[A longish post about developing film and the wages of procrastination…]

I have a little staging area in my basement bathroom/darkroom, where I sit the odd roll of exposed film to be developed at a later date.   If it’s something immediate, I do it then and there.  But if the roll gets put into the staging area who knows when I’ll develop it.  I’ll get to it later, I tell myself.  Later being anywhere from tomorrow to the heat death of the universe.

Point of fact, as of Saturday morning I had about twenty-five rolls of exposed 35mm black and white film from various periods in the past decade that I hadn’t yet processed.  Some of it was stored in the fridge, and some in the darkroom staging area, and none of it was labeled.  This became important when I decided this weekend that I absolutely positively had to develop the last roll of black and white I took at the class reunion.  Over a year ago.  Okay…now which one was that…??

I’d turned in the digital images from the reunion, and tons of shots I’d taken back in high school, long ago.  But that last solitary roll of Tri-X I’d exposed mostly just for old times sake, just to see myself snapping some Tri-X with my classmates as I had once upon a time back when we were all kids, just hung out there waiting.  And waiting.  This weekend, I was determined to get to it.  I reckoned I’d just develop what I had in the staging area until I got to the roll I was looking for.  Ha.  Setting up to develop film isn’t as simple as copying your digital image files from the flash card to the computer.  It’s a tad messy and you have to be careful. This is probably why I’m getting so lackadaisical with my roll film backlog.  The digital camera is spoiling me.

I needed to make fresh chemicals and for that I needed to go to the store and buy distilled water.  A gallon for Kodak Rapid Fix, Indicator Stop Bath, Perma-Wash and Photo-Flo, then enough to make a half-gallon of HC-110 stock solution.  From the stock solution I make a working solution of one ounce stock to fifteen water.  I have a Kindermann stainless steel tank that can hold two reels of 120 roll film and four 35mm.  The tank needs a quart (32 ounces) to cover four reels of 35mm, so that’s two ounces of HC-110 stock solution to 30 ounces of water to make 32 ounces of developer.  That’s a one-shot solution…that is, you use it once and toss it.  The advantage to a one-shot solution is you always start with your developer at a consistent strength.  But I was going to need 30 ounces of distilled water for every batch of film I ran through the tank.  So I went to the grocery store and bought six gallons of distilled water.  I swear one of these days someone is going to look at me going through the checkout line with all those bottles of distilled water and think I’m running a meth lab or something and call the cops.

So I get my plastic jugs of distilled water home and start cooking up a batch of fresh chemicals.  I have a large assortment of measuring flasks, and a bucket I’ve marked off with half-gallon and gallon tick marks (my European readers are just going to have to endure my constant references here to U.S. measurements…sorry.).  I pour the old chemicals out of their storage bottles and rinse them thoroughly.  One thing this process isn’t is very green.  I use tons of water and all sorts of chemicals are going right down the drain.  Whether the chemicals needed to create the circuit boards and memory sticks of the digital realm are any greener when all is said and done is something I wonder about.  But from a household point of view, film is a messy business.

I have the basement bathroom light sealed.  All I need a darkroom for these days is loading film into the tank.  That needs absolute darkness.  I have a routine.  I set down my film cassettes and lay out all my tools…the stainless steel film reels and developing tank, its lid, a pair of scissors and a tool for popping open 35mm film cassettes.  I need these things to be where my hands expect them to be, because once the lights are out the darkroom is, must be, so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face.  You have to know the room by touch.  You have to do everything by touch.

A 35mm film cassette is a metal case with a length of film inside, wound around a plastic spool.  When I have the lights out, I feel for one, get my fingers around it, and then find the opening tool and pop the case open.  Then I ease out the roll of film inside.  There better be not even the faintest breath of light in here now or else the film has just been ruined.  I carefully put the opener tool back Exactly where it was, then get my fingers around the scissors.  The start of a roll of film is shaped into a little tab that goes into the camera’s take-up spool.  I have to cut that off to make the end square.  When that’s done and the scissors put back, I feel around for one of the stainless steel reels and carefully try to get film started on it. 

The reel holds the film in the tank and allows the processing chemistry to circulate around it.  Some folks use a loader device but I use my fingers.  In the darkroom it’s all about touch.  So long as your hands are clean you can safely touch the back of the film and the edges and you’re fine.  Just never touch the emulsion side.  You need to feel around the edges of the reel to know which way it’s oriented so you don’t try to load the film on backwards.  Then thread the film into the center of the reel and start working it around the track.  Once you get it started correctly it’s not hard to wind film onto a reel.  If it jumps the track you can feel it start to kink and you just backup until it’s going on right again and continue.  You must do all this by touch.  The saving grace of it is that the natural film curl helps you out in this.  It just wants to slide nicely into the reel.  If it’s fighting you then you know it’s jumped the track somewhere and you need to backup and do it over.  When I reach the end of the film I need the scissors again to cut it off the spool.  I let the pieces…the metal case and the spool, just fall onto the floor in the darkness.

When I’ve wound a roll of film into a reel it goes into the tank.  Rinse, repeat…  I do this four times for four rolls of film and I’m done.  I put the lid tightly down on the tank and now I can turn the lights back on.   My floor is littered with film cassette cases, spools and film tabs, which I clean up then and there.  It’s Real Easy throughout this process to let everything turn into a big mess and you can’t let that happen or you’ll get sloppy and make a mistake and ruin your film.  You have to concentrate.  I am not a naturally tidy person, but I will keep my work areas clean and well organized because that helps me keep my focus on what I’m doing.

I take my film tank around to the art room The rest of this can happen in normal light.  Thanks to the scanner and the computer I don’t need a paper darkroom anymore.  Processing film is nothing compared to the work and mess of making paper enlargements.  Nowadays I can make bigger prints of far, far better quality with Bagheera, my art room Macintosh, and my nice Epson wide bed printer, then I ever could with my old enlarger setup.  And it’s a lot less of a mess.  But processing black and white film is mess enough.

The art room is the finished front half of my basement, which the previous homeowner made into a clubroom.  It’s got the usual knotty pine walls and thick carpet.  He’d put a bar in the back of it.  I set up there.  On the bar I lay down a work rag because no matter how careful I am there is always some spillage.  I put out three one quart measuring flasks.  Into one I carefully measure and pour two ounces of HC-110 into 30 ounces of distilled water.  Then I pour a quart of stop bath and fixer into each of the others.  I have a precision Weston dial thermometer I dip into the flask of developer.  It responds quickly and I get a fix on the solution temperature.  From that I calculate my development time using the Kodak charts.  I am using a non-standard dilution of HC-110…the photo hacker children call it "dilution ‘H’".  But it’s simply a double of the standard times for dilution ‘B’.  I also take the temperature of the other two solutions.  This is important.  If they’re not close enough to the temperature of the developer I have to take steps to equalize them.  Tri-X is a fast, but grainy film.  If you keep everything the same temperature during the process the grain you end up with will be nice and uniform and not bother the eye really.   But if the temperature of your solutions diverge very much the grain will tend to clump together and it will look horrible.

When I have all my chemistry ready I hang an old fashion stop watch around my neck and click on and pour developer into the tank and I’m off.  For the next fifteen minutes I can’t be disturbed or distracted by anything.  While you have solution in the tank you have to watch the clock and agitate every so often.  That’s because the solution against the more highly exposed parts of the film gets exhausted quicker then what’s against the less exposed parts, and so development slows down there sooner then elsewhere.  Agitation brings fresh chemical up against the parts of the film that are exhausting it quicker.  If you don’t agitate those areas of the film don’t get as well developed and overall contrast suffers.  But on the other hand if you agitate too much the effect is to over develop parts of the film.  This effect is something a film photographer knows how to manipulate depending on shooting conditions.  This, and adjusting the development time, is how we used to finesse contrast in the negative before Photoshop.

So I’m sloshing chemicals in and out of the tank.  11 minutes development time at 65 degrees f.  10 minutes at 68, which is the more ideal temperature.  My basement nicely oscillates between the two in the winter months.  In the summer I have to let my chemicals cool down in a bath of cold water before I can begin.  Pour out the developer and then pour in, and right back out, the stop bath.  This is just a very weak acid solution.  The developer is a base (remember your chemistry class?) and when the stop bath hits what’s left of the developer sticking to the film it kills it.  It’s like an instant off switch for the developer stage.  Then in comes the fixer.  Fixer is acidic too, and so some photographers don’t bother with a stop bath for film.  I do it on the ground that at least it protects the fixer from becoming exhausted too quickly.  But it isn’t critical.  The developer changes the silver salts in the film that were hit by light to metallic silver.  The fixer dissolves the silver salts that were not developed, leaving the negative image on the film.  4 minutes to fix.

Then I have to wash it.  I take the tank over to the sink, take the film reels out of the tank and drop them into a film washer that holds the same size and number of film reels as the tank.  It connects to the sink faucet and two holes at the base draw in air and create a vortex that swirls around the film, getting the last of the fixer off it.  That’s very important.  If any fixer is left behind on the film it will begin to slowly stain it and then your negatives are ruined.  Again, I have to monitor the temperature of the wash carefully.  It needs to be the same as the chemicals I used for developing. 

Now I can relax a bit.  The critical part is done.  I will usually take a quick glance at the film now, to reassure myself that everything is okay.  I can let my mind wander a bit…maybe go grab a snack from the kitchen.  But I still keep the stopwatch around my neck.  After about fifteen minutes of washing I pour a solution of Perma-Wash into the tank and dip the film in it for a minute.  This is supposed to neutralize the last of the fixer.  Then wash for a few minutes more, then I pour a solution of Photo-Flo into the tank and bathe the film in that for a minute.  Photo-Flo is a simple wetting agent that prevents spotting on the film as it dries.

Slosh, slosh, slosh.  By now I have little spills everywhere.  I’m not exceptionally clumsy, but you have to get these solutions in and out of the tank pretty quickly and I won’t fret if a little spills now and then.  Your kitchen isn’t going to remain spotless while you’re busy cooking in it either.

Then I take the film back to the bathroom and hang it up to dry.  It must dry in as dust-free an environment as I can manage.  At this stage the film emulsion is soft, and if dust gets on it now as it is drying and hardening it’s there forever.

Once the film is up on hangers to dry, I begin cleaning my workspace.  Even if I am going to do another batch right away, I clean everything up.  Especially then.  The used developer goes down the sink.  The stop bath and fixer back into their storage jugs.  The tank and reels and empty measuring flasks into a wash bin I carry upstairs to the kitchen sink.  I mop up every spill until the workspace is clean and dry again.  I rinse out the tank and reels and flasks and set them out to dry, or hand dry them if I need to use them again right now.

Take a breath.  Pause.  Think about what you are doing…go over your mental checklists…  Wash…rinse…repeat…

I did this all weekend long, looking for that damn roll of film from the reunion.  And I didn’t find it.  Twenty-five rolls I processed, and none of them were the one I was looking for. 

There was one roll left in the staging area…a roll I wasn’t sure was Tri-X.  It was in a Fuji color film cassette, but I’d often re-used those for bulk reloading back in the day.  I usually make sure to put a piece of tape over it to identify it as Tri-X though.  This one didn’t have that, but it was one of the older Fuji cassettes I usually used for that.  So I turned off the darkroom lights, popped the case, cut off the tab, put the film back in the case, turned the lights back on and looked at it.  Even before I’d turned the lights back on though, I knew it was one of my bulk reloads because of how I’d shaped the tab.

I had a batch of film from the big tank in the wash.  I had some smaller tanks though that held only one and two reels, and a spare reel.  So I ran that roll through the process while the others were washing.  That wasn’t the roll I was looking for either.

I was beginning to get desperate.  I dug around and uncovered three more unprocessed rolls of Tri-X in a part of the fridge I’d reserved for color.  They’d gotten mixed in, but this was old stuff and I doubted the film I was looking for was one of those.  I dug through my camera bags looking for anything I might have missed.  I found a partially exposed roll still in one camera body that I though might…just might…be the roll from the reunion.  My habit is to use one body for color and one for black and white, and at the reunion I had both of those plus the digital camera.  Maybe I just hadn’t taken out the roll of film from the black and white body.

But I was done for the weekend.  I’d used up all the distilled water I’d bought and before I could process any more I’d need to buy some.  After a thorough search of Casa del Garrett I’d come up with four possible rolls of film and a fifth that had still been in the camera.  Figured I’d do them Monday.  I was already thinking out my apology to the reunion committee for loosing the film.  It wouldn’t have been a big loss…I’d given them a ton of stuff already.  But that one last little roll might have had some good shots on it too, and it seemed now that it was gone.

So this morning I get up and start cutting all the film I’d developed down from the hangers.  I cut a roll to lengths of six shots each, and store the strips temporarily in glassine envelopes until I get them scanned.  During scanning the roll gets assigned a number based on a system I’ve used since high school, and then it goes into an archival film holder page with that number written on it, plus a few notes about what’s on it, and the page goes into a binder for safekeeping.  As I’m cutting I’m looking at what’s there.  It’s an odd assortment of images from almost a decade’s worth of odds and ends…film I hadn’t gotten around to developing because it wasn’t pressing.  An office Party.  Images of Kansas and Monument Valley.  Shots from around my Baltimore neighborhood.  Oh…what’s this…??

I’d worked my way back to the beginning of my weekend’s work and there, in the middle of one of the rolls, were the shots from the reunion.  I hadn’t taken a whole roll of black and white that evening, which was probably why I’d not developed it the next day.  I’d likely wanted to finish the roll first, then in the process of getting the color film developed and working on the digital images plus all the stuff from my high school years, I’d let it slip.   I’d developed the roll I was looking for in the very first batch I’d done and I’d missed it completely.  The reunion shots were right there, in between a trip to Stroudsburg to visit my friend Glenn, ironically another high school classmate I hadn’t seen in almost two decades, and Peterson’s performance at Gallaudet a month after.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere but I am unlikely to learn it.  Considering the volume of film I still shoot, even with the digital cameras in my stable, I actually don’t stage all that much.  It’s mostly odds and ends that I put aside for later processing.  There were another two full rolls from Peterson’s Gallaudet performance that I’d developed right away, and one from that first visit in years to see Glenn.  The reunion shots were in the middle of both of those and I had tons of other stuff from that event that I’d taken care of.  It fell between the cracks. 

I do this all the time…staging odds and ends for development that I never get around to for years, and then suddenly I do it all at once.  And what I discover every time is how facinating the odds and ends are when you look at them after years have gone by.  It’s like re-living random bits and pieces of your past all at once.  But I need at least, to make it a rule from now on, that no film goes into the staging area without a tag on it that tells me what it is. 

People who look like that, want people who look like that.

I’m not sick or dead or away somewhere…just discovering that I get a lot more done around the house when I have my computers turned off.  The weather here in Charm City is trying to struggle itself out of winter and I’m finding a lot of things to do outside.  Plus…I have two major photo projects I absolutely must get done this weekend.  Plus, I have a project demo I have to do at work, plus start the process of migrating the test center to new quarters.  In other words, I’m a bit swamped.  So…lite to no posting for a while.

I am treating myself to some nice dinners out though.  I’d become used to the Friday night happy hour and dinner with some gay friends in the Washington area.  I’m not doing that anymore for reasons I may go into here at a later date.  But there is tons of good eating right here in Baltimore, if not the tons of Gay bars and clubs that Washington has, and I’m taking more advantage of that now then I did before.   Very good eating within walking distance from the house at Cafe’ Hon and elsewhere on The Avenue.  And if I want to go downtown…my god Baltimore is just loaded with good eats.  They say the best revenge is living well.

My computers are a subtil trap.  They make me good money.  But they also keep me sitting down.  I don’t want to be spending the rest of my life sitting down.

DJW over at Lawyers, Guns and Money sums it up….

In the post Scott mentioned earlier, Dreher insists that the jarring juxtaposition that occasioned many readers to question his values and priorities, has been the subject of a significant misinterpretation. It’s the surprisingness of the "bisexuality is cool" claim that motivated his post, not it’s relative wrongness.

Many commenters remain, understandably, unpersuaded by his effort to explain his bizarre post. But it’s necessary to take Dreher at his word to fully grasp the depravity of his position. So let’s grant him: a) that a remark by one (horribly traumatized) parent is sufficient evidence to to grant that bisexuality is indeed "cool" in the high school culture of one East Texas town, and b) that while this doesn’t rise to the level of parricide in an index of moral wrongs, it is a disturbing and troubling trend that suggests something that was once right with the world has gone wrong.

The nature of the typical experience of non-heterosexual adolescents in our schools and our society is hardly a secret. The ostracization and bullying of those suspected to be non-heterosexual takes an enormous psychological toll, and has life and death consequences, as evidenced higher rates of depression and suicide amongst non-heterosexual youth. They typically live in fear: fear that something is horribly wrong with them, fear of being rejected by their friends and family, and fear of violence. But: in one small town, at least for some non-heterosexual youth, there’s a chance this status quo might be changing. For anyone whose moral worldview contains any compassion, changes to this horrific status quo are a sign of hope. For Dreher, it’s the precise opposite.

Dreher was adamant in that post that he was "so keeping his kids away" from modern American culture, if that meant a toleration of bisexuality…let alone one supposes homosexuality.  But what if one of those poor kids is gay themselves? 

Tens of thousands of gay kid come of age in that hostile environment every generation and many of them don’t make it to adulthood alive.  And it’s a fact that many of their parents would actually rather they killed themselves, or were killed, then grew up to be happy, contented gay adults.  It doesn’t take much to imagine where Dreher fits in.  He reads a horrific news article about a home invasion massacre, and instead of grieving for the dead kids, their mother, and the father who has to now carry those horrible memories to his grave, he goes on a rant about something the father said offhandedly about how cool bisexuality was in his town.  I read something like this and I can’t get out of my head how horrible their last moments must have been (which is why I avoid crime stories in the newspapers).  Dreher, reads it and is just stunned by the fact that bisexuals in one small East Texas town aren’t hated.

This is eminently typical of what hate does to a person’s conscience.  This is the conscience of the culture warriors.  Look at it if you have the stomach for it.  There is the Pit, grinning back at you.  The grotesque indifference to human life in that crime story, and in Dreher’s callow, superficial response to it, are of a single piece.  What is more shocking then the murder of a man’s entire family?  Why…bisexuality of course.

Don’t look for too long.  Nietzsche was right about the dangers of staring into an Abyss.

A wee update on This Post, concerning the kid who is suing his college because he couldn’t give an anti same-sex marriage speech in his public speaking class…

Exactly what Lopez said in Matteson’s class is unclear. Lopez turned down an interview request, Matteson did not respond to e-mails, and French said he did not know enough about the speech to detail it.

So we still don’t know what it was he actually said.  And that’s the crux of the entire episode.  But…dig it.  Lopez, the kid who is suing (through the courtesy of the culture warriors at the Alliance Defense Fund), isn’t saying.  Now…why would he not want to tell anyone what it was he actually said?  Better yet…why would couldn’t the reporters covering this story not be bothered to find out?

His Alliance Defense Fund mouthpiece (French) says Lopez spoke two verses from the bible that "had nothing to do with homosexuality."  But…look at this…he’s not saying what they were.  If he knows for a fact that they had nothing to do with homosexuality, then he knows what they were and he can tell the reporters what they were.  If he doesn’t know what Lopez actually said then he can’t say that they had nothing to do with homosexuality.

They’re being very evasive here.  It’s not hard to figure why.

Why I am not driving across the midwest by myself anytime soon…

Gunman: ‘If You’re Not A Christian You’re Going To Die’

BOULDER, Colo. — A 24-year-old ski lift operator who fatally shot the general manager of the Eldora ski area was determined to kill co-workers who weren’t Christian, according to court records obtained Thursday.

The documents, filed Wednesday in Boulder District Court, said witnesses told authorities that Derik Bonestroo walked into a building at work, fired a gun into the ceiling and said: "If you’re not Christian, you’re going to die."

General manager Brian Mahon was shot and killed Dec. 30 at the ski area west of Nederland, Colo., in Boulder County.

Witnesses said when Bonestroo asked Mahon’s religion, Mahon said "Catholic" and Bonestroo shot him twice: in the chest and head.

I guess that was the wrong answer.  I suppose Mormon wouldn’t have been a good answer either.  Or Unitarian I suppose.  The other employees fled out the back door and into the woods.  Boonestroo left in his car and was chased down by a local deputy who, fortunately, was also a SWAT team member.  When Boonestroo opened fire the deputy shot back and that was that for one little hammer of god.

He was found to be wearing the usual para military gear and armed to the teeth.  Oh…and this…

Among the list of items confiscated from Bonestroo’s apartment were medication and a dead cat that was stabbed several times, Pelle said. The cat was believed to be Bonestroo’s pet.

This is how the culture war staggers onward…with religious right megachurch gasbags calling down God’s wrath on Americans, knowing prefectly well that they are raising the temperature higher and higher and before long someone, some crazy someone, some massively stressed out to the point of breaking someone, will take their words and turn them into blood. 

By now you’ve probably heard about the nine year old Brazilian girl who was sexually abused and raped by her step-father.  She became pregnant with twins. Her mother arranged an abortion to save her life.  Doctors were found to do the procedure and the little girl’s life was saved.

The danger to a little nine year old girl’s life under those circumstances isn’t something you’d think a rational person would even question, let alone condemn the adults who took the measures they had to in order to save her life. 

You’d think.

Vatican backs abortion row bishop

A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication in Brazil of the mother and doctors of a young girl who had an abortion with their help.

The nine-year-old had conceived twins after alleged abuse by her stepfather.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re told Italian paper La Stampa that the twins "had the right to live" and attacks on Brazil’s Catholic Church were unfair.

…

The girl, who lives in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, was allegedly sexually assaulted over a number of years by her stepfather, possibly since she was six.

The fact that she was four months pregnant with twins was only discovered after she was taken to hospital in Pernambuco complaining of stomach pains.

…

Brazil only permits abortions in cases of rape or health risks to the mother.

Doctors said the girl’s case met both these conditions, but the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho said the law of God was above any human law.

He said the excommunication would apply to the child’s mother and the doctors, but not to the girl because of her age.

Guess who else the excommunication doesn’t apply to…

Upon learning of the abortion, the regional archbishop excommunicated the doctors, as well as the girl’s mother. He did not excommunicate the step-father, saying the crime he is alleged to have committed, although deplorable, was not as bad as ending a fetus’s life.

Emphasis mine.  As Andrew Sullivan said today, "I guess the Vatican is used to finding ways to see the lesser evil of raping and molesting children." 

Sullivan also notes today that Rod Dreher is shocked, shocked to learn that there are bisexual teenagers in East Texas.  Here’s the Dallas News story that fairly curdled poor Dreher’s blood…

Demons in the house: E. Texas man details escape from attack

Terry Caffey awoke to gunshots and his wife’s guttural screams.Instinctively, he threw his right arm over her body – taking three bullets in the forearm and three in the shoulder – before a seventh round caught him in the right cheek and exploded through his ear.

That one blew him out of bed, face down.

Moments later, someone shot Caffey three more times in the back.

"He came up and kicked my foot to make sure I was dead," he said. "There was heavy breathing, and I could hear them reloading. I was basically just waiting for them to shoot me in the back of the head. But it got very quiet, and he walked off."

Caffey passed out.

When he regained consciousness, furniture crashed, glass shattered and footsteps marched upstairs toward his children’s bedroom.

His right arm hung limp because a bullet had severed a nerve. He scrambled to his knees.

Then he heard his 13-year-old son Bubba cry out – "No, Charlie! No! Why? Why are you doing this?"

Caffey collapsed again…

No, No…wait just a moment…  That’s not the part of the story that shocked Rod Dreher.  This is:

Penny home-schooled the children soon after the family moved from Celeste, population 800, to Emory, population 1,200, about three years ago.

The transition to a larger school district was bumpy.

"I guess you’d call it culture shock," Caffey said. "Emory has a lot of bisexual kids; it’s like it was almost cool to be bisexual. One of the first things that happened was some girl wanted to be Erin’s little girlfriend. And I was like, ‘That ain’t happenin’.’ "

But after three years of home schooling and much discussion, the children re-enrolled in public schools in 2008. The boys seemed to thrive, but Caffey and his wife were concerned about Erin. 

Emphasis mine.  No, really, Dreher wrote an entire post off of this news story about a man surviving the home invasion massacre that killed his entire family, about how shocked he was to discover "a bisexual culture" in East Texas.  If you think I’m exaggerating that, let Rod tell you all about it himself…

…the killings aren’t what shocked me about this story. What got me was this: This is a tiny East Texas town — and there’s a bisexual culture in one of them, among the teenagers? WTF? What do I not get about teenage life these days? What do I not get about the cultural air kids breathe?

And now of course, he’s getting all pissy because people are questioning his sanity in the post’s comments…

UPDATE: To clarify: I’m not saying that the teenage culture of bisexuality is worse morally than murder, for heaven’s sake. Obviously murder — and murder of one’s own family — is about the worst thing imaginable.. I’m simply saying that I was more shocked by this tidbit about the decadent teenage culture in a tiny Texas town than I was by the foul crime itself. Big difference.

UPDATE.2: Reading the comments, what on earth is wrong with some of you? I’m not saying bisexuals killed that family.Good grief. It’s obvious that the murderers include the daughter and her boyfriend. The bisexuality thing was a mere aside that I found more startling than the murders, given the small-town culture where this crime took place. I freely admit that I am out of touch with teenage culture today. If you’re bound and determined to conclude that I think bisexuality is worse than murder, you’re completely wrong, and you’re willfully misreading my post for whatever reason. At least understand what you’re doing, and the bad faith in which you’re doing it.

A pastor was shot dead in his pulpit today in Illinois. That appalls me. It doesn’t shock me. This kind of thing happens these days. Sad but true. You don’t hear every day about a tiny Texas town whose teenagers are engaged in a culture of bisexuality. At least I don’t.

UPDATE.3 Ah, so now I get where the unusual traffic has been coming from.

Andrew Sullivan linked to this post, calling my point of view "clinical." So it must be to someone with his values. I think I have said five times here that murder is incomparable to bisexuality in terms of moral meaning, but why let that clarification get in the way of a good snit? The point of my post was not that one thing is worse than the other, but that I personally found one thing more shocking than the other. Shocking, in the sense of being surprised by something.

Well that sure clears things up doesn’t it.  Rod…you’re done.  Whatever humanity you may have once had within you…it’s gone now.  Don’t even bother trying to figure out why your readers are appalled.  You will never know.

You can wonder whether the culture war has utterly corrupted what might have otherwise been decent human beings, or whether they never actually took that belly flop into the gutter because they were there to begin with.  But if nothing else the culture war has made it pretty plain that there is a difference between spirituality and religious dogma, and the two are not compatible.  Dogma destroys the human spirit as surely as rust, because it demands we give it our conscience, our integrity, and eventually everything we are, and everything we might have become.  Dogma fashions out of our living bodies and empty shell for it and it alone to fill, and we stop being the person we are, and we become dogma. 

Jacob Bronowski put it perfectly in his series, The Ascent of Man…

There are two parts to the human dilemma.  One is the belief that the end justifies the means.  That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine.  The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts – obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.

It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false.  Look for yourself.  This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz.  This is where people were turned into numbers.  Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people.  And that was not done by gas.  It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma.  it was done by ignorance.  When people believe they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Science is a very human form of knowledge.  We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped.  Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.  Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.  In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken".

…We have to cure ourselves of the itch of absolute knowledge and power.  We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act.  We have to touch people.

But this is precisely what dogma demands we do not do. We cannot touch people, lest the scarecrow that dogma insists to us they must be, comes undone, and we see a human being not that much different from ourselves.

The state of mind, the state of society, is of a piece.   When we discard the test of fact in what a star is, we discard in it what a man is.

Likewise, when we discard the test of fact in what a homosexual is, we also discard in it the human being that they, and we are.  Integrity.  Dogma will not share power with it.  And that is the lesson people are learning…

Most religious groups in USA have lost ground, survey finds

When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers.

The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

"More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself,’ " says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.

Among the key findings in the 2008 survey:

• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, "the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion," the report concludes.

• Catholic strongholds in New England and the Midwest have faded as immigrants, retirees and young job-seekers have moved to the Sun Belt. While bishops from the Midwest to Massachusetts close down or consolidate historic parishes, those in the South are scrambling to serve increasing numbers of worshipers.

• Baptists, 15.8% of those surveyed, are down from 19.3% in 1990. Mainline Protestant denominations, once socially dominant, have seen sharp declines: The percentage of Methodists, for example, dropped from 8% to 5%.

…

The ARIS research also led in quantifying and planting a label on the "Nones" — people who said "None" when asked the survey’s basic question: "What is your religious identity?"

The USA Today article goes on to postulate a number of causes, from increased mobility to sex abuse scandals in the clergy.  But it doesn’t take on the most obvious one: culture war weariness.  People are sick of it.  They are sick of being told over and over again to hate their neighbor.  Sick all the more, for being told to hate their neighbor in the name of love.   And sick still more, for having that message of hate preached to them by the likes of this…

He did not excommunicate the step-father, saying the crime he is alleged to have committed, although deplorable, was not as bad as ending a fetus’s life.

I’m simply saying that I was more shocked by this tidbit about the decadent teenage culture in a tiny Texas town than I was by the foul crime itself. 

Religion isn’t on the decline in America.  People are just getting sick of being lectured by moral degenerates.  Life is good.  This good earth is a wonderful place to be living it.  Our families and friends give it sweetness.  Love and sex bring it joy and contentment.  To ask questions, to search for knowledge is not only a good thing, it is a great adventure.  Life is good.  The gutter is no place to be living it.

If you’re picky about how your photos are displayed, then putting them up on the web is going to make you pull your hair out.  You can get it just right…perfect even…in your photo software (I use Apple’s Aperture).  Then you look at what you’ve done in a browser and it isn’t the same.  The browser rendering engine renders it just a tad differently then you see it in your photo software, or any of the operating system’s built-in picture viewers.  And what is more, each browser seems to render your image files a tad differently. 

I was looking at some of the photos I posted yesterday in Firefox and the contrast was off.  I started up Safari and they looked better.  I’m looking at them now in IE and they look very flat.  I took those shots in overcast conditions and paid careful attention to the contrast values as I was making the image files for upload, and the browsers just make all that work go for nothing.  Hopefully something of image content gets through to the viewer.  That’s all I can do.

I’m going to re-arrange my photo galleries a tad in the next few days.  2, 3, 4 and 6 are coming down, and I’m going to create a few loose galleries that group the images together better then the topics I put them under there.  Rather then the context of how I came to take them, I’m going to try something a little different.  I’m working myself up to producing a nice book of my art photography later this year.  It won’t be cheap and I doubt I’ll sell very many.  But I’m going to arrange with one of those print-on-demand outfits so I won’t have to buy a lot of inventory all at once, which I can’t afford. 

I’ve got some books on self publishing, and getting set up with those ISDN numbers and such.  They hand them out in such a way as to indicate clearly to book sellers and reviewers that the book was self published, but in this day and age I really doubt that makes much of a difference.  Whatever I produce will be as high in quality as I can get, which will probably make the book somewhat expensive, but this is going to be my declaration of a lifetime’s work so far and I’m going to do it right.  What will be in the book is the images as close as I intend them to be viewed as I can get from a printer.  The only thing better would be right off my own printer, which you can always ask me for if you want.

That’s the other thing I’m going to put on the gallery main page…how to order.  I sell them for $40 for 11×17 inch prints, plus shipping.  Signed and dated on premium gloss photo paper in non-fading pigment base ink at maximum resolution.  They will look much better on your wall then in a browser, so if there’s something in the galleries that you like ask me about it.

Andrew Sullivan…

Mastering American Accents

Harder than some might think. I, for one, will never forgive Dominic West for McNulty.

That’s okay…I can’t bear to listen to Dick Van Dyke’s Bert.  I never watched The Wire (I actually live in Baltimore…I don’t need to watch it on TV too…), but West couldn’t have been that bad. 

It gets worse for actors with the global media these days.  You watch British television on cable.  You watch British movies.  You watch ordinary English folk doing this and that on YouTube.  And then you listen to American actors trying to get it right and maybe the best of them, or the ones who’ve lived in England most of their lives are convincing, but mostly it’s an embarrassment. Let it be said a lot of actors don’t do different American accents very well either (southern…deep southern…New England…Western…).  That’s something you really notice the more you travel within the U.S.

Bawlmer, hon?  Yeah…everyone here in my neighborhood knows I didn’t grow up here.  J.K. Rowling was absolutely right to insist on a British cast.

Scott Lively, author of the revisionist Pink Swastika, is in Uganda.  Lively has previously traveled to eastern Europe, and the former Soviet block, to tell the people there that the Nazis who massacred millions of Slavs during World War II were homosexuals.  Here’s what I wrote about it a year ago January…

The Christian Science Monitor has an article up about The Watchmen On The Walls…

Alex Shevchenko has been arraigned for a hate crime tied to the assault and eventual death of Satender Singh in July. According to prosecutors, Mr. Shevchenko and Andrey Vusik taunted Mr. Singh in a park because they thought he was gay. Mr. Vusik eventually threw a punch that toppled Singh, dashing his head, they charge.

Gay leaders in Sacramento say the incident followed several years of escalating tensions with some Slavic immigrants.

"The gut feeling of the [gay] community is that preaching among the local Russian evangelical community is breeding hate and that something would happen. And Satender was the something that happened," says Ed Bennett, a gay Democratic activist.

While Slavic leaders say their community is being unfairly scapegoated for legitimate political protests and deeply held religious beliefs, some monitors warn that an emerging group called the Watchmen on the Walls may be fomenting a dangerous atmosphere within the ranks of Slavic immigrants here.

I’ll say it’s dangerous.  Scott Lively, one of the group’s founders, is also the author of The Pink Triangle…a Holocaust revisionist book that argues that the Nazis were basically a homosexual movement and that rather then being among the victims of the Holocaust, homosexuals were the primary instigators of it.  Consider that Lively is now preaching this message to Slavs in what was the eastern Soviet bloc at one time…a people who suffered a staggering loss of life at the hands of the Nazis during world war two…

Videos of Watchmen conferences abroad suggest some leaders are less modulated, and their audience less against violence. One video shows Lively giving a version of Singh’s killing different from reported facts, including the notion that Singh was undressing in front of children. The audience cheered twice as Lively recounted the punch and the death of Singh – a reaction Lively rebuked, saying: "We don’t want homosexuals to be killed. We want them to be saved."

The camera was on and Lively knew it.  There is no way on God’s green earth Lively doesn’t know the impact his message that the Nazis were homosexuals and homosexuals are all basically Nazis has on this particular group of people.  He knows Exactly what he’s doing.  He has never publicly condemned the killing of Satender Singh by a group of young Slav men in Sacramento.  There’s a reason for that.

Eastern Europe taken care of, and sufficiently incited to murder, Lively has now traveled to Africa, with basically the same message: African genocide is caused by homosexuals…it is the homosexuals who are killing Africans…  Jim Burroway reports…

Uganda Anti-Gay Conference: Day Three — Gays Blamed For Rwandan Genocide; More Exodus Ties To Holocaust Revisionism

According to anonymous blogger GayUganda — as we said, Ugandan gay bloggers need to remain anonymous for their own safety — American Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively provided the much-anticipated red meat on day three of the anti-gay conference taking place in Kampala.

On Saturday, Lively repeated his discredited historical revisionist theory in which he claims that the cornerstone of  Germany’s Nazi lies firmly in the gay movement, and that the gay movement today, if left unchecked, will result in a similarly murderous fascism wherever it goes. In Kampala, he went further by expanding his examples of what he calls homosexuals’ murderous impulse by blaming the 1994 Rwanda genocide on gay men.

Now consider the environment Lively is pouring his gasoline into…

Lively was asked about the current state of Ugandan law, which provides for a life sentence for homosexuality. Lively reportedly approved of the existing law, and endorsed adding a provision mandating forcing convicted gay men and women into ex-gay therapy. Conference speakers had called for such a law on the second day of the conference. Adding more fuel to the fire, GayUganda had earlier noticed that this apparent press release was posted on The Earth Times:

Kampala Anti-gay activists in Uganda Saturday formed a pressure group to discourage homosexuality, following a two-day conference of religious leaders, teachers and social workers in the capital Kampala.

The group, to be called the Anti-Gay Task Force, is intended to “fight against the spread of homosexuality and lesbianism in the country,” spokesman for the group Stephen Langa told reporters. Same sex-relationships and marriages are illegal in Uganda, and human rights groups have criticized the government for harassing homosexuals.

The task-force said that it would one day “wipe out” gay practices in the African state.

The threat to “‘wipe out’ gay practices” is not an idle threat in a nation that provides a life sentence for those convicted of homosexuality. Further, Uganda witnessed at least three seperate campaigns of government sanctioned and media-led vigilantism between 2005 and 2007. The last spate of violence was sparked by a press conference of LGBT leaders calling on the nation to simply allow gays and lesbians to live in peace. The LGBT leaders at the conference wore face masks out of fear of being identified.

This conference poses a very dangerous development in a country with such a volatile history in how it treats gays and lesbians.

Which is precisely what Lively went there to accomplish.  Is there any doubt now that this man wants to rise the mob against gay people, in order to enact his final solution?  This is deliberate incitement to violence.  There is just no mistaking it for anything else.  Like so many other Culture Warriors, Lively wants gay people dead.  But unlike most of the others, he has a plan to accomplish it.  Step one: Go to nation that has suffered genocide.  Step Two: Teach the people of that nation that the ones who killed their kinfolk were homosexuals.  Step Three …

Satendar Singh was a native of Fiji.  At age 19 he immigrated to the USA and lived with relatives in the Sacramento, California area.  He worked at an AT&T call center.  He was well liked by both his co-workers and friends.

On Sunday afternoon July 1, 2007 he and 6 friends, reportedly 3 couples of Indian and Fijian descent, were partying at a California State park at Lake Natoma, east of Sacramento.  Trouble broke out between Singh’s group and another group, reportedly Russian speaking and of Russian descent.  Verbal assaults were traded between the groups.  The Russian group allegedly made racist and homophobic comments to Singh’s group and singled him out for homophobic comments.

About 8pm that evening as Singh’s group was leaving, the men of the Russian group confronted Singh’s group in the parking lot.  During the confrontation one man punched Satendar Singh in the face and Singh fell backward hitting his head.  Singh slipped into a coma never to regain consciousness. Four days later on July 5, 2007, family removed Satendar Singh from life support and he died.

…dead homosexuals.  Celebrate.  Repeat.

It got really nice all of a sudden in Maryland.  So I took a day trip to New Jersey.  Saturday I drove to Wildwood, which I have never really spent much time in.  It’s down the Jersey coast from Ocean City where I usually go.

Wildwood is an echo of what Atlantic City used to be before the casinos moved in.  It has a big boardwalk and two really huge amusment piers.  It’s more big city by the sea then anything else on the Jersey coast apart from Atlantic City.

I took my camera.  Rather then make this post take forever to load, I’ll split it into several parts…

Hilzoy finds that the Men Of The Mind are a puzzling lot…

The unemployment numbers are dreadful. But for once, there’s a glimmer of hope on the horizon: conservatives are going Galt.

"While they take to the streets politically, untold numbers of America’s wealth producers are going on strike financially. Dr. Helen Smith, a Tennessee forensic psychologist and political blogger, dubbed the phenomenon "Going Galt" last fall. It’s a reference to the famed Ayn Rand novel "Atlas Shrugged," in which protagonist John Galt leads the entrepreneurial class to cease productive activities in order to starve the government of revenue. (…)

The perpetual Borrow-Spend-Panic-Repeat machine in Washington depends on the capitulation of the wealth producers. There’s only one monkey wrench that can stop the redistributionist thieves’ engine. It’s engraved with the word: Enough."

As Matt Yglesias says:

"Just think what kind of nightmare scenario we might be inflicted with if the titans of finance who’ve made up such a large proportion of high earners in recent years were to pull back on their efforts! I shudder."

Unfortunately, we don’t know how many of America’s wealth producers are going to go on strike, since their number is "untold".

There’s a wee problem here that I’m sure has been spotted by the gasbags on the right. Vis:

But every one of them will free up work for someone else.  And thanks to eight years of Bush’s economic policies, we are not short of unemployed people to take up the slack.

I am puzzled by one thing, however: the fact that none of the people who advocate "going Galt" seem to have actually done it.

I appreciate your puzzlement Hilzoy.  Keep looking at the sentence you wrote about how every one of them that goes Galt frees up a job for someone else and you get the picture.  They know damn well that quitting isn’t going to prove anything, other then how worthless they actually were in the grand economic scheme of things.  Let’s face it, these are the folks who have been advocating, for decades now, the kinds of deregulation blue sky that got us into this mess in the first place.  Wealth producers?  More like wealth leaches. 

I’m not clear whether the point of "going Galt" is to stop doing creative or productive work, as Rand’s novel would suggest, or trying to lower one’s income, as many of the people quoted in stories about "going Galt" claim.

To stop doing productive work, you’d have had to have been doing productive work to begin with.

But as best I can tell, the people advocating this are doing neither. Consider:

Rep. John Campbell has neither resigned from Congress nor given back any part of his salary.

Michelle Malkin is still blogging, and still seems to be on the PJMedia payroll.

Dr. Helen, who is "still mulling over ways that she can "go Galt,"" has not taken any of the obvious steps: stopping blogging, giving up her career, severing her connection to PJTV, or even not taking BlogAds. Neither has her husband.

Cassy at Wizbang, who says it’s "time to go Galt", doesn’t seem to have stopped blogging either, and Wizbang is still running ads.

It’s almost enough to make me think they’re just posturing.

Like…when they’re going on about homosexuality and sexual morality?  Personal accountability?  Let’s face it, if it weren’t for the right wing billionaire dole most of these deep thinkers wouldn’t have an income, let alone a platform.  They’re gasbags.  And I’ll endure lectures on the evils of government spending and taxation from a lot of people, but not a congressman.  Especially not a republican congressman.

Let’s take a closer look at this ersatz grass roots revolt against President Obama’s economic policies…shall we?

Right-Wing ‘Tea Party’ Movement Was Planned Months Ago by GOP Billionaires

Populist revolt against the U.S. government is all the rage in the Republican Party, these days. As they tell the story, the public is so outraged by the recovery and reinvestment efforts of the Obama administration that Americans everywhere are turning out to overthrow the tyrannical king of the federal government by re-enacting the Boston Tea Party.

Funny thing, though: it turns out this whole "populist" movement was a planned PR stunt funded by big-money right-wing backers of the GOP who specialize in faking grassroots movements to drum up opposition to Barack Obama.

Everything about this so called "Tea Party" movement was pre-planned–from the supposedly "spontaneous rant" of CNBC stock market reporter, Rick Santelli, to the presumed ground-level organizing of protests all over the country. Fake, fake, fake–like a product launch staged covertly to look like a spontaneous trend.

Playboy bloggers Mark Ames and Yasha Levine pulled together all the pieces of this puzzle in an incredible expose (Exposing The Rightwing PR Machine):

What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s “tea party” rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine, from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called “astroturfing”) to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that’s because it was.

What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.

As you read this, Big Business is pouring tens of millions of dollars into their media machines in order to destroy just about every economic campaign promise Obama has made, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. At stake isn’t the little guy’s fight against big government, as Santelli and his bot-supporters claim, but rather the “upper 2 percent”’s war to protect their wealth from the Obama Adminstration’s economic plans. When this Santelli “grassroots” campaign is peeled open, what’s revealed is a glimpse of what is ahead and what is bound to be a hallmark of his presidency.

Go read the whole thing.  It’s the right-wing billionaire club we’ve all come to know and love, screwing the political process so they can keep screwing the middle-class.  If you thought the fight was over when Obama won, you are sadly mistaken.

If we could just get rid of these drooling morons we might have a rational discussion in this country about the economy and how to clean up the mess the billionaire teat sucking jackasses have brought down on all of us.  Going Galt would be a blessing for this country…the best thing they’ve ever done for it.  So, fat chance of that happening. 

A. Barton Hinkle writes an editorial over at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, that makes an argument many gay conservatives have been making for years. 

Gay marriage is banned in France. But about a decade ago, France’s Socialist government created a compromise — a civil solidarity pact, known by its French acronym PACS — as a form of quasi-marriage for homosexual couples.

This is France’s equivalent to the so-called "civil unions" that exist in some U.S. states.  And naturally, France’s right wingers denounced it as a cheapening of marriage.  But it was a cheapening they’d had a hand in creating, by their dogged resistance to letting same sex couples simply marry.  PACS were seen to be a compromise, just as they are here in the United States, between the needs of gay couples and the hatred of homophobes. 

Then, as Hinkle puts it, a funny thing happened.  Large numbers of straight couples started opting for PACS, too…

MARRIAGE IN France has been on the skids for years. The French marriage rate has fallen more than 30 percent in the past generation. Marriage has been declining in other European countries as well, but in France the slope has been steeper. By 2005, 59 percent of all first-born children in France were born out of wedlock. More and more French couples live in "free unions," or what Americans might think of as nonbinding common-law marriages. They simply shack up, often for life.

Now France’s experience with PACS helps clarify a very muddled point in the debate over gay marriage here in America.  Social conservatives commonly argue against gay marriage for a multiplicity of (often dubious) reasons, from the necessity to protect children to the importance of subsidizing procreation. But perhaps the most often cited reason is that gay unions threaten the "institution" of marriage.

How, precisely, they do so is not intuitively clear. No one seriously argues that a marriage between John and Steve somehow undermines the bonds of affection that keep Ted and Amy together. Nor is it clear how encouraging homosexuals, who sometimes are condemned for libertine promiscuity, to enter a contract requiring lifelong fidelity weakens the appeal of lifelong fidelity.

So opponents of gay marriage fall back on the idea that letting gay people marry somehow cheapens the currency — as though a marriage between Ted and Amy weighs less in the cosmic scales because John and Steve have entered into a similar contract. That is akin to the argument that letting gay people open bank accounts weakens the institution of banking.

FRANCE’S EXPERIENCE teaches a different lesson. It is not gay marriage, but the attempt to deny gays the chance to participate in marriage, that has cheapened the currency and further imperiled the institution. By creating a second-class — call it a "subprime" — form of marriage, France gave both gays and straights a watered-down option that let people enjoy all the privileges with none of the obligations…

…and then, he puts his finger on the heart of it:

And that points to the real issue at the heart of the argument about marriage as an institution. To say that letting gay people marry cheapens the currency of marriage holds true only if gay people have less intrinsic worth than straight people — just as the argument against interracial marriage, that it would lead to the "mongrelization of the human race," made sense only to those who saw blacks as less than human.

To let gay people enter into sacred matrimony, then, requires recognizing something sacred within them…

There’s the problem.  How do you recognize it when from nearly every pulpit in America gay people are called abominations in the eyes of God?  How do you recognize it when in one statehouse after another gay people are called a bigger threat to America then terrorists?

You can’t.  You don’t.  You are incapable.  They are not human beings.  They are some strange, alien, dangerous, evil other.  There is nothing at all sacred in them. You are not putting a knife in their hearts, because they have no human heart.  Only degenerate lust.  You are defending the dignity and the honor of your love, against the animal passions of sub-humans that threaten to devour it.

There can be no dialogue as long as we are not human.  There just can’t.  Only war.  We have seen time and time again how we appeal to our common humanity and we get slammed in return with one filthy lie after another, after another after another.  We hold out our hand in fellowship and our enemies jump at us like a pack of pit bulls.  As long as we are not human, they will continue to put their knifes into our hearts and put their wreaking balls to the lives we try to make for ourselves, and call it self defense.  And we, because we are human, will continue to fight back.  Because we must.  Because the only alternative is to live with the knife and the wreaking ball.  And it will never end.  Until the day comes that they can finally look at us, and see human beings. 

How to make that day come, I honestly don’t know.  Large swaths of the U.S. still cannot look at a black man and see a human being either.  Or a red one.  Or a brown one.  Or a yellow one.  Too many U.S. males still seem to think that the female half of the human race is sub-human…good only for making babies and cooking dinner.  How do you fight that?  Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said that a bigot’s mind is like an eye…the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes.  But for the sake of our common future, our survival as a species, those eyes have to open.

I have no idea how to make that happen.  But I know this full well: until they do, this fight will never end.  It will only grow more bitter, more damaging, more violent.   The word people are choking on in the fight isn’t "marriage".  It’s "homosexual".  And we are not only being preventing from marrying because of it.  We are targets…

"A 4-pound stone, one of several door stops hurled at patrons in a bar that includes gay people among its clientele, left one man with 12 staples in the back of his head and two brothers and an acquaintance accused of a hate crime. Marc Bosaw, 57, said Monday he has little recollection of the Sunday night attack, in which police said one suspect held open the door to Robert’s Lafitte bar while two others launched an assault shortly after 8 p.m. Bosaw sat at the corner of the bar at 2501 Ave. Q just a few feet from one of two entryway doors. ‘I thought I had just been slapped, and the second rock hit me here,’ Bosaw said of the mark on his hand. ‘Everything went white in my mind, and I thought that was it. I even said ‘goodbye.’’ The barrage also hit another patron, James Nickelson, 39, who police listed as a Houston resident, but bar patrons said Monday they believed he had recently moved to the island."

Other bar patrons reportedly struggled to keep Bosaw conscious before he was transported to a regional medical center.

The Houston Chronicle reports: "The three men fled, but were apprehended by police about 10 blocks from the bar, Alvarez said. They were then brought back to the bar, where witnessses identified them. One of the men arrested told police they targeted the establishment because it was a gay bar, Alvarez said. All three men were charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon along with hate crime charges. They are being held on a combined bond of $120,000."According to the Galveston News, "Bonds for Lawrence Henry Lewis III, 20, Lawrneil Henry Lewis, 18, and Alejandro Sam Gray, 17, all of Galveston, were set at $120,000 each on two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon with the enhancement of a hate crime, said Lt. D.J. Alvarez, a Galveston police spokesman."

Robert’s Lafitte became a place of refuge after Hurricane Ike, providing food and water for locals in need.

…because we are a bigger threat then terrorists…

Following a series of recent gay bashings in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, people took to the streets over the weekend for a "Take Back the Night" rally meant to send a signal to those perpetuating violence against the city’s LGBT community.

KOMO news reports: "The latest attack came a week ago near 13th Avenue and Columbia Street, about a block from the Seattle University campus. Forty-one-year-old Jerry Knight was on his way home when two men confronted him. And now he says the horror of that weekend might always haunt him. ‘I remember being hit hard, where I fell and my hands were bruised falling directly on the ground,’ he said Saturday in an interview. He acknowledges it could have been worse.’I am grateful,’ he says. ‘I am grateful I did not wake up in the hospital. I am grateful I am not in a coffin. I know that, and honor that.’ He says he was attacked by two men as he walked home alone in the early morning hours. The assault was first reported online by The Stranger newspaper."

…because we are abominations in the eyes of God…

In March 2007, Skipper’s body was found by the side of a rural road in central Florida with more than 20 stab wounds. His car and laptop had been stolen. The car was abandoned and recovered by authorites, who reported that the assailants had attempted to set it on fire but did not succeed. They had also cut out a seat belt because it was so bloody they couldn’t clean it. Bearden, then 21, and William David Brown Jr., then 20, were later arrested and indicted for the killing. A witness brought in by authorities at the time told police that Brown had killed Skipper because he was gay.

Bearden’s co-defendant, William Brown, is to be tried at a later date on charges of first-degree murder and robbery.

Bearden was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 25 years.

…because we are not human….

Blabbeando: "27 year old Isaac Ali Dani Peréz Triviño was born in Spain. 32 year old Julio Anderson Luciano was born in Brazil. They lived together in the Spanish province of Vigo and were planning to get married. Both were stabbed to death by Jacobo Piñeiro Rial in their apartment in the early morning of January 13th, 2006. The bodies showed a total of 57 stab wounds, according to forensics. After killing them, Piñeiro took a shower and cleaned himself up. He filled a suitcase with some of their belongings to make it look like a robbery and then spilled clothing all over the place. He poured alcohol over everything, including his victims’ bodies, turned on the gas spigot on the stove, and set everything on fire. The local fire department said that little evidence would have survived if it wasn’t for their prompt response to the 5-alarm fire"

The jury bought the killer’s ‘gay panic’ defense…

This fight isn’t about marriage.  It was never about marriage.  It has always been about our human status.  The sacred is within us too.  But you have to want to see it.  That is the problem.  That is the only problem.