on I want to put up here, before I resume regular blogging. In the meantime, I’ve been chattering away on Facebook, so you can look for me there if you want.
[Update…] I’ve pulled that post for the time being. My blog is a place for me to think out loud, vent, thump my pulpit…and even occasionally bleed in public. Just not too much.
I just received my copy of Republican Gomorrah and cracked it open (after doing the usual book binding break-in thing…you all do this with the new books you get…right…?). The book is subtitled: Inside the movement that shattered the party. It purports to be about how the religious right subverted, then dominated republican party politics.
Opening it to the page after the dedications page, I came across this quote…
The great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor
or the good and the evil. The biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones
that have had or have pleasure in love and those that haven’t and hadn’t any pleasure in love,
but just watched it with envy, sick envy.
–Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth, Act I
I expect the author Max Blumenthal, understands his subject completely…
And Since When Did You Care About The Sexual Abuse Of Kids Mr. Hannity?
GLSEN, The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, has struggled since 1990 to make schools safer for gay kids. Here’s their mission statement:
GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, is the leading national education organization focused on ensuring safe schools for all students. Established nationally in 1995, GLSEN envisions a world in which every child learns to respect and accept all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. GLSEN seeks to develop school climates where difference is valued for the positive contribution it makes to creating a more vibrant and diverse community.
They started as a local group in 1990, when there were only two Gay-Straight Alliances in the nation. Since then they have helped nurture more then four-thousand in schools all over the county. They also sponsor the national Day of Silence, to draw attention to how anti-gay bullying shuts gay kids out of the education they need and deserve.
Predictably…all too predictably… they’ve been facing an onslaught of political attacks by the right since day one. In a world where all children can learn in safe, nurturing environments, where does that leave people…kids and grown adults alike…who think bashing faggots is one way of telling Jesus you love him? Worse, if kids are taught to respect their gay peers in grade school, they might also respect them in the adult world too. That simply cannot be allowed to happen.
So GLSEN has been for many years, a major target for various right wing propaganda machines…
Behind its promotion of "tolerance" and "safety," however, are the sordid realities of what GLSEN actually supports. Just about every type of sexual practice imaginable is "celebrated" and even graphically described in first-person stories by students in GLSEN’s recommended literature. GLSEN also supports gender distortion through cross-dressing, even in books recommended for elementary school children.
Criminal, underage sexual contact between adults and minors is a frequent, casual theme in these materials…
Old-timers naturally recall Communist, Fascist and Nazi youth brigades as severing children from their parent’s religious traditions and beliefs.
Such American classroom indoctrination is now found in "hate" and sexual diversity training and in 3,500 nationwide Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) school clubs. Under color of a "Safe Schools Movement" battling alleged "bullying" of so-called "gay" children (K-12), some see GLSEN as a modern version of the Hitler Youth and as preparing the ground for a larger, sweeping, schoolroom Youth Brigade.
GLSEN, which stands for Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, proudly claims that its goal is to promote safe schools for people of all sexual orientations. Many of its programs are billed as "anti-bullying." GLSEN presents itself as a benign organization devoted to tolerance and understanding.
In fact, GLSEN is anything but benign or tolerant. What GLSEN actually opposes is "heterosexism." In other words, GLSEN wants schools to rid children of the outrageous notion that heterosexuality is the norm, and make sure they’re clear that gender is merely a man-made construct. They’re not really about stopping bullies. They’re about bullying schools into adopting their radical pro-homosexual agenda. Not only do they want to teach your kindergartener that it’s okay to be gay, they want to teach your middle-schooler how to be gay.
Both GLSEN and PFLAG are activist groups that promote acceptance of homosexuality, bisexuality and cross-dressing even in elementary schools. They help students organize homosexual clubs with or without parental knowledge; advocate job protection for openly homosexual teachers and ministers; and attempt to partner with schools and churches. Both groups have taken political stances in favor of "gay" marriage and against the Boy Scouts’ moral beliefs on homosexuality.
The homosexual monster has always been after your children. That is still one of the most potent means of hate-mongering the struggle for gay equality, and it continues to make the gay community at large gun shy about reaching out to, and supporting gay youth. GLSEN boldly and proudly stepped into the breach and not only reached out a hand to struggling gay youth, they have energetically taken up their cause. They say you can always tell who the pioneers are…they’re the ones with the arrows sticking out of them.
Because their outreach is to youth, GLSEN is among the easiest of gay rights groups to smear with the accusation that their only purpose is to give predatory adults access to children. It is a bedrock trope of the right that homosexuals are not born they are created. As the slogan goes, Homosexuals don’t reproduce, they recruit. In the context of gay youth, support, honest facts about homosexuality and sex education become a means to turn your children into homosexuals. This is the accusation that is usually employed against GLSEN, if not outright, then as a barely concealed subtext.
The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) is holding its annual homosexual recruitment effort on April 9th at several hundred public schools nationwide. It bills this event as the "Day of Silence," which is an attempt to dramatize the alleged plight of "homosexual" teens who are fearful of going public about their sexual behaviors.Day of Silence, however, is nothing more than a clever propaganda campaign designed to silence opposition to the homosexual seduction of children-and to lure more sexually confused teens into a lifestyle that is fraught with physical and mental health dangers.
Radical activists foresee a time when homosexuals literally rub elbows with children in an effort to alter their views. Lesbian author Patricia Nell Warren wrote in The Advocate of “the bloody war in our high schools and colleges for the control of American youth.” Part of what was needed to win that war, Warren said, was that homosexuals “need to be mentoring, teaching, canvassing” both gay and straight kids.
Homosexuals are not fighting this “bloody war” in a haphazard manner. Instead, homosexual groups like the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), are organizing and developing a national strategy to get into public schools. Based in New York City, GLSEN has been enormously effective since it was formed in 1990. Some 7,500 GLSEN members now promote their agenda in more than 80 chapters throughout the U.S., and the number of Gay-Straight Alliances in public schools registered with GLSEN now stands at 400.
The homosexual monster has always been after your children. It should come as no surprise that this is the first thing the right jumped on, when President Obama nominated GLSEN founder, to head his Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools…
He wants homosexuality to be taught in American schools — in his book Always My Child, Jennings calls for a “diversity policy that mandates including LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] themes in the curriculum.” But he wants only one side of this controversial issue to be aired, and apparently believes in locking sexually confused kids into a “gay” identity. That’s the implication of his declaration, “Ex-gay messages have no place in our nation’s public schools. A line has been drawn. There is no ‘other side’ when you’re talking about lesbian, gay and bisexual students.”
Jennings does not limit his promotion of homosexuality in schools only to high schools or middle schools. He wrote the foreword for a book titled Queering Elementary Education, which includes an essay declaring that “‘queerly raised’ children are agents” using “strategies of adaptation, negotiation, resistance, and subversion.”
Perhaps the most dramatic illustration, however, of Jennings’ unfitness for a “safe schools” post involves an incident when he taught at Concord Academy, a private boarding school in Massachusetts. In his book One Teacher in Ten (the title is based on the discredited myth, now abandoned even by “gay” activist groups, that ten percent of the population is homosexual), he tells about a young male sophomore, “Brewster,” who confessed to Jennings “his involvement with an older man he met in Boston.” But at a GLSEN rally in 2000, Jennings told a more explicit version of “Brewster’s” story. Jennings here quotes the boy and then comments: “‘I met someone in the bus station bathroom and I went home with him.’ High school sophomore, 15 years old. That was the only way he knew how to meet gay people.”
Did Jennings report this high-risk behavior to the authorities? To the school? To the boy’s parents? No — he just told the boy, “I hope you knew to use a condom.” Sex between an adult and a young person below the “age of consent” (which varies from state to state) is a crime known as statutory rape, and some states mandate that people in certain professions report such abuse.
This story that Jennings had looked the other way at a case of statutory rape ran like an angry mob with torches across the right wing noise machine…
Sean Hannity: "As The Washington Times said, ‘At the very least, statutory rape occurred,’ and he didn’t report it." On the September 30 edition of Fox News’ Hannity, host Sean Hannity said: "We have the safe schools czar, a guy by the name of Kevin Jennings, OK? And he writes this book, and he gives information to a 15-year-old — ABC News and Jake Tapper write about this tonight — a 15-year-old sophomore, and his advice to him when he’s having a gay relationship is, you know, ‘Did you use a condom?’ He knew it was an older adult. Now, as The Washington Times said, ‘At the very least, statutory rape occurred,’ and he didn’t report it. Now he’s saying that he made a mistake, only because it’s been reported on. My question is, where’s the vetting process? Why was he even put in this position?" Hannity went on to call for Jennings to be "fired."
But there is a problem with this. First, Jennings now says the boy was 16, not 15, which is the age of consent in Massachusetts. That would mean there was no statutory rape. But that is beside the point. The problem the right has with Jennings isn’t that he looked the other way when an older man had sex with a kid. Here’s the problem:
In a 1994 book, he recounted his experience as an in-the-closet gay teacher at a private school, and he described a 1988 episode in which a male high school sophomore confided to him his involvement with an older man. Jennings was 24 years old then, and as he wrote, "I listened, sympathized, and offered advice. He left my office with a smile on his face that I would see every time I saw him on the campus for the next two years, until he graduated."
In a 2000 talk to the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, which Jennings had started, he recalled that this student had been 15 years old, had met the older man in a bus station bathroom–for that was the only way he knew how to meet gay people–and that he (Jennings) had told him, "I hope you knew to use a condom." Jennings’ best friend had died of AIDS the week before his chat with the student. According to Jennings, the student replied, "Why should I? My life isn’t worth saving anyway."
Emphasis mine. Jennings told this kid his life Was worth saving. That’s the problem. Make no mistake…that is Exactly why they are whipping up the standard right wing feeding frenzy over Obama picking him to head the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Jennings told a gay kid his life Was worth saving. That is the wrong message to give to gay kids.
This incident happened in 1988 and both Jennings and the kid were in the closet. Here David Corn almost grasps it:
The right is vilifying Jennings because he didn’t tell the student’s parents or the authorities that this closeted gay student was having sex with an older man. That is, he didn’t out this student, who was clearly troubled by his inability to be open about his sexual orientation.
…
Conservatives who oppose gay rights generally don’t display much sympathy for people who have to keep their homosexuality hidden–and don’t show much concern for how that affects their lives. But I can imagine the difficult situation both Jennings and the student were in. The student needed a confidante, and Jennings had to worry about the students well-being, which included protecting his secret. (Had there not been so much anti-gay prejudice, of course, the two would not have been in these respective positions.) It’s possible that Jennings helped save the kid’s life by encouraging him to think about condoms. It’s possible that outing the student may have led to terrible consequences. There’s no telling. But only someone blinded by ideology would refuse to recognize that Jennings was contending with thorny circumstances. Perhaps he didn’t make the right decision. It was a tough call. But the go-for-his-throat campaign being waged against Jennings is mean-spirited and fueled by an any-means-necessary partisanship.
Well…no. Partisan it surely is, but the fuel on this fire is hate, pure and simple. Jennings should have brought the police into it, not to look into a case of statutory rape, but to have the kid locked up for having sex in a public place, where he would likely have been raped by older inmates. The kid should have been outed to parents and family and peers and everyone he knew. His life should have been made so miserable that the only smile to grace his face would be the one he made as he slit his wrists. That instead the kid walked out of Jennings office with hope instead of despair was unforgivable. That is what this is all about.
It is grotesque to take at face value the word of bigots who have opposed with scorched earth political warfare even the smallest efforts to stop the bullying of gay youth in schools, that they are appalled that Jennings looked the other way at a case of child abuse. If they are appalled at anything, its the prospect of real work being done now at the federal level to insure that schools are actually made safer for kids…all kids…and that gay kids can get an education too, and grow up healthy and strong and walk proudly into their future. That must never be allowed to happen. Because our hopes and dreams are their stepping stones to heaven. Because if we don’t bleed, they are not righteous.
You knew the ex-gay movement had no conscience when you saw them dragging contented, well adjusted gay teens into their reparative therapy chambers against their will. And if that didn’t cinch it, when you saw them opposing grade school anti-bullying reforms that sought to protect gay kids out of one side of their mouths, while out of the other insisting that they are being oppressed simply for who they are. Right? You knew this. Now behold David Elliott bellyaching in this PFOX press release that gay state representative Jay Fisette does not respect the rights of the rhetorically heterosexual…
When staffing the Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX) exhibit booth at the Arlington County fair last month, I spotted Jay Fisette, my elected county representative who self-identifies as gay. Two years ago at this fair, a gay man had assaulted me because he was upset with my ex-gay story of hope and change from a homosexual identity. Because I did not press assault charges, some gay activists and Fisette falsely claimed the assault never occurred.
When I saw Fisette at the fair this year, I had the opportunity to tell him the assault had actually occurred, no matter how much he may dislike ex-gays like me. I said, "I wanted to let you know that I was hit when I was working at this booth in a previous year." Fisette replied, "What happened to you wasn’t good, but neither is your message." I responded, "Everyone has their own opinion." Briskly, he replied, "No."
Fisette then looked at us and inquired, "Are you guys ex-gays?" Both myself and the other PFOX volunteer affirmed that yes, we are ex-gays. Fisette shook his head and hurriedly walked away.
Question: When Jay Fisette, an elected government official, says "No," does he mean that I do not have a right to my own opinion of not accepting the ‘gay’ label for myself? Or does he mean that he refuses to dialogue on the ex-gay issue?
Gay groups exhibit at this fair too. Does Mr. Fisette also believe that gay groups do not have a right to their own opinion? Or is the right of self-determination permitted only to gays like him?
The Washington D.C. Superior Court recently ruled that ex-gays are a protected class eligible for sexual orientation non-discrimination protection. Does Fisette agree that his county’s sexual orientation law also protects ex-gays?
Jay Fisette is an elected official in Virginia and I would hope that elected officials are tolerant toward others, regardless of their sexual orientation.
To someone unfamiliar with the events described therein, the press release reads like a cry for help amidst the onslaught of the militant homosexual agenda. But to anyone else its in-your-face, any-lie-you-can-get-away-with-oh-see-my-golden-halo mendacity is grotesque. Also par for the course when it comes to PFOX, which is to integrity in discussions concerning human sexuality as FOX News is to integrity in journalism. Let’s start with the biggest whopper first…
The Washington D.C. Superior Court recently ruled that ex-gays are a protected class eligible for sexual orientation non-discrimination protection.
In 2002, the group applied to secure a display at the National Education Association’s annual convention. PFOX submitted an application, signed a deposit check, and prepared its exhibit: an educational display, it claimed, “to promote tolerance and equality for the ex-gay community.” The NEA denied PFOX’s application, citing limited booth space. PFOX suspected there was another motive at play: sexual orientation discrimination.
In 2005, PFOX filed a discrimination claim with the D.C. Office of Human Rights against the NEA for “refusing to provide public accommodations to ex-gays.” When the OHR sided with the association, PFOX appealed. D.C. Superior Court Judge Maurice Ross handed down the decision in June of this year: PFOX’s discrimination complaint was again denied.
But Ross handed PFOX a symbolic victory. While he decided in the NEA’s favor, Ross also held that ex-gays should, in fact, be protected under the sexual orientation clause of the D.C. Human Rights Act. In Ross’ view, the Human Rights Act protects not only groups defined by “immutable characteristics,” as the Office of Human Rights’ decision claimed. The act also protects groups defined by “preference or practice”—like people who previously “practiced” gayness and now “prefer” to practice heterosexuality.
…
PFOX’s celebratory press release about the ruling didn’t mention that the judge saw fit to make an analogy to the KKK. The embrace of D.C.’s sexual-orientation law was a bit of a departure for PFOX, which has spent most of its history rallying against anti-discrimination protections for gays, lesbians, and transgender people…
Dig it…PFOX Lost that case. The judge, in agreeing that ex-gays fall within the protections of the D.C. Human Rights Act, was basically smacking the Office Of Human Rights upside the head for arguing that the act only protected those groups with immutable characteristics. Yes…that’s what they argued. HuH?
A person’s religious beliefs for example, are chosen. Going to church and worshiping in the manner your conscience dictates is a chosen behavior. These sorts of chosen behaviors, expressions of a person’s deepest convictions and conscience, deserve the same protections under law as characteristics of race and gender. And in fact, the first civil rights laws I am made to understand, were passed in New York City ages ago…to protect Irish Catholics.
It’s that Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness thing. Which…ironically…the religious right absolutely despises when it’s granted to the heathens too. But it protects both them as well as the likes of me, and a decent society respects that right to conscience in all its citizens. Even the morons.
PFOX lost the case, because the judge also recognized the right of the NEA to exclude groups based on the content of their message. The same right in other words, that gives the New York City Hibernians the right to exclude gay Irish from their Saint Patrick Day parade, also gives the NEA the right to exclude groups that promote anti-gay intolerance. Groups like…oh…PFOX…
In 1998, two dozen of the country’s leading Christian Right groups convened in Colorado Springs, Colo., at Focus on the Family’s sprawling headquarters complex. Led by Janet Folger of the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, the coalition of anti-gay groups called themselves "Truth in Love." They decided to spend $600,000 on advertisements in the New York Times and USA Today to try to make "ex-gay" a household word.
Folger spelled out the new strategy in an NPR interview, saying, "That ex-gays exist shatters the foundation of the homosexual movement." On ABC’s "Nightline," she admitted to wanting to imprison gays through enforcing anti-sodomy laws that were later thrown out by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. Regardless, Truth in Love officials maintained that their message was one of hope and compassion.
Initially, ex-gay therapists and ministers were elated at the money and attention from the wealthy and powerful Christ Right groups that had shunned them for decades. In 1999, the Family Research Council, created as a political arm of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, gave $80,000 to fund PFOX, or Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays. In return, PFOX president Anthony Falzarano – a former male prostitute and confidante of closeted prosecutor Roy M. Cohn, the rabid anti-communist who persecuted homosexuals before dying in 1986 from complications of AIDS – lobbied to keep anti-sodomy laws from being repealed in Louisiana.
Today, PFOX is headed by Regina Griggs, the mother of an openly gay son. The group’s goals have as much to do with transforming public schools as they do with changing people’s sexual identities. In a move its officials aim to replicate nationally, PFOX, with the help of Alliance Defense Fund and the Thomas More Law Center ("Christianity’s answer to the ACLU"), sued the Montgomery County School District in Maryland for the right to operate a high school ex-gay club. PFOX lost the suit but continues to distribute ex-gay literature in Maryland schools.
For a flavor of how PFOX views same sex relationships…try their article on same-sex marriage…
From a young age, I was exposed to explicit sexual speech, self-indulgent lifestyles, varied GLBT subcultures and gay vacation spots. Sex looked gratuitous to me as a child. I was exposed to all-inclusive manifestations of sexuality including bathhouse sex, cross-dressing, sodomy, pornography, gay nudity, lesbianism, bisexuality, minor recruitment, voyeurism and exhibitionism. Sado-masochism was alluded to and aspects demonstrated. Alcohol and drugs were often contributing factors to lower inhibitions in my father’s relationships.
My father prized unisex dressing, gender-neutral aspects and a famous cross-dressing icon when I was eight years old. I did not see the value of biological complementing differences of male and female or think about marriage. I made vows to never have children since I had not grown up in a safe, sacrificial, child-centered home environment. Due to my life experience, I ask, "Can children really perform their best academically, financially, psychologically, socially and behaviorally in experimental situations?" I can tell you that I suffered long term in this situation, and this has been professionally documented.
PFOX is part and parcel of the religious right’s Ex-Gay dog and pony show, and that show is not about, as they claim, helping people overcome unwanted same-sex attractions, but giving bigots an excuse to blame gay people for their own persecution. If the gays don’t want to be discriminated against they can always change… This is what that "change is possible" rhetoric is all about. Change is possible, so if that hospital shuts a gay man out of his dying lover’s room because only real, as opposed to homosexual fake families are allowed to be together, if a lesbian’s boss fires her because the company doesn’t want sexual deviants in the work force, if a gay teenager got the crap beaten out of him because normal kids are disgusted by homosexuals, it’s their their fault because they choose to live the homosexual lifestyle.
Which brings me to the other big whopper in David’s press release…
Two years ago at this fair, a gay man had assaulted me because he was upset with my ex-gay story of hope and change from a homosexual identity. Because I did not press assault charges, some gay activists and Fisette falsely claimed the assault never occurred.
I’d previously posted on PFOX’s rather hysterical claims a homosexual activist assaulted an ex-gay at the Arlington County Fair. At the time I noted only suspect websites catering to the religious right were reporting on the supposed incident.
Bravo to editor Dave Roberts at Ex-Gay Watch for undertaking an investigation. Roberts contacted the only gay organization with a booth at the fair, the Arlington Gay and Lesbian Alliance. He also contacted the fair’s event manager and the Arlington County Police Department and strangely no one had heard of such an incident. Roberts wrote:
We contacted the Arlington PD and ended up speaking with John Lisle of the Media Relations/Legislative Affairs Office. He had no initial knowledge of such an incident. After checking briefly, he again said that no one was aware of such an incident. So we sent a copy of the PFOX statement to him at which time he agreed to check more thoroughly. After over two days of research, there was nothing he could add to his statement; no report exists and no one recalls such an incident.
Mind you…this was in a fair area packed with people. And nobody saw this attack? Ah Ha says PFOX…but one of the officers Did Confirm It Happened….!
On September 10, we received the following email from John Lisle, our contact at the ACPD. It was our original inquiry to him that started their investigation into the matter and we asked that he let us know if any new information turned up. This was also posted to the original thread by a commenter about an hour after we received it.
One officer told me today he was on patrol at the Fair when a woman approached him and told him a man had knocked over pamphlets at the PFOX booth and assaulted another man there.
The officer then spoke to the alleged victim. He did not want to press charges and therefore no written report was filed.
Based on the description the officer was given, he located the suspect at the Fair. Another officer escorted that gentleman off the Fair grounds.
This was quite exciting, as up to now we were coming up dry everywhere. Contrary to the way it has been framed by some, this obviously isn’t proof of an assault — even the police have no witnesses — but it is something. Clearly the PFOX workers had talked with the officers and we were able to exchange questions with them through Lisle over the next week or so.
We first verified the place and time. Whatever it was, it did in fact occur at approximately 5:00 PM ET, Saturday, August 18, at the PFOX booth located inside the indoor section of the Arlington County Fair. One can get a general idea of how the booths were arranged by the photograph to the left, however we were told that it was more crowded Saturday evening than in this photograph. This was also the time frame during which two witnesses told us they saw what they called a “heated discussion” at the PFOX booth (but no assault or literature thrown).
When questioned by the police, the alleged attacker denied hitting anyone but admitted that “his emotions got the best of him.” So while he could be lying, he could also be truthfully admitting to the “heated argument” that others have reported. Either way, we still have no one from a crowded, indoor location who saw a physical assault or literature being thrown to the floor — at least no one other than those at the PFOX table.
The police asked him to leave based on their belief that he was at the very least involved in some sort of disturbance, as even he admitted to becoming overly emotional. Since they saw nothing themselves, and the alleged victim did not press charges, no other action was taken. Currently, the police do not know the name of the alleged attacker, and they have no witnesses other than the two PFOX workers. If they had seen an attack themselves, they could have arrested the attacker whether the victim pressed charges or not.
So…to recap…nobody saw it happen the officers who responded included, nobody was arrested, and nobody even knows now who this alleged assailant person is. But…All Is Not Lost…
In the mean time, PFOX found a sympathetic ear in Matt Barber, a Concerned Woman for America attorney and writer. In a web audio interview, PFOX executive director Regina Griggs and someone claiming to be the alleged victim, “David,” basically told the same story as before, while Barber read the email above from Lisle as “proof-positive that this occurred.” Again, it is certainly germane, but it is not proof of anything beyond the fact that someone from PFOX relayed this story to the police that evening, and based on that they asked someone to leave.
And the problem with all this is that the word of PFOX is…well…worth its weight in gold…
There were some other issues brought out in this interview. David describes the alleged attacker as “belligerent,” yet in the next breath says he invited him out to his car, away from the booth, to retrieve his Bible — not a smart move for someone he considered so threatening. Also, Griggs stated a couple of times that she was the woman at the booth with David, yet both our witnesses have identified Estella Salvatierra — a longtime PFOX vice president and moderator, who is a civil rights attorney for the FCC in Washington — as the woman there during the incident, and after. While we don’t currently have a photo of Griggs, there are at least 20 years and any number of physical differences between her and Salvatierra.
We don’t yet know why it would matter, but the evidence suggests that Griggs was not there and Salvatierra was, yet Griggs is saying otherwise. Lisle has also said that during her conversations with him, Griggs has never spoken as though she was present at the booth during the incident, as she does in the audio interview and other places. Again, we don’t yet know the significance of this, but she clearly can’t speak about events in the first person if she was not there at the time.
Does it even matter? Maybe there is some yet to be revealed motive for concealing the identity of the second PFOX worker there, but more likely it is just the reflexive lying of the habitually mendacious. As Frank Lloyd Wright once said, no stream rises higher then its source. The ex-gay movement, to the extent it can even be called a movement and not a prop in the religious right’s culture war, is built on a bedrock of myths, lies and superstition regarding homosexuality. Truth is a matter of belief, not facts. What matter who was actually there, or what they actually saw. Concerned Women For America have another story to feed the right wing propaganda mill about the threat of militant homosexuality, which is all that really matters.
Here’s what I think happened, based on nothing more then a middle aged gay man’s lifetime of watching how fanatics readily build up a head of steam when they’re not getting their way. Someone, probably a gay someone, saw the PFOX booth, went over, looked at one of the pamphlets denigrating homosexuals as sexually broken disordered threats to children and families, and got into an argument with the droids working said booth. Said droids, shaken as their kind usually are whenever their scapegoats get uppity, rush to ask fair security to eject the uppity homosexual. But even in Virginia…well…Northern Virginia…you can’t just demand to have a homosexual ejected because they don’t appreciate pamphlets being handed out describing them as sexually broken versions of what a human being is supposed to be. So the threat was…elaborated upon. He didn’t just have an argument with us…he was…Belligerent. He threw our papers to the ground. Yes…that’s what he did. And…and…wait a minute…he trashed our booth. And…and…he assaulted us! Physically assaulted us!
And then we invited him to walk with us to our car so we could read the bible to him…
Mind you…I’m not saying they don’t thoroughly believe their own stories by now. Look up the word confabulation. If it wasn’t for confabulation, there wouldn’t even be a republican party in America right now, let alone a religious right. In the meantime, David Elliot is working the Alexandria County Fair another year, mining it for all the outrage he can concoct, all the evidence that it is ex-gays who are a persecuted minority, and not gay people who face another election year round of state ballot initiatives making marriage a right only heterosexual couples can enjoy…
Jay Fisette is an elected official in Virginia and I would hope that elected officials are tolerant toward others, regardless of their sexual orientation.
No you don’t. No more then you hope school kids are tolerant of their gay peers, or society as a whole is tolerant of same-sex couples. It’s not your sexuality that’s fluid David. It’s not your reality either. It’s your morals. Your word as to what transpired between you and Jay Fisette is worth its weight in gold.
Roman Polanski And The Child Abuse Apologists…All Of Them…
Like many people I suppose, I’m following the story of Roman Polanski reluctantly…drawn into it against my better judgment. It’s an ugly affair but there is far more ugliness in the public chatter surrounding it. In 1977, the year he was arrested and tried, I had just tentatively begun to come out to my circle of friends and I had my own issues with human sexuality. I wasn’t all that interested in the sexual trials and tribulations of a 44 year old Hollywood glitterati, other then how it re-enforced my perceptions of the heterosexual double standard. Had his thirteen year old victim been a boy I had little doubt his film making career would have been over instantly and his name would be poison in the film industry. But Hollywood seemed perfectly willing to forgive him his use of a thirteen year old girl as sexual junk food. Probably because it was something practiced among the Hollywood rich and powerful all the time. His crime it seemed, if any, was that he had allowed it to make headlines.
So now it’s back in the headlines again, and I’m watching the stories fly across my Google News page with the same sense of irritable astonishment. Hello…look at all the people who were outraged at the way the Catholic church aided and abetted child molesting priests, coming to Polanski’s defense. I have to wonder in retrospect how much of that outrage was because they took sexual advantage of kids at the same time they’re preaching about sexual purity, or because they were homosexuals and the victims were boys. How much ink would have been spilled on the scandal had the victims been girls instead? But this passage from Polanski’s victim, now an adult who just wants to not have to deal with it anymore, struck me…
She spoke with People magazine in 1997. After her mother went to police, "all hell broke loose," Geimer said. The European media compared her to Lolita, the young seductress in fiction.
"The fallout was worse than what had happened that night," she told People. "It was on the evening news every night. Reporters and photographers came to my school and put my picture in a European tabloid with the caption Little Lolita. They were all saying, ‘Poor Roman Polanski, entrapped by a 13-year-old temptress.’ I had a good friend who came from a good Catholic family, and her father wouldn’t let her come to my house anymore."
Against that backdrop, the plea deal was struck.
Afterward, Geimer shut down emotionally and rebelled, she told People on the 20th anniversary of the crime.
"I was this sweet 13-year-old girl, and then all of a sudden I turned into this pissed-off 14-year-old,’ Geimer said. I was mad at my attorney; I was mad at my mom. I never blamed her for what happened, but I was mad that she had called the police and that we had to go through this ordeal. Now I realize she went through hell trying to handle things as best she could."
Geimer dropped out of school, got pregnant at 18 and married at 19. She divorced and moved with her family to Hawaii. She later married a carpenter, with whom she had two more children.
Cindy and Dan O’Connor were very worried about Zach. Though bright, he was doing poorly at school. At home, he would pick fights, slam doors, explode for no reason. They wondered how their two children could be so different; Matt, a year and a half younger, was easygoing and happy. Zach was miserable.
The Times story is as heartwarming as the tale of Roman Polanski is grotesque. Zach’s parents loved their gay kid, and tried their level best to make sure he knew it, even as the kid struggled with terrible fears and doubts about himself. But both stories contain this little nugget of fact: both kids turned from sweet little dears into sullen, angry, and self destructive shells of their former selves almost in an instant. And it wasn’t simply a case of raging adolescent hormones that did it. They had both been sexually abused. Geimer directly and physically. O’Connor, though his parents tried their absolute best to protect him from it, by the culture of anti-gay hate he was growing up in.
The misery Zach caused was minor compared with the misery he felt. He says he knew he was different by kindergarten, but he had no name for it, so he would stay to himself. He tried sports, but, he says, “It didn’t work out well.” He couldn’t remember the rules. In fifth grade, when boys at recess were talking about girls they had crushes on, Zach did not have someone to name.
By sixth grade, he knew what “gay” meant, but didn’t associate it with himself. That year, he says: “I had a crush on one particular eighth-grade boy, a very straight jock. I knew whatever I was feeling I shouldn’t talk about it.” He considered himself a broken version of a human being. “I did think about suicide,” he says.
Though I never hated myself for being gay, I know something of the misery that kid was going through. I wrote about it Here…
That was so me. And looking back on it after mom retired, I never really appreciated how bad I was. Then when mom passed away, I inherited her diaries. And I saw it all then. It was very painful reading…
Bruce came home in a very bad mood. Stomped into the bedroom… So I called up J*** & went over to her place for the rest of the evening. He had my stomach just tied up in knots…Oh how I wish he would turn back to the Lord & become like the little boy I once knew, kind, thoughtful, & love for all…
But I wasn’t her little boy anymore, let alone bloody likely to walk back into a church where I would be demonized as an abomination in the sight of God. I was a young man with a young man’s needs and doubts and heartbreaks, all the more confusing and difficult to deal with not so much because I was gay, as that I couldn’t talk to the one person in my life who by all rights should have known me better then anyone, and who might have been able to give me some guidance, but mostly just love, when I needed it most. And love she Did give me…but it had, or so I felt, strings attached. Strings I was terrified to break.
She absolutely positively didn’t want me to come out to her. Every time I even went near the subject of my sexual orientation she would get cold and angry herself and throw up a wall. So I just accepted the fact that we could never talk about it, and I always had to keep that part of me inside when I was in the house. So when my first love left me, and then my second try went very bad on me, and then my third, and I was a miserable desolate wreak inside, I had to keep it inside. I grew increasingly sullen and angry.
Even my friends back then, who were mostly straight, saw it. It was a time before the Internet, and easy access to information about the greater gay community beyond my doorstep. I only knew of a few seedy bars downtown, where I really didn’t want to be. To get my weekly copy of the Washington D.C. gay paper, The Blade, or the Advocate, I had to venture down to this really squalid adult bookstore in nearby Wheaton. Gay kids nowadays will, thankfully, never know how alone and isolated it felt to be gay back then. Most of my friends were straight kids I knew from my high school days, and I really couldn’t talk much to them either, as counter-cultural tolerant as they were (though some of them not so much really). But none of them could have given me what mom might have been able to, had we both lived in a different world.
If only I’d had a chance to open up to her about what was going on in my life, if only I’d had her to talk to then, I might have been a lot less angry, a lot less miserable. My temper was always flaring. I would storm into my room and sulk for hours. I knew I was having "anger management" issues back then, but in retrospect I never thought I was as bad as I was, until I read her diaries.
It isn’t just Roman Polanski’s apologists who are hypocrites here. The deeper, uglier hypocrisy hangs around all the sexual moralists now venting at Polanski’s apologists, who themselves see nothing wrong with sexually brutalizing children. From clergy thumping their pulpits that god considers homosexuality an abomination, to right wing pundits and politicians raging against the homosexual menace, to the hostile hate filled mobs that pack school board meetings to rage against anti-bullying rules that protect gay kids, to the child abusers in every ex-gay ministry that teach gay kids to fear their bodies and hate themselves, the only difference in kind between them all and Roman Polanski is that Polanski, as near as I can determine, never said he boozed up and raped that girl because he loved her and wanted to bring her closer to God.
The age at which the most people are convicted of "sexual assault" is fourteen. Fourteen. And no doubt some of those were actual sexual assaults. But the vast majority of them were not. The vast majority of them were kids convicted of statutory rape. And they are then, in most states, considered sex offenders for the rest of their lives. A taste of why this essay is so important, first on how easy it is to become one of those statistics:
It takes so little for this happen to a child. A girl in school has oral sex with a boy in school. She becomes a sex offender for the rest of her life. Streaking a school event, as a practical joke, becomes a sex crime in the new America. Two kids "moon" a passerby and are incarcerated in jail as sex offenders, where they may well learn a lesson or two about rape. A teenager, who takes a sexy of photo of him, or herself, is paraded around the community as a "child pornographer" for the rest of his or her life…
If you think this was an unintended result of the past couple decades of right wing hysteria over child sexual abuse, you are not paying attention. This is exactly what they wanted to accomplish. Not the persecution of child molesters, but of children. Because they must hate their bodies. Because they must hate themselves, all of them, gay and straight alike. They must hate themselves. And most of all, they must fear joy.
This isn’t rocket science. Our children are our future. The way we treat them is the judgment we pronounce every day upon the human race. When you see someone treating them like crap you have to wonder if that’s not because they think the human race is crap and doesn’t deserve to survive. And many do. If you think child molesting louts like Polanski are the bottom of the human gutter you haven’t looked down into it very far and I can’t say I blame you. Nietzsche was right about gazing for too long into an abyss…
To Polanski’s defenders I can only say this: No means No. That simply should not even be an arguable thing. I understand the reflex to push back against American sexual hypocrisy. But: No means No. Furthermore, if you are a grown adult and the person whose pants you’re trying to get into is a kid, Yes means No too. They may come onto you. They may think they get it. But they don’t. Not the way you do. Your job is to set an example, to show them what it is to be the grownup they ache to become. How often do you bellyache about corporate greed and political avarice? How often do you rail against the coarseness of American culture, the casual off-handed brutality of a might-makes-right morality? Did you ever blast the cigarette companies for pushing their health damaging addictive wares onto kids? You take sexual advantage of a kid, and for sure that kid will grow up with an understanding that taking advantage of someone weaker and more vulnerable then them for your own greedy pleasures isn’t so wrong after all. Is that what you want?
You need to be the kind of person you want that kid to grow up to be. You need to live the kind of life you want the world of tomorrow to become. Yes, sex is wonderful. Sex is one of this life’s perfect joys. But only where No means No and grownups don’t take advantage of naive youngsters, itching to grow up quickly. If you want kids to grow up strong and proud and beautiful and unafraid of their sexual selves, then adults who take advantage of them must be held accountable. For the sake of all those strong, proud, beautiful kids and the tomorrow they represent.
As for the voices from the kook pews now crying hypocrite at Polanski’s defenders: If sex, as your kind is so fond of saying, is for making babies, then hating human sexuality is also a way of hating the future, hating the human race. You warp a kid emotionally to the point they are incapable of having a healthy sexual relationship with anyone, and you are damaging not only that kid, but everyone that kid takes into their arms, and whatever children they might bear. I am perfectly aware that this is fine with you.
You teach them abstinence not to keep them healthy and strong but because you know perfectly well that teenage girls will get pregnant, that kids who don’t know how to protect themselves from STDs will get horribly sick and you believe that motherhood, sickness and death are just punishments for enjoying sex for its own sake, just punishments for living life for its own sake. Didn’t the bible say that Eve’s punishment for disobeying god was to bear the pain of childbirth? Children should be afraid of joy as you are. They should loath their human bodies as you do. They should hate their flesh and blood life and this good earth and all of human existence as much as you will until the day you die. Your problem with Roman Polanski is that he took pleasure in sex, not that he raped a young girl. Women are supposed to submit to the authority of men aren’t they? Were Polanski a moral man he would have broken that kid’s heart without taking any physical pleasure from it.
The next time a case of child sexual abuse hits the headlines, please kindly shut the fuck up, because you are no better then that criminal is. Wait…let me amend that. You are worse.
The other day, while Judy Shepard, the mother of murdered gay college student Matthew Shepard, was giving a talk about hate crimes, a man rose from the audience to call her a liar…
About 45 minutes in, a man rose and asked a question that amounted to repeating a current popular right-wing lie – Matthew Shepard was killed because his killers were high and wanted to rob him; his sexual orientation was irrelevant. Mrs. Shepard refuted the claim – pointing out that in one of the killer’s confessions, he admitted they acted because of Shepard’s sexual orientation; the other, in his statement in court, admitted the same. Neither men tested positive for drugs or alcohol after Matthew’s murder. The interlocutor asserted at this point that she was lying and doing a disservice to history by lying about the reasons for her son’s murder. To my eyes, Judy Shepard appeared visibly upset by the man’s accusations. He claimed to be relying on a report from 20/20…
Ah yes…the 20/20 whitewash. That gift to America’s bigots that keeps on giving…
“The Matthew Shepard Story: Secrets of a Murder,” which aired Nov. 26, promised shocking new information about the case. But it contained mostly speculation, scandalous details, unreliable new witnesses and revised confessions. The premise of the report by Elizabeth Vargas was that McKinney attacked Shepard during a robbery under the influence of crystal meth and that the murder had nothing to do with the victim’s sexuality…
Vargas went out of her way to show that McKinney and Henderson did not hate gay people. She questioned previous reports that characterized them as “rednecks” (her word), and tells viewers that in fact they had steady jobs and girlfriends. Vargas reported that Shepard’s friends promoted the hate crime theory in the days following the attack…
Emphasis mine. I’ve written about the hacktacular 20/20 piece before. But it is best summed up by Rob DeBree, the lead investigator on the case…
In his confession to DeBree, McKinney had denied using meth the day of the murder, and while McKinney had been arrested too late for the police to confirm this through blood testing, DeBree felt certain that McKinney had for once told the truth. Obviously it’s unsurprising that the lead investigator would disagree with the defense, but DeBree had some compelling reasons on his side. "There’s no way" it was a meth crime, DeBree argued, still passionate about the issue when I met him nearly six months after the trial had ended. No evidence of recent drug use was "found in a search of their residences. There was no evidence in the truck. From everything we were able to investigate, the last time they would have done meth would have been two to three weeks previous to that night. What the defense attempted to do was a bluff." Meth crimes do have hallmarks. One, "Overkill," certainly seems to describe what happened to Matt, but no others so seamlessly fit that night: "A meth crime is going to be a quick attack," DeBree pointed out. "It’s going to be a manic attack… No. This was a sustained event. And somebody that’s high on meth is not going to be targeting and zeroing in on a head, and deliver the blows that they did in the way that they did," with such precision. "Consistently it was targeted, and even if you’re drunk, you’re going to have a tough time trying to keep your target. No. There’s absolutely no involvement with drugs."
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 133 – 134
A week after we met in his office, Rob [DeBree] took me to the crime scene. As we drove out to the fence in a Sheriff’s Office SUV, he stopped in mid-sentence by the Wal-Mart" "Here’s where it began," he told me and gestured in imitation of McKinney striking Matt. We restart the conversation, but he’s made his point: the drive to the fence seems unimaginably long. It’s not far – no more then a mile or two – but the rutted dirt road they turned on to makes for extremely slow driving. When I say something to Rob about how long it takes, he agrees. "They were coming here to finish him." On that dirt track, it is hard to believe the defense attorney’s claims that the two killers had been drunk or high on drugs or crazed by homosexual panic. It just takes too long to get to the fence…
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 155 – 156
"I have never worked a homicide with this much evidence," Rob says, all these months later a bit of wonder still bleeding into his voice. "It was like a case of God giving it to us. I’m not kidding. The whole way it broke down from the beginning to the end – it was like, here it is, boys: work it. It’s almost like it pissed off God, and he says, oh well, come here, let me walk you over here, walk you over there, pick up all this, pick up all that. It was just a gift.
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 157
I drove that same path when I was in Laramie, to the extent I was able to before coming upon all the "private property signs", and that same impression swept over me like a cold clammy sickness. You simply cannot drive the path that Shepard’s killers took and come away from it believing that it was simply a robbery gone bad. Unless of course, that is what you need to believe.
Considering the sorry state of American journalism, to say the 20/20 piece represented a new low is almost complementary. But historically it is unremarkable. Since the 1950s, mainstream American journalism has always excused anti-gay violence, usually by blaming the victim. ABC didn’t so much sink to a new low, as pound some well worn territory. There is no violent anti-gay hatred in America, only homosexuals who go too far and suffer the consequences. That is what the news media in this country believes, if not on the beat, then without a doubt in the boardroom.
But now the creators of The Laramie Project have returned to their work to write an epilogue. And in the process they’ve interviewed one of the killers, Aaron McKinney…
"As far as Matt is concerned, I don’t have any remorse," McKinney is quoted as saying in the script, which was provided to The Associated Press by the production company.
McKinney, according to the script, reiterates his claim that the 1998 killing in Laramie, Wyo., started out as a robbery, but makes clear that his antipathy toward gays played a role.
"The night I did it, I did have hatred for homosexuals," McKinney is quoted as saying. He goes on, according to the script, to say that he still dislikes gays and that his perceptions about Shepard’s sex life bolstered his belief that the killing was justified.
Emphasis mine. But wait…there’s More…
According to the script, McKinney expresses empathy with Shepard’s parents over the loss of their son, though he adds about Judy Shepard: "Still, she never shuts up about it, and it’s been like 10 years."
Gaze for a moment, if you have the nerve, into that utterly empty heart and then contemplate this fact: mainstream American news publishers, editors, owners, that rarefied media club of old boy straight male testosterone, still believes, 40 years after Stonewall, decades into the gay community’s struggle for equality here in America, that gay kids like Matthew Shepard are less a normal part of American society then this cold blooded killer is. The killer they can understand. They don’t approve of what he did that night, but they understand him. The gay kid they simply cannot. He was flaunting it. He was coming on to someone who was disgusted by homosexuals. He should have known better. He brought it on himself. In the end, when all the other excuses have withered away…it was a robbery gone bad…it was drugs…that knee-jerk understanding of McKinney’s disgust at homosexuals, that if Shepard hadn’t come onto him he would still be alive today, will remain, unmovable.
The media establishment does not regard homophobia as a problem because in the boardrooms, among the CEOs, media owners and big dollar producers, disgust is a normal reaction to homosexuality. See it here, in this article on 10 Sexual Controversies That Changed TV…
With everything from the new Melrose Place to trashy Twilight knockoffs, the new Fall TV season promises steamy viewing. Hemlines may rise and morals may fall, but TV writers would do well to remember that presenting sex on network TV has always been a tricky business. Though we’ve come a long way since Ricky Ricardo knocked up Lucy, only to discover that the network censors wouldn’t let him say the word “pregnant,” it’s amazing how sensitive the suits still are to sex. Here are ten TV shows in which the sex lives of their characters dramatically changed the entire series, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
Yet in one instance after another that the authors cite, it’s homosexuality that causes an uproar, not so much among the viewing audience, as in the boardroom. Are you old enough to remember watching all of these TV shows and wonder why the gay characters never had lovers and somehow always ended up dating women…?
In the end, the network had it both ways, collecting their big ratings when everyone tuned in at the start to see what the fuss was about, then ordering that the creators downplay the sexy stuff and reshape the central storyline into a murder mystery. The worst damage was done to Crystal’s character, who attempted suicide in the hospital after being dumped by his boyfriend on the eve of his gender-reassignment surgery. He survived, but while the character continued to identify as gay, he never hooked up with another guy in the course of the series; instead, he had a quick fling with a woman, got her pregnant, and spent much of his remaining time on the show fighting for custody of his daughter…
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…religious groups, rather than being impressed with Sidney’s anti-abortion bona fides, made such a stink about the idea of a gay man on TV that NBC delayed airing the pilot for a year, then insisted that Sidney be gelded. Apparently Sidney was so crushed by the death of his one male lover (whose photo on the mantelpiece watched over the action like a baleful ghost) that he could never date again. When, towards the end of the second season, he dipped one toe back into the dating pool, it was with a woman, as if he’d been on the shelf so long that he’d forgotten his orientation…
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…Early ratings were shaky, and the CBS brass decided that it must have something to do with viewers being put off by threatening lesbian vibes. Though both characters were supposed to be straight, it was felt that when the two dark-haired, hard-edged actresses were seen in close proximity to each other, they looked like, in the words of an unidentified CBS executive, “a couple of dykes.” It was decided that the best way to solve the problem was to fire Foster and replace herwith the blonde Sharon Gless, who, according to some mysterious executive calculation, was judged more Malibu Beach than Isle of Lesbos…
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…Coming at the end of an episode, the kiss was tantamount to a cliffhanger; it all but guaranteed that slack-jawed viewers would tune in next week. Those who did got to see Donohoe deliver a back-pedaling speech about how she liked both men and women equally and would be happy just to be friends if that’s what her new friend preferred, while Greene “considered” exploring a new side of herself before deciding that, nope, she wouldn’t be going there…
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The show had a resident good-looking gay guy — Matt Fielding, played by Doug Savant — who, in contrast to the juicy goings-on by the hormonally deranged straight people all around him, seemed almost pathologically stable. When Matt was permitted to enjoy an on-screen kiss with a man, the network edited it out of the program before allowing the episode to be broadcast, though they had no problem with having him gay-bashed on camera, twice…
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…As the show neared its seventh season, there was a persistent and widespread rumor that the youngest Connor child, D.J., was going to announce he was gay. It never happened — the big surprise of the season premiere turned out to be that Roseanne herself was pregnant again…
In 2005 the Hollywood establishment fled from Brokeback Mountain into the comforting arms of Crash, a self-serving story about racism in Los Angles, so John Wayne wouldn’t be rolling in his grave. Next year saw a remake of 3:10 to Yuma, with an added psychotic homosexual killer subtext that wasn’t in the original. Of course the psychotic homosexual killer is himself killed in the film’s climax, to avenge the heterosexuality of the hero. So the establishment returns again and again to its comfort food: Homophobia isn’t a problem, homosexuality is. Disgust toward homosexuals is both natural and normal. It is only when homosexuals flaunt it that things get violent and that is simply to be expected.
20/20 didn’t do a story about why Matthew Shepard was murdered, it did a story about why anti-gay hate coudn;t possibly have had anything to do with it. And if you think this latest confession from his killer changes that you aren’t paying attention. McKinney’s disgust and acid loathing are understood and shared throughout the media establishment, and so they see nothing out of the ordinary. It merely confirms for them that essential truth that it was Shepard’s being open about his homosexuality that got him killed. If you are a homosexual and you are open about it then you bring it on yourself. You should have known better. In the old media boardrooms that’s not considered hate, but merely a fact of life.
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