California Musical Theatre is Sacramento’s "oldest professional performing arts organization and California’s largest nonprofit musical theater company" according to the Sacramento Bee and its artistic director Scott Eckern, who has been with the theatre for 25 years, has placed it in turmoil following revelations that he donated $1,000 to the campaign to pass Prop 8.
Hairspray director Marc Shaiman is leading the charge to boycott the theatre. Shaiman reportedly told Eckern: "The idea that your donation came from a salary that for a short amount of time was drawn from profits from a show I wrote upsets me terribly and I would never allow anything I write to play there and will encourage my colleagues to consider doing the same."
Backlash…was it you said Dreher? Backlash was it…? It’s not only same sex couples you gutter crawling bigots attacked. You have obliterated longstanding friendships, and family ties, so you could feel righteous about yourselves. Welcome to the morning after. I’ll be your server today. My name is Fuck You.
I believe you and the reader you quote are missing what is fundamentally different about the Mormon attacks. This was not typical church activism. The Mormon Prophet commanded that every California member give time and money to pass Prop 8. Each member was then contacted by a church authority to make sure the orders from Salt Lake City were obeyed. Mormons were organized into groups to canvas neighborhoods, knock on doors, distribute yards signs, and otherwise organize against gay marriage rights.
Sounds like standard civic participation, right? But remember, Mormons are not allowed to dissent.
Those who openly speak disagreement with the church’s orthodoxy are routinely excommunicated (you can easily Google public examples, most are secret). There are reports on public websites that Mormon Bishops even questioned individual’s actions supporting Prop 8 in “Temple Interviews,” a form of confessional where members validate that they are living up to the highest church standards.
Questioning support for Prop 8 in such a setting is an implicit threat to the individual’s church membership and continuation as a member of Mormon society. Deliberately complicating matters for outside observers, church members were ordered to disguise their actions. Official church orders told them to disguise their Mormon identity, not go in pairs, and not to wear white shirts and ties.
As the campaign escalated, the church broadened its call to members, drawing in activists and money from around the country. So although Mormons are less than 2% of the California population’s, several gay websites claim that over 70% of the private money donated in support of Prop 8 was Mormon. Yes, some Mormon individuals stood up against their church. Of the 13+ million Mormons, about 300 signed an online petition. A Mormon ex-football player’s wife put out a supportive statement. He didn’t join it.
Dig that they were told to conceal their affiliation with the church. The Mormon church has been waging a furious war against gay equality for decades now, but by stealth. But it couldn’t last. As more and more people come to see their gay and lesbian neighbors not as some kind of depraved monsters but as fellow travelers in life, the work it takes to demonize us becomes harder and harder. In 1998 they were able to buy the vote in Hawaii and Alaska with under two million dollars, because public opinion then, while improving, was still strongly against gay equality. But in 2008 they needed over 40 million dollars and you just can’t shovel that kind of money into something in stealth.
So now everyone knows how big the Mormon hand is in this. And you can appreciate why they wanted to keep it generally unknown for as long as possible. The more you understand what Mormons believe, the crazier they look.
In 1827 Joseph Smith and his bride, Emma, arrived at her father’s farm near Great Bend in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania. Here in this peaceful country along the banks of the Susquehanna River, Joseph would spend the next two-and-a-half years translating the Book of Mormon into English.
He had been born twenty-one years earlier in Sharon, Vermont. His father, also named Joseph, and his mother, Lucy, had started their marriage auspiciously with Lucy’s ample dowry of one thousand dollars. But the dowry was quickly spent and the farm was overgrown with weeds. In a last desperate attempt to recoup his losses, Joseph’s father had invested everything he had left in a shipment of ginseng to China. He had heard that the Chinese would pay high prices for the root of the ginseng plant, which grew wild in Vermont. When he failed to get a penny for his ginseng, Joseph’s father moved his family to a farm near Palmyra, New York, in the western part of the state. There he fared little better than in Vermont. The Smith family often went hungry during the winter months. As soon as they were able to work, the Smith children had to help support their family. Consequently, Joseph obtained little schooling.
When Joseph was adolescent, an itinerant magician and diviner stopped over in Palmyra and offered his services to the local residents. The diviner claimed that he could locate not only ground water near the surface, but also treasure which had been buried by Indians many years before. Some farmers hired the diviner at three dollars per day to look for buried treasure on their lands. The diviner had several magic stones which he looked into, in order to discover the sites of the buried treasures.
Young Joseph Smith took a deep interest in the diviner’s skills and spent as much time as he could in the magician’s company, trying to master the man’s divining abilities. When no treasure was found and no more farmers would pay him, the diviner left town, but by that time Joseph had picked up some of his lore. Acquiring some magic stones of his own, Joseph was successful in using the stones to locate some lost tools.
A visitor to Palmyra who heard about Joseph’s clairvoyance was interested in meeting the young seer. The visitor was from the eastern part of New York State, and convinced that Spaniards had once deposited treasure on his property. Joseph agreed to accompany the visitor east, and to help him locate the treasure, provided that Joseph was paid three dollars a day, the same fee the diviner had charged. Joseph’s father accompanied his nineteen-year-old son on this expedition in 1825.
The site of the hoped-for treasure was the Susquehanna Valey near Damascus, New York, just north of the Pennsylvania border. While hunting for the treasure, Joseph and his father lived at a farm in Pennsylvania, where the Susquehanna dips into that state near Great Bend.
A large party of diggers stowed up to help in excavating the treasure. All of them contributed to Joseph’s wage, in return for a share in the expected treasure. The work progressed slowly. For the first few days the diggers worked with a will, anticipating the riches that would soon be theirs. But as they dug and found nothing, their spirits began to sink. When Joseph told them that the treasure had begun to sink lower due to an "enchantment," they suspected him of being a charlatan and felt that he had made fools of them.
The search for treasure ended, and Joseph’s father returned to his home in Palmyra, but Joseph stayed on in the Susquehanna Valley. He had fallen in love with Emma Hale, the daughter of Isaac Hale, in whose house Joseph and his father had boarded during the treasurehunt. Emma, who was one year older than Joseph, was a beautiful and self-contained schoolteacher who kept herself aloof from Joseph.
Despite Emma’s coolness, Joseph took a job as a farmhand just over the border in New York State, within walking distance of the Hale house in Pennsylvania. In his spare time he attended school to improve his skill in reading and writing, very likely so that he would seem a worthier suitor to a schoolteacher.
As Joseph persisted in his courting of Emma, she gradually yielded to his ardor. But when Joseph asked her father for Emma’s hand in marriage, he was brusquely refused. Mr. Isaac Hale had been one of the original diggers for treasure under Joseph’s direction, and one of the first to lose confidence in the young diviner. He considered Joseph to be an arrogant, fraudulent, and lazy young man, totally unworthy to marry his daughter. After being turned down by Isaac Hale, Joseph continued to visit his daughter while Isaac was away on frequent and extended hunting trips.
In the spring of 1826, some of the former treasure-hunters brought legal charges against Joseph in the court at Bainbridge, New York. Joseph was accused of "disorderly conduct" and also of being an "impostor." One of the witnesses testifying against him was his sweetheart’s father, Isaac Hale. Joseph was found guilty on both charges. There is no record of the sentence imposed on him.
Despite this public humiliation which was aided and abetted by her father, Emma Hale remained attracted to Joseph. In January 1827, when Joseph was twenty-one, he succeeded in persuading Emma to elope with him. After getting married in New York State, they went to live with Joseph’s parents in Palmyra.
In the fall of 1827, Joseph and Emma returned to her parents’ home in Pennsylvania to pick up her belongings. There was an emotional meeting between Isaac Hale and his son-in-law, in which Isaac accused Joseph of having stolen his daughter. Amid tears, Joseph asked his father-in-law for forgiveness. Joseph promised to lead a more honest and responsible life, and to be a worthy husband to Emma. Isaac seemed reassured by Joseph’s contrition, and offered to give the young couple a small house on his property.
Joseph and Emma moved into the small house, and Isaac expected that Joseph would help with the work on his farm. Instead, Joseph kept himself occupied with some mysterious indoor activity. One day Isaac decided to investigate what was going on in the small house, and paid a visit to his son- in-law.
Isaac found Joseph sitting at a table with a hat over his face, uttering long Biblical phrases. Emma sat behind a curtain, hidden from Joseph, while she wrote down the words Joseph was speaking. On the table-top in front of Joseph sat some square object concealed by a cloth. When Joseph removed his hat from his face, Isaac could see two stones in the hat, similar to the stones Joseph had used in divining the location of the "buried Spanish treasure."
Alarmed, Isaac demanded an explanation of this strange activity. The explanation that Joseph and Emma gave him only alarmed Isaac more. They told Isaac that Joseph had seen a vision of an angel back in Palmyra. The angel had led Joseph to a place which Joseph called Cumorah, a hill near Palmyra. There, digging in the spot the angel indicated, Joseph had found a set of golden plates comprising a holy book, called the Book of Mormon. The book was written in symbols which Joseph called "reformed Egyptian," but with the gold plates were two stones, with which Joseph could decipher the ancient symbols on the gold plates .
Joseph told Isaac that the gold plates were right in front of them on the table, in a box covered by a cloth. It was not necessary for Joseph to see the plates in order to decipher them. He could read the plates, understand them, and translate them into English, by gazing into the stones. However, in order to see into the stones, he had to shut out all extraneous light. Therefore, he put the stones into his hat and covered his face with the hat.
When Isaac asked to see the golden plates, Joseph refused permission. Joseph said that, if anyone besides himself looked at the golden plates, it would mean instant death for the person.
So far as Isaac could tell, no change had occurred in Joseph since his treasure-hunting days. Isaac later said, "The manner in which he pretended to read and interpret was the same as when he looked for the money-diggers, with the stones in his hat, and his hat over his face."
Isaac failed to notice that, although Joseph’s occult techniques had not changed, the purpose of Joseph’s life had taken a new direction. Formerly, Joseph had been looking for gold. Now, he seemed indifferent to money. As described by Joseph, the gold plates he had found at Cumorah were worth millions of dollars; yet Joseph valued only the message engraved on them.
Isaac felt certain that there were no gold plates, and that Joseph was plotting some elaborate fraud. But Emma remained loyal to her husband, dutifully taking down Joseph’s dictation, hour after hour, day after day. The words Joseph spoke through his hat told the story of Jewish families which had migrated to America from Israel in the seventh century before Christ, becoming the ancestors of the American Indians. According to the scriptures which Joseph was translating, Christ himself had come to America before his ascension.
During his work of translation, Joseph received some financial support from a few acquaintances who believed in the importance of his task. One man mortgaged his farm to support Joseph. The man’s wife, who considered Joseph’s scriptures a hoax, was so incensed that she left her husband.
Emma worked as Joseph’s secretary until the summer of 1828, when she gave birth to a son who survived for only a few hours. Emma was so depressed by the death of her firstborn that Joseph was deeply worried about her. To give Emma a rest, he called in one of his supporters to serve as his scribe, and Emma regained her health and stability.
The following year 1829, the second secretary was replaced by a third. Finally, in 1830, the work of translation was completed. Joseph was now twenty-four years old, and had spent two and a half years translating the Book of Mormon. He had dictated a total of 275,000 words.
His translation complete, Joseph had one further use of the golden plates. To assure skeptics that the plates did, indeed, exist, he showed them to several trusted witnesses, who signed statements affirming that they had beheld the plates. In preparation for viewing the plates, the chosen witnesses prayed for several hours. After lengthy praying, one witness reported that he saw only an empty box. Joseph sent him out for additional prayer, after which the golden plates were fully visible to the witness.
Joseph later announced that he had returned the plates to the angel who had first led him to them. The angel took them off to eternity.
This is not a religion that’s going to want a lot of time in the spotlight…
One thing I noticed while watching this, is that theologies created before the invention of the telescope all have a very earth-is-the-center-of-the-universe feel to them, while those created after all read like bad science-fiction novels.
So this cult, started by a nineteenth century psychic treasure hunter, who apparently found his gold in the pockets of a lot of suckers willing to believe that God wants them to become a God too, with their very own universe someday, has taken it upon itself to banish gay people from the book of love. Well forgive us if there is no love lost in return. You called down the thunder. Now you have it. And it came to pass that the spotlight turned back upon the kooks. And it came to pass there was no hiding from its awful light. And it came to pass the people of the land saw the kooks among them for what they were. And it came to pass there was much laughter. And it came to pass that there was also much anger. For the kooks had cut off the ring fingers, of many loving couples…
Via Atrios… I’m going to be like a damn broken record for the next couple of years telling people that their gay and lesbian neighbors have been seeing all this for decades already. I just know it …
I used to have an idea of what a "good faith debate" was; that was in 1999. My general feeling now is that a liberal who says "fuck" a lot is one who got mugged by a conservative who pretended to be interested in a "good faith debate."
Now you know why this blog contains a lot of cursing.
I am going to insist here upon the grouchy perspective: I do not believe that there is any such thing as a "conservative intellectual," never mind one who is "thoughtful" or "sane." I contend that "conservatism" in its 21st century incarnation is nothing more or less than a particularly ill-conceived social formation based upon pernicious doxa. Or to be blunt, it is stupid identity politics. Sound unfair? Well then. To be a conservative nowadays and not be Cast Forth from the Tribe, you need to believe:
1. Anthropogenic climate change is a Lie.
2. The "Main Stream Media" has a partisan bias in favor of Democrats.
3. The invasion of Iraq was based on an honest appraisal of the evidence.
4. Torture is acceptable, and also, we do not torture.
I could go on, but these will do to make the point. To be a conservative in the 21st century American sense, you need to believe things that are not true, and you need to tie yourself into knots to pretend otherwise.
You could go on? Oh…get me started… How about:
Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.
The average homosexual relationship only lasts a few days.
The average homosexual has thousands of sexual partners in a lifetime.
Homosexuality is a mental illness. The APA only removed it from the list of mental illnesses because of protests by militant homosexuals.
Homosexuals have more money then everyone else.
Gay Liberation caused AIDS.
The Nazis were all homosexuals.
So were the communists.
No society that tolerated homosexuality ever lasted very long. Homosexuality caused the fall of Rome.
No society has ever allowed same sex marriage.
Same sex marriage will cause heterosexuals to stop getting married.
If same sex marriage is legalized, churches will be forced to marry homosexuals.
If same sex marriage is legalized, people will be jailed for speaking out against homosexuality.
If same sex marriage is legalized, the human race will die out.
If same sex marriage is legalized, homosexuals will be allowed to recruit children in kindergarten.
All homosexuals are pedophiles.
Homosexuality is the result of being molested as a child. All homosexuals were once molested.
Homosexuality is the result of poor parenting.
Male homosexuality is the result of failure to bond with the father.
Lesbianism is the result of failure to bond with the father.
Poor Fathering is the cause of all homosexuality.
No…wait…it’s overbearing mothers.
No…it’s godlessness…
…and so on. Get me started. And here’s the thing…It doesn’t matter that none of this is true. The point is, this is their Belief. Beliefs don’t have to be true. Accepting the Belief identifies you as being part of their tribe. That’s what’s important. Not that the Belief is true, but that you are either in the tribe, or an outsider. To put it into gang terminology, these are their colors. Wearing them identifies you as a member of the gang.
This is why rational discussion with these people is impossible. It’s not about what is true and what isn’t. It’s about defending the tribe against outsiders. We in the reality based community are always wrong, because we are outsiders. Their colors have to be stronger then our colors, because the most important thing on earth isn’t what is true and what is not…the most important thing on earth is defending the tribe against outsiders.
But when true and false stop being your guide to right and wrong, then you just walk eyes wide open into a pit. Why did the bottom fall out of the economy all of a sudden? Why did the splendid little war in Iraq that was only supposed to take a few days drag on and on and on and kill thousands? Facts, as it so happens, matter more then Belief after all. And came election day 2008, a lot of people were looking at their 401k quarterly reports, and seeing possibly for the first time, what kind of world you get when people think Belief is more important then facts, and decided it was time to kick the bums out. Facts matter.
So while I quite respect Hilzoy, I think she is dangerously mistaking the nature of movement conservatism. To go back a bit to the Tim Burke post she cites:
But I think we can all make things just ever so slightly better, make the air less poisonous, by pushing to the margins of our consciousness the crazy, bad, gutter-dwelling, two-faced, tendentious high-school debator kinds of voices out there in the public sphere, including and especially in blogs. Let them stew in their own juices, without the dignity of a reply, now that their pipelines to people with real political power have been significantly cut.
Tempting, but absolutely wrong. In the 1990s this was a fashionable attitude towards the crazy anti-Clintonoids — against whom the best and the brightest on the left failed to mobilize. This failure occurred because Clinton was, well, not really very far to the left, so why defend him? But it was also because it was assumed that Clinton could take care of himself. Which he could. But what happened underneath…? Well, the foundations were laid for the Bush administration, that’s what. The media in particular had their own institutional biases manipulated, with almost no pushback from liberals, who should have known better, but let themselves by and large get rolled. Where did the 21st century wingnuts come from? The 1990s. The case rests. And then throws up.
It seems to me that there is a powerful, but foolish, desire on the part of certain liberals, especially academic liberals, to want to engage in a nice, friendly, open debate with "conservatives." This is an error. You will always lose a game you do not realize you are playing.
Bingo. They are not about debating anything…they’re on a mission from God. They’re fighting a culture war where right and wrong are measured in terms of what is good for the party. It’s way past time to call this for what it is, and fight it for what it is. Assuming good faith only allows the other side to keep pretending they’re something they aren’t. What we are up against are theocrats and other sorts of totalitarians who think the "radical individualism" of the American Dream must be defeated by any means necessary. We can all just stop pretending now, that the divisiveness of the past few decades is about two different visions of America…one liberal, one conservative. It isn’t. We are fighting an enemy as old as the first tyrants, and just as bereft of scruples. At rock bottom, these people are thieves, who want to steal everything precious from our lives, not so much to fatten their own, as to make sure we never feel the joy of life more then they ever could.
Finally tonight as promised, a Special Comment on the passage, last week, of Proposition Eight in California, which rescinded the right of same-sex couples to marry, and tilted the balance on this issue, from coast to coast.
Some parameters, as preface. This isn’t about yelling, and this isn’t about politics, and this isn’t really just about Prop-8. And I don’t have a personal investment in this: I’m not gay, I had to strain to think of one member of even my very extended family who is, I have no personal stories of close friends or colleagues fighting the prejudice that still pervades their lives.
And yet to me this vote is horrible. Horrible. Because this isn’t about yelling, and this isn’t about politics.
This is about the… human heart, and if that sounds corny, so be it.
If you voted for this Proposition or support those who did or the sentiment they expressed, I have some questions, because, truly, I do not… understand. Why does this matter to you? What is it to you? In a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option. They don’t want to deny you yours. They don’t want to take anything away from you. They want what you want — a chance to be a little less alone in the world.
Only now you are saying to them — no. You can’t have it on these terms. Maybe something similar. If they behave. If they don’t cause too much trouble. You’ll even give them all the same legal rights — even as you’re taking away the legal right, which they already had. A world around them, still anchored in love and marriage, and you are saying, no, you can’t marry. What if somebody passed a law that said you couldn’t marry?
I keep hearing this term "re-defining" marriage.
If this country hadn’t re-defined marriage, black people still couldn’t marry white people. Sixteen states had laws on the books which made that illegal… in 1967. 1967.
The parents of the President-Elect of the United States couldn’t have married in nearly one third of the states of the country their son grew up to lead. But it’s worse than that. If this country had not "re-defined" marriage, some black people still couldn’t marry…black people. It is one of the most overlooked and cruelest parts of our sad story of slavery.Marriages were not legally recognized, if the people were slaves. Since slaves were property, they could not legally be husband and wife, or mother and child. Their marriage vows were different: not "Until Death, Do You Part," but "Until Death or Distance, Do You Part." Marriages among slaves were not legally recognized.
You know, just like marriages today in California are not legally recognized, if the people are… gay.
And uncountable in our history are the number of men and women, forced by society into marrying the opposite sex, in sham marriages, or marriages of convenience, or just marriages of not knowing — centuries of men and women who have lived their lives in shame and unhappiness, and who have, through a lie to themselves or others, broken countless other lives, of spouses and children… All because we said a man couldn’t marry another man, or a woman couldn’t marry another woman. The sanctity of marriage. How many marriages like that have there been and how on earth do they increase the "sanctity" of marriage rather than render the term, meaningless?
What is this, to you? Nobody is asking you to embrace their expression of love. But don’t you, as human beings, have to embrace… that love? The world is barren enough.
It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward. Your marriage only stands a 50-50 chance of lasting, no matter how much you feel and how hard you work.
And here are people overjoyed at the prospect of just that chance, and that work, just for the hope of having that feeling. With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?
With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate… this is what your heart tells you to do? You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents? Then Spread happiness — this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness — share it with all those who seek it. Quote me anything from your religious leader or book of choice telling you to stand against this. And then tell me how you can believe both that statement and another statement, another one which reads only "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
—
You are asked now, by your country, and perhaps by your creator, to stand on one side or another. You are asked now to stand, not on a question of politics, not on a question of religion, not on a question of gay or straight. You are asked now to stand, on a question of…love. All you need do is stand, and let the tiny ember of love meet its own fate. You don’t have to help it, you don’t have it applaud it, you don’t have to fight for it. Just don’t put it out. Just don’t extinguish it.Because while it may at first look like that love is between two people you don’t know and you don’t understand and maybe you don’t even want to know…It is, in fact, the ember of your love, for your fellow **person…
Just because this is the only world we have. And the other guy counts, too.
This is the second time in ten days I find myself concluding by turning to, of all things, the closing plea for mercy by Clarence Darrow in a murder trial.
But what he said, fits what is really at the heart of this:
"I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar-Khayyam," he told the judge.
"It appealed to me as the highest that I can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all:
"So I be written in the Book of Love;
"I do not care about that Book above.
"Erase my name, or write it as you will,
"So I be written in the Book of Love."
—
Good night, and good luck.
Emphasis mine. I see I’m not the only person who remembered those words of Omar-Khayyam.
"What is this to you", he asks. Simple. When your own soul is an open sewer, you cannot bear the sight of beauty in your neighbor. They want to empty our hearts of all hope, all joy, all peace, all love, so they won’t have to see the dead and stinking corpse they’ve made of their own. They want to drag us all down into their gutter, so they won’t have to know the beauty the human heart is capable of. That is what this fight is all about. That is what this fight has always been about. They want to empty our hearts of everything, so they can write their devotions on the bare walls inside.
When I finished my remarks, it was question time, and the first question was: “But you’re not gay!?” I must radiate a kind of straight guy dumpiness that no self-respecting gay man would be caught dead displaying in public.
Anyway, I took it to mean, “So why do you care about this?” and gave an answer I’ve always been proud of.
“I see it through a Jewish perspective,” I said. “I see you guys as another loathed minority trying to get through the day.”
Which they are. Readers complain to me that homosexuality isn’t a God-given condition, but a sinful choice, and I always respond, “It is? A choice? Really? I couldn’t choose it. Could you?” They never have a good answer to that.
The look-how-far-we’ve-come aspect of Obama’s triumph was mitigated by citizens in California, Florida and Arizona voting to bar gay marriage. An awful intrusion of government into the private sphere, one we would never tolerate if it didn’t touch upon the American obsession with sex. I mean, we’d never ban gays from holding fishing licenses, arguing that they somehow spoil the fishing experience for the rest of us.
But religious conservatives have cooked up this palpable lie about gays and marriage, based on nothing at all, and the public has accepted it because it tickles the unexamined biases they already have.
Just like civil rights, this is a generational war that will be won, I have absolutely no doubt, in the fullness of time. But not yet.
Emphasis mine. And actually…time was a homosexual might not be allowed even a fishing license. Time was you could be denied all kinds of professional licenses if you were known to be homosexual. You could have your plumber’s license taken away. Your license to practice medicine. You could be fired, evicted, rounded up by the cops in your local bar, or just walking down the street in some places, and tossed into jail.
The marriage barrier is a bitter, lingering part of all that. It isn’t marriage they want to protect. It’s the right to persecute homosexuals. They can’t just round us up and toss us in jail anymore. But they can still torment loving couples…still remind us that a whole human life is not ours to have…still drive the knife into our hearts every now and then, so they can feel good about themselves.
Bitterness generated by the bruising battle between Betsy Markey and Marilyn Musgrave apparently lingers days after voters decided the winner of the 4th Congressional District.
Incumbent Republican Musgrave, who lost to Democrat Markey by a 56 to 44 percent margin Tuesday, has yet to call and congratulate Markey on her win.
Musgrave also hasn’t conceded the race, said Markey spokesman Ben Marter. "She has yet to admit defeat," he said. "It’s a little bizarre."
Calls to Musgrave’s campaign and congressional office went unanswered Friday.
Some Stuff To Add To My Reading List While I’m At It…
Per the previous post…
Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (Hardcover)
by John T. Cacioppo (Author), William Patrick (Author)
From Publishers Weekly
Eleanor Rigby might have been in worse shape than the Beatles imagined: not only lonely but angry, depressed and in ill health. University of Chicago research psychologist Cacioppo shows in studies that loneliness can be harmful to our overall well-being. Loneliness, he says, impairs the ability to feel trust and affection, and people who lack emotional intimacy are less able to exercise good judgment in socially ambiguous situations; this makes them more vulnerable to bullying as children and exploitation by unscrupulous salespeople in old age. But Cacioppo and Patrick (editor of the Journal of Life Sciences) want primarily to apply evolutionary psychology to explain how our brains have become hard-wired to have regular contact with others to aid survival. So intense is the need to connect, say the authors, that isolated individuals sometimes form parasocial relations with pets or TV characters. The authors’ advice for dealing with loneliness—psychotherapy, positive thinking, random acts of kindness—are overly general, but this isn’t a self-help book. It does present a solid scientific look at the physical and emotional impact of loneliness.
A Cry Unheard: New Insights into the Medical Consequences of Loneliness (Hardcover)
by James Lynch (Author)
"Thirty years ago, anyone blaming loneliness for physical illness would have been laughed at," the editors of Newsweek observed in a March 1998 cover story…" (more)
Amazon.com Review
We’re a lonely society. Twenty-five percent of American households consist of one person living alone; 50 percent of American marriages end in divorce (affecting more than a million children); 30 percent of American births in 1991 were to unmarried women. These factors are linked to an increased risk of premature death, according to loneliness specialist James J. Lynch, Ph.D., who has spent almost four decades clarifying how loneliness contributes to a marked increased risk of developing premature coronary heart disease. "Mortality rates in the United States for all causes of death, and not just for heart disease, are consistently higher for divorced, single, and widowed individuals of both sexes and all races," writes Lynch in A Cry Unheard: New Insights into the Medical Consequences of Loneliness. An important point in this book is that loneliness in childhood has "a significant impact on the incidence of serious disease and premature death decades later in adulthood." School failure is a major contributor to this problem. Children who fail in school are socially isolated and deficient in the language and communications skills that could help them overcome their isolation. Lynch also explores the links between loneliness and premature death, and describes the biological power of human dialogue–which, he says, is more intimate than sexual intercourse, because dialogue involves the heart, not just the body. This is not a fluffy, feel-good book. There are no quick tips, no instant relief from loneliness, no "do now" lists of activities. This book is for readers willing to delve into the subject of loneliness and health risk. Lynch wants you to understand the magnitude of the problem, which he presents in a style that is both academic (with plenty of statistics and graphs) and accessible. He also wants you to understand the complex solution: contact, companionship, and communication. –Joan Price
From Library Journal
Psychologist Lynch’s The Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences of Loneliness (1977) was the pioneering work that linked mental and emotional states to physical well-being. In A Cry Unheard, he expands on the connection between the stress of loneliness and the state of one’s health. Drawing from his own and others’ research, Lynch contends that loneliness has become a silent epidemic, leading to depression and early death. He points out that parents’ use of language and school failure can result in alienation and antisocial behavior, which sow the seeds of loneliness. And while we may seem more "connected" through technology, Lynch warns that technology-induced loneliness is likely to increase and result in even more medical problems. Loneliness, writes Lynch, is a lethal but avoidable poison. While not a "how-to" book, this is worthy of inclusion in larger consumer health collections. -Valeria Long, Van Andel Research Inst., Grand Rapids, MI
A lethal but avoidable poison… I’ve tried for decades to avoid it and all it got me were friends who think I never tried hard enough. This is why I don’t think I’m going to make it out of my fifties alive.
In Loneliness, the psychologist John T Cacioppo and the science writer William Patrick report on the situation in the United States: Between 1985 and 2004, the number of Americans who said they had no close confidants tripled. Single-parent households are on the rise, and the US Census estimates that 30 percent more Americans will live alone in 2010 than did so in 1980. As the American way of life spreads around the world, no doubt loneliness is being exported with it.
People do like to be alone sometimes. But no one likes to feel lonely – to feel that they are alone against their will, or that the social contacts they do have are without deeper meaning. According to Cacioppo and Patrick the feeling of loneliness is the least of it. They present scientific evidence suggesting that loneliness seriously burdens human health. By middle age, the lonely are less likely to exercise and more likely to eat a high-fat diet, and they report experiencing a greater number of stressful events. Loneliness correlates with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s. During a four-year study, lonely senior citizens were more likely to end up in nursing homes; during a nine-year study, people with fewer social ties were two to three times more likely to die.
To explain why loneliness hurts so bad, Cacioppo and Patrick turn to evolutionary psychology…
(Emphasis mine…) A chance comes along for you to do something good, maybe something wonderful for a friend. Perhaps nothing will come of it. The odds are poor at best. But it’s a chance. It has dropped in your lap. You need only lift your little finger to give this chance to your friend.
But perhaps lifting your little finger is too much trouble. If instead, you allow this chance to float away on the wind, like a dead autumn leaf, don’t tell yourself afterward that it wasn’t really of much importance. Don’t just shrug and think that, after all, probably nothing would have come of it. That isn’t the point. …scientific evidence suggesting that loneliness seriously burdens human health. By middle age, the lonely are less likely to exercise and more likely to eat a high-fat diet, and they report experiencing a greater number of stressful events. Loneliness correlates with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s. During a four-year study, lonely senior citizens were more likely to end up in nursing homes; during a nine-year study, people with fewer social ties were two to three times more likely to die…. Is this what decent people allow to happen to the ones they care about? Of course not.
So don’t tell yourself that it was nothing. Don’t reassure yourself that the odds were poor anyway. Stop making excuses. Look yourself in the mirror, and fess up to the fact that if you care so little about this person, that you’d allow even a billion to one chance they’d find happiness to fly off into the night without so much as a shrug, they were never really someone you cared all that much about to begin with.
The Side Of The Comic Book Rack I Always Stayed Away From…
…had a lot of these in it…
When I was a kid, I just couldn’t imagine how even girls liked these. Although I never actually saw any browsing that side of the comic book racks anyway. Maybe they were too embarrassed to be seen looking at these. Or maybe they just waited for the boys to leave first, before approaching them. I can imagine the snickers coming from the boys side of the rack were a girl to wander over and pick one up…
But there must have been a market for these, because the comic book publishers kept grinding them out. Some of the most famous names in comic book…er…excuse me…Graphic Novel history did these. Here’s one by Jack Kirby…
At the age I was buying a lot of comics, I could barely stand to look at these. They just completely creeped me out. That whole icky love stuff just totally mystified me. Who cares? I used to fidget in my seat at the movies whenever the love interest parts of the story were going on. I’d be sitting there thinking to myself, Ah Jeeze…come on, come on, let’s get on with it…
Had I bothered to sneak a look inside one of these, I might have found something like this inside…
…which would have just confirmed my suspicions for me. All that love stuff was for the birds. Who cares? Leave me out…please.
I just couldn’t fathom it. As I said…those things really creeped me out. Why would anyone…even a girl…bother with crap like that. Especially when you could buy a really neat comic like…oh…this one…
Or…this one…
Man…I couldn’t get enough of that when I was a kid. For some strange reason. Even though the stories were usually pretty lousy.
They say girls mature a tad sooner then boys in the romance department, and maybe that’s true to a degree. Also, I was a bit of a late bloomer. But there was a section missing from the comic book racks back then too, and had it been there, maybe I could have grown up understanding all that gooey, icky love stuff a little bit better. Maybe by the time my hormones really started to percolate, I wouldn’t have been so fumbly, clumsy and deathly shy.
I grew up in a world where homosexuals were twisted monsters who lurked behind schools waiting to pounce on kids my age. The messages we all got back then to beware of strange men fell on the ears of gay kids too…and looking back on it, I can clearly recall flinching away whenever my thoughts began to stray toward how…attractive…some of the characters in my comic books were. I didn’t want to be a monster. I didn’t want to be sick. So I just kind-of let my eyes wander over whatever it was something deep down inside of me had jerked them towards…
…and then wander away again without thinking about it too closely.
What I really needed in my young teenage life was something that spoke to me. Well…what I really needed was to grow up in a time when adults were willing to talk to teenagers honestly and rationally about sex and sexuality. The girls weren’t getting any of that either back then really.
Even so…as horrible as it was back then, to even contemplate being homosexual, had I seen something like this on the comic book racks, I would have snatched one up instantly…
I don’t know if I could have worked up the courage to actually take it to the cashier or not…but I’d have gotten it out of the store one way or the other…
Well…of course there would have been no “explicit content” allowed. But just the idea that boys could fall in love with other boys, and that it was okay, and that you weren’t a monster if you felt sexually attracted to one, would have made so much of a difference in my life later on… So very, very much of a difference…
Romance. Maybe it wasn’t so icky after all…
…maybe I could find one of my own someday…
Every time I buy one of these now…and I have several bookshelves full of them…I have to laugh at how contemptuous I felt toward those girl’s romance comics way back when. Yes…they were horribly sexist. But at least love always won in the end in those things. It was something you could hope for, for yourself too. Here’s a portion of the back cover of Constellations In My Palm…
What would you do if you lost the best thing that happened to you because of your own pride and selfishness? What would you do if you lost the best thing that happened to you because you were taught to be afraid of it? What would you do if you lost the best thing that happened to you because you were never taught how to reach for it like the other kids were? What would you do if you had another chance and lost it again? And again? And again? What would you do if you spent your whole life trying to get beyond that fear and confusion they put into you when you were a kid, and you couldn’t?
My generation, and the one just before us, the pre Stonewall generation, began this movement to break down those barriers of self loathing, fear and confusion, and reclaim our human right to love and be loved. And this is our great victory: that gay teens no longer have to live in a world where all they ever hear about themselves is that they are sick, broken, twisted, monsters. They can grow up now, believing that they are fully human too. They can grow up now, believing in the promise of love too.
It was, and still regretfully is, a hard and bitter fight. But every day now, more and more of us are finding our way to the promise land. Even, thankfully, some of us older gay folk too. Some of us will only stand on the hillside just beyond, never to find our way in after all, stricken by how much more beautiful it really was, how much more beautiful then we could have ever imagined, back when we first started fighting to win it back. But we can take heart in this, and carry on: so no kid will ever have to grow up in a world that tells them they will never find love, never be loved, because they are gay.
And Now…A Word From Some Useless Fucks Who Need To Just Go Away Now…
This came in the mail just a little while ago. And here I thought I wouldn’t be hearing any more from these folks…
Dear Bruce,
This has been an incredibly difficult week for Californians who are disappointed in the passage of Proposition 8, which takes away the right to marry for same-sex couples in our state. We feel a profound sense of disappointment in this defeat, but know that in order to move forward we must continue to stand together as one community in order to secure full equality in California.
In working to defeat Prop 8, a profound coalition banded together to fight for equality. Faith leaders, labor, teachers, civil rights leaders and communities of color, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, public officials, local school boards and city councils, parents, corporate law firms and bar associations, businesses, and people from all walks of life joined together to stand up against discrimination. We must build on this coalition in order to achieve equal rights for all Californians.
We achieve nothing if we isolate the people who did not stand with us in this fight. We only further divide our state if we attempt to blame people of faith, African American voters, rural communities and others for this loss. We know people of all faiths, races and backgrounds stand with us in our fight to end discrimination, and will continue to do so. Now more than ever it is critical that we work together and respect our differences that make us a diverse and unique society. Only with that understanding will we achieve justice and equality for all.
Dr. Delores A. Jacobs
CEO
Center Advocacy Project
Lorri L. Jean
CEO
L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center
Kate Kendell
Executive Director
National Center for Lesbian Rights
Geoff Kors
Executive Director
Equality California
This is all well and good…especially the part about not putting all this on African-Americans. Yes, they voted heavily for it, but they didn’t put four out of very five dollars into the kitty for Proposition 8 either. They didn’t get it on the ballot. They didn’t donate vast amounts of logistical support for it.
But…leaving all that aside… You know…you folks lost the fight...
I worked for both the No on 8 campaign and the Obama campaign this year and cannot tell you how far apart those two were in style and substance. One was top down, the other bottom up. Ironically, it was the presidential campaign that was the grassroots model, not the state-level proposition campaign. As soon as I started working for the No on 8 campaign I was amazed at the level of scripting: "don’t say ‘civil rights,’ don’t say ‘constitution,’ don’t say ‘gay.’" I couldn’t believe it.
One of the most brilliant things about the Obama campaign was that they didn’t expect callers and canvassers to be policy wonks. They just said "tell your story, let people know why you’re voting for him. Connect with people." I can’t help but feel at this point that if the gloves were taken off we could’ve helped people get a grip on the real issues at stake here, which I happen to think is a matter of soiling the state constitution.
What was even more confounding was the No on 8 campaign’s decision to stay away form polling places at churches and schools. First of all, most polling places are at churches and schools, and second, that mentality buys right into the Yes on 8 brainwashing campaign that same sex marriage is going to corrupt our morals and our children. This idiocy was obvious to everyone that I worked with on the campaign. What was going on with the leadership upstairs?!!!
I don’t think I’m the only one who gave you a lot of money I couldn’t really afford who is wondering now why you let a substantial lead over the yes vote when this campaign started just…evaporate. So why don’t all of you to just shut your traps now and stay out of this. I’d rather watch ten hours of James Dobson gloating then one second of you pathetic milksops lecturing us about respecting the people who just cut off our ring fingers. You don’t bring a handshake to a knife fight.
SAN FRANCISCO — The California Attorney General, Equality California, and the nation’s leading LGBT legal groups agree that the marriages of the estimated 18,000 same-sex couples who married between June 16, 2008 and the possible passage of Proposition 8 are still valid in the state of California and must continue to be honored by the state.
As Attorney General Jerry Brown has stated in previous court papers and as he reaffirmed to the San Francisco Chronicle, those marriages should remain valid notwithstanding Proposition 8’s possible passage. On August 5, 2008, Brown told the Chronicle, "I believe that marriages that have been entered into subsequent to the May 15 Supreme Court opinion will be recognized by the California Supreme Court,’ He noted that Proposition is silent about retroactivity, and said, ‘I would think the court, in looking at the underlying equities, would most probably conclude that upholding the marriages performed in that interval before the election would be a just result.’"
There is absolutely nothing in the language of Proposition 8 to suggest that the initiative would apply to couples who have already legally married. Unless the language of an initiative specifically says that it is to be applied retroactively, California’s courts have been very reluctant to do so, especially when the newly passed measure is in such stark conflict with existing constitutional provisions.
And that stark conflict makes it just possible, barely, that Proposition 8 will be found invalid by the courts. Simply put, it is a revision to the state constitution itself, as opposed to an amendment. The distinction is important because a revision must be, according to the constitution, first approved by the legislature, and then by a super-majority of the voters, not merely a simple majority. But at this point, to strike down the vote, especially after the court already had a chance to rule on this very matter before the vote, will take more nerve then I think this court has now. It takes a special sort of person to stick their necks out for a hated minority they themselves are not one of. And then stick it out some more.
But that’s a post for another day. The interesting thing here is this sudden…enthusiasm…by the Mormon church elders for…healing the rift…
Now that California voters have outlawed same-sex marriage, an LDS Church leader called Wednesday for members to heal rifts caused by the emotional campaign by treating each other with "civility, with respect and with love."
Hahahaha! Civility. Really?
Although it is extremely unlikely that California courts would apply the initiative retroactively, the proponents of Proposition 8 may file a legal challenge trying to invalidate the marriages of those who married before Proposition 8 possibly passed.
May? Yeah. Right. And the sun May rise in the east tomorrow. According to the bigots no heterosexual marriage is secure so long as a single same sex couple remains legally married. They’ll sue all right. The least we can do is wave all their rhetoric about "civility", "respect" and "love" back in their faces.
For the first time since the end of 1994, we can have normal politics and policymaking–can discuss what policies are best for America, and what America should be.
You see, from the end of 1994 to the end of 2000, the Republican congressional majority’s single fixed idea was that nothing should happen that could be portrayed as a success for Bill Clinton. And from the end of 2000 to today, the executive branch was controlled by a gang of malevolent, immoral, and destructive thugs that have disgraced the United States of America.
We can finally have normal politics and policymaking again. That’s not a tremendous accomplishment, is it?
It feels like one…
Yes. Yes it does. Or will…when I can get around to feeling it myself. Having lived under the cloud of republican party radicalism for decades now, it’s going to be hard to come back out of the bomb shelter, so to speak, and look around without feeling nervous.
If you want to know what Barack Obama’s magic was, it was simple. He ran as a democrat. In the New York Times, columnist Roger Cohen writes…
Beyond Iraq, beyond the economy, beyond health care, there was something even more fundamental at stake in this U.S. election won by Barack Obama: the self-respect of the American people.
For almost eight years, Americans have seen words stripped of meaning, lives sacrificed to confront nonexistent Iraqi weapons and other existences ravaged by serial incompetence on an epic scale.
Against all this, Obama made a simple bet and stuck to it. If you trusted in the fundamental decency, civility and good sense of the American people, even at the end of a season of fear and loss, you could forge a new politics and win the day.
Four years ago, at the Democratic convention, in the speech that lifted him from obscurity, Obama said: “For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga: a belief that we are connected as one people.”
He never wavered from that theme. “In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people,” he declared Tuesday night in his victory speech to a joyous crowd in Chicago.
But this is the democratic party ideal in a nutshell ever since FDR.
It is nothing new. What’s different this time, is that a democrat actually ran on it. Republicans have been trying to utterly destroy FDR’s New Deal ever since he passed away toward the end of the great war he had guided the nation through. But this is still FDR’s America. His vision that we are all one America, whether rich or poor, factory or farm worker or white collar manager, eastern, western and everywhere in between, still resonates with us.
It is the American dream, that diverse people of many faiths, descendants of many nations, can still be a people in spite of their differences, because of a shared vision of liberty and justice for all. The tragedy of my lifetime is that the democratic party came to believe decades of republican propaganda, that America was not one nation after all, but a winner-take-all playing field where only the most ruthless, the most greedy, could win if they carved out of it just the right voter block.
And all it took to crush them, was someone willing to take up the dream again, and remind us what it was once upon a time, to still believe in it…
In that four-year span, Obama never got angry. Without breaking a sweat, he took down two of the most ruthless political machines on the planet: first the Clintons and then the Republican Party.
An idea has power. John McCain had many things in this campaign, but an idea was not one of them. At a time of economic crisis, he could not order his thoughts about it. Hard-hit Ohio drew its decisive conclusions. It was not alone.
McCain flailed, opting on a whim for a sidekick, Sarah Palin, who personified the very “country-first” intolerance and Bush-like small-mindedness of which many Americans had grown as weary as the world has.
The divisions the republicans have been sowing in the amber waves won’t be soon healed. But now we can begin a start on it. People Are tired of it. Not everyone surely. The christianists. The bigots. The greedy. But they have always been the hangers-on. There is an aching in the land for a way out of the culture wars, and a return to business as usual. That’s where we can make a start. At last. At long last.
Now that California voters have outlawed same-sex marriage, an LDS Church leader called Wednesday for members to heal rifts caused by the emotional campaign by treating each other with "civility, with respect and with love."
"We hope that everyone would treat [each other] that way no matter which side of this issue they were on," said Elder L. Whitney Clayton, of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Presidency of the Seventy.
…
In a statement, the LDS Church said it does not object to domestic partnership or civil union legislation "as long as these do not infringe on the integrity of the traditional family or the constitutional rights of churches."
Which same sex marriage does not. But…you know that…
As for Proposition 8, "we consider this to be a moral issue," Clayton said. "We’re not anti-gay, we’re pro marriage between a man and a woman."
Right. Like you weren’t racist when you were denying black people a seat in your church…just pro white. You don’t have to be racist to be pro-white.
You gutter crawling scum have been lurking in the background of this battle for over a decade now, and all that is over. You fought to make your gay and lesbian neighbors second class citizens in their own country. Own it. Trust me…you will have to. Nobody is forgetting this. You want civility? Get The Fuck Off Our Backs.
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