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?
Calling it "absolutely the worst thing that I’ve ever done in my life," U.S. Sen. John Ensign admitted Tuesday that he had an affair with a campaign staffer last year.
It was with a staffer who worked on his senate campaign. Oh…and her husband worked in his senate office. Oh… And He’s A Promise Keeper.
"If there was ever anything that I could take back in my life, this would be it," Ensign, 51, said Tuesday afternoon in Las Vegas, reading from a prepared statement in a brief news conference at which he took no questions.
During the height of the scandal surrounding Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, the Nevada Republican denounced the president’s conduct as "an embarrassing moment for the country."
‘I think we have to feel very sad for the American people and Hillary and Chelsea,’ he said.
Weeks later, Ensign would call on Clinton to resign. "I came to that conclusion recently, and frankly it’s because of what he put his whole Cabinet through and what he has put the country through," he was quoted saying at the time. "He has no credibility left," he added.
At the time, Ensign was in a tight Senate race with incumbent Harry Reid, an election he would ultimately end up losing. And he didn’t shy away from trying to exploit the moral trip-ups in Clinton’s personal life to benefit himself and the GOP.
"It could have a dramatic effect on Democrats like (President Nixon’s resignation after the Watergate scandal) had on Republicans in 1974," he said, according to a local AP article from September 14, 1998.
In fact, not only did Ensign envision the Lewinksy affair as a political boon for Republicans, he actively made it an issue in his campaign against Reid. At one point during the campaign, Ensign accused his opponent of having a double standard when it came to politicians and sexual dalliances. Reid, he argued, had been much tougher on former Sen. Robert Packwood — who resigned from the Senate under allegations of sexual harassment — than he was with Clinton.
Ensign would support amendment banning gay marriage
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said he would support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
Ensign cautioned that changing the Constitution should not be done lightly.
After evaluating the idea of President Bush’s recommendation of such an amendment Tuesday, Ensign said he believes it is necessary "to protect the institution of marriage in America."
"In order to defend the institution of marriage, uphold the rights of individual states and maintain the will of the people, I believe we are compelled to amend our country’s Constitution," Ensign said.
So many righteous defenders of marriage. So many marriages needing defending from their defenders. It wasn’t gay people who broke your marriage vows jackass. It was you. Stop blaming other people for your own pathetic failures of moral character. We are your neighbors, not your scapegoats. Leave us the fuck out of your problems. If you had minded your own goddamned business instead of dumping your cheapshit bar stool moralizing on other people you might still have a reputation to defend, let alone a marriage.
While reading the extract below, keep in mind that the author is talking about a time in this country, the 1950s, when every state in the union outlawed same sex relations among consenting adults. No prostitution or public sexual conduct was necessary to be convicted of "the crime against nature". Gay men and women, caught up in police witch hunts, often had to denounce others. And in addition to being locked up in jail, people’s names, and sometimes photographs were published, and homes and jobs would be lost…
Across the country there was an alarming vagueness in legal definitions as to who might be classified as a sexual psychopath. State laws defined a sexual psychopath as someone who had a "propensity" to commit sex offenses (Michigan and Missouri) or who "lacked the power to control his sexual impulses" (Massachusetts and Nebraska). In most states, however, authorities couldn’t just pluck such a person off the street and label him a sexual psychopath. In Alabama, for instance, the suspect had to be convicted of a sex crime first. Under the proposed Iowa legislation, such a person had to be charged with – but not necessarily convicted of – a "public offense." In Nebraska, on the other hand, a suspect didn’t have to be charged; all that was needed were certain facts showing "good cause" and the process of classification as a sexual psychopath could begin. And in Minnesota, the only requirements were a petition by a county attorney and an examination by "two duly licensed doctors of medicine."
Whatever their individual wordings, such laws were intended to bring about the indefinite of dangerous or socially undesirable people. In all these states, a sexual psychopath could not be released from detention until psychiatrists rule that he was "cured" or at the very least no longer posed a threat to society.
Despite their good intentions, sexual psychopath laws invariably took a catch-all approach to sexual offenses. The intended targets may have been rapists and murderers, but in almost every state with a sexual psychopath law, little or no distinction was made between violent and non-violent offenses, between consensual and nonconsensual behavior, or between harmless "sexual deviates" and dangerous sex criminals. An adult homosexual man who had sex with his lover in the privacy of his bedroom was as deviant as a child murderer. A person who had a pornographic book or photograph hidden in a night table faced the same punishment as a rapist. All these people were lumped into one category – that of the sexual psychopath – and could be incarcerated in a state hospital indefinitely.
New York lawyer and judge Morris Ploscowe, one of the most prominent critics of sexual psychopath laws at the time, found that these were most often used to punish and isolate minor offenders rather then dangerous predators. In Minnesota, which enacted its sexual psychopath law in the ’30s, some 200 people were committed to state hospitals in the first ten years of the law’s existence, according to Ploscowe. Most were detained for homosexual activity, not for being hard-core sex criminals.
–Neal Miller: Sex-Crime Panic
This may be difficult for some of my heterosexual readers to grasp here…but back in those days, mere possession of pornography was enough to get you lumped in with rapists, murderers…and homosexuals. What may be difficult for some of my younger gay readers to grasp, is that a heterosexual charged with possession of pornography back then would likely be more appalled to to find themselves being compared to homosexuals then to rapists and murderers. The stigma of being homosexual really was that profound. You were more despicable then even rapists and murderers. More despicable even, then a communist.
When the U.S. Supreme Court abolished the sodomy laws in 2003, fourteen states still had some form of sodomy law on the books…four of them applying only to conduct between members of the same sex. In Idaho and Michigan you could get life for it. That was only six years ago.
If you’re curious, Miller’s book, Sex Crime Panic is a good place to begin developing an understanding of what Stonewall means to your gay and lesbian neighbors. Miller details events that took place in Iowa in 1955, following the rape and murder of two children. To address a growing public anti-gay hysteria, authorities arrested 20 gay men who they never even claimed had anything to do with the murders, had them declared "sexual psychopaths" and locked them up in a state mental hospital indefinitely. The only thing unique about Miller’s story, is that someone actually went to the trouble to document it all, finally.
Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-Jig…Goooood Evening J.R….
So…I’ve been on the road for a few weeks. And I’ve not been updating my blog very much. And there’s a reason for that and it isn’t that I’m not talkative anymore. I’ve actually been very active on my Facebook account while on the road. And the reason for that is there is a handy little Facebook application for the iPhone that works…sorta kinda. There’s a lot it’s missing, but for basically updating your status, sending Facebook email and posting photos off your iPhone it works okay.
There is a WordPress app for the iPhone too, but I need to upgrade my WordPress software to enable it and as I have some customization in amongst my php files that isn’t a simple chore. I need to set aside some time for it. I could also enable email posting too I suppose…but again I need to set aside some time to experiment with it.
Anyway…I’m back at Casa del Garrett again, and I have lots to talk about in the coming days. But for now I need a rest. Here’s some quick stats from Traveler’s trip computer…
6753 Miles
29.6 Miles Per Gallon Average
61 Miles Per Hour Average
111:04 Hours Driving
30.7 Miles Per Gallon Averaged Today (6-10-2009)
That last figure is from the time I started the car this morning in Vandalia Illinois to shutting it down just now in front of Casa del Garrett in Baltimore. That’s almost entirely highway driving with the cruise control on, which I did more to keep me safe from speed traps then for gas milage.
I’ll total up the money this weekend. I didn’t buy as much turquoise this trip as I usually do when driving through the southwest. But I got a couple of really nice pieces, and one very nice amber bracelet in Chinatown. Brother-Mine has promised me a custom jewelry box to finally give all this turquoise a nice home.
I’ve got tons of photos, which I’ll work on over the weekend too.
I love my native state, California. I often dream of living out there. That was the plan, once upon a time. But then I got the job of my dreams, and a nice little Baltimore rowhouse to go with it, and so Maryland is probably where I’ll spend the rest of my life too. But…it’s good to be home. I love to travel…I love the open road. But…it felt so nice to walk into my house a few hours ago. So very, very nice…
On SLOG… Charles Mudede hits me where I am still pretty raw… Where I guess it will always hurt…
This morning, around James and 5th, a woman across the street waves at me. She is around 50, black, and wearing a tracksuit. I think it is my mother. She is on her morning walk; she is waving at her son. But a closer look reveals the waving person to be not my mother but a crackhead who has mistaken me for a crackhead or dealer. I look away from her and walk up the hill.
But to slip by a trick of light and colors into that split second was something wonderful. In that split second I believed that my dead mother was alive and out and about. She was in the world with her own body. The thing about a death is that it finishes not so much the person but the relationship with that person. Instead of the subject object relationship, there is now only a subject—you who survives. The death of a close person is the total internalization of that person. Your living body becomes the site of their burial. It is here inside that the dead have something like an afterlife (alive but not alive, in time but not in time). They roam the body like a ghost roams a tomb.
Mom… Dad… My favorite uncle who I didn’t get nearly enough time with… All the friends who are missing now… It’s not the certainty of my own death that I hate. Death doesn’t come like a thief in the night and take you away in the twinkling of an eye. It kills you slowly…a little bit more and a little bit more every time it takes someone away from you. Ghosts are the phantom limbs of the part of you that exists in a friend’s smile or a parent’s embrace, that your subconscious mind keeps insisting must still be there. I could name them all. Sometimes I still see them walking by on the street. Then I realize it was just a chance resemblance in a walk, or a gesture, or a smile. And it hurts all over again.
I live in suburban Orange County, California, which is great place for my family and the weather can’t be beat. I grew up near Edinburgh, Scotland and moved to the US in the late ’80s, when the UK was just a mess. Orange County is one of the most conservative, wealthier counties in the US. Even so, I had an unbelievable experience the other day that brought home the recession in a way that still upsets me.
While on a lunch break I pulled into a gas station in Irvine to gas up. While I was standing around waiting for my gas guzzler to fill up I heard a small boy crying. Over in the far corner of the parking lot was a fairly nice sedan, late ’90s model, perhaps a Lexus. It was parked next to the air-and-water pump. I could not see anyone but I could still hear a child crying from somewhere near the car. Then I heard something like "No, Daddy, that hurts." Well, this got my attention real quick, so I wandered around the back of my car to get a better look.
Two small good looking young boys, ages roughly 3 and 7 were being bathed in the free water pump by their parents. The young kid was crying as the water was cold and the dad was attempting to rinse the shampoo from his son’s hair The mom was trying to comfort the young one. When I looked at the car again I noticed it was absolutely packed with clothes, etc. It hit me right away that this family was homeless.
I could just see the sadness and desperation on the mom’s face. I felt a chill inside. I walked up to the dad and offered him all the cash I had – about $30. The look in his eyes was something I will always remember: grateful, yet ashamed. A sad, sad situation. And for this to happen in Orange County is just remarkable.
It was seeing this back during the big Reagan recession that cured me of my libertarian delusion. For the same reason a nation of free people still needs a rule of law, an economy needs regulation to prevent corruption and maintain a healthy state of competition in the marketplace. So when you hear some dimwit libertarian or Randite ask "Who are you to tell other people what to do with their property?", the answer should be, loud and clear "I’m one of the people who gets sick whenever someone in the boardroom of a hedge fund I’ve never even heard of sneezes, that’s who."
I could just see the sadness and desperation on the mom’s face.
That face is what you get when you take the brakes off. Every. Time.
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committe held the first-ever hearing on the Uniting American Families Act, which would equalize the status of foreign-born same-sex partners of American citizens. Heterosexual Americans can earn citizenship for their foreign partners by marrying them. Gays, obviously, cannot do that, effectively making a gay American and his or her foreign spouse legal strangers.
Testifying was Shirley Tan, a Fillipino woman who has been with her American partner for 23 years. Together, they are raising twelve-year-old twin boys…
…one of Tan’s children started crying within seconds of the start of her testimony. At the sight of this, Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy stopped the hearing and asked Tan if her son might want to sit in another room, where presumably a Senate staffer would console him for the duration of what was clearly an emotionally fraught experience. For most people, the sight of a 12-year-old boy in tears at the prospect of his mother being deported halfway around the world would invoke some sympathy. Unmoved, however, was Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, ranking minority member of the Committee and the only Republican to bother to attend the hearing. At the sight of the weeping boy, according to a Senate staffer who was at the hearing, Sessions leaned towards one of his aides and sighed, "Enough with the histrionics."
Take Note:
Sessions opposes the bill, stating that it would amount to a federal recognition of same-sex marriage.
I keep drumming on this but it’s a simple fact: Everything we have ever asked for in this fight, from hospital visitation to the repeal of the sodomy laws amounts to recognition of same-sex marriage if you listen to our enemies. This has always been their trump card in Every Fucking battle over any and everything: turn it into a fight over same sex marriage.
So it makes no sense to say that we are wasting energy fighting over same-sex marriage when we could be putting our resources into fighting for anti-discrimination and hate crime laws. Everything is a fight over same-sex marriage. Which is to say, everything is a fight over the legitimacy of our emotional lives. The pieces make up a whole at the center of which is a simple question: do gay people experience life the same way heterosexuals do, or do we, as Orson Scott Card would say, merely play house in hollow mimicry of genuine emotions that heterosexuals feel?
Look at Sessions’ gut level knee jerk response to that kid’s tears again. Histronics. He doesn’t believe they are real. They can’t possibly be. Because that family is only playing house. It isn’t a real family. They don’t have real feelings. It’s just an act they have convinced themselves of. Even the kids. This is the enemy your gay and lesbian neighbors have been facing for decades now.
At a hearing earlier this year on one of the stalled bills to allow same-sex marriage, Mark S. Goldberg told a Senate committee about his months-long battle last fall to persuade state authorities to release to him the body of his partner of 17 years, Ron Hanby, so he could grant Hanby’s wish for cremation — only to have that request rejected too because “we were not legally married or blood relatives.”
After struggling for years with depression, he said, Hanby took his own life.
Try to picture Goldberg’s state of mind right then. The death of the one you love is hard enough, but this was a suicide. He must have been absolutely devastated. But then, homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. So now is just the right time to twist the knife in his heart…to make sure he knows how much he is hated.
Goldberg said he tried to show the police and the state medical examiner’s office “our wills, living wills, power of attorney and marriage certificate” from Connecticut, but “no one was willing to see these documents.”
He said he was told the medical examiner’s office was required to conduct a two-week search for next of kin, but the medical examiner’s office waited a full week before placing the required ad in a newspaper. And then when no one responded, he said, they “waited another week” to notify another state agency of an unclaimed body.
After four weeks, he said, a Department of Human Services employee “took pity on me and my plight … reviewed our documentation and was able to get all parties concerned to release Ron’s body to me,” but then the cremation society refused to cremate Ron’s body.
“On the same day, I contacted the Massachusetts Cremation Society and they were more than willing to work with me and cremate Ron’s body,” and so, “on November 6, 2008, I was able to finally pick up Ron’s remains and put this tragedy to rest.”
They treated this man, this grieving lover, like so much human garbage. And without a doubt they all did it, every single mother fucking one of them in this chain of events, with a sense of moral righteousness.
The right to bury the one you loved, and shared a life together with, is just one out of the great plenty of rights heterosexual couples take for granted every single day. It is a safe bet, none safer, that a lot of folks in Rhode Island think extending even that one to gay people is far too much. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…
WICHITA, Kan. – Dr. George Tiller, who remained one of the nation’s few providers of late-term abortions through decades of protests and attacks, was shot and killed Sunday in a church where he was serving as an usher and his wife was in the choir.
The gunman fled, but a 51-year-old suspect was arrested some 170 miles away in suburban Kansas City three hours after the shooting, Wichita Deputy Police Chief Tom Stolz said.
Andrew Sullivan writes that Bill O’Reilly painted a bull’s eye on the doctor during one of his shows. John Aravosis reminds us that President Obama caved recently to right wing demands to bottle up or tone down a report on domestic terrorism. At some point, this naton is going to have to confront its right wing hate mongers and their willing tools. Either that, or let them cow us all into the facist theocracy of their dreams. In the meantime, I am on vacation and I have a new mantra…
…I will not become a misanthrope…I will not become a misanthrope…I will not become a misanthrope…
Yes…I haven’t been very talkative here lately. I’m on vacation and these days I try to keep the world at arm’s length when I am trying to rest and relax. I’m at my brother’s house in Oceano for a bit…then on to San Francisco and the Java One developer’s conference. At the moment, I just don’t want to deal with the world.
Here’s some images for you, until the talking feather comes back my way again…
In Grand Junction…The Rain In Maryland Has Apparently Followed Me…
I decided to abandon my plan to go into lower Kansas and from there into the Rockies and take a small scenic side road though them up to I-70. The weather here in the four corners states is horrible…all socked in with clouds and rain. And it looks like it will be that way for days to come. I suppose in some of the desert areas they appreciate getting rain, but this seems a tad much and the Colorado river is all floody now. I drive over it and it’s almost up to the bottom of the road deck on some bridges now. This throws my plans into some chaos since it means some of the scenic side roads I wanted to travel down might get washed out. I don’t want to get stuck driving down a small side road in the Utah canyon lands only to have to turn around and drive hundreds of miles back the way I came because the road in front of me got washed out. Or worse, get stuck because now the road behind me is washed out too.
So when I got to Oakley Kansas I drove US 40 for a while in the plains and then just let it take me back to I-70. Now I’m here in Grand Junction after going through some serious elevation changes that seriously stressed my out of shape 55 year old body. Around ten thousand feet I started noticing my heart pounding and my face getting all flushed out. I stopped at a rest stop at ten thousand six hundred feet and tried to get myself stabilized and just kept being on the edge of too dizzy to drive. Crap. I guess I my sitting down all the friggin’ time job has left my circulatory system a tad weakened. Or maybe I just have my mom’s side of the family’s bad heart gene. So I guess going up the volcano to see Keck is out of the question now…
It’s memorial day weekend, which I wasn’t aware of when I planned this thing out (I’m a software engineer…I am oblivious to the regular work week of most folks…), so I’ve been watching warily the parking lots of the motels I pass along the way, trying to judge how full they’re getting. I don’t normally make reservations on these road trips because I want the freedom to adjust my travel plans as I see things along the way. But this puts me at risk of entering a town tired at the end of the day and wanting to stop now, and all the motels are full and then I have to keep driving and hope the next town over isn’t full too. That’s happened to me.
So I freaked when I drove past Rifle Colorado and saw all the motel lots jammed full. When I got to Parachute I hit the first little motel I saw and asked for a room and they gladly gave it to me, which should have set my alarm bells off. But I was just releaved to have a room for the night. The room was around back and while it was nice the neighborhood behind the room was scary. I sat in the room for a while looking out the window and thinking I’m driving a Mercedes-Benz and it’s going to stick out like a neon sign around here telling everyone who looks at it that there are probably things worth busting out a window in that car for…and breaking into the room it’s in front of…
So I freaked and got back in the car hoping that Grand Junction wouldn’t be full when I got there. I shouldn’t have worried. But once I got here I made a reservatin online via Travelocity for Kayenta, my favorite place to stay near Monument Valley.
I’m off now to try and see what I can see in the Utah canyon lands. Given propsition 8 I’ll try not to spend much money while I’m there (Kayenta is in Arizona). But the weather may make my trip through here a bust this year and that’s really bringing me down today because I don’t think the price of gasoline is going to allow me to do this for many more years. This may be my last trip through the four corners area for a long, long time. And it’s getting rained out.
Tomorrow morning around now, bright eyed and bushy tailed, I should be on I-70 headed west. The Institute is sending me to the Java One conference in San Fransisco the first week in June, and I am taking vacation time to do another small road trip across the great plains, and the Rockies, and a little of the southwest. I want to do this while the price of gasoline still makes it possible. Last year at four dollars a gallon plus I simply could not do it.
Lane Wallace, posting on Sullivan’s blog yesterday, put up this image from a current MOMA exhibit titled, "Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West". I have a similar image of my own that I’ll post later today for comparison, taken on at the northern approach to Monument Valley down Utah highway 163. Images like these capture the allure of the road trip for me perfectly…
There’s a moment in every long distance road trip that I think of as escaping the gravity of home. Like the Apollo astronauts who escaped the earth’s gravity to go to the moon…there is a threshold you cross on a long distance drive where heading back home to your own comfortable bed is no longer possible, even if you push it bleary eyed into the night. You must bed down somewhere else. Keep going and its two nights. Then three. You’ve left the safe comfortable orbit of home. Now you’re traveling among the planets. At some point, and for me it’s usually the middle of the second day, comes the awareness that no matter what happens, you’re not getting back home any time soon. You and your car are a self contained capsule, scooting down the highway, looking for whatever it is ahead of you that you’ve never seen before…
Friday May 24, 2003
To really get to know planet Earth you have to travel across it. Not over it in an airplane. A train comes closer. But you need a personal, private mode of transit to really get to know it, see its many different faces. You have to have your hands on the steering wheel, your feet on the pedals, feel your vehicle respond to the road. Then you are one with the land you’re traveling across. You should feel the sun and wind on your skin, be completely free, untethered. Then you can stop whenever, wherever. Get out of your car. Feel the land under your feet. The wind plays with your hair. It came from over that horizon. Look. It’s telling you that there is something over there you should go see.
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