From the Science Blog’s, Dispatches From The Culture War blog, comes news that pope Ratzinger finds President Obama’s ambassadors lacking in some basic quality…

It was reported a couple weeks ago that the Vatican had rejected three possible nominees to be the next ambassador to the Holy See because the people they’d nominated were pro-choice on abortion:

The Vatican has quietly rejected at least three of President Obama’s candidates to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See because they support abortion, and the White House might be running out of time to find an acceptable envoy before Mr. Obama travels to Rome in July, when he hopes to meet Pope Benedict XVI.

Italian journalist Massimo Franco, who broke the story about the White House attempts to find a suitable ambassador to the Vatican, said papal advisers told Mr. Obama’s aides privately that the candidates failed to meet the Vatican’s most basic qualification on the abortion issue.

Okay…so this is about Abortion…right?  The pope doesn’t want President Obama slapping him in the face with a pro-choice ambassador…right?

Hahahahaha….

Now the London Times identifies two of the names rejected by the Vatican: Caroline Kennedy and Doug Kmiec.

Caroline Kennedy, the Roman Catholic daughter of the assassinated President, has been rejected by the Vatican as the next US ambassador to the Holy See because of her liberal views on abortion, stem-cell research and same-sex marriage, according to Vatican insiders…

Mr Obama was said to have wanted to reward Ms Kennedy for supporting his election. The other rejected nominees reportedly included Douglas Kmiec, professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University and a former legal adviser to Presidents Reagan and George Bush Sr, who urged American Catholics to vote for Mr Obama.

But Kmiec is firmly anti-choice on abortion and always has been. He endorsed Obama despite disagreement over abortion. Which means the only basis for rejecting him is that he supported someone who is pro-choice. And on that basis, Obama would have to pick someone who does not support his presidency in order to satisfy the Vatican.

Kmiec was probably a worse pick then a pro-choice candidate.  Kmiec is probably a traitor in Ratzinger’s eyes.  It doesn’t matter that he opposes abortion.  He supported Obama.  Probably because he, like a lot of social conservatives who, after eight years of watching the republican party run itself into the ground, put his country before his personal views on abortion.  That is precisely the kind of thing that would have made him absolutely unpalatable to Ratzinger.  The first thing you have to abandon in the culture war, is your conscience.

[Longish post about the continuing trials and tribulations of a geeky little techno nerd trying to understand how to take care of a house of his very own.  Skip if talking about refrigerators is likely to bore the hell out of you…]

The trick to buying major household appliances like…well…the new fridge I bought last week, is to match them correctly to the scale of your life.  The problem is, at least here in Bigger-Is-Always-Better America, you need to have a life scaled to the expectations of American corporations.  Specifically, you need to have a large family living in a McMansion with a mortgage you can’t afford and two Hummers in the driveway.  Get that, and everything they want to sell you in the major appliances department…everything nice at least…will fit your lifestyle to a ‘T’.

The refrigerator problem I related last September…Here…came back last month.  I noticed frost forming yet again at the bottom corner of the freezer, which meant that the cooling coils were probably frozen up by then.  And sure enough the ice maker stopped working shortly thereafter.  Icemakers, as I discovered last time, have a thermal switch that won’t turn on until the temperature of the unit is cold enough to freeze water in a certain period of time.  I also had a thermometer mounted in the freezer this time, which allowed me to see exactly how much less efficient my freezer was getting by the day.

To get it fixed would have meant the third time since September that someone from GE has been out to fix it.  I don’t blame GE service, which at least here in the Baltimore area is very good.  But the fridge was more then 20 years old judging from the records left by the previous home owner, and had a lot of trouble when it was brand new.  Each time it was something else in the system that had failed.  First it was the thermostat.  Then the defroster timer.  Now for all I knew it was the defroster heater, or something else.  I could have had it fixed again but the fixes were starting to add up to the cost of a new one, and a new one would be much more energy efficient.  Especially if I bought one scaled more correctly to the life of a single guy.  But it was also money I really hadn’t wanted to spend just now.

I started doing some somewhat more in-depth research then I’d done last September, and quickly became shocked at the state of the art…or at least what I could see of it here in the U.S.  Fridges made in the last half decade appeared to be loud, cranky and a whole lot less efficient then advertised.  Consumer were complaining bitterly online about just about every brand, including the brands Consumer Reports says need the fewest repairs.  It took me a while to realize that those ratings were relative to each other, and not to other products.  Even U.S. made automobiles seem to be more reliable these days then refrigerators.

It made me almost want to just keep getting the old one fixed.  But old as it was, that wasn’t likely to be a less costly choice either.  So it seemed I was stuck with getting a new one.  But at least I could take the opportunity to get one more suited to the life I live.  

I’m a single guy, living alone, in a small Baltimore rowhouse.  I just don’t need a big family sized fridge like the one that came with the house.  That fridge was almost always nearly empty, except for the freezer.  I live so close to two really nice grocery stores that I almost always buy perishables the day I am actually going to use them, and then only just enough to use right away.  If I buy more food then I am likely to use in a week I end up throwing most of it away when it spoils.  Milk, cheeses, veggies, lunch meats…it all either gets used right away or I end up having to throw it out.  So I don’t buy much at any one time.  So the fridge is mostly empty most of the time.  Figure I was spending a lot of electricity just to keep the air in it cool, which has been an annoyance.

The freezer compartment however, was another story.  Between the TV dinners, french frys, onion rings and other deep fryer treats, fish, shrimp, beef and occasional ice cream treat it was almost always packed full.  It’s not just that I like meat.  It isn’t simply that I practically live out of the deep fryer some weeks.  It’s that the stuff in the freezer, so long as it stays frozen, stays good to use for months.  I purchase on a longer time frame for the freezer then for the stuff that gets put in the fridge.  And I really wanted more space to do that.  I’d been thinking about getting a small chest freezer now for some time.

So what I really needed, I decided, was less refrigerator and more freezer.  I could buy a much smaller sized fridge, and then pair it with a small chest freezer.  I had a spot in the basement where a small chest freezer would fit nicely and have a circuit all to itself off the main box.  The previous home owner had a second refrigerator there for his club room, which I gave to a friend shortly after moving in.  There is even a water tap there for an ice maker.  A small 5 sq foot chest freezer would do nicely in that spot.

On a hunch, I looked to see if they sold refrigerator only units.  That would have been ideal.  I found some but they were all second refrigerator units, for those families even a monster sized fridge just wasn’t big enough for.  They were even larger on the inside then the fridge I was replacing.

So I decided to go with a small top freezer unit.  The fridge section would hold everything I needed without wasting energy just cooling off empty airspace and the small freezer section could hold the icemaker, and be a staging area for the kitchen.  The chest freezer would be for long term bulk storage.  Whenever I saw a sale on meats and TV dinners, I could take advantage of it.  I could buy the bulk meat and fish items at Costco and have a place for it.  On an as-needed basis, I would periodically restock the fridge freezer with items from the basement freezer.

So now I had my specs.  I began looking around for something to fit them and it was frustrating.  Last September I wrote:

I could get a good, state of the art energy saver fridge, sized just right for a single guy, for around 850 to a thousand bucks.  Or I could get a decent low tech smaller one for about 300-400.  I figured if I was going to replace the fridge I might as well buy a good one, but money for one of the good ones wasn’t in the budget.

Well I could squeeze it out of the budget now, but alas I was completely wrong about getting a good one sized for the life of a single guy.  I could get a nicely built, nicely equipped fridge, but only at a size a large family would ever need.  And mind you, what I mostly desired was something that was built well.  The built-in gadgets would be nice…oh look, an ice dispenser, oh look, a built-in wine rack…but I wanted something built well first.  I like solid things in my life.  I want to reach out and touch the shelves and they fit well into their slots and don’t feel like they’re about to come apart in my hands.  I want to slide the snack tray and the veggie bins in and out and they move smoothly and don’t feel like they’re cheap plastic that’ll crack and break and I’ll always have to be replacing them.  I see stuff like that and I wonder how well the stuff I can’t reach out and touch and see is made.

But all I could find in small, single guy sized refrigerators, was cheap plastic crap on the inside and no nice extras, except the ice maker, which I guess is considered essential now in a refrigerator.  Some of what I saw was done more nicely to the eye then others, but it was still all low quality plastic on the inside.  I wondered how they did it over in Europe, where small scale living is fairly common, even for families.  I tried looking for some European brands, and some from Japan and Korea, but it seemed the only things that got exported to the U.S. were the family sized fridges and those were hugely expensive.

I tried looking around the appliance outlet stores.  There were places you could buy factory reconditioned units, or ones that had minor cosmetic damage, for a whole lot less.  But again, most of what I saw were the big McMansion style units.  The few small, single person units I saw all looked…a bit less then factory reconditioned.  More like second-hand and a tad cruddy more often then not.

Why aren’t you married with children citizen…?

One thing I discovered, in the nick of time since I was considering buying a stainless steel unit, is that fridge magnets don’t stick to stainless steel.  My fridges always get decorated with fridge magnets, reminders, letters and cards from friends.  I still have the Christmas card my first high school crush sent me a couple years ago, tacked to the fridge with a magnet I got in Monument Valley the summer before I’d found him again.  I started pocketing one of my fridge magnets on my shopping trips, along with the tape measure.

In the meantime, I’m eating out of the old fridge and not buying any new food to put into it so I don’t have any to spoil when I make the change from the old to the new.  It takes about a day, really, for the inside temperature in a fridge to stabilize and you don’t want to be putting food in until it’s cold enough, especially lunch meats and dairy products.  The freezer, which by this point was just barely getting cold enough to freeze food, but not freeze it really hard, took the longest to empty.  The fridge section not so much.  I emptied the snack bin pretty quickly.  The only thing I kept putting back into the fridge was the daily batch of fresh ice tea.  After about two weeks of it I was eating almost exclusively from local restaurants and eating peanut butter sandwiches and I was getting desperate.

I ended up buying a Kenmore fridge and small chest freezer from Sears.  The fridge wasn’t as horribly cheap on the inside as some, but it was still less well made then I wanted.  But by now I’d given up on getting what I wanted in the size I wanted it and this fridge was just exactly the right size.  It was also inexpensive since Sears was running a sale at the time.  It is small enough that instead of having a fan that forces air through a heat exchanger coil it has the old radiator style heat exchanger mounted on the back.  Since the whole unit is smaller, it can sit in the space where the old one did and get more air circulating around the back anyway, so that older passive air cooling mechanism shouldn’t be a problem at all.  Simpler is better, when you can manage it.  Or so I’m hoping anyway.  The freezer is a very small chest model that will require manual defrosting periodically.  Interestingly enough, the freezer is quieter then the fridge.

I let the units run for a day to stabilize temperatures.  Late in the evening the icemaker in the new fridge finally began making ice, so I knew the freezer was ready to hold food.  Which meant that the fridge probably was too.

So now I have a smaller fridge, and a chest freezer now, and a better balance of food storage here at Casa del Garrett.  To this I added one more thing: A small, self contained ice maker for the bar downstairs.  By self-contained I mean it drinks from its own built-in water tank, not a hookup to the household plumbing.  More on it later, but it’s part of a master plan to improve the bar for when I have company.

Mrs. California apparently doesn’t much like them thar gays…

"We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite. And you know what, I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised."

You were raised to parade around in front of TV cameras in high heels and a tiny little bikini were you?  Then later, out comes this…

"It is a very touchy subject and [Perez Hilton] is a homosexual and I see where he was coming from and I see the audience would’ve wanted me to be more politically correct," she added. "But I was raised in a way that you can never compromise your beliefs and your opinions for anything."

and still later…

"I think Mr. Mellish is a traitor to this country because his views are different from the views of the President and others of his kind. Differences of opinion should be tolerated, but not when they’re too different. Then he becomes a subversive mother."

No…wait…  I’m confusing Carrie Prejean with a different Mrs. America.

Via Box Turtle Bulletin…  Scott Lively and Exodus’ hard work in Uganda is paying off it seems…

Timothy Kincaid, notes that the Ugandan government is now denouncing Amnesty Internation and UNICEF the U.N.’s children’s relief fund, for promoting homosexuality (UNICEF is accused of smuggling pro-homosexuality books into Ugandian schools…) and he asks…

I wonder if American anti-gay groups, including Exodus International, are proud of the part they played.

Yes.

This has been another edition of Simple Answers, To Simple Questions…

For the past couple weeks or so, the net has been all abuzz about that almost too campy to be real National Organization For Marriage ad…you know…the Scary Gathering Homosexual Menace Storm ad.  The National Organization For Marriage said it was spending 1.5 million dollars to saturate several New England states considering same sex marriage with it.

Listen okay…just listen.  When some group you only vaguely ever heard of before suddenly bursts into the national dialogue with millions of dollars to spend on anti-gay advertising, the very first fucking thing that should cross your mind is: Where Did The Money Come From? 

That was my first thought, but I didn’t see anyone else out there who seemed to be sharing it.  I knew that the usual suspects, Forcus On Your The Family and other religious right groups were actually hurting for money since Proposition 8 drained their coffers of what little was left. They’re just not raking in the dough from the faithful like they used to, since the Bush Gang started eating the life savings of all those older folks in the pews.  So where the hell did the National Organization For Marriage suddenly get one and a half million fucking dollars to wage a targeted media campaign in New England?

I figured I’d wait and see, because sooner or later someone was going to turn that rock over and see what maggots crawled out of it.  Swear to God I thought it was going to be one of the usual right wing billionaires funding this.  Ahmanson most likely…

Surprise!

Tomorrow Californians Against Hate will be launch a six-state online ad campaign in the Northeast to let everybody know that NOM, the National Organization for Marriage, is a front group for the Mormon Church. Banners ads will appear on the capital city hometown papers of states currently in play for marriage equality: NY, NJ, DE, ME, NH, and RI.

Jesus Christ…why couldn’t Joseph Smith have sold extended automobile warranties or hedge fund shares or something?

I’ll endure George Will’s half-assed There Is No Such Thing As Global Warming claptrap…but by god not this…

Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy’s catechism of leveling — thou shalt not dress better than society’s most slovenly. To do so would be to commit the sin of lookism — of believing that appearance matters. That heresy leads to denying the universal appropriateness of everything, and then to the elitist assertion that there is good and bad taste.

Denim is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances.

Sure George…whatever…

I can’t think of a better reason for the existence of blue jeans then human skin.  Snuggled up there at the hips, that little gap between denim and flesh is just so damn lovely you can’t look away.  Or at least I can’t.  Polyester just doesn’t cut it.  Neither do dockers.  Blue jeans are that perfect marriage of form and function, utility and art, durable and almost unbearably sexy.  Low class is a mindset, not what you wear.  There are a lot of low class assholes in this world, wearing very expensive clothes made from rare and expensive fabrics that can’t hide the asshole that face and body language give away.

I have a couple-dozen or so jeans in my closet, each with their own personality if you will.  Patterns of wear and fading…slight differences in fit…dark blue, black, low risers, boot and straight leg…they each require careful consideration.  Do I wear the light stone washed 527s I bought last July, or that pair of nicely faded 501’s that’s almost a year old now, but fits perfectly in all the right places?  Or maybe the new pair that looks really sharp with the red SM-4 Mission shirt I got last September?  Decisions…decisions. 

I like how guys look in jeans.  I like how I look in them.  And let it be said, they keep me in line.  They are my motivation to stay in shape…or as much shape as a nerdy fifty-something IT worker can stay.  As I get older it gets harder to keep my waistline in control.  But swear to God I’ll eat birdseed for the rest of my life if that’s what it takes to wear my blue jeans and they fit right and I’m not not looking like…well…like this sad example of malehood they found over at Fark.Com…

Denim is what people who don’t care about what they look like wear.  Yellow saggy polyester pants and a shirt that telegraphs to the whole goddamned world that lazy ass self indulgence isn’t just for welfare state liberals…that’s okay.  Mature.  Sensible.  Ugh.  Just…ugh.  I’ll endure lectures on what a well dressed male looks like from a lot of people…but not you bow-tie boy…

[Edited a tad…]

Via Slashdot…

Florida To Build Solar-Powered City

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 16, @07:57AM
from the sunny-side-of-the-street dept.
 

Mike writes "The sunny state of Florida just announced that they will begin construction this year on the world’s first solar-powered city. A collaboration between Florida Power & Light and development firm Kitson & Partners, the 17,000 acre city will generate all of its electrical needs via a 75 megawatt, $300 million solar-powered generator. The city will also use smart grid technology to manage its power and allow all inhabitants of the community to monitor their energy consumption."

Nice idea.  Sounds…vaguely familiar…

It’s not just about how the energy is produced.  It’s about how it is used. 

Via Atrios…  Four decades of post 60s movement conservatism in a nutshell:

Anti-tax ‘tea party’ could draw crowd to downtown Syracuse

Joanne Wilder has never protested anything in public before. She’s never boxed with City Hall, let alone Washington.

"I’ve been a quiet little person my whole life," she said.

But today in downtown Syracuse, the 60-year-old great-grandmother will lead a Tax Day Tea Party protest against the spending policies of the Obama administration and Congress.

Well good for you Ms Wilder!  We Americans should all roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty in the nuts and bolts of making representative government work for us.  After all…it Is our government.  Of the people, by the people, and for the people. 

Common, average, everyday people…like the Heritage Foundation, FOX News, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck…

The protests are being coordinated by a coalition of national conservative groups and promoted by celebrity conservative commentators such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.

But they’re being carried out across the country by new grass-roots leaders like Wilder, who are upset that the government seems to be bailing out everyone but them.

Everyone but you, eh?

After a lifetime of working, paying taxes and raising three children on her own, Wilder is struggling.

She said she retired on disability from M&T Bank three years ago after undergoing knee replacement and back surgeries. She lives on her Social Security and disability benefits. Last year, she petitioned the bankruptcy court for protection from creditors.

She said she did not have to pay federal income taxes last year because her income was too low.

"I don’t want to see this country turn into a welfare, nanny state, where we stand in line for groceries, and we’re in welfare lines, and in socialized medicine lines," Wilder said.

Okay…let me get this straight.  You’re living on social security and disability benefits and you want the government to get off the backs of the rich, cut taxes and put an end to entitlement programs.  I have a question: who pays your health care costs m’am?

Tool.

I actually know someone in a similar situation.  Lives on disability (it’s legit…trust me)…lives in one of the most upscale counties in the nation and gets section 8 housing because he has no source of income…medical and health care costs all paid either by the state or the feds, which yes, he really needs or he’d have died long ago.  Oh…and smokes pot like a goddamned chimney.  Liberal socialist communist hippy freak?  Oh mes non…  Loyal Republican.   Listens to Rush…watches FOX…just can’t stand what the liberals are doing to this country.  Like…oh…putting food in the stomachs of people who can’t work and giving them a roof over their heads and some semblance of human dignity instead of tossing them into the street to beg…which is exactly what would happen if the right had its way.

If it amazes you how so many people whose lives have been made better by American liberalism have turned against it with a snarl you aren’t paying attention.  This isn’t about policy.  Digby’s right…the issues are fungible.  This is about tribe.  The folks saying now that the republican party needs to move beyond the culture war if it wants to survive, seem not to have got the point of the last few decades.  It was always about the culture war.  The social issues aren’t tangential, they’re the bedrock.

In a week where headlines announcing two more gay bashings glided across my computer screen, along with the murder-by-bullying suicide of an 11 Year Old Boy who couldn’t take the fag baiting he was getting at school anymore, this headline somehow managed to grab my attention…

Young and Gay in the Bible Belt: ‘My Mom Came at Me With a Butcher Knife!’

After asking the conversation-opener of the group — "So, would you like to all share your coming out stories with me?" — a young woman on my right named Angie* immediately burst out, "My mother came at me with a butcher knife!"

Stunned, I was trying to process this when a young woman to my left whispered, "You don’t want to hear my story, it’s too violent." More violent than your mother attacking you with a butcher knife? How is that possible? What does that mean?

Maybe you don’t want to know.  The author of this AlterNet post, Bernadette C. Barton, has done these Gay/Straight alliance visits previously, as she says, "…during my campus visits".  Apparently this was the first time she’d done that in the God fearing Jesus loving South.  Never mind the stories you heard that day Ms Barton…all the stories you didn’t hear are staring you in the face right here:

Meanwhile, the alliance students, although attentive and respectful to Angie and one another, did not act disturbed or even very surprised by the butcher-knife story or the ones that followed. Their general demeanor suggested that these kinds of horror stories were simply business as usual in their lives.

I am 55 years old and ever since I came out to myself in the early 70s, and began to wander my way through the gay community and this never ending scorched earth war on our hearts and souls, I have heard stories from gay teens and grown adults alike, bearing wounds from their childhood days that would make a stone cry, if not a fundamentalist.  That time in our lives, when we are just discovering desire, and what it is to love another, and be loved by them in return, ought to be one of the most magical times in our lives.  Instead, it gets turned into this:

"My father called me an abomination and quoted Scripture."

Remember this the next time you hear some drooling numbskull yap, yap, yapping about how they’re not anti-gay, just pro-family, and that same-sex marriage will irrepairably harm children.  Presumably in some sort of way that a butcher knife, or their own parents calling them an abomination won’t.

Divide the nation, Nixon’s adviser Pat Buchanan told him, and we’ll have the bigger half.  Several decades of culture war later, the right has simply led a fairly sizable slice of America into a kind of mental prison more lock tight then anything old Joe Stalin, Mao or Goebbels could have wished for in their wildest dreams.  Here’s one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers explaining something I’ve seen with my own eyes in my own family, and among folks who once upon a time were friends of mine…

I celebrated Easter yesterday with my ultra conservative family. I love my family but they have gone so far to the right over the past 8 years that it is difficult to have any sort of discussion with them. I think they are typical of conservatives born in the baby boom. They are scarred by the culture wars and the hatred they have for the left is so strong that it becomes disturbing.

That hatred, let it be said, didn’t start with Reagan.  It started with Nixon.  These are the folks of my own generation and earlier, who cheered on the hard hats as they bashed the hippies protesting racism, the Vietnam war, and fought for women’s rights and sexual liberty.  You need to remember about this crowd that they thought that the twin beds in Lucy and Ricky’s television apartment and the fact that even when Lucy was clearly "with child" nobody was allowed to utter the word "pregnant" on TV was as perfectly appropriate for TV as Fred Flintstone selling cigarettes.  Separate But Equal was working just fine until some communist inspired uppity blacks and a bunch of New York Jews started agitating everyone.  A woman’s place was in the house cooking dinner for her husband not in the workplace unless she was too ugly to find a man and maybe those women could be secretaries or nurses or waitresses or something.  And the more horrifying symbol of social decay, the biggest threat to the sanctity of American family life wasn’t homosexuality or even the Communist Menace, it was males wearing their hair so long it went below the collar. 

These people weren’t scarred by the culture wars.  They were scarred by the shock, shock of seeing that there were other people in the world who didn’t buy into their racist, sexist, war mongering moral values.  Let’s see how well they’ve matured over the years shall we…?

So with this in mind I compiled a few themes from the days discussions that you might find interesting (or horrifying). None of this is ground breaking but it is interesting to see these generalizations about the current conservative movement be personified in ones family.

1. Total insulation from MSM.

Everyone refuses to read the New York Times or Washington Post. Sunday morning while getting ready for Church I put on "Meet the Press" and my father looked on with disgust and changed the channel to Fox News. At dinner I brought up an article in The Economist that was critical of Barack Obama and my uncle said that it was a socialist rag.

2. Distrust of centrists When discussing the future of the Republican party I suggested that we needed to create a bigger tent and avoid social issues that alienated us from younger voters. My GRANDMOTHER responded that we don’t need the back benchers like Christopher Buckley dictating our principles. I think that line was straight from the Mark Levin show.

3. Neoconservative aspirations The most interesting part of the day, was that so much of the discussion focused on the Somali Pirate issue. It was the story of the day, but I didn’t think their was that much to talk about. Surely, not as interesting as talking about Iran, Obama’s budget, the economy etc. However we spent most of the day discussing Obama’s lackluster response to the issue and the weakness he displayed in not acting quicker. My father was incensed that the media kept referring to this as a crime rather then an act of terrorism. His suggestion was to engage in a land war in Somalia…

This tracks pretty well with my own personal experiences, particularly among a few ersatz friends of the Republican Persuasion who kept right on voting for the Shrub even when his party waged one of the most blistering anti-gay election campaigns in American history.  They get their news from FOX.  As terrified of them as the mainstream news media is, the hard core Still avoids it like it was radioactive, and read only their own tribal publications. 

Let me tell you a wee story about that.  After I’d been to Memphis to show my support for an Ex-Gay Survivor’s conference, I noticed that Time Magazine did a story that week on gay teens that touched on how this new generation of gay teens is often pressured by their families into ex-gay camps.  So I figure I’ll pick up a copy on the drive back home.  My drive took me east on I-40 to I-81 and up the backbone of Virginia.  Starting around just north of Galax I began to check the drugstores and WalMarts for copies.  What I found was that nowhere…and I mean nowhere I stopped, and I must have stopped at dozens of places on the way home…had Any mainstream news magazines for sale on their racks anywhere between Hillsville and Winchester Virginia.  Not just no Time, but no Newsweeks, no U.S. News…nada…nothing.  Maybe there were some to be found somewhere in that stretch of countryside…but I never found any near the highway until I got to Winchester and pulled into a shopping mall.  And the young lady behind the counter gave me a dirty look when she saw what I was buying.

They don’t want to even hear it now.  And they don’t have to.  They can get their news exclusively from tribal sources.  But those sources are anything but grass roots.  They imagine they are part of a disenfranchised grass roots majority that was…somehow…denied power that is rightfully theirs by a variety of secret liberal-communist-socialist-homosexual cabals.  In fact, they are almost completely owned by right wing billionaires and corporate America.

Case in point…this sad, odd, pathetic tea protest.  I’m going to steal this post from Digby (who you should read more often if you don’t already) because it pretty well sums it all up…

Corporate Grassroots

by digby

Following up on Krugman’s column today and the shrieking and rending of garments by the rightwing, I think it’s it’s probably important to make very clear why the tea-bagger parties are not a grassroots uprising.

The right seems to want us to believe that Fox News is promoting this non-stop as a genuine news event rather than a sponsor — despite the fact that it is an event which hasn’t happened yet. They are, by definition, promoting it.

Local news organizations, which are reporting on the planning for this event either do not realize that they are being spun by a front group pretending to be a grassroots organizing campaign or they don’t care. That front group is called Freedom Works, which presents itself as the conservative answer to Move On.

Here is how Move On was conceived:

The MoveOn.org domain name was registered on September 18, 1998 by computer entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, the married cofounders of Berkeley Systems, an entertainment software company known for the flying toaster screen saver and the online game show "You Don’t Know Jack." After selling the company in 1997, Blades and Boyd became concerned about the level of "partisan warfare in Washington" following revelations of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. The MoveOn website was launched initially to oppose the Republican-led effort to impeach Clinton. Initially called "Censure and Move On," it invited visitors to add their names to an online petition stating that "Congress must Immediately Censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the country."

At the time of MoveOn’s public launch on September 24, it appeared likely that its petition would be dwarfed by the effort to oust Clinton. A reporter who interviewed Blades on the day after the launch wrote, "A quick search on Yahoo turns up no sites for ‘censure Clinton’ but 20 sites for ‘impeach Clinton,’" adding that Scott Lauf’s impeachclinton.org website had already delivered 60,000 petitions to Congress. Salon.com reported that Arianna Huffington, then a right-wing commentator, had collected 13,303 names on her website, resignation.com, which called on Clinton to resign.

Within a week, however, support for MoveOn had grown. Blades calls herself an "accidental activist. … We put together a one-sentence petition. … We sent it to under a hundred of our friends and family, and within a week we had a hundred thousand people sign the petition. At that point, we thought it was going to be a flash campaign, that we would help everyone connect with leadership in all the ways we could figure out, and then get back to our regular lives. A half a million people ultimately signed and we somehow never got back to our regular lives." MoveOn also recruited 2,000 volunteers to deliver the petitions in person to members of the House of Representatives in 219 districts across America, and directed 30,000 phone calls to district offices.

Here’s how it does business:

MoveOn uses e-mail as its main conduit for communicating with members, sending action alerts at least once a week.

The MoveOn.org web site also uses multi-media, including videos, audio downloads, and images. In addition to communicating via the Internet, MoveOn advertises using traditional print and broadcast media, as well as billboards, bus signs, and bumper stickers, digital versions of which are downloadable from its web site. It also contains an area called the "Action Forum", which functions much like a traditional electronic discussion group. The Action Forums act as a grassroots organization allowing members to propose priorities and strategies.

Through this grassroots methodology, MoveOn collaborates with groups like Meetup.com in organizing street demonstrations, bake sales, house parties, and other opportunities for people to meet personally and act collectively in their own communities.

Some of its core principles are that it is not dependent on foundation money and that it has the ability to use ‘hard money’ – as opposed to grants and tax-deductible contributions – which enables them to be partisan, contribute to political campaigns, and exercise clout in the political process.

Here’s how Freedom Works came to pass:

Stealing a page from MoveOn.org‘s successful organizing playbook, the leaders of FreedomWorks – a complete merger of the conservative think-tanks Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and Empower America – hope to conduct massive get out the vote and political education campaigns in the swing states on behalf of President George W. Bush.

The two groups decided to merge because there was "an overlap in issues between the two organization," Shawn Small, the Director of Policy at Empower America, told me in a telephone interview. It was an opportunity to bring together Empower America, which Small characterized as a "grasstops" organization driven by such inside the beltway "superstars" as William Bennett, Vin Weber and Jean Kirkpatrick and CSE’s "grassroots" following.

Will FreedomWorks be successful? Maybe, maybe not, but it is sure to be controversial with longtime Republican Party operative Matt Kibbe at the helm.

If the agenda of FreedomWorks sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The organization’s new website proclaims that it "will expand and broaden the national fight for lower taxes, less government, and more economic freedom."

The leaders of FreedomWorks have all been around the Beltway a number of times. Former House Majority Leader, Texas Republican congressman Dick Armey, C. Boyden Gray, onetime legal counsel to Bush’s father and chairman of the Committee for Justice, an organization about to launch a campaign on behalf of Bush’s right wing judicial appointees, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary and failed vice-presidential candidate, Jack Kemp, will serve as the Co-Chairmen of the organization.

And here’s how it operates:

FreedomWorks claims a membership of over 360,000 and a multi-tentacled legal structure that includes a 501 c(3), a 501 c(4), a 527, a federal PAC, and various state PACs. John Stauber, co-author of Banana Republicans: How The Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State, recently pointed out that that according to internal documents leaked to the Washington Post in January 2000, the bulk of Citizens for a Sound Economy‘s revenues ($15.5 million in 1998) came not from its members, but from contributions of $250,000 and up from large corporations, including Allied Signal, Archer Daniels Midland, DaimlerChrysler, Emerson Electric Company, Enron, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Philip Morris and U.S. West (now Qwest).

And like their progenitors they get millions from the conservative foundations.

Can we all see the difference between Freedom Works and Move On? I knew that you could.

This is what a grass roots movement looks like in conservative America.  It’s fake.  Just like all the rhetoric about individual freedom, Jesus and family values.  Just as The Washington Times could not survive without the infusions of large piles of cash from messianic crackpot Sun Myung Moon, nearly every so-called conservative grass-roots organization could not exist without the largess of corporate America and the stable of right wing billionaires who have been funding the modern conservative movement since the culture wars began in the 60s.  Scaife.  Ahmanson.  Coors.  Bradley.  Olin.  Koch.  These people, and the rest of what Eisenhower warned as The Military Industrial Complex, are the crack epidemic poisoning the veins of our country.  Without them Americans might actually be getting along with one another reasonably well. 

And families like those of Sullivan’s reader might not be living in a 21st century cave, complete with nice TVs and radios that stroke their bar stool conceits, making goddamned sure they see of the world outside only what the ayatollahs of the hard right want them to see, and think Exactly what they want them to think.  They are tools, useful idiots, disposable human lives in the war a small but very powerful group of billionaires and corporate interests have been waging for decades now on the American Dream.  

What you need to understand: many of them made that of themselves willingly.  Joyfully even.  Better to live in a cave, then to know that the heathens aren’t monsters after all, but other human beings, happy and content with their own lives just as they are.  Anything to not have to know that.

The Consumerist has a post up warning about a new rash of ATM Card Skimming devices being installed into the wild.  Apparently the devices are getting smaller and easier for just about anyone to use.  Placed over the real ATM card reader slot, they are often used in conjunction with fake mirrors or brochure holders that have hidden cameras in them to record your fingers entering your PIN number…

Pay a little extra attention next time you use an ATM.  That would also include gasoline pump card readers too I imagine.   Photos of what the devices look like on The Consumerist website.

Ahem…

I read online today that Amazon has stopped ranking gay themed titles.  This is having the effect, intended or not, of pushing a whole genre of publishing off your lists, and into the closet.  Even the children’s book "Heather Has Two Mommies" has been de-ranked and thereby de-listed.  Or, put another way, closeted.  Only Kindle editions are listed now when you search Gay and Lesbian bestsellers, because the print editions have had their rankings stripped.

What were you thinking when you did this?  As a gay man, and a frequent customer here, I am more unhappy to read about this then I can express.  It’s one thing to keep sexually graphic content out of sight of minors, but another thing entirely to push anything having to do with the lives of gay people into the closet.  That, simply put, is bigotry.  A kind of bigotry I thought Amazon wasn’t really interested in trading in.

And here I was, just about to purchase another lawn and garden tool…something I need and can’t seem to find locally.  Like the lawn mower blade I bought some time ago.  Oh…and all the mp3s I’ve been buying lately…I have some more titles I was going to search for.  Hardly a week goes by that I don’t buy a song, or a book, or some other product, from Amazon.  But not now.  You need to seriously re-think this policy, and quickly, or I will not be buying a single thing more from Amazon.  And considering the stink I’m seeing about this online already…I doubt I’ll be the only customer you loose over this.  Get a little more common sense into your ranking policy, and the prejudice out of it.  My thanks in advance.

Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland.

[Update…]  Via Toweler Road…a wee list of some of the titles Amazon.Com is now essentially considering pornography…

Meta Writers has posted a list of the books that have been stripped which includes almost all novels in a user’s Top 100 Gay Novels List including James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance.

Our theatre critic Kevin Sessums reports that the hardback edition of his memoir Mississippi Sissy retains a sales ranking while the ranking for the paperback edition has been stripped. Michelangelo Signorile reports that his books have all lost their rankings.

The L.A. Times reports on the de-ranking:

Our research shows that these books have lost their ranking: "Running with Scissors" by Augusten Burroughs; "Rubyfruit Jungle" by Rita Mae Brown, "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" by Alison Bechdel, "The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1" by Michel Foucault, "Bastard Out of Carolina" by Dorothy Allison (2005 Plume edition), "Little Birds: Erotica" by Anais Nin, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" by Jean-Dominque Bauby (1997 Knopf edition), "Maurice" by E.M. Forster (2005 W.W. Norton edition) and "Becoming a Man" by Paul Monette, which won the 1992 National Book Award.

[Update…]  Andrew Sullivan discovers that as far as Amazon is concerned, he’s a writer of pornography…

This has to be one of the weirdest and least defensible policy changes imaginable. Mein Kampf is fine. Jackie Collins is fine. But books about gay subjects are now "adult" on Amazon and so not included on best seller lists or rankings. Sure enough, "Virtually Normal" and "Love Undetectable" have been de-listed and stripped of customer sales rankings. Jackie Collins’ "Married Lovers" hasn’t. My books contain discussions of Aquinas and Freud and Foucault and Burke. I’m puzzled as to why those authors are more "adult" than Collins’ adulterous couplings.

Seems someone at Amazon has had a homosexual panic moment.  Well…the electric pole saw I was going to order from them tonight (I have a tree I need to prune a tad…) is available on the ACE Hardware website too, which claims to ship for free to my local ACE store.  

[Update…]  Ah…it was a GLITCH…

"A groundswell of outrage, concern and confusion sprang up over the weekend, largely via Twitter, in response to what authors and others believed was a decision by Amazon to remove adult titles from its sales ranking. On Sunday evening, however, an Amazon spokesperson said that a glitch had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new adult policy."

Well that certainly explains this…

"Many of us decided to write to Amazon questioning why our rankings had disappeared. Most received evasive replies from customer service reps not versed in what was happening. As I am a publisher and have an Amazon Advantage account through which I supply Amazon with my books, I had a special way to contact them. 24 hours later I had a response:

"In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude ‘adult’ material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

"Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

"Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage"

And how suddenly every book with a gay theme or content in it was wiped off hundreds of Amazon book lists as if they’d never existed…but not other books with similar heterosexual themes.  As I said previously, I think someone in Amazon HQ had a homosexual panic moment and made a really bad decision they thought, whilst in the grip of their homosexual panic, that it wouldn’t be noticed or much disapproved of.  "Glitch" goes a long way toward explaining what happened…not.  How the hell does Virtually Normal, Brokeback Mountain, and Maurice suddenly get treated like they’re pornography if this wasn’t some jackass attempt to push gay books into the closet because somebody got all upset that Amazon was treating gay folk like just another customer demographic?

[Update…]  Over at The Examiner, they have a new and interesting theory about that little "Glitch"…

Now a new theory is starting to circulate, that in fact, there was a glitch in the system, and that glitch was abused by people wanting to hurt Amazon.  Here is the theory:

On each book is a feature allowing customers to tag a book with words to help people search.  Someone might tag a book about Britney Spears with the words "popstar" or "meltdown", words potentially related to the book.  If a book was tagged "adult" enough times, it is possible that Amazon had a system in place to remove the sales rank and remove it from the search engine, perhaps until a live person could double check it.  This would fit with the statement from a customer service representative over the weekend that this was a new policy about "adult" content. 

Now, a group of people makes a concerted effort to tag books they don’t like with the "adult" tag, knowing the automated system will remove them from the search.  Reports have surfaced that authors have been discovering their books removed from search as early as February of this year.  At that time, they complained and Amazon put the books back in the search.

This weekend is when many people became aware of the fact that so many books were disappearing, hence the firestorm.  Some on the internet find it odd that the cat would be let out of the bag on Easter weekend, a religious holiday when few staff would be on hand at Amazon to deal with the fallout.

I’m generally not a conspiracy theory fan, but this has a certain ring of truth to me.  Trusting the crowd to rate content is pretty common across the internet, so for Amazon to have instituted an automated feature like this would not be surprising.  In fact, as I noted in my previous report, one of the books that did not disappear from search is "For The Bible Tells Me So", a positive look at homosexuality with a biblical perspective.  This actually supports this theory- someone trying to eradicate books that support homosexuality might easily think this one was opposed based on the title.

Given that I’ve seen wingers doing crap like this elsewhere, it’s not at all beyond the realm of possibility.

I wrote previously that the fight for gay equality isn’t over simply when common, decent heterosexuals stop seeing their gay neighbors through the prism of every anti-gay stereotype the hatemongers have been pushing for generations, and start seeing us for the human beings we really are.  That’s an important step, but not the final one.  The last step comes when they finally start seeing the hatemongers for…well…the hatemongers they are.

The saving grace of it is that it gets easier the closer gay folk get to the equality prize.  The masks of civility and decency just start dropping like crazy and for a moment, the homophobes seem to have suddenly become completely unhinged.  But your gay and lesbian neighbors know that they have always been unhinged.  They’ve just never talked that way in front of the rest of the nation before.  Case in point, Peter LaBarbera.  Or as he’s affectionately known over at Pam’s House Blend…The Peter.

LaBarbera’s signature act is to go "undercover" into the gay S&M scene and report back on all the unsavory things going on in the backrooms, sex parties and dungeons.  Never mind that S&M isn’t a particularly gay phenomina.  Never mind that you could wander through the heterosexual side of any adult bookstore anywhere in this country and find grown heterosexual adults engaging in the very same acts.  LaBarbera seeks out the most exotic, the most extreme, the most unsavory things he can find in the gay community, and then presents it to his flock as what it is to be homosexual.   This is how hatemongers have operated since the dawn of human history.  Via Pam’s House Blend, here’s a typical example of how LaBarbera preferrs to operate…

Man, oh man…after he wrote me a letter to chastise me for making fun of his excursions to leather clubs to do undercover work for Jeezus, Illinois Family Institute’s Peter LaBarbera just lets it all hang out in an article on Salon (registration required) by Michelle Goldberg, "Sinners in the hands of an angry GOP." It’s an inside look at the goings-on at the War on Christians and the Values Voters conference.

Because Petey’s efforts to demonize the entire gay community are failing miserably (the Gay Games are going on in Chicago with Walgreen’s sponsorship; his marriage amendment initiative can’t get the signatures it needs) he must now escalate the homo-hate wars with a little spice — by trolling on gay boards for research on how to scare youth away from the gay agenda.

Perhaps worrying that anti-gay rhetoric hasn’t been sufficiently inflammatory lately, some speakers urged listeners to start using more scatological and stigmatizing language. Peter LaBarbera, who heads the Illinois Family Institute and is known for his obsession with gay men’s most outré sexual practices, told the audience, "My greatest frustration has been our side’s inability to make homosexual behavior an issue in the public’s mind." In order to inspire the kind of revulsion he wants to see more of, he read from a posting on a gay message board: "Hey guys, I know this is kind of gross and all, but I was wondering if I’m the only one. I’m usually the bottom in my relationship with my boyfriend. After having been the receptive partner in anal sex it’s only a few hours before I start to experience diarrhea … it really stinks, because I really like sex, duh, but it takes the fun out of it when I know I’ll be tied to the bathroom for the next day."

"I don’t think so-called GLBT teens are told anything like this" by their school counselors, LaBarbera said. "We need to find ways to bring shame back to those who are practicing and advocating homosexual behavior."

Take note of two things: firstly, that this is being discussed openly as a matter of tactics.  It’s not about what the facts are, it’s about what creates the maximum effect.  Secondly, this is the kook pews talking among themselves.  This is being discussed at the War on Christians and the Values Voters Conference.  In the mainstream news, they would never say they are choosing what to say about homosexuality mostly for effect.  Yet note also, the rote bemoaning of their inability to get the message out.  Time and again you hear them saying among themselves, that if they could only get their message out Teh Gays wouldn’t be winning the culture war.  Note that, and note along with it that they are nonetheless careful to moderate their rhetoric in public. 

At least, up until now.  Triumphant after last November, once again they see themselves loosing ground to an enemy they can’t seem to get an edge up on no matter how much they do, no matter how many political victories they score.  When all you have are lies to win the war with, then the war is lost.  But you go into battle with what you have.  And as I said, the saving grace of all this is that the more they loose, the more vehement they become.  And then people start to notice something.

People like Glenn Sacks.  Sacks, a columnist whose focus is on men’s and fathers’ issues, specifically on the father’s rights movement, but also on men’s rights in general, took issue recently with Christian Newswire’s giving LaBarbera a forum to dump his poison into the political dialogue…

Mercifully, most opponents of gay marriage are not anti-gay bigots like LaBarbera. I have no problem with gay marriage and gay rights, but however one feels about gay marriage, it has nothing to do with the decline of the American family. The real threat to American families is not gay marriage but instead divorce and a family law system which separates millions of children from the fathers they love and need.

Sacks provided his readers with a handy link they could use to tell Christian Newswire what they thought of LaBarbera’s bigotry.  Naturally, LaBarbera couldn’t take that laying down.  As Sacks reported in a follow up post, LaBarbera responded in his own characteristically measured and thoughtful way…

Are you a homosexual, Glenn? 

More of that exchange Here.   Here’s where it get’s interesting.  LaBarbera sent an alarm out to dozens of religious right groups, calling Sack’s post arrogant and harmful to the movement.  You get the sense from Sacks’ follow-up post that he expected better from the movement’s leaders then he got.  But almost any gay American citizen could have told him what to expect…

Surprising & Disappointing–Major Christian Leaders Back Peter LaBarbera in Letters to Me

In a letter to me cc’d to dozens of Christian leaders, LaBarbera called my post "arrogant and harmful" and sent a follow-up letter asking "Are you a homosexual, Glenn?" A lively debate ensued, in which many Christian leaders wrote to me.

What I expected was that many of them would say something along the lines of "We agree that Peter LaBarbera’s views are extreme and we don’t support them, but we do believe that gay marriage is harmful." While I don’t believe that gay marriage is harmful, I do not now nor have I ever believed that all who oppose gay marriage are anti-gay.

I taught in Christian high-schools for several years and the religious leaders always told me that the Christian teaching on gays is to "Love the sinner, hate the sin." If Christians want to have credibility on opposing gay marriage, they must also oppose anti-gay bigotry, and I expected that many of them would.

Instead, I’ve been disappointed and at times floored by the unreserved support some have shown LaBarbera, including many letters with the subject line "I Stand with Peter."

Many of these are major figures. For example, Janet M. LaRue, Chief Counsel for Concerned for America, wrote:

"Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!"…I know Pete LaBarbera. Pete LaBarbera is a friend of mine.

Christian radio host/author Janet Folger Porter wrote:

Peter LaBarbera is the best example of what Christians should be doing…Peter’s comments have been nothing but honest, loving, and courageous.

Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel and Scott Lively, president of Defend the Family, signed on to the "I Stand with Peter" letter. Lively, apparently referring to me, wrote:

Who is this uncircumcised Philistine who challenges the army of the Living God?

Lively adds

You obviously don’t have a clue about the role of the homosexual movement in the disintegration of the natural family model in America.  Without the "gays’" largely hidden but relentless anti-family social-engineering campaign since the 1940s, there wouldn’t be a fathers’ rights crisis in our land.

Hetersoexual divorce and out-of-wedlock births are the fault of gays? Lively is right–I certainly missed that one.

Townhall columnist Robert Knight of Coral Ridge Ministries writes:

Peter LaBarbera is a courageous, talented and honest advocate for the truth who will not back down in the face of vicious attacks or smear campaigns. He has said nothing that is not backed by voluminous evidence…

He has exposed the relentless and reckless promotion of behavior that is documentably dangerous and soul-destroying. That’s the face of real compassion, not the ersatz concern of people who pat homosexuals on the head, watch them go off a cliff into disease, drugs, alcohol, and suicide, and then blame others for not going along with the fictions that homosexuality is harmless and inevitable.

Ingrid Schlueter of the VCY America Radio Network writes:

Peter, unlike most evangelicals today, has the testosterone to challenge those who pervert Scripture, pervert sexuality, and insist that everyone accept it as normal. He has my absolute support…

Phil Burress, Chairman of Equal Rights not Special Rights, writes:

Peter LaBarbera is my friend and I want to be named alongside him the next time you attack him for telling the truth.

It goes on and on…with Sacks just staring dumbfounded…

Peter Sprigg, Senior Director of Culture Studies of the Family Research Council, did give an answer to my question "If Peter LaBarbera’s statement isn’t bigoted, what is?", writing:

Fred Phelps, who says "God hates f-gs," is bigoted. Peter LaBarbera is not.

Both Phelps and LaBarbera are bigoted, but I would agree with Sprigg that Phelps is far worse.

Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International and author of Leaving Homosexuality, defended LaBarbera, writing:

Peter may not always say the right thing, but who one of us does? As Christians I think we ought to go to our brother or sister when we think they have missed the mark before we do a blog post on it…

I’m fully aware that people sometimes don’t always express themselves the way they would like to, and I’ve certainly said things on TV and the radio that I could have phrased better. But Peter’s views that I criticized are ones that he has written on many occasions–it’s fair to characterize them as his views and criticize them.

Chambers also states that he is "unalterably convinced that Peter indeed loves sinners and cares about their eternities more than the policies he fights for." All I can say is that if this is true, Peter is uncharacteristically shy about letting the public know about it.

That Chambers would be quick to come to LaBarbera’s defense is interesting for the controversy that’s been actively reported on over at Box Turtle Bulletin, concerning Exodus participation in a Ugandian conference on homosexuality.  Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively was a speaker and once again ginned up anti-gay passions in a land torn by genocide, by claiming that genocide is the work of homosexuals, while Exodus board member Don Schmierer sat and smiled. Jim Burroway and Timothy Kincaid have been asking Exodus to repudiate board member Don Schmierer’s participation in the conference, which included calls for wholesale witchhunting and imprisoning of gay people in Uganda.  To date, other then a squalid bit of both-sides-of-the-mouth boilerplate PR, Exodus has remained silent.  Gay people are killed time and again in the venomous hostility created by hatemongers like LaBarbera and Lively, and Exodus, which laughably claims to be a non-political faith group that only seeks to heal unwanted "same sex attractions" acknowledges with President Alan Chamber’s defense of LaBarbera, that the blood of all those innocents is on its hands too.  As Christians Alan, you ought to consider whether your words bring peace to the world, or inflame passions.  But then, your Christianity is as thin as your ersatz love for those gay poeple who had more courage and stronger inner resources of character then you could ever muster in your own life, isn’t it Alan?

Sacks ends the exchange with this…

In conclusion, I’m surprised and rather disappointed. Is Peter LaBarbera really representative of modern Christian thought? I don’t believe that–I believe Christians are much better than that. I have a very hard time imagining the many hard-working, devoted religious faculties I once worked with holding LaBarbera’s views. But in general this recent exchange doesn’t do much to support my optimism.

LaBarbera isn’t representative of modern Christian thought.  He’s merely and utterly representative of a certain kind of American culture warrior…the kook pews…the ones who are still arguing that giving women and non-property owners the vote is what ruined America.  And no doubt the darkies too.  There is a good deal more to Christianity then this little corner of the human gutter.  You thought they were better then this.  A lot of people do.  Welcome to the other side of the public face…the side that has been spitting in the faces of your gay and lesbian neighbors for decades now. 

Yes…it’s pretty awful.  But you needed to see this.  Just remember what Nietzsche said about staring into an abyss.  You have to keep reminding yourself that there is more to humanity, let alone to Christianity, then this. 

[Edited a tad…]

Just pretend I’m not talking about you.  No…not you.  You!  Just pretend.  You know…like you could just pretend that I didn’t have any human need for companionship and love.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…

So I’m scanning Andrew Sullivan’s blog, and come across his latest Malkin Award nominee…

"Last June, a "500-year flood" ushered millions of gallons of water through eastern Iowa. In Cedar Rapids alone, more than 25,000 individuals were displaced in one day. Hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage was done. The Flood of 2008 is arguably the most destructive disaster that the state of Iowa has seen — at least, that is, until last Friday… Flood waters erode the soil. "Gay marriage" erodes the soul. A flood impacts for a decade. "Same-sex marriage" destroys generations. A flood draws a community together. "Homosexual marriage" tears the family apart. Communities recover from floods. The promotion of un-natural unions has an eternal consequence," – pastor Eric Schumacker, Baptist Press.

I’m 55, and single, and it’s looking now as though that is how my life will always be.  And I blame hatemongers like Schumacker for that.  The ones for whom hating gay people just isn’t enough.  The ones whose cheap bar stool hatreds have to be shared by everyone for them to feel good about themselves.  The ones who teach gay kid like the one I was once upon a time to hate themselves, just as much as their haters do, driving their knives deep into hearts only just learning what it is to feel desire, and glimpse a world of romance, trust, and tender joyful companionship.  The ones that drive a knife deep into a kid’s capacity to love themselves, let alone anyone else, and who do it, with a smile in the name of God, and once again in the name of Jesus, and then one more time in name of love.  I might have found a love of my own by now, were it not for gutter crawling human hating maggots like pastor Schumacker, who had to make me, and other human beings like me who mate to our own sex instead of the opposite, into their scapegoats for all the cheap failures of character within themselves.  We had to be monsters, so he could be righteous…and monsters aren’t allowed to love.

It isn’t that I reject the theology, although I do.  Somehow, all the little rules and regulations that come along with being a Christian as the kook pews percieve Christianity to be, don’t translate into loving your neighbor.  Or rather…love consists of sticking a little dagger with Jesus’ name engraved on it into your neighbor’s heart and praising God.  The earth was not created in six days…the rocks in the ground say different, and if God is that which created all that is, all that was, and all that will ever be, then the rock, not the word, is the testament of God, the original manuscript, God’s own handwriting.  But even the word means only what the reader says it means, and it seems, especially so when it’s telling you to love your neighbor.  Ah yes…love…   Feel the love for their gay neighbors in this life here: "Gay marriage" erodes the soul.  No.  Hate does.  And I have fought so very hard to keep it from eroding mine all my life, and especially whenever someone tries to put their Jesus dagger into my heart in the name of love. 

We love you…stab stab stab…  Can you feel our love?  Stab Stab Stab…  You may never know how hard that personal inner battle has been for me, or the cost.  I get angry.  Livid.  And I am all alone with it, with no companion of the heart to talk to, no smile to look for whenever I need reminding that life is good, and that the haters, the bigots, the human vampires who suck the love out of everything they look at aren’t important.  No hand to put into mine.  No companion of the soul to put my arms around for a little while, and feel that life is good and the world makes sense after all.  I put my head down on the pillow every night it seems, just a little bit angrier then the night before, just a little bit angrier then I thought it was humanly possible to be angry.  And I am all alone with it.  Alone with it, and the memories of all the near misses I’ve had in my life, when love seemed like it might just be possible after all, only to have that chance snatched away from me once again, in the name of love.

The promotion of un-natural unions has an eternal consequence…  But murdering another person’s ability to love, and accept love from another, apparently does not in his bible.  I would give up everything I have to have had the love of my life beside me.  I would wash dishes for the rest of my life, dig ditches, clean pigsties, live without anything but the clothes on my back to have had his smile to look at, and his hand to hold every now and then.  I would spend forever in Hell, knowing that even an eternity of pain could not touch the love I had shared once.  I could survive in Hell forever with that smile to remember, those moments spent in the arms of the one I loved.  If you don’t know what I am talking about then you have never loved and I feel sorry for you.

Homosexual marriage" tears the family apart…  All the gay children who were thrown out the door like they were so much human garbage.  All the gay sons and daughters who will go to their grave remembering the sound of their parent’s voices as they told them to burn in hell.  All the grieving parents who will go to their graves remembering how they drove their own children to suicide for the glory of God.  All the lonely people, bearing the wounds on their hearts that keep them from reaching out to another in trust, and then in love.  I dated one of these once and naively thought that if I loved him wholeheartedly I could heal that wound.  But even love can’t heal a wound that someone blames their own existence for.

Un-natural unions…  I know what Jesus would want me to do.  I have to forgive him.  I understand it.  I understand the necessity of it.  Jesus, whatever you think he was, was absolutely right about this one thing: we must love one another.  This poor world tears itself apart a little more every day with hate.  He would tell me I have to forgive this man, and all the others like him, who put all those knife marks on my heart.  And I can’t.  This world is so much poorer, and meaner, and smaller for the likes of him, and all for nothing more then so Schumacker can imagine the monster he sees every morning in the bathroom mirror is some other person, some other convenient scapegoat.  So many broken hearts, turned into someone else’s angel wings.  So many lost dreams of love and peace and joy, turned into other people’s stepping stones to heaven.  They say God never gives us a greater burden then we can bear, and some days I think that what I am being spared is that I will never know how, I will never know why, some folks can walk to heaven on the broken hopes and dreams of their neighbors with little tears of joy in their eyes.  It’s not that I reject the theology, it’s that I can’t forgive.  I just…can’t.  And that is why I am not a Christian.

Instead of loving your enemies, treat your friends a little better.
-Edgar Watson Howe 

[Edited a tad…]