The Bell Shoals Baptist megachurch in Brandon, Florida is making headlines for carting 10 Pepsi machines out of its premises and replacing them with machines from Coca-Cola, because, they say, Pepsi donated to Prop 8, sponsors Gay Pride parades, and runs ads that cater to homosexuals.
Your church had ten soft drink vending machines in it? Wow. What else you got in there… A Chick Fil A? A swimming pool? Oh…I see you have an online Store! Very nice…
Oh look at all the microphone stands that came to church on Sunday.
Church is such a…different experience from when I was a little Baptist boy…
Very different. So…is that really a church or is it a sports arena? Do you have hockey games Sunday nights? Is Coca-Cola served?
[Update…] Dan Savage shares my astonishment at the lovely modern amenities now available to customers of today’s modern luxury MegaChurches…
Michael Duvall is a conservative Republican state representative from Orange County, California. While waiting for the start of a legislative hearing in July, the 54-year-old married father of two and family values champion began describing, for the benefit of a colleague seated next to him, his ongoing affairs with two different women. In very graphic detail.
For instance:
She wears little eye-patch underwear. So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And
 so, we had made love Wednesday–a lot! And so she’ll, she’s all, ‘I am going 
up and down the stairs, and you’re dripping out of me!’ So messy!
Oh how lovely. Haven’t I already seen this movie?
As the OC Weekly reports, 
Duvall has "blasted" efforts to promote gay marriage, and got a 100 percent score from the Capitol Resource Institute, which describes its mission as to "educate, advocate, protect, and defend family-friendly policies in the California state legislature". In March, a spokeswoman for the group called Duvall "a consistent trooper for the conservative causes," adding that "for the last two years, he has voted time and time again to protect and preserve family values in California."
See…this kind of thing is funny for a while (oh look at what just popped out of another conservative’s closet…!), but then it gets so soul wearying. I really need to remember that morality and values and honor and decency really do represent more in our lives then convenient hooks to drive the rubes to the polls with…that there is more to the human status then this runt represents.
People need to look…really look…at what’s motivating all those moral crusaders of the right, waving scarecrows bearing their neighbor’s faces. They’re just pushing your buttons because they know it works. And why is that?
Why I Am Disappearing Into Disney World For A While..
Starting…uh…well, right now actually…I’m going on a wee vacation. My birthday is Saturday and I am going to spend a week in Disney World. I’ve got a room inside the enclave, in The Caribbean…one of the middle-tier resorts. I’ve stayed there before and it is lovely. It’s also well located, almost right in the middle of the enclave, to get to everything. My plan is to go through the gates and forget about the world outside for a week.
Esquire has a great story about the conservo-crazy cult which he colorfully describes as "pus exploding from a wound." When you read the article, you’ll see just how apt this description is. Here’s just a little excerpt:
Almost immediately following the election, a rash of extreme but nonetheless important statements about Obama and his agenda started appearing in the media. Here’s a small but representative sample, lest we allow the latest Dobbsian rhetoric (or Chuck Norris) to obfuscate the chorus:
1. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said the bailout was the start of America’s downfall. "To abandon a market-oriented society and transfer it to a Soviet-style, government-centered, bureaucratic-run and mandated program, that is the thing that will put the stake in the heart of freedom in this country."
2. Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas said that Obama intended "to inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not kill it."
3. Congressman Ron Paul of Texas said that "socialism" was too mild a word for what Obama was doing because taking over corporations "adds a fascistic aspect to socialism."
4. Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota said she wanted her constituents "armed and dangerous" because Obama was planning "re-education camps for young people." She also said that "Thomas Jefferson told us having a revolution every now and then is a good thing."
5. Ambassador Alan Keyes called Obama a communist who is trying to establish "an American KGB."
6. Rush Limbaugh Show guest host Mark Davis told a joke about a soldier who has only two bullets in his gun when he meets Osama Bin Laden, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi — and uses both bullets on Pelosi before strangling the other two.
7. Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama put his considerable weight behind the "birther" movement: "His father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii, but I haven’t seen any birth certificate."
8. Legislators in thirty states filed Tenth Amendment "sovereignty" laws as a symbolic gesture of defiance to Washington.
9. Tens of thousands of YouTubers watched a video called "Revolution Now," in which a masked man claiming to be a soldier and an "anonymous American patriot" warned of growing resistance within the military. "There’s a revolution brewing," he said. "We have allowed the tyrants to take over this country."
10. Seven percent of the countrythought, at a time when the Republicans were almost unanimously resistant to everything the Democrats proposed, that the GOP was being too cooperative. That’s roughly 21 million seriously alienated people.
But nobody vibrated with the new sense of alarm more vividly than Fox’s new talk-show host, Glenn Beck. "The year is 2014. All the banks have been nationalized," he began one show. "Unemployment is about between 12 percent and 20 percent. Dow is trading at 2,800. The real-estate market has collapsed. Government and unions control most of business, and America’s credit rating has been downgraded."
In another, he sounded exactly like a militia member from the backwoods of Montana: "They’ll take away guns, they’ll take way our sovereignty, they’ll take away our currency, our money. They’re already starting to put all the global framework in with this bullcrap called global warming. This is an effort to globalize, to tie together everybody on the planet!"
Beck called for resistance and talked about storming Washington, selling T-shirts blazed with the pitchfork of an angry mob — and all of this led to startling success. Debuting last January in a weak 5 P.M. time slot, Beck shot to the No. 3 cable-news slot overnight, right behind Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity with 2.5 million viewers.
And all of this was nothing compared to the alarmed citizens raging away on his Web site:
* Obamacare meant that "bureaucrats are going to decide who lives and dies," one said.
* The new pro-union card check law was "possibly the greatest threat against American free enterprise ever," said another.
* People were "better off trusting their mattresses" than the greedy bankers, said another.
* There were "35 terrorist training camps spread across the U.S.A." that were run by Sheikh Gilani from Pakistan, said another.
* Homeland Security "deliberately ignores the border and the redistribution of wealth is NOT constitutional," said another.
* Others solicited signatures for a new "martial law early alert" system and suggested that people download a video that "completely destroys the myth that Barack Obama is working for the best interests of the American people."
* "GET YOURSELVES HUNKERED DOWN WITH FAMILY AND FRIENDS," one woman advised. "GET PASSPORTS AND START LOOKING NOW FOR INEXPENSIVES SAFE PLACES TO GO — THE U.S.A. IS OVER AS WE HAVE KNOWN IT."
Militia groups with gripes against the government are regrouping across the country and could grow rapidly, according to an organization that tracks such trends.
The stress of a poor economy and a liberal administration led by a black president are among the causes for the recent rise, the report from the Southern Poverty Law Center says. Conspiracy theories about a secret Mexican plan to reclaim the Southwest are also growing amid the public debate about illegal immigration.
Bart McEntire, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told SPLC researchers that this is the most growth he’s seen in more than a decade.
"All it’s lacking is a spark," McEntire said in the report.
Swell. Just swell.
I was saying all during the Bush years that the shit doesn’t really hit the fan until the kooks start Loosing power. That’s when you’ll see the crazy start. Well. Here we are.
Swell. Just swell.
I need to remind myself what the world looked like back when I was a kid.
Especially these days.
No, no… Not merely cartoon mice and Mary Poppins. But that world where the future was always going to be brighter, where technological progress made life better, not worse. Where science and the pursuit of knowledge weren’t just good things, but great adventures. Where you could smile at the stranger you passed on the street, and not have to wonder if they wanted to stab you in the back. Where it really is a small world after all. People forget that this is what Disney was all about once upon a time too. I’d forgotten it until that first trip I took down to Orlando, and then it all came rushing back. There was a world I was delighted to be living in…once. I need to go visit it from time to time now, in my adulthood.
This isn’t an escape from reality. This is reminding myself why the struggle for that better tomorrow is worth it.
So I’m walking to class in one of my old Junior High Schools (they call them Middle Schools these days…). The bad one. The one I got bullied in so much I actually skipped out some days. I had a hideout in the corner of one of the apartment building basements where the tenants could store things. I’d found a storage bin that wasn’t being used and set up a bunch of big old cardboard boxes and some carpet and a flashlight in it, and brought in some books to read and on days when it was really bad I went and hid there until after school let out. That was the only time in my life I ever skipped school, but some days it was just too much. Surprisingly, nobody at the school ever questioned my occasional unexcused absences either. In retrospect, it was of a piece with the administration’s lackadaisical attitude toward discipline. Bullies at that school essentially had free reign. Nobody was ever punished for picking on the smaller kids. And sometimes I saw the smaller ones dragged into the principle’s office for fighting back.
Anyway… So I’m walking to class in this Junior High School. At least…I think it’s that one. Something about it is different. Odd. The halls seem the same, and yet different somehow. And then I realize I’m naked.
You’ve all had this dream…right? You’re in school and you’re naked and suddenly you realize that fact and you spend the rest of the dream dying of embarrassment. I’m walking to class and I realize I’ve forgotten, somehow, to put my clothes on (maybe I’d just left gym class and forgot to dress after showering or something…) and now I’m trying hard to find my locker so I can put something on and then maybe…I dunno…flee the school or something.
But then I realize I’m dreaming and it gets odder. Somehow I know that I’m dreaming and I’m walking in the geek wing of the school…where all the geek kids go. And what is more, it’s the geek wing in a school where everyone goes when they’re dreaming about being back in school. So I’m walking down the hall without a stitch on and trying not to make eye contact with anyone, and I see another kid walk past me the other way also trying not to make eye contact, and he’s only wearing his pajamas, and I’m thinking Okay…that kid’s having an "I’m in school in my pajamas" dream. Then along comes another kid with her hair a really gross shade of green and I’m thinking She’s having her Bad Hair Day In School dream. Another kid is struggling with his locker door and I think He’s having a Can’t Remember My Locker Combination And I Have A Final In Two Minutes dream…
Eventually I get to the door to my classroom and I see a rack of towels beside it with a sign that says Naked Dream – Self Serve, and I grab one and wrap it around my waist, walk inside and sit down to take a test. Nobody pays me the slightest attention as I walk to my desk. After I woke up I couldn’t recall what the test was about.
My dreams get like this sometimes. Really. In some Twilight Zone dream school there is a wing where all the geek kids go to have their tormented dreams about school. But the administration provides towels. So maybe it’s where uncaring school principles and teachers are sent to try and make amends.
Correction: It has come to the attention of the Daily News that a number of statements in this article written for the Daily News by a freelance reporter are, or may be, false. Cornell University has told us that Shante did not receive any degree from it under either her birth or stage name. We have confirmed that prior to the article, at least four publications on Cornell’s own website reported that Shante had earned a Ph.D. from the university. Those references have now been removed. And in response to an inquiry today, Marymount College stated that Shante attended there for less than one semester.
Numerous e-mail and telephone inquiries by the freelance reporter to Marymount during the preparation of the article to confirm Shante’s account were not responded to. Finally, there have been recent media reports that there never was an education clause in Shante’s recording contract. When the reporter contacted Warner Brothers Records about the contract before the article, its only response was that it was having difficulty finding someone within the company who could "talk eloquently" about it.
Oh swell…now the music labels can claim they’re victimized by false stories about how badly they treat their artists. Serves me right for taking a New York Tabloid Seriously.
And though I agree with their sentiment, it’s a gloopy business when a company celebrates the election of a president with the flavour ‘Yes Pecan’. In an age when ice cream companies are melting away and reforming as purveyors of frozen yoghurt, is this dinky piece of homespun cheeriness really the best focus of the company’s efforts?
Ah, yes…the old Don’t We Have Better Things To Worry About sigh. Followed up like night after day with…
That gay people should be able to get married seems to me a basic human right, and I admit that in a completely partisan way I was tempted to justify B&J’s action as part of the ongoing struggle against ignorance and fear. But what would I be thinking if a contrary point of view was being aired? I’d be first in line to denounce them as squalid influence peddlers, shamelessly meddlesome, shiveringly undemocratic tricksters.
Ice cream should be a relief from side-taking…
Yes. And so should getting married. So should taking your kids to the pool. So should having lunch at the local diner. So should a nice quiet stroll along the beach. Life’s simple beautiful pleasures. And next time you’re wondering why so many of life’s simple beautiful little pleasures have been turned into a scorched earth battleground, ask yourself what happens to any neighborhood, any community, any nation, when its people turn a blind eye to crime.
Because that’s what this is. A bunch of low brow back alley, knuckle-dragging thugs are stealing all those beautiful simple life pleasures away from some of your neighbors. In some ways it’s far more wounding then even those acts of outright violence against us. Imagine how it is, to not even be able to walk down the street hand in hand with the one you love, without fear. Life’s simple beautiful pleasures.
Ben & Jerry’s is, in their own hippy-dippy little way, giving it back to us. Yes, it’s corporate marketing. But also…love, marriage and ice cream. Happiness. There are worse things corporations can do to market their wares. Yes, this is taking sides. It is always a matter of taking sides. Every time you pause for a moment to take in the simple beautiful joy of life, you are taking sides against the pain and heartbreak and unmitigated horror that seems sometimes to make life utterly pointless. Your gay and lesbian neighbors struggle to hold onto those moments every day.
Bishop Desmond Tutu, who knows a few things about life under the jackboot of hate, said "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." Why does the right to marry seem like such a basic human right to you, one that same-sex couples should enjoy too, if not that giving that promise to love, honor and cherish, and receiving it, and keeping it in all those endlessly simple day-to-day ways spouses do together, is one of this life’s great joys. If you believe that gay people are people too, then taking sides shouldn’t even be in question. Especially when it comes to the simple things. Especially those.
There are people in this world who wish your gay and lesbian neighbors to never know those joys…great or small. But it seems sometimes, especially the small. Because in their world, if we can love and laugh and live in peace and happiness, and find simple quiet contentment in the arms of the one we love, even for a moment, even for an instant, then they’re not hating us enough. Are you tired of it all? Trust me, you will never be tired of it as much as any of us are. And…trust me…to the extent you can find your own moments of simple perfect joy too, then they hate you too. You don’t have to be homosexual for them to hate you. Just happy and content and in love with life. Even for a just moment. That is enough. That is all it takes for them to hate you. And all it takes for you to defeat them is to reach for one simple beautiful joy and let it remind you that life is good.
Ross Douthat has a great column in today’s times looking at American social conservatism through the lens of Judd Apatow’s movies. All three Apatow films have, as he points out, strains of conservative values running through them. But in The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up conservative choices wind up working out suspiciously well. In the darker Funny People, by contrast, bad choices have unchangeable consequences and doing the right thing proves painful…
And that’s the one movie of his that didn’t do too well at the box office. Now why would that be…? I’ll hazard the same guess Yglesias does: Because the United States is a country that’s “conservative right up until the moment that it costs us.
I think this explains a lot about the appeal of anti-gay crusades to social conservative leaders. Most of what “traditional values” asks of people is pretty hard. All the infidelity and divorce and premarital sex and bad parenting and whatnot take place because people actually want to do the things traditional values is telling them not to do. And the same goes for most of the rest of the Christian recipe. Acting in a charitable and forgiving manner all the time is hard. Loving your enemies is hard. Turning the other cheek is hard…
Christianity…honest to goodness Christianity…is Hard. When you hear someone vacantly telling you that becoming a Born Again Christian has taken all the hardship, lifted all the burdens of their lives from their shoulders, you can be pretty damn confident that you’re dealing with a Mega Church christian. Yes, yes… when your church has its own Olympic size swimming pool and a Chick-Fil-A in it the life of a Christian must be very easy indeed. But…it isn’t. Forgiveness, for example…is Hard. Damn near impossible sometimes. Ask me how I know…
Homosexuality is totally different. For a small minority of the population, of course, the injunction “don’t have sex with other men!” (or, as the case may be, other women) is painfully difficult to live up to. But for the vast majority of people this is really, really easy to do. Campaigns against gay rights, gay people, and gay sex thus have a lot of the structural elements of other forms of crusading against sexual excess or immorality, but they’re not really asking most people to do anything other than become self-righteous about their pre-existing preferences.
No fooling. Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been pointing out for decades now that these people have been waging a culture war on us, but not…oh…divorce…infidelity…premarital sex…teenage pregnancy. Yes, they will bellyache about those things, but not throw millions and millions of dollars into political campaigns against them. Nobody on the religious right is trying to get constitutional amendments passed making divorce or adultery or pornography or having babies out of wedlock illegal. They’re not putting planks in the republican party platform about divorce. But homosexuality? Oh…ThATs the biggest threat to western civilization since Earl Warren. Since Roosevelt. Since Lincoln even.
This isn’t rocket science. We’re their scapegoats. Their scarecrows. The disposable lives of faceless Other People they can pave their highway to heaven with. It wasn’t enough that Christ died for their sins. We have to bleed so they can tell themselves they’re righteous. Because otherwise they have to deal with their own lives, their own sins, their own cheapshit failures of moral character, and anything but that. As long as they can wage war on the Homosexual Menace, they don’t have to look at themselves.
Right there is where that venomous ferocity against homosexuality comes from. You see parents who do absolutely horrific things to their gay children that they would never do even if they’d committed some terrible crime like murder or rape. It’s not that they suddenly think their kid is some kind of unspeakable monster. It’s that first hand face-to-face evidence that the monster isn’t real pulls out from under them a vital pillar of self respect. I may be an unfaithful husband…I might be cheating on my spouse…I might be stealing from my employer…I might be abusing my own children…but by god I am not a faggot.My cheap little crimes aren’t as damaging to society as Homosexuality. God will forgive me…but not Them… You take away that scapegoat, that punching bag, that Faceless Other who has to die for their common everyday bar stool sins, and suddenly morality isn’t something they can beat someone else over the head with whenever their conscience starts tapping them on the shoulder. Nothing on this earth gets more enraged then a cheat caught in the act.
Twenty-five years after the first queen of hip-hop was stiffed on her royalty checks, Dr. Roxanne Shante boasts an Ivy League Ph.D. – financed by a forgotten clause in her first record deal.
…
After two albums, Shante said, she was disillusioned by the sleazy music industry and swindled by her record company. The teen mother, living in the Queensbridge Houses, recalled how her life was shattered.
"Everybody was cheating with the contracts, stealing and telling lies," she said. "And to find out that I was just a commodity was heartbreaking."
As it turned out…the record company tossed in a clause in her contract where they basically agreed to finance her college education, probably figuring (according to the article) that a teenage mom living in the projects would never make any use of it. Even so, she had to drag it out of them kicking and screaming. She found an ally in the dean at Marymount Manhattan College, who let her attend classes for free while pursuing the money. The record company (Warner Music) agreed to pay up when she threatened to go public with her story.
The company declined to comment for this story.
Doesn’t look so good to be throwing lawsuits around on the grounds that piracy steals money from the same artists you’re busy screwing over, does it?
Music brings sweetness to life and people will gladly pay for it. But nobody likes being gouged, and especially when they know full well that the artists they love are being screwed over too. The contempt you see among some younger (and older) folk for the Music Labels is merely a mirror of the contempt they fully understand the labels regard them and the artists with. It doesn’t have to be that way. My own wish is that the technology eventually makes it so easy for the artists and their listeners to cut the labels, at least the big greedy ones, out of the transaction altogether, that nobody can remember what the hell they were ever good for in the first place and they just go the way of the dinosaurs. Hell, they’re already fossilized.
A few readers here have asked me what’s up with the silence. It’s nothing serious…just life apart from the web. I’ve been real super busy with a major high visibility project at work and I’ve been putting in a lot of overtime on it. That’s "non-comp" time for all you salaried workers out there. But I don’t mind. Working at Space Telescope has been a dream come true for me, and the vacation package is so nice here I really don’t mind putting in long hours on something.
I have a bunch of stuff I want to talk about…but first, I’ve posted a bunch of new cartoons to the political cartoon page…two of which have been published in our local Baltimore gay paper, OUTLoud. I have a steady gig with them now and it’s been a real source of satisfaction seeing my cartoons in print. I’ve been published elsewhere but just randomly, whenever someone somewhere takes an interest in one of my cartoons and asks for reprint rights. This seems like it’s going to be a real steady gig so I’m delighted. Cartooning was the first love.
Here’s one I didn’t get into this month’s issue…
There’s more on the cartoon page. Hopefully, more to come soon as I get back into this. I have several other fun-er cartoons on the drawing boards, including the next episode of A Coming Out Story. Plus several political cartoons I didn’t put up from way back. You may have noticed that the last cartoon was from the aftermath of Proposition 8, and before that practically nothing for almost a year. I was just getting burned out on it, burned out on staring hate in the face week after week after week.
So I’ll try to post some more stuff soon. I have lots to talk about. But end of next week I’m going to disappear again for a while and visit Disney World in Orlando for my birthday and try to leave the ugliness behind. There are two anti same-sex marriage referendums coming up and it seems every time I look at the news I’m seeing anti-gay crap that just makes me angrier and angrier and venting about it here and on the cartoon page only gets it out of me a little. I’m at a stage in my life where I just want to bale out of civilization altogether and forget that I ever heard of the likes of NOM and Proposition 8 and so many people who don’t know me from Adam but keep screaming in my face that I’m a cancer on society…but they have nothing against gay people personally.
Hello…Alan…? So Laws Banning Same-Sex Marriage Saved Your Life Did They…?
I saw this little news tidbit over at Box Turtle Bulletin. But first, let’s review some testimony about marriage from Alan Chambers, president of the ex-gay therapy group Exodus International. Alan likes to tell people that homosexuals can change. Here he is, giving testimony at a 2004 U.C. Berkeley Debate on Same-Sex Marriage…
My name is Alan Chambers; I am a Christian…
Hello Alan…
…a husband to my wife, Leslie and I also used to be a homosexual. To be clear, I did not choose my same-sex attractions nor did I willfully adopt a homosexual orientation, but my response to both, my behaviors, were a choice.
I remember being a lonely 18 year-old searching for Mr. Right. I remember the ache to have a man hold me, protect me, love me and devote his life to me. I remember thinking I would do anything to fill that insatiable need. I did everything short of praying for my knight in shining armor to show up on my doorstep. I was certain that beyond the shadow of a doubt that the missing piece to my life’s puzzle was going to be found in the man of my dreams.
Nearly 14 years later, I am happy, content and satisfied emotionally, physically, spiritually, relationally and sexually. My process was one of self-determination and willful choice to move beyond the box that enslaves so many wonderful same-sex attracted people. Change is possible and I am living proof. I used to be homosexual and today I am not.
Had same-sex marriage been legal in 1990, I am certain that I would have tested that option. I met men who I wanted to marry. Yet today, as a mature adult with a sober perspective, I realize that I wasn’t searching for a man as much as I was searching for an answer, a drug even, to numb the pain and to make me feel better about who I thought I was. The law kept me from making one, if not many, life-altering mistakes.
Recently, Dennis Teti wrote in "The Weekly Standard", "Governments’ purpose is not to dispense rights but the secure rights created by nature and nature’s God." The current laws saved my life and continue to save the lives of other young people like me who need life saving boundaries.
As a former homosexual, I know that this battle has little, if nothing, to do with marriage, but rather with an absolute need for social approval and acceptance. This experiment with marriage, being promoted by a few, is about silencing inward guilt, pain and the gut-wrenching reality resident within homosexual and lesbian people that their desires will never be completely satisfied in the ways they seek homosexually. Legal endorsement and approval of same-sex marriage will simply guarantee that more lives those of today’s and future children, will be ruined. We already live in a truly tolerant society where the law views us all equally. Race, religion, gender, age or disability affects our personal freedoms. The laws in place that protect marriage do so to protect an institution that has been the bedrock of societies for thousands of years and most importantly to protect children. A two parent, one man-one woman, family is the best environment in which to raise the next generation. We must do all we can to protect this family unit.
Again, I am one of tens of thousands of people whom have successfully changed their sexual orientation. I am grateful for the message of change and for the current laws that saved my life.
BOULDER – A woman accused of stabbing her husband less than two months after their wedding day is now facing second-degree murder charges.
[Traci] Housman told police they were drinking a lot the night of Aug. 2 and started arguing after "John began telling everyone, ‘I’m a gay guy.’"
According to the wife the fight got physical when they got home and she stabbed him in self defense. She’s facing 32 years in jail now. Good thing this guy wasn’t allowed to marry another man, eh Alan?
You’re right Alan…absolutely right. This battle has little, if nothing, to do with marriage, but rather with an absolute need for social approval and acceptance. Right on. It is being promoted by a few, is about silencing inward guilt, pain and the gut-wrenching reality resident within homosexuals. Some homosexuals. The ones that hate themselves and want more then anything else to be heterosexual. Homosexuals like you Alan. As long as there exist some gay people, anywhere, who could accept themselves just as they are, and live happy, contented, decent lives just as they are, and find someone of their own sex to love and cherish and settle down with…then what does that make you?
Silencing inward guilt? Can a man really buy self respect by driving a dagger into the hopes and dreams of his neighbors? Really?
At The Center Of It All: The Right To Kiss The One You Love
I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating again and again because it really says it all. An old high school friend of mine told me once about taking a college course on human sexuality. The course, he said, included a number of films which you might easily expect to find in an Adult Entertainment store then in a university classroom. Most of the kids who signed up for that course did so, according to my friend who probably did also, just to see those films.
What they didn’t bargain for was also having to watch a bunch of sex they didn’t much like. In addition to the hot young babes there was also footage of folks old enough to be their own parents having sex. This was after all, a course on human sexuality, not pornography. My friend said the sections on geriatric sex generally grossed out the audience. But not as much as the section on gay male sex. But it wasn’t just watching two guys having sex specifically, that bothered the audience. Some of them.
Which was what my friend was telling me about, in wide eyed wonder, since he was one of the few heterosexuals I knew back then who were really and truly unfazed by my sexual orientation. We were all in college then and I was in the process of slowly coming out to my friends, one at a time. He was one of the first I’d come out to and that afternoon he was telling me in wonder about his human sexuality class and the gay sex film they’d seen. I remember it well, because in retrospect it was one of those rare moments where I could actually see someone getting it. He said when the gay male sex scenes came on screen, the ignorant jock types in the class burst out laughing and mocked the couple. But then images of them being affectionate with each other came on screen and the atmosphere changed. Those scenes completely offended the jocks he said…far more, far, Far more, then watching them have sex did.
That was 1973 or ’74 as I remember it. Back in those days if you wanted to watch pornography you either got some grainy 8mm stag films from some shady character or you went to an X-rated movie somewhere in the really bad part of town (or Viers Mill Road across from the Zayres if you lived in Rockville, Maryland…). Nowadays you download it off the Internet and teens as young as 13 are way more sexually confidant and secure then my generation ever was. The cultural scolds are bellyaching that the nation is swimming in sexually charged images and that it’s dragging our morals into the gutter. But notice that one of their biggest bugaboos, their deepest fear, their prime target in the culture war isn’t the proliferation of pornography…it’s same-sex marriage. This, this above all else, is their evidence that the culture is sinking into a bottomless pit: homosexuals couples are getting married.
Try this experiment. Open a gay bath house somewhere in the Bible Belt, and nearby, open a same-sex wedding chapel, and see which one gets the most protests. Trust me it won’t even be close. It will be as though the bath house isn’t even there, as long as the chapel is.
The lightning rod, the flash point in homophobic bigotry has always been same-sex love, not same-sex sex. It isn’t that we have sex that bothers the bigots. If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard that "I don’t care what you people do in the privacy of your bedrooms…" bullshit I’d be rich. It’s when we Flaunt It that they start screaming about militant homosexuals. And what, exactly, is flaunting it? Well I can tell you what it isn’t: having sex.
The tectonics of attitude are shifting in subtle ways that are geographic, psychic and also generational, suggested Katherine M. Franke, a lesbian who teaches law and is a director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University. “I’ve been attacked on the street and called all sorts of names” for kissing a female partner in public, Professor Franke said. “The reception our affection used to generate was violence and hatred,” she added. “What I’ve found in the last five years is that my girlfriend and I get smiles from straight couples, especially younger people. Now there’s almost this aggressive sense of ‘Let me tell you how terrific we think that is.’ ”
Yet gay-bashing still occurs routinely, Mr. Patton of the Anti-Violence Project said, even in neighborhoods like Chelsea in Manhattan, where the sight of two men kissing on the street can hardly be considered a frighten-the-horses proposition. “In January some men were leaving a bar in Chelsea,” saying goodbye with a kiss, Mr. Patton said. “One friend got into a taxi and then a car behind the taxi stopped and some guys jumped out and beat up the other two.” One victim of the attack, which is under investigation by the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, was bruised and shaken. The second had a broken jaw.
That Times article begins with a story about how a candy commercial featuring an accidental same-sex kiss generated enough controversy that it had to be withdrawn. The article noted that the incident, "had the inadvertent effect of revealing how a simple display of affection grows in complexity as soon as one considers who gets to demonstrate it in public, and who, very often, does not."
And so it goes. A same-sex couple is brutally beaten in front of a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona simply for holding hands inside. So security guards at a fast food joint throw a same-sex couple out for sharing a kiss and then call the police on them. So a same-sex couple, strolling too close to the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, get handcuffed and arrested for kissing. That arrest for kissing in front of the Mormon Temple, so soon after it became apparent that Proposition 8 was funded by massive amounts of Mormon money and labor, made headlines all over the world. The response of the Mormon hierarchy was to smear the kissers with accusations that they were groping each other in public. Not a shred of evidence exists, apart from Mormon propaganda to support that charge, but look at it for what it says about the thinking here. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…
When they talk about their "deeply held religious beliefs", this is what they mean. Not the belief in God Almighty. Not the belief in Christ the redeemer. Not the belief in the literal truth of the Bible. This is the deeply held religious belief that they will not suffer doubt in. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. A kiss in public between a same-sex couple isn’t a gesture of affection, it’s a sex act.
One denomination after another is stressed — possibly to a breaking point for some believers — by furious battles over the roles of openly gay people in church life and ministry. Can they be clergy or bishops? Can their relationships be blessed?
And the newest protest symbol by gay activists is a kiss…
But this has always been the battle. Not to have sex, but to be allowed to love. The difference between the thugs who beat up Jean Rolland and Andrew Frost in front of the Frasher’s Steak House in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the Mormon church, isn’t so much one of degree as clarity of purpose. It came to this: When Mormon security guards saw a same-sex couple share a kiss, they had to detain them and call the police. When that arrest became a headline all over the world, the Mormon church immediately sought to replace the image of a kiss in the public mind with an image of two men groping each other. You hear the anti-gay warriors say time and again that there is no such thing as a homosexual, there is only homosexual behavior. But look at their attitudes toward marriage generally. Men are the God ordained head of the household. Women must submit gracefully to their husbands. Their union isn’t validated by their joy in one another, but by the blessing of the church. It isn’t something that exists for its own sake, but to further God’s plan for humanity. It is not simply that there can be no homosexuals. There is no such thing as love. There is only authority. There is only power. And a kiss embodies everything that power hates and wants to exterminate from the human spirit.
A new species of giant carnivorous plant has been discovered in the highlands of the central Philippines.
The pitcher plant is among the largest of all pitchers and is so big that it can catch rats as well as insects in its leafy trap.
There’s a photo of it on the BBC site. I used to grow pitcher plants and Venus fly traps, but these kinds of plants don’t take well to the Mid-Atlantic climate (they are tropical plants mostly) and I gave it up. But this one seems to grow at high altitudes which can’t be all that hot. Be nice if we could get it to grow in here in Baltimore. I could grow a bunch of them around my garden and not have to worry about rats going after my bird feeders.
In July 2008, hotelier and developer Doug Manchester donated $125,000 to help gather signatures for a proposition that would ban same-sex marriage in California. The early money was crucial to getting the initiative—which ultimately passed—on the ballot. At the time, he told The New York Times that he made the donation because of “my Catholic faith and longtime affiliation with the Catholic Church,” which preferred that marriage remain between a man and a woman. Indeed, the Catholic Church has vehemently opposed gay marriage. Then again, it’s also not too keen on divorce.
On Oct. 9, 2008, Manchester ended 43 years, eight months and nine days of marriage to Elizabeth Manchester by moving out of their La Jolla abode. The couple spent the next several months trying to reach a quiet settlement on how best to distribute millions of dollars in cash and other assets. In July, those talks totally broke down, and Doug started playing financial hardball with Elizabeth, allegedly draining the couple’s shared accounts and stealing her mail…
Let me guess…it was all those same-sex marriages the California supreme court allowed to stand that caused their divorce. Manchester was a critical player in the battle over Proposition 8. Specifically, he provided a big chunk of the cash that helped it get on the ballot…
Developer Doug Manchester and other prominent San Diego County businessmen have given significant financial support to an initiative that would ban same-sex marriage targeted for the November statewide ballot.
Manchester’s $125,000 donation has prompted a gay-rights activist to urge a boycott of the Manchester Grand Hyatt and the Manchester-owned San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina.
In addition to Manchester, Mission Valley developer Terry Caster has donated $162,500; Robert Hoehn, owner of Hoehn Motors in Carlsbad, has given $25,000; and La Jolla businessman Roger Benson has given $50,000, state records show.
Manchester said he was motivated by his strong Catholic faith.
“I personally believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman,” he said.
Donations from San Diego residents make up a significant part of the $1 million raised for the initiative.
That has allowed the campaign to hire professional signature gatherers to help collect the 700,000 signatures needed to qualify the constitutional amendment for the ballot, said Andrew Pugno, an attorney for Protectmarriage.com, which is sponsoring the amendment.
So now this prize bigot, after forcibly divorcing thousands of same sex couples in California, is having himself a messy divorce. Sweet. I hope your wife drags you over a bed of hot nails Doug. I hope she makes your life a living hell. And if you ever find yourself wondering why your private life has become so much fun and games for so many total strangers who don’t know you from Adam, go ask the jackass you see every morning in the bathroom mirror who it was that turned marriage into a scorched earth battleground and see if he doesn’t laugh in your face like I’m laughing in your face.
Town hall disruptions around the country have led to some outbreaks of violence. Unions participating in town halls have received death threats. At an event held by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) last week, the threat of violence led her aides to call the police after one attendee dropped a gun.
MSNBC just aired footage of the crowd gathering at the Obama town hall meeting on health care that’s supposed to start later today in New Hampshire and pointed out one man in a group holding protest signs with a gun in a holster on his hip. Apparently not a law officer, but a civilian.
If some nutcase shoots the president this nation will know full well that it was Fox News and all the other tentacles of the republican party noise machine, who incited it. They’ve been screaming for months now that President Obama wasn’t born in America, isn’t legally president of the United States, is secretly a Muslim, is a socialist-fascist tyrant who wants to shovel senior citizens into death camps. This is hatemongering rhetoric that has been winked and nodded at by the party leadership, when they haven’t been excusing it outright. It isn’t just that the extremist fringe has taken over. The party leadership aren’t nutcases, just consumed with bringing down a democratic president. If they have to bring down America in the process too, they’re fine with it. They Know What They’re Doing. They are republicans first and Americans second. If this president is killed by the hysteria they have been cynically whipping up, the nation will hold them responsible. There will Never be another republican president, let alone a republican congress, if the worst happens now.
They need to step back from the edge. Now. Or face the judgement of the nation, and the world, and history.
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