Kilmeade and two colleagues were discussing a study that, based on research done in Finland and Sweden, showed people who stay married are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s. Kilmeade questioned the results, though, saying, "We are — we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other …"
At this point, his co-host tried to — in that jokey morning show way — tell Kilmeade he needed to shut up, and quick, for his own sake. But he didn’t get the message, adding, "See, the problem is the Swedes have pure genes. Because they marry other Swedes …. Finns marry other Finns, so they have a pure society."
You can see the video of it on Salon. I suppose they’ll be touting the benefits of incest on FOX News next. It doesn’t get much purer then that…
Michael Moore, a former resident of Martinsville, VA said he was forced to resign from the Virginia Museum of Natural History because he is gay. The state has no anti-discrimination law, just Governor Tim Kaine’s (who is also the DNC chair) 2006 executive order. The courts have ruled that without legislation on the books, Moore has no recourse there.
Well of course the Governor’s executive order wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. It dared to suggest that gay people are something other then human garbage. You can bet your ass that if Kaine had ordered an anti-gay witch hunt the Virigina courts would have backed him a thousand percent, legislation or not. People think Texas is the most anti-gay state in the union, but it just gets noticed more when it does dumbshit things like raid a gay bar and crack some gay heads on the anniversary of Stonewall.
Tell me please, what this man did to deserve loosing his job. Oh…right…he was gay and it was Virginia. By all appearances it was an act of pure anti-gay animus on the part of the executive director of the museum, Tim Gette, who probably thinks Moore should be grateful he didn’t call the police and have him arrested for being a sodomite. Moore had been given an employee evaluation at the time of his getting the boot, that had entitled him to a pay raise. And then Tim was told the horrible news by someone. Hey Tim…you have a gay guy working for you. Imagine that…a gay guy working in a museum…
According to Moore, during his evaluation in October 2006, the museum’s executive director, Tim Gette said, “Michael, there are board members that are aware you are gay, and I do not appreciate you hiding that from me.”
I can’t imagine why he’d have wanted to hide that fact from you Tim, considering you gave him the boot the moment you found out. Homophobe much? You find yourself wondering if the board members who didn’t alert Tim to the presence of a homosexual on the staff are going to get the axe next. I do not appreciate your failure to inform me there was a homosexual on our staff… Hey Tim…are you sure you’re the executive director and not an exhibit somewhere over in the Neanderthal section?
Meanwhile, the Roanoke Times is wagging its finger at a statehouse that wishes its sodomy law was still enforceable…
The decision by the Martinsville court should be a convincing sign to the General Assembly that protection against such discrimination must be written into Virginia’s code. Only a law will offer genuine confidence to Virginia’s gay employees that they won’t face irrational threats to their employment based on their sexual orientation.
It would be better if such protection were guaranteed to all workers in Virginia, not just state employees, but a law making it official state policy not to discriminate against public employees because of their sexual orientation would at least be a start.
Editorial – The Roanoke Times, July 7, 2009.
I’d like to know what planet the editorial board of the Roanoke Times is living on. An anti-discrimination law? They expect the Virginia statehouse, which passed an anti same-sex marriage amendment so draconian, so breathtaking in its sweep that some legal experts say it could even be used to break a same-sex couple’s joint checking account…they expect That legislature to pass an anti-discrimination law? Earlier this year the statehouse gutted an anti-bullying bill of its LGBT protections practically the instant that bill hit the floor. You expect a state that thinks there is nothing wrong with beating up gay kids to pass an anti-discrimination law? There something funny in the tobacco down there lately?
Two options I made sure to get when I bought Traveler were the fold down rear seats and the trunk liner. I did this because the car, lovely though it is, needed to be a working member of the family too. It’s been a welcome feature this past couple weeks as I’ve been trying hard to rid Casa del Garrett of all the excess…stuff.
I took a load to the city recycling drop-off yesterday. It’s an uneasy feeling driving a Mercedes-Benz carefully among the dumpster rows. You just get the feeling the car doesn’t belong here, even though you’re just taking care of the same everyday household business your neighbors are. But among the banged up pickup trucks loaded down with junk, the car sticks out. What yuppy scum is this bringing his luxury car here? What’s he throwing out…his old expresso machine?
One of the trash guys started backing up a drumpster next to where I was busy unloading Traveler. He gets out of his truck and walks over to my car and looks carefully at the tires. Then he asks me if they’re 19" or 17". I’m embarrassed to admit I hadn’t a clue, but he looks more carefully at them, declares them to be 19" and says his own Mercedes has 19s too but he wasn’t sure they were right for that car. Turned out he had a CLK he’d bought second-hand from Carmax. If I’d had half a brain I’d have bought a used Mercedes ages ago and I’d have had one to drive then for more of my life. The two of us chatted easily for a while about our favorite car maker before getting back to work. We were both fans.
Well. If the trashman owns a Mercedes, I don’t have to feel so self conscious about driving mine with a load to the dump from time to time. That’s the thing about these cars…they’re not just empty status symbols. People in all walks of life appreciate them for their engineering. The car gave me a reminder of that as I pulled away from the dumpster.
I’d emptied the trunk and the back seat, and flipped back up the rear seatbacks. Then I got behind the wheel and started the engine and immediately got an alert in the speedometer display that the right rear seatback wasn’t fully latched. So I got back out and checked it and sure enough. Just a little nudge and it locked into place. I’d been too offhanded about flipping the seats back up. But it was another discovery about my car. I’ve had it for three months shy of two years and I’m still discovering things about it. Whatever senses the seatbacks aren’t latched has to know, somehow, the difference between all the way down and not fully up. It isn’t like the doors where you can just throw an alert if they’re ajar when the driver starts down the road. Sometimes the driver will drive off with the rear seat backs down because they’re taking a load somewhere. So the car had to know I meant to latch them back up again, and hadn’t.
And I’m sure the Daimler engineers considered it a safety issue. Logically it isn’t a hard issue: you just test for the seat being in the upright position but not latched. But that’s more complex then simply testing for not latched, which is all you need to do for the doors. And I didn’t just get a generic One Of The Seatbacks isn’t latched messages, it told me which one it was. Just like it has whenever I’ve tried to drive off with a door ajar. I love this car. Geeze…why haven’t I owned one of these before now…?
Just So We Don’t Have To Talk About What Louts We Allowed Ourselves To Become
Once upon a time, it may surprise you to learn, the American Puritan set wasn’t so afraid of the natural world. In fact, they embraced it with a passion very much akin to the environmentalists of today. My favorite American landscape painter, Fredric Church, embodied the thinking in those days. His absolutely stunning landscapes were representations not merely of nature’s awesome beauty, but also of the eternal spiritual truths one may behold within. They were revelations on canvas for "…those who have eyes to see and a mind to understand".
In his essay, Church and Luminism: Light for America’s Elect, David C. Huntington says of Church’s painting, The Andes of Ecuador, that it is…
…a joyous paean to a divine universe. The very composition appears to soar in exaltation. All, as it were, becomes a resurrection. The light of the sun expands without effort to touch and bless the whole earth. The atmosphere itself bears the higher message of the painting. In Cotopaxi, however, the sun must suffer for the evils of this world.
Church painted Cotopaxi in 1863 and many understood it to be a parable for the nation in the midst of a bloody civil war. Understand, these were not your trite modern bible story paintings. They were realistic, almost hyper realistic, awesomely beautiful landscapes. Church twice visited South America, drew many sketches in oil on paper of the natural wonders there. As well as any modern day naturalist, Church took pains to make sure that every detail of his landscapes were true to nature. And yet they were created by an artist for a viewing public that took for granted that the natural world and the revelations of the Bible not only did not contradict one another, but did in fact emphasize one another.
Cotopaxi is a geological parable, a proverb drawn from the sacred "volume in stone". The canvas is as charged with the spirit of prophesy as is Bushnell’s discourse. "The word, the meaning and the expression" of the great Andean volcano becomes a "revelation" to "those who have eyes to see and a mind to understand". Cotopaxi is nature’s type for the regeneration of America.
Once upon a time in America, religion was not at war with the natural world. In fact it was the pride of many biblical literalists that Americans held a special regard for the natural sciences. Some even believed that it was here in North America (some said it was Yosemite Valley) that the Garden of Eden had once been located. Much of the 19th century efforts to protect and preserve the natural wonders of America were based in no small measure on these deeply religious people’s intent to venerate that "sacred volume in stone"…
For those who will have remarked the visible absence of an explicitly Christian context in The Personal Narratives and Cosmos of Alexander von Humboldt, works which twice inspired Church to visit South America, McCosh’s treaties would seem to provide a missing link between Church’s religious and Humboldt’s secular approach to natural history. Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation is a dedicated Calvinist’s guide to the "Science of Design". Geology is viewed as a Bible in stone, infallibly inscribed with the story of creation. Like the verbal Bible, known to the generations who lived without the benefit of the new dispensation of science, the physical world is as much, so McCosh tells us, the word of God as is the word recorded by the prophets and the apostles.
And then Darwin came along and scared the steaming shit out of all of them, and they never forgave science for it. It takes courage, and a little humility, to look God in the face and ask a question, because you might just get an answer. Why yes Pope Urban, Gallilao and Copurnicus were right…the earth isn’t at the center of the universe after all. And oh…by the way…neither are you…
After Darwin, America’s religious purists retreated back into a padded room prison of Bible idolatry which has corrupted them ever since. It is not a matter simply, of science verses the Bible. Religion that teaches its faithful to deny any fact that contradicts its dogmas makes liars out of them. First to themselves, then to their neighbors. When lying to yourself becomes a daily necessity, to lie to your neighbors becomes simply a fact of life.
Witness the routine, almost offhanded lying by the modern religious right in their war against their gay and lesbian neighbors. A good recent example is provided by Timothy Kincaid over at Box Turtle Bulletin…
Reports are coming in that some people collecting signatures in opposition to the new marriage law in Maine are doing so under false pretenses (Sun Journal):
Gerard Caron walked into the Auburn Post Office and was met by a woman with a pair of clipboards.
“This petition is against gay marriage and this other petition is to support gay marriage,” she said, according to Caron.
The Poland man said he asked her why there would be a petition to support something that already happened, referring to the petition “in support of” gay marriage.
“She just kinda gave me a little grin and didn’t say anything,” he said.
Then he looked at the two petitions and discovered they were identical, both were supporting the repeal of the same-sex marriage law, Caron said.
There is no way this person honestly made that mistake. It was a lie. A simple, easy, toss-off lie for Jesus. We are doing God’s work and that means we have to lie. Eventually the lying becomes so ingrained in one’s day to day life that it goes unnoticed. What was a pious duty becomes a habit of two-facedness. Thus, during the Dover Pennsylvania Intelligent Design trial, Alan Bonsell, then on the Dover Pennsylvainia school board, may have actually believed it when he told Judge John Jones that he didn’t know who the money came from to purchase copies of Of Pandas and People, a creationist textbook, even though he himself had handed his father the check for $850 to buy them…a check that a former board member had given him, from the proceedings of his church’s fund raiser for the books…
The judge also wanted to know why the money needed to be forwarded to his father, why Buckingham couldn’t have purchased the books himself.
Bonsell stammered.
"I still haven’t heard an answer from you," Jones said.
"He said he’d take it off the table," Bonsell said.
"You knew you were under oath?" Jones asked at one point.
Yeah he knew he was under oath. This is what fundamentalism brings people to. More specifically, it’s what idolatry brings people to. They are not worshiping God the creator. They are worshiping a book. After Ben Stein’s film Expelled came out, National Review columnist John Derbyshire smacked out into the open what his fellow movement conservatives are loath to speak of publicly…
When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise. Individual creationists can be very nice people, though they get nicer the further away they are from the full-time core enterprise of modern creationism at the Discovery Institute. The enterprise as a whole, however, really doesn’t smell good. You notice this when you’re around it a lot. I shall give some more examples in a minute; but what accounts for all this dishonesty and misrepresentation?
My own theory is that the creationists have been morally corrupted by the constant effort of pretending not to be what they are. What they are, as is amply documented, is a pressure group for religious teaching in public schools.
The shifty… That’s it exactly. It’s the shifty. But Derbyshire doesn’t dig deeply enough into the cause. It isn’t simply creationists are pretending not to be a religious pressure group. Morality in the fundamentalist world is a constant struggle to have it both ways.
All this was churning in my thoughts the other day when I came across this post by Marv Knox, Editor of the Baptist Standard. Marv thinks it’s time for Baptists to talk about homosexuality. Here’s what talking looks like to Marv…
I’m not a geneticist or a biologist, so I don’t know if someone is “born homosexual.” I do know many homosexuals who swear they did not choose their orientation and never would choose to feel this way. Still, a direct reading of Scripture says sexual relations are designed by God to be enjoyed between one woman and one man exclusively within the bonds of marriage. While I empathize with the pain and grief of homosexual friends, I believe the Bible says their option is to remain celibate. I do not belittle their suffering, because the sex drive is one of the most powerful forces on Earth, but I also cannot ignore what seems to me the plain teaching of Scripture. Likewise, I do not feel their same-sex yearnings alone comprise sin. Humans are responsible for actions, not feelings. So, we must differentiate between homosexuality and homosexual activity.
There’s lots here to unpack, but if the first thing that strikes you is how shallow this man’s empathy is for his gay "friends" you don’t grasp what it means to talk about…well…anything, in fundamentalist circles. It all comes back to the bible, and ultimately there is no talk because there are no questions. Questions aren’t permitted. Only answers. Does your job bite? Well, Ephesians 6:5-8! Are credit card companies ripping off the public? Well, Psalm 37:21! Origin of the species? Well, Genesis 1:20! Homosexuality? Well, Leviticus 20:13!
Talk about homosexuality? Sure…as long as we already know what the answers will be. Talk to homosexuals? By all means…to save them. You can talk all you want as long as you don’t listen.
Marv empathizes with the pain and grief of his homosexual friends. Some of my best friends are… But he is also perfectly willing to join in the pummeling of them because that’s what the bible tells him he must do. This he regards as friendship. Look at that, if you have the nerve. His "friends" are in pain and grief. Marv is not looking the other way while they suffer. He’s looking right at it, adding his own righteous measure to it, and calling that empathy. He must. The bible calls us to love our neighbor, and to kill the homosexual…
Mark 12:31 And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.
Leviticus 20:13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.
"A direct reading of scripture" says both these things. We must love. We must kill. Therefore, to love the homosexual, is to kill them. Or at least, to make sure they understand that God condemns them.
And let it be said that gay people are killed every year in this country by murderers who claim some measure of justification in the bible’s condemnation of homosexuality. But while actually killing his homosexual neighbor may be more then Marv’s conscience will endure, twisting the knife in their hearts can be seen as a kind of tough love, the moral qualms at seeing yourself doing it washed, washed, washed away in the knowledge that you are simply obeying God’s will. That isn’t you bringing pain and grief into the lives of your homosexual neighbors, it’s the fallen state of humanity…it’s Satan…it’s God’s will…not mine… I am twisting this knife into your heart because God wants me to love you…
Once upon a time the righteous believed that God’s will could be seen in nature’s design. Then one day nature informed them they weren’t the center of the universe and they turned away in anger. But as Jacob Bronowski once said, when you discard the test of fact in what a star is, you discard in it what a human is. The commandments were not written on the stone, but in the stone, and in the light of the sun and stars, and in the songs of birds, and the color of the tiger’s eyes and the fish’s scales, and in our flesh and blood and bones, and in our hearts. To turn away from the natural world is to turn away from your human identity, and everything fine and noble a human being can become. Then you enter the wasteland, where inflicting pain and grief upon your neighbor is regarded as loving them…where the death of love is embraced as the purest essence of it. No Marv, let’s not talk about homosexuality. Let’s talk about how you became so callow. You need to understand why that happened.
Road kill reported by a driver in the German state of Lower Saxony turned out to be a drunk badger taking a nap, police in Goslar reported on Wednesday morning.
Late on Monday night, a driver reported what he thought was a dead animal on county road 32 near Groß Döhren to police.
But when officers arrived on the scene to remove the traffic obstruction, they were stunned to find that the animal was not dead or injured.
“Right in the middle of the street there was a badger sitting and staring at the officers incredulously,” a police statement said.
The officers quickly discovered that the animal – which was not frightened by their presence – had been snacking on the overripe cherries on a nearby tree.
“The animal’s belly digested the fruit to alcohol and the badger was, as the saying goes, ‘drunk as a blackbird’,” the statement said, adding that the little mammal was also suffering from “diarrhoea containing cherry pits.”
Officers directed the badger off of the road, where he could “sleep off his intoxication in a meadow.”
–The Local, Germany
Well of course they let it go on its way. Who wants to arrest a badger for public drunkenness? You’d get your hands chewed off.
Good thing it was the happy peaceful kind of drunk and not the loud belligerent kind. Just imagine walking home from a night out at the bars and suddenly encountering a drunken pissed off badger…
Really? Staffers that would otherwise have contributed to police work, road repair, education, and sea research were pulled in to help the governor’s office deal with the legal ins and outs of ethics complaints? That’s the official explanation for Palin’s claim now?
Well, it will be for the next five minutes. Then another lie will come along. Note in particular that ABC News’ Kate Moss did not even question her bizarre claim that she was resigning to save the state "millions" in frivolous lawsuits, a claim that was suspicious on its face, debunked on the blogs and now a proven lie. But on ABC News, stenographers to the powerful, Kate Snow just sat there and let Palin state…
This would be the same ABC News that claimed that Matthew Shepard knew his killers, that he was a druggie, and that his murder was a meth fueled robbery gone bad, not a sickeningly typical-in-its-brutality gay bashing? That ABC News?
If You Understand Nothing Else Understand This: Those Days Are Over
Dan Savage puts his finger on what’s so utterly dumbfounding about the Rainbow Lounge raid…
…The police burst into that bar as if it were still 1968, the year before the NYPD’s raid on the Stonewall Inn, as if the old rules were still in force. They assumed that the other men at Rainbow Lounge that night—the men who witnessed four officers assaulting Chad Gibson—would disappear into the night, grateful that they got out of the Rainbow Lounge without getting assaulted and arrested too. The police didn’t expect the other gay men men at the Rainbow Lounge to talk to the media—or to organize a protest outside Fort Worth’s city hall. The police didn’t even seem to realize that there were men taking pictures with their cell phones during the raid. It’s as if the police in Fort Worth didn’t know what decade this is.
In June 2008, Washington D.C. Council member and former mayor Marion Barry declared his support for same-sex marriage in the District. Three weeks ago Barry co-sponsored the District law that recognizes legal same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. The former mayor now breaks his promise and appears at an anti-gay rally organized by the publicity-hungry gay-bashing Bishop Harry Jackson of the Hope Christian Church in nearby Beltsville. Barry and Jackson call marriage equality "immoral."
D.C. Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), the only council member to vote against the bill today to legalize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, predicted today there could be a "civil war" in the District if the Council decides to take up a broader gay marriage bill later this year.
"All hell is going to break lose," Barry said while speaking to reporters. "We may have a civil war. The black community is just adamant against this."
Barry made his remarks a few hours after a group of same-sex marriage opponents, led by black ministers, caused uproar in the Wilson Building after the Council voted 12 to 1 to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. They caused such a ruckus that security guards and police had to clear the hallway. The protesters shouted that council members who voted for the bill will face retribution at the polls.
U.S. Park Service Police arrested Barry (D-Ward 8) about 8:45 p.m. in Anacostia Park after a woman flagged down an officer to report that a man in a nearby vehicle was "bothering her," police said.
After interviewing Barry and Watts-Brighthaupt, Barry, 73, was charged with one count of "misdemeanor stalking," said Sgt. David Schlosser, a Park Police spokesman. Barry, on probation for failing to pay his federal taxes, was released hours later and ordered to appear in court Thursday.
It’s a girlfriend who broke up with him and says he won’t leave her alone. Except they had lunch together that same day and she’s saying now she didn’t ask for him to be arrested. This is the same girlfriend he bought a eight-hundred dollar coat for at auction while he was struggling to repay the back taxes he’s on probation now for not paying. Moral Leadership.
Tune in again next week when our topic will be: Moral Leaders And Their Soulmates…featuring Marion Barry and Mark Sanford.
I saw the other day that Sirius/XM has an iPhone app. Neat, I thought. Until naturally I saw the details. It’s extra, on top of a subscription fee that I have been wondering for months now why I keep paying.
Oh I know…mostly. It’s for OutQ…the only gay radio station on the planet. Well…there’s a German one I found using Wunder Radio. But it only plays dance music. At least it doesn’t have the inane chit-chat programs that OutQ does. The only thing I ever listen do on OutQ these days is Signorile. And he’s the only reason I’d want Sirius on my iPhone. I have tons of other music and talk options on the iPhone. I don’t need Sirius for either one.
So to ask me to pay extra above and beyond the normal subscription price is more then too much to ask. When I first signed up Sirius had a lot of content I liked. They’ve systematically removed or destroyed most of it. Swing Street is gone. It became…somehow…the All Frank Sinatra All The Time station. When they bought XM they brought over its 40s station…but that seems to always play the very worst most saccharine stuff my parent’s generation ever listened to. I don’t think they’d even bother with it were they still alive. The Trance channel is only trance part-time these days. The "New Age" channel became the International Music channel and it really eats toxic waste. The classical stations never play anything worth listening to. The sixties channel seems to just play the same set of songs over and over. I scan the dial and I hear nothing, Nothing, that is worth my time. In the car these days, I mostly listen to my iPod/iPhone, or the CD player.
Why am I paying money for this? Well…because it’s still handy to have when I travel cross-country. But only barely. I can plug my iPhone into the car stereo and hit "shuffle" and hear more songs I like then I can on Sirius. For hours at a time now I am listening to the iPod while driving.
Hey Sirius…bring back Sunset Cruise and I might reconsider. I’d take that to mean you are taking your gay listeners seriously again. Sunset Cruise was this sweet little call-in show where gay folk would call and dedicate a song to the one they love. They ran it Sunday evenings and it was a perfect way to end the week. I used to listen to it while I was drawing the weekly political cartoon for my web site. It was just the thing I needed to remember why the struggle was worthwhile, and life was good after all. It’s DJ, Pat Marino, has set up his own Internet broadcast Here, called The Heartbeat Cafe’. If he was still doing Sunset Cruise on Sirius I wouldn’t hesitate to add that iPhone app to my subscription. But you seem to think the kind of raunchy talk you hear constantly on Derek and Romaine is all gay people want to listen to.
If there were no OutQ I wouldn’t even bother subscribing. But its programming is way too narrowly focused on an urban gay stereotype that isn’t most gay people. It had more bandwidth a few years ago. But then, your entire channel line-up had more variety then it does now. You are not competing with broadcast radio anymore. You are competing with the iPhone and iTunes and the Internet. And just like the newspapers, you are loosing because you are stuck in an old business model and you keep thinking you can drag your customers back into it somehow and you can’t.
I’m cleaning house here at Casa del Garrett, going through tons of old stuff, and I got into a storage bin I have of posters that go back to my teen years. I found one titled Peter’s Laws. I’m not going to keep it…it really isn’t my style. But I know why it found its way into my collection: it’s hilarious. Well…I think it is. Here’s a few of them…
If anything can go wrong…fix it. To hell with Murphy.
When given a choice, take both.
Multiple Projects lead to multiple successes.
When forced to compromise, ask for more.
If you can’t beat them, join them. Then beat them.
If you can’t win, change the rules.
If you can’t change the rules, ignore them.
Perfection is not optional.
When faced without a challenge, make one.
"No", simply means begin again at one higher level.
The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live
This poster was subtitled, The Creed Of The Sociopathic Obsessive Compulsive. I can’t imagine why. Like I said, I’m not going to keep it, it’s not my style. But there are times when I get like this. I can’t imagine being like that all the time though. You don’t always need to be relentless. It’s good to step back from time to time and just watch the chaos happen. You see things you wouldn’t have otherwise seen. Life takes you places you would never have guessed would be interesting.
NEW YORK – Federal marshals seized disgraced financier Bernard Madoff’s $7 million Manhattan penthouse on Thursday and forced his wife to move out and leave her possessions behind, including a fur coat she had asked to take with her, an official told The Associated Press.
…U.S. Marshal Joseph Guccione said the marshals arrived at the property at noon with a court order permitting them to take custody of the apartment and to make anyone living there move out. Guccione said Madoff’s wife Ruth had been advised in advance of the marshals’ plans and was leaving the residence and surrendering all personal property.
"She will be leaving," he said at midday. "Restitution for the victims is the government’s top priority."
There are the people he took money from. But I wonder if he ever thought about what he was doing to his wife too…
From No Macs In My Life To A 100 Percent Apple Household In Just Five Years…
[Geek Alert…]
My life with computers started with a Coleco Adam, and was not auspicious. It was 1983, back when consumer home computers had just started to appear on the store shelves, not just the back page advertisements of the hobbyist magazines. Apple, Atari, Commodore, Texas Instruments, Radio Shack and Heathkit all had one you could buy, most still horribly expensive. They had only text based user interfaces, and if they had graphics capabilities at all, they were very crude and slow.
Initially I saw little use for them, but I had a ColecoVision game console I played constantly and one day Coleco announced it was coming out with a home computer that would do it all, and play the same ColecoVision cartridges. A Commodore C64 could be had for around the same price, but I already had a big investment in ColecoVision game cartridges. Plus, the Adam came bundled with its own printer: a really nice (in theory) daisy wheel printer which would make good letter quality output, as opposed to most of the consumer dot matrix printers of the day. My typewriter skills were tragic. Worse, though I had a huge vocabulary for my age (due to being such a bookworm), I reliably failed to correctly spell a lot of it. When I saw a word processor demo…I think it was on an Atari…and discovered I could compose words on a computer screen…backspace, erase, correct, rearrange all of it before printing out a single page of paper…I was floored. Then I saw it spell check. That did it. I had to have one.
But like thousands of others I had to return my Adam the day after I bought it because it was defective. Not a good beginning to my entry into the world of computers. But because of all the hype from Coleco about what the Adam could do, I turned around and with the refund bought a Commodore C64. And my love of computers took wing almost immediately. In retrospect, it was probably a given that I’d get my hands on a computer eventually. I was always a little techno nerd, and had built my first Heathkit radio when I was a fifth grader (my teacher at the time refused to believe I’d built that radio myself when I brought it to show and tell and insisted I’d had help, which made me furious…). Computers and I were going to get a thing going eventually. We just were.
So now I had my first…well…second one. There was a kit you could buy for the Commodore that let you decode teletype traffic. It included a software cartridge and a box that converted the signals from the radio to something that could be fed into the Commodore’s serial port. I’d been hooked on shortwave radio since I discovered at eight or nine that I could listen to broadcasts from around the world on mom’s old one. So that kit was high on my list of things I wanted to try out. As soon as I got the Commodore home I ordered up one and when it came I connected it the really nice ICOM shortwave receiver I’d bought a few years previously with some inheritance money. Finally I could listen in on some of those mysterious beeping-clicking-chirping sounds I kept hearing on certain frequencies.
As I look back, this was oddly enough the real beginning for me. From my studies of radio I was already familiar with the concept of bandwidth…a thing the expensive ICOM receiver was able to adjust to better capture a signal. But with the RTTY converter kit I started becoming familiar with the basic concepts of electronic communication systems…how to work the serial port…bits, words, baud rate, and eventually also packets and protocols, concepts that would later be useful in understanding computer networking.
But the Commodore had one other thing that intrigued me. When you started it up without a software cartridge in it, the initial screen you got was its Basic interpreter. I began playing with that and right away the discovery that I could make the computer do stuff by feeding it instructions in Basic became an absorbing curiosity.
I could make it display words and shapes and colors on the screen…move them around and…ohmygosh, calculate the answers to complex math problems! Sweet! Algebra was my downfall in grade school, so this last really got my attention. With one of these things I could solve problems I simply could not cope with. Or so I thought. How I wish back then that someone had told me that algebra was just another kind of symbolic logic, because I actually did have a head for solving logic problems. I was doing it right there on the Commodore, every time I wrote a simple Basic program, although I didn’t realize it then.
I still needed a word processor. I checked around and found a program called PaperClip that ran on the Commodore. It did it all on that little machine. But it required one of the Commodore disk drives to run it. Which made sense. Even if they’d sold it on a cartridge, which a lot of software for the Commodore came on in those days, you still needed a place to store your written text while you were working on it. So I got the money together somehow and bought one. I quickly discovered I could store my Basic programs on that drive too. Good. Now I didn’t have to key my programs in every time I wanted to run them. Now I could write big ones, that did more things. This was when I really started learning how to compose software code, and test and debug it.
As time went on I began to bump into the limits of my Commodore’s horsepower. IBM came out with its PC and some friends of mine had one in their household. The thing awed me whenever I came to visit. Then I learned that some enterprising folks were selling parts you could put together to make one of your own. I’d been building Heathkit electronic gizmos for years, so the notion I could build my own IBM-PC from parts immediately took wing in me and I ran with it. When the next county HAM Fest came along I went with a list of parts and came home with the makings of the computer that would change my life.
And I knew after I had it together and working that something big had happened. I can still remember vividly sitting on the edge of my bed, just staring at it, amazed. It had a 16 bit microprocessor. It had 1 megabyte of ram, 648k available for user program space. I’d installed two double sided 5 1/4 inch Teac floppy drives, the best most reliable drives made, that could each hold a whopping 360k of data. I’d bought a Hercules Graphics card, one of the most powerful and sharpest monochrome cards made. And I’d installed a 2 megabyte expanded memory card, from which I could create a 2 megabyte ram disk. This was serious business. And so it was. That computer, and what I learned to do with it, eventually got me my first job as a programmer. Which led me, eventually to my first apartment of my own, then to a new car, and then to my first house, and to working on the Hubble Space Telescope. Wish I’d held onto it now, but you only see these things clearly in retrospect.
Had IBM not started to immediately lock down the PC platform I’d have been more grateful to them. But my love turned mostly toward Microsoft. They’d developed the operating system the PC ran on. But more importantly to me and my new career, they’d developed and extended the Microsoft dialect of the Basic programming language I’d begun to earn a really nice living with. And their professional developer’s tools were easily affordable, compared to the stuff the big computer companies sold. Even after IBM entered the microcomputer market they still didn’t get what it was about. One story I heard was that while IBM was hawking it’s new OS/2 operating system at tech conferences, they’d sell you the driver development kit for about ten grand if you asked. That was pretty typical pricing for software from the big iron crowd. Microsoft on the other hand, working its competing NT operating system, would sell you their driver development kit for fifty bucks…but if you gave them a nice song and dance at the conference about the really cool thing you were working on, they’d just give it to you for free.
That was then. In those days I viewed Microsoft with something like revolutionary ardor. They had taken on the big establishment corporate behemoth IBM and won. They had brought the power of the computer out of the big corporate data centers and into the hands of the people. They had made tools available to everyone, at prices most of us could afford, to create software that ran rings around anything the big iron mainframes could do, other then by raw horsepower. I can still remember demonstrating my DOS Basic IDE to several Baltimore Gas and Electric mainframe programmers, how their jaws simply dropped when I showed them that I could run and debug my program right there in the editor, and how the editor would even check my syntax for me as I typed. This was back in 1993 and these were simple DOS programs, but they danced rings around what anyone was doing on the mainframe.
Microsoft practically gave me my career as a software developer, and all the perks that came with it: a good income, a place of my own to live in, and a new car. Just a few years before I’d been living in a room in a friend’s basement, mowing lawns and doing Manpower jobs to make ends meet. I’d had to scrounge up a junker car from a friend to travel to Baltimore for my first job as a programmer. Now I had a new car, and my first apartment that was all my own, and enough money at the end of the week to think of buying things like…well…like a better computer. I soon graduated from that first IBM PC compatible I’d built to other more powerful ones. But I always kept building my own. That way, I could get exactly the hardware I wanted in it.
Which was so unlike the other kid on the block back then…Apple. Apple computers were there right from the beginning of the personal computer revolution. The Apple II was the first consumer PC that came complete in the case with a keyboard. It was the Visicalc spreadsheet, mated to that early Apple II computer, that brought the PC into the workplace, and made IBM finally take notice of the market for those little "toy" computers. But the Apple was hugely expensive and even then, was its own world. Especially after struggling with all the non-standard ports and software quirks of the Commodore (even it’s character set wasn’t standard ACSII…) I wanted nothing more to do with closed systems. At the time I thought Microsoft didn’t either. At the time I thought Microsoft was all about the freedom the personal computer brought down from the corporate heights to everyone. Go ahead…laugh at me. I can laugh too. Now.
Time passes…the universe expands… I got the job of my dreams at Space Telescope, largely for the skills I’d developed writing business applications in Microsoft Visual Basic. But by then I’d become massively disillusioned by Microsoft’s highly predatory nature. Bill it turned out, wasn’t a revolutionary after all. He was just another robber baron, willing to betray every ideal of the personal computer revolution for power and money. Software was just a means to an end. He’d realized that the future world would be driven by software, and he wanted to be the John D. Rockefeller of software. By comparison, Steve Job’s little Cult of Macintosh didn’t seem so egregious, although I still didn’t want any part of it.
I gravitated to Linux and the Open Source movement. At work, most of the systems were Unix based, so learning to run and maintain Linux at home helped me greatly with my working skill set. I eventually took on the task of maintaining the Linux test center for our engineering branch. I tested and ran various Linux distributions at home too, in the hope that I could wean myself off of Microsoft systems. By that time, two things had permanently soured my relationship to Microsoft. First, they’d trashed their Basic development platform, replacing it with a pathetic .NET bastardization. Second, they’d implemented software branding in the OS, which made it nearly impossible for me to experiment with building new hardware at Casa del Garrett. But as time went on, and my responsibilities at work grew, I needed more and more to have computers around me that didn’t have to spend a lot of time fixing and tweaking and fiddling with and Linux is a lot of things but not that. And in my personal private world the story was much the same.
The computer had entered parts of my life I’d never dreamed of. My photography hobby was now thoroughly tied to the computer, as were the cartoons I was now putting up on my web site. I was starting to get really, really tired of how often my Microsoft workstation at home, or the Linux ones, were blowing up on me because some software update had broken everything right as I was trying to get some work done. And now the hardware for them seemed to also be going down in quality. I was always having to rebuild a machine because some part of it had failed. My closet was full of computer parts now, that I was relying on more and more to be able to swap around until I got something fixed.
At work, the Macintosh was gaining more and more ground, largely because the Mac OS then was based on a Unix kernel. In 2004 I bought my first one, a 12" PowerBook G4 laptop, to take with me on a trip to a software developer’s conference. I bought it mostly to explore the Mac OS for the first time, and to familiarize myself with it enough that I could be useful to the Mac users at work, and to the Mac users in our external user community.
Macs had by then evolved greatly since that first Macintosh came out in 1984. The operating system as I said, was now based on a Unix kernel and was now truly preemptively multi-tasking and powerful. There was an actual terminal window in the Mac now…a thing that had once been considered heresy…so now a developer or a power user could get inside of the file system and the OS and dig around a bit. This was something that previous Macs had been determined to keep you out of. And Macs lived in much better harmony with third party hardware now. They even worked with two-button mice! And though the Mac was still a highly closed ecology, let it be said that Microsoft, by way of stabbing so many of its software and hardware partners in the back, was working mightily it seemed to shrink its own ecology. How many viable commercial non-Microsoft word processors are still in production for Windows? How many alternative compilers and software development platforms? At least Apple’s ecology worked.
And that was the thing. That little Mac laptop I bought was a pure pleasure to use on that first trip, and on every trip thereafter, business or vacation. It took a little while to get use to the Macintosh way of doing some things, particularly and annoyingly regarding the keyboard mapping inside of text editors. But it got to the point where I simply took for granted that the Mac would work when I started it up, and that the software updates wouldn’t break it. That was a new experience for me.
So much so that a year later I bought a second one, and dedicated it to the art room. Macs had always held on to their reputation in the arts and publishing businesses and I felt the Power Mac G5 I’d bought would fit perfectly into my art room workflow. And so it did, becoming both a darkroom and a virtual drawing board. I still develop my own black and white film, still do most of my artwork with the traditional tools on my drafting table. But I don’t bother with silver prints anymore, I just scan in the negatives and go to work in the computer. The results are so much better, and there is no mess to clean up afterward. And now I also do a lot of post production work on my cartoons in the Mac after scanning them into Photoshop. It’s mostly just touching up things here and there, and the lettering, which my hand was never good at. And once they’re in the computer, I can publish them on my web site, for the world to see. Having a worldwide audience for my cartoons was something I could only dream about once upon a time. Now, thanks to the computer, it is a reality.
Those two household Macs, Akela (the laptop) and Bagheera (the G5 tower) have become staples of the household network. So rock solidly reliable that over the years I have come to take them for granted. They just work. I don’t sweat the software updates. I don’t sweat the hardware upgrades on the G5. There is something to be said after all, for control-freaking the hardware and the software ecology. Users chaff at Apple’s tight control…I still do…often. Yet, it all just works. Time and again when Mowgli, my Intel Windows/Linux box would break down for some reason, either a hardware or software failure, I would have to attach its data drive to one of the Macs so I could keep working. The Macs have never given me any problems. I can rely on them.
So now I had two Macs that I came to utterly rely on. Then came the iPod. Years previously I’d bought a second generation Sony Walkman and then later a Walkman CD player. When I saw that I could put almost my whole CD collection on an iPod, and carry hours and hours of music with me wherever I went, I had to have one. Naturally when I got it home I mated it to one of the Macs instead of the Windows box. It all just seamlessly worked together.
Then along came the iPhone. Once I carried around a Palm Pilot to help me manage my calendar and other personal information. Then when the Kyocera smart phone came out I could combine phone and PIM and then I had my contact information with my cell phone where it made some sense for it to be. I began to hope the someone would intergrate an mp3 player with a cell phone/PIM. But the first few tries I saw were less then wonderful. The Kyocera could play music, but it didn’t do it well, didn’t hold much, and the interface was cumbersome. The I saw my first iPhone. Cell phone… PIM… iPod… eMail… Web Browser… Road Atlas… Video player… Application Platform… Computer… In the blink of an eye that little touch pad device swept away everything I ever thought about what a smart phone could be.
You see where this is going, right? The computer had become an integral part of my life. Probably yours too, and probably you take that for granted. But for nearly half my life computers were something only big corporations had the money, let alone the room for. So I have witnessed some amazing changes in how computers are used, and I am still taken aback sometimes at how ubiquitous they’ve become, and how radically they’ve changed the way we live. Listen to music…on a telephone…? Why the hell would I want to do that? Now most of my time is spent using computers in one form or another. And at home, whether it’s working on some photographs on Bagheera, or listening to the iPod while doing household chores…most of the time I’m running something made by Apple.
It was insidious. I had no plans whatsoever to join the cult of Steve Jobs. I wanted nothing to do with it actually. He got me anyway. By making a better computer. And then by doing what was never in Bill Gates to do: make them liberating.
People smirk at Job’s relentless focus on making his products "cool". But it forces him to think outside the box. Bill just wants to put the world into his box. The difference really shows not on the desktop, but all the places nobody in their wildest dreams would have thought back in the 1970s to put a computer in. That IBM executive who once wondered why the hell anyone would want to use a computer to write a memo…I wonder what he would have thought to hear someone say that one day they’d be putting computers into telephones.
Bill had Windows on cell phones long before Steve got MacOS on them. But when Bill brought out Windows Mobile he was about putting Windows into cellphones and adding cellular technology to his items of world conquest. See…you can even open a Word document in one and read it…You can read Outlook Mail…share your calendar with other Microsoft Exchange users… It was Windows on a cellphone. When Steve brought out the iPhone he was about reinventing the telephone. There’s the difference between Bill and Steve. Yes, MacOS is at the heart of the iPhone. But the iPhone is not about MacOS. The iPhone is about what you can do with the technology now, that you couldn’t before. Not an incremental step from familiar territory into well explored territory, but a grand glorious crazy leap into the future.
That kind of thing still has appeal to those of us who got into the personal computer revolution at the beginning. So I have this little cell phone now…a thing I can hold in the palm of one hand…and I’m feeling like a kid again, beholding the world of tomorrow. I love that feeling. This little gizmo would make that first IBM PC compatible I built tremble in awe if it had feelings. If I could have foreseen my iPhone 3Gs back when I was sitting alone in my bedroom, staring amazed at the PC I’d just successfully built, I’d have known that the future really was going to be everything I’d ever dreamed it would be. Had I seen a Zune…not so much.
So I’m writing all this because a few days ago Mowgli died…again. This makes the fourth major hardware failure I’ve had with Mowgli since I bought the Mac Laptop back in 2004. And I can’t count the software glitches that kept him down for days at a time until I could work my way through it. And with Microsoft’s new Windows license enforcement code, I can’t just simply fire up my copy of XP once I put a new motherboard in Mowgli. This will be that XP install’s third motherboard and so I’ll have to phone Redmond and convince them I am not stealing their software so they will kindly unlock my copy remotely. Fuck that. I have had too many problems with Windows and Windows updates and Windows applications and Windows drivers and Windows this and Windows that to be begging them allow me to run software I have bought and paid for. If my Windows platform was as reliable and as pleasant to use as my Macs I’d grit my teeth and bear it. But it isn’t. It never was.
So I’m replacing it. With a Mac. I’ll still be able to fiddle around with Linux since the Macs will boot off of external drives and most Linux distributions have always produced a version that ran on Macs too, whether they be PowerPC Macs or the new Intel based ones. I could even run Windows on a Mac now, via one of the enabling VMs such as Boot Camp or Parallels, although Redmond restricts which versions of Vista and presumably Windows 7 you can do that with. Which is the other thing I hate now about Windows…all the idiotic flavors of it.
The office is running on Akela for the moment. I put Mowgli’s data drive in a IDE to USB converter box and hooked it up to Akela, then copied its contents over to an external Firewire drive I’d partitioned and formatted in the MacOS file system. My plan is to eventually move that data to a network drive, probably off a new router like the Apple Airport, that all the household computers can access. I connected Akela to Mowgli’s ViewSonic monitor, the Altec sound system and the router and turned off it’s wireless for now. I bought an Apple keyboard since I wanted a standard layout, not the laptop layout, to work on and all my spares are IBM PS2s and I don’t have any PS2 to USB connectors. With the external keyboard I can run Akela with its lid closed and it’s almost like I’m working with a Mac desktop computer instead of a laptop. I’m tempted to just run the office on a laptop forever now, since Akela has plenty of horsepower for it. But it’s good to keep a laptop that is separate from your day to day home office so that when you take it anywhere it has no sensitive data on it.
I haven’t decided yet, but I’m leaning towards buying a Mac Mini for now, since it’s just straight pluggable into the peripherals I already have gathered about Mowgli, and now Akela. I don’t really have the money now to replace Bagheera with a newer Mac Pro or Mowgli with an iMac. My plan ideally would have been to replace Bagheera possibly next year and then move the older PowerPC machine upstairs to the office. I need the more powerful Mac to be in the art room, where the graphics intensive work is. But for now I need a new Office machine and it will not be another Windows box. I am done with Windows. I’m just not fucking with it any more. Five years ago I wouldn’t have dreamed I’d be an all Mac household. Now I am.
It happened that fast, after the first one came into the house. I am amazed. But happily so.
Life happens. My cartoon pages have been terribly neglected recently and I apologize to those of you who enjoy that part of the site more then this one.
When I included the political cartoon page, my goal was to do one a week. I was frustrated then, and still am, by the disinterest of mainstream political cartoonists in the gay rights struggle. They were not nearly so reticent about racial equality in America, although now that I think of it, the women’s rights struggle also got pretty short shrift from them too…at least among the male cartoonists. Most of them are pretty terrible at dealing with issues of gender. Witness Pat Oliphant, who I mostly admire for his style and willingness to let a cartoon deal with a subject (like racism) passionately. That’s a rare quality in a political cartoon these days, and getting rarer. But he once portrayed the equal rights amendment as a Wagnarian fat lady, decked out in a ridiculous Brunhilde costume.
It’s gotten better in recent years, as the gay rights movement seems to have finally found acceptance as a legitimate issue in mainstream news. But it’s still not great. Some prominent and well respected cartoonists still can’t seem to get beyond treating the whole subject as a joke.
Now I’m hardly the only gay cartoonist out there. There are many others, most of them a lot better at the drawing board then I am. But I still don’t see anyone else out there taking on this subject in the traditional political cartoon format. What I see are many excellent multi-panel cartoons…often done in a slice-of-life style…documenting our lives and our struggle. The best of them is Howard Cruise, whose artwork is a level of draftsmanship I will never be able to touch. He is an amazing story telling, as are cartoonists Robert Kirby, David Kelly and Robert Triptow who all contribute these absolutely wonderful gay slice-of-live comics. Cartoonist Willie Hewes, who I came to know through the Love Won Out protests, did an absolutely stunning zine style comic on the topic of forced conversion therapy, and she continues to produce first rate comics on gay issues.
These are not a trivial things. The more the stories of our lives can get out there where they be seen, the more our heterosexual neighbors can see us as human beings, and not the monsters we’re made to be by the religious right. But none of them do political cartoons in the traditional form. Single panel, black and white, whose impact comes largely from the imagery it uses to convey a point of view. You take one glance at it, and it hits you squarely with its message.
As I am a gay man myself, and in love with the political cartoon as an art form ever since I was a teenager, I consider this topic my particular beat. But the cartoons have been absent for quite a while now. That’s partly because my personal life has been relentlessly crowding out my time at the drafting table. But also because I just got tired of being angry all the time. Another reason I started the political cartoon page, was to have a way of venting a little of the anger I always seem to be carrying around with me. You live a life that is constantly under attack by massively financed right wing anti-gay machines and it’s hard not to be angry all the time. What I discovered was that simply researching the material for each week’s cartoon just made me angrier. After a while, I got tired of being angry all the time.
I’d wanted to see if I could sustain a weekly output. I found that I could…the material was, unfortunately, abundant…but it became less and less rewarding. But I never quite stopped altogether. I have dozens of cartoons that never made it to the scanner. Things I drew intending to post here, and then never finished because I lost steam in the middle of it.
Well that’s about to change.
Several weeks ago, during a Baltimore Guerrilla Gay Bar event, I met Steve Charing, editor of Baltimore OUTLoud. He’s invited me to contribute a political cartoon to his bi-weekly newspaper. I just turned in my first one and hopefully it gets published in this week’s edition. Now I have a steady gig, and I’ve got the drafting table all fired up again and I’m hot to go. I’m going to finish off some of the cartoons that never made it to the scanner and post them here over the next few weeks. And I’ll be posting the cartoons I send to OUTLoud, a week after they appear in the paper.
The bi-weekly time frame of OUTLoud gives me some breathing room, but at the same time I want to see if I can get back to doing these on a weekly basis. Again, regrettably, there is no dearth of material for me out there. But don’t expect one every week for now. The bi-weekly OUTLoud cartoon however, will continue for as long as Steve wants me in his paper. I really appreciate his giving me this opportunity.
Hopefully, this will also kick-start A Coming Out Story. If I don’t knuckle down on that one I’ll still be working on it when I’m 100.
Message From A Stonewall Adult, To A Post-Stonewall Kid…
The day after the homos rioted in Greenwich Village, the New York newspapers barely mentioned it. But that was par for the course back in the 60s. I was a fifteen year old kid when it happened, growing up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C., and didn’t hear about the riots until I was well into my own coming out to myself process in 1971. By then, the scruffy, angry, younger gay liberation front was rudely elbowing aside an older generation of more genteel suit and tie activists, who had tried with painfully little to show for it, to work within the system for change.
You’d have thought the gay civil rights movement had begun on the street in front of the Stonewall Inn. It didn’t. In the lightning flash of the Stonewall riots we lost sight for a while of how much courage it would have taken to picket for gay rights in front of the White House, as activist Frank Kameny and members of the Mattachine Society of Washington did on April 17, 1965. Kameny was rightfully honored recently at a White House ceremony, and received an official apology for being fired in 1957 from his position as an astronomer for the Army map service. People think the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s were all about ferreting out communists in government and industy. But homosexuals were just as much, if not more of a target then. We need to remember the staggering courage it took for those early pioneers in the struggle to come forward, and push back against the hate. But we also need to remember this…
A prominent Stonewall myth holds that the riots were an uprising by the gay community against decades of oppression. This would be true if the “gay community” consisted of Stonewall patrons. The bar’s regulars, though, were mostly teenagers from Queens, Long Island and New Jersey, with a few young drag queens and homeless youths who squatted in abandoned tenements on the Lower East Side.
I was there on the Saturday and Sunday nights when the Village’s established gay community, having heard about the incidents of Friday night, rushed back from vacation rentals on Fire Island and elsewhere. Although several older activists participated in the riots, most stood on the edges and watched.
Many told me they were put off by the way the younger gays were taunting the police — forming chorus lines and singing, “We are the Stonewall girls, we wear our hair in curls!” Many of the older gay men lived largely closeted lives, had careers to protect and years of experience with discrimination. They believed the younger generation’s behavior would lead to even more oppression…
And thus the phrase "militant homosexuals" entered the vernacular. But all it takes to become a Militant Homosexual is to simply believe there is nothing wrong with you and behave accordingly. There is nothing unusual about people getting angry when they are mistreated. There is nothing remarkable about people fighting back when their basic human rights are denied them. There is nothing less surprising then to witness lovers protecting and defending the sacred ground between them. Especially young lovers. When someone utters the phrase "militant homosexuals", what you should be hearing is: I Can’t See The People For The Homosexuals.
The older generation had grown up in a time when homosexuality was almost universally regarded as a dirty secret, a filthy perversion, the less spoken of the better. As new studies began to show that we were a natural part of the human family after all, that generation began, very courageously, to take that message to the public. See…we’re just like you after all… And so we are, the ordinary among us and the exotic both. But you can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into.
As long as the rest of society could look the other way while our lives were drowned in a sea of prejudice and hate, we would never make any progress. As long as the rest of society could ignore the toll prejudice was taking on our lives, that prejudice would keep doing its work on us. That night in June of 1969, the frustration of the young and outcast simply boiled over. And the rest of us saw something we had never seen before: gay people, angry gay people, fighting back. And it lit a fire in us. And we would never be the same. Because a few street kids and drag queens simply had enough, that one night, that one time.
There are times when it’s wise to listen to what the older generation has to say. We’ve been there…we took the hits…we saw it all with our own eyes. But never…Never…let someone old enough to have achieved some measure of success, and made a good and comfortable life for themselves, tell You what you have to put up with.
Heroes Of The Culture War #721…Collect The Entire Series!
As Jim Burroway remarked last night on Facebook, I had no idea "Hiking the Appalachian Trail" meant that…
Mark Sanford. Republican. Conservative. Sexual moralist. Fierce defender of Traditional Marriage. Protecting innocent children from the homosexual agenda. Upholding his state’s reputation as a place decent normal families can come visit…
When South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford learned that his state was being advertised as a gay tourism destination, he ordered a Cabinet-level department head “to do the right thing personnel-wise or process-wise to ensure this does not happen again,” Sanford’s spokesman Joel Sawyer told Q-Notes.
Sanford was reacting to U.S. media reports that a subway poster mounted in London, England, during Gay Pride week was announcing, “South Carolina is so gay.”
A state employee who approved the ads was called to a meeting with management and resigned, according to Marion Edmonds, spokesman for the state’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism (PRT).
If the employee broke any rule in the conduct of her job, it was apparently an unwritten one.
…
Governor Sanford mandated that PRT director Chad Prosser will from now on have to personally sign off on all advertising campaigns, Sawyer said.
S.C. Governor Mark Sanford has admitted to being unfaithful to his wife, and stated in his press conference at 2:30 p.m. that this was the reason he was in Argentina for Father’s Day instead of at home with his family.
I don’t want to hear one more word about how horrible it is that teh gays hold their parades every year on Father’s Day. Oh…and his mistress is also married…
Seemingly fighting tears at times, he said the situation holds a certain irony. He said his mistress is also married and has two children.
Good thing we have people like you keeping children safe from all those same-sex households, so they won’t grow up with a twisted set of values.
Another day…another anti-gay culture warrior pops out of the philanderer closet. So…"I believe in traditional marriage" is a euphemism for "I’m cheating on my spouse" is it?
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