Looks like the parents of Lawrence King have bought into the defense strategy of their son’s killer.  News reports I’m seeing this morning are that King’s parents have filed a claim against the school where he was shot to death, asserting that it was their failure to enforce the dress code on their son that led to his death (so far all I see is the AP report, which I’m not linking to because of the blogger AP boycott).  In other words, because Lawrence felt himself more feminine then the other boys, and the school allowed him to dress more femininely, the school made him a target.

This is so unbearably sad.  The poor kid’s parents seem deathly ashamed of their own son, even in death. He had to know how they felt about him before he died.  And maybe that was why some of the teachers at his school took him under their wing as they did.  Lawrence’s parents aren’t arguing here that the school failed to protect their son, but that they failed to keep him in the closet.  They are granting the premise of their son’s killer and his lawyer, that hate has more right to walk in the hallways of the public schools then gay kids do. 

It’s one thing to argue that the school let the bullying that Lawrence endured escalate dangerously.  It is another thing entirely to argue that letting Lawrence be openly gay led to his murder.  Waving the dress code around is a calculated and disgustingly cynical ploy.  It sidesteps the question of whether the code itself embodies discriminatory gender norms.  Gay and transgendered children should feel welcome and safe and secure in school too, or they cannot assert their right to an education.  Shoving them into the closet, for the sake of the delicate sensibilities of bigots, punishes them simply for existing, forces them to try and learn, somehow, in an environment where they are made to feel deviant, outcast and ashamed.

I read elsewhere that Lawrence’ father has complained bitterly that the gays have turned his son’s death into a cause.  As though the safety and welfare of all the other gay and transgendered kids in the public schools isn’t something worth fighting for.  It’s one thing to forgive his son’s killer.  The boy is only 14 after all.  But it’s another thing to excuse him.  Many gay and transgendered children know with horrible sickening clarity, some living on the streets because they were thrown out of their homes, that their parents would excuse their killer too.  Some would excuse them with great sadness.  Some would applaud.

I’m still running a very old version of the WordPress blog software here at The Story So Far so an upgrade is long overdue.  I’m going to work on that this weekend, as weekends seem to be when my traffic here is at its lowest ebb.  Presumably that’s because most of you have work to do around the house on the weekend like I do, and not because blog prime time happens to be during normal work hours when the boss isn’t looking. 

I’ll start the process sometime this weekend.  Saturday or Sunday morning depending on how my other household chores go.  Hopefully the upgrade will be reasonably painless.  There’s a WordPress upgrade plugin I’m going to try first.  If that doesn’t work then I’ll have to to it manually.  Obviously I’m backing everything up first, so unless the backups fail nothing here should be lost.  But the blog may be unavailable for a time.  Please Stand By…

Ecuador is debating a new draft constitution and Pope Ratzinger doesn’t much like it.  The new constitution, which goes to the voters on September 28, among other things guarantees the rights of same sex couples.  Consider that here in the land of the free and the home of the brave we’re busy taking those rights away one state at a time.  Some say the new Ecuadorian constitution also concentrates too much power in the office of the current President, who is a socialist.  But that’s not what Ratzinger’s men are busy complaning about…

Archbishop Antonio Arregui Yarza of Guayaquil criticized the draft charter for including what he called ambiguous abortion laws and granting the same benefits to same-sex couples and married heterosexual couples.

"A union between homosexuals is not a family," Arregui said in a news conference Monday.  "We’re going to request that the entire Christian conscience takes note of the nonnegotiable incompatibilities of this constitution with our faith." He also said the proposed document is "leaving the door open to the deletion of a new baby."

Just ignore that little bit of translation awkwardness…the new constitution doesn’t explicitly ban abortion outright and that’s a problem for the Archbishop.  But what’s unacceptable to him, is that it gives same sex couples the same rights as opposite sex couples.  To him that is a nonnegotiable incompatibility with his faith. 

Luckly for Ecuadorian gays, their president isn’t afraid to throw the religious argument right back at the haters…

President Defends Gay Rights in Draft Ecuadorean Constitution

President Rafael Correa has defended a new draft Ecuadorean constitution that grants same-sex couples the rights of marriage, El Telégrafo reported Aug. 1. The document faces a popular vote Sept. 28.

Speaking in the city of Monteverde, Correa said: “Jesus of Nazareth never preached hatred, homophobia or segregation; instead he knew to say, ‘Love one another.’

“It is false that (the draft) is recognizing as family the union of homosexuals. What we are doing is recognizing the dignity of all people without discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation, etc.”

“Let’s hope, now that there’s been so much talk about moral incompatibilities between the new constitution and the Gospel, sometimes utilizing falsehoods, that we also can talk with equal force about the profound incompatibility of the social situation — of that inequality, of that existing social injustice — with the Gospels,” Correa said.

Emphasis mine.  This is why John-Paul furiously tried to stamp out liberation theology in South America.  It’s one thing to preach to the poor and the outcast.  It’s another thing entirely when they start preaching back at you.

Lifted from Fred Clark’s blog, Slacktivist, which you should read more often…

"You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists."

-G.K. Chesterton – The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare.

Via Pam’s House Blend…

Lavonia, Ga., man imprisoned family for years, police say

Police say for the past three years, the wife and children of Raymond Daniel Thurmond lived in fear and squalor; held captive in a singlewide trailer where they were literally not allowed to see the light of day.

According to the news article, nobody in the neighborhood even knew there was a family in that trailer.  Trailers in that park sit within feet of one another…

Only one of the children, who are ages 14, 13, 12, and 9, had been to school.

“The 14-year old had been allowed to go school until second grade,” Chief Carlisle said.

… 

The only food found in the house was rotted, leftover fast food, said Roger Dutton, who has been responsible for cleaning out the structure, and investigators said all four children were undernourished and underweight. “Their weight is not consistent with their height and age. They were deprived of food and had also gone without medical attention for a long period of time. In fact, one of the children has a serious medical condition that has gone untreated,” Carlisle said.

Photos taken at the scene by investigators and shown to this reporter revealed the family was living in unimaginable filth.

The photos showed thousands of roaches and roach dirt covered every part of every room. They crawled in and out of drawers, cupboards, and furniture.

Old pizza boxes were stacked in one corner of the living room with dozens of empty plastic soda bottles strewn about on the floor.

In the kitchen, counters were covered in stacks of dirty dishes and old empty cans of food. Bags of garbage were strewn about the house, mixed in with dirty clothes and other trash.

Workers have hauled away two Dumpsters full of trash so far, and the work still is not done, Dutton said.

The prisoners family were discovered when Thurmond decided to take himself a mistress on the side and his wife bolted…

All are now in protective custody at an undisclosed location. The children are being evaluated and their medical needs treated.

Thurmond was arrested when he showed up at the Fieldale chicken processing plant where he worked.

But at least those kids weren’t growing up in a same sex household, so they still had a good roll model of what family life is supposed to be like.

It’s a hopeful sign to see more mainstream liberal pundits finally waking up to the fact that the moral argument is actually their friend.  This from Slate, in an article on Reclaiming The Morality Of Abortion…

Liberals have never won anything by reframing moral questions as pragmatic ones; they end up looking shifty and evasive. 

And…cowardly.  Here’s why the moral argument matters…

The gay-rights movement best illuminates the need to emphasize the role of morality in politics. In 1986, the Supreme Court decided Bowers v. Hardwick, upholding the constitutionality of criminal penalties for gay sodomy. Choice, said the five-justice majority, although available for a wide range of decisions (including abortion), was not available for conduct we consider really, really icky. (They didn’t say that explicitly; they put the words in the mouth of the "Judeo-Christian" tradition and let the priests say it for them.) Just as Bowers was decided, however, the AIDS epidemic motivated and enabled gay people to tell the world why their behavior was moral. As gay men began to die, they and their loved ones began to write about their relationships, their shared homes, and their desire—going back to Homer—to bury those they loved. At the same time, lesbians, who had been fighting for their children after divorces and for the families they were creating with donor insemination—publicly told the story of their own moral commitments.

By the time the Supreme Court faced the previously sinful gay litigants again in Lawrence v. Texas, 17 years later, the decision went the other way. It is impossible to read the two opinions and ignore the change in moral climate that produced the legal shift. And although recent polling fails to reveal a majority supporting gay marriage, the numbers have been steadily improving.

To fight for your own part in the American Dream, you must first fight for the American Dream.  That, Liberty And Justice For All thing.  Eight years of George Bush, and the collapse of America’s moral stature among the nations of the world, right as one of the world’s great tyrannies rousts itself from a short slumber to start eating its neighbors again, is the price we are paying now for ceding the moral ground to the human hating Right.  There is a pragmatic human potential and productivity side to the fight for democracy and freedom.  But it should never replace the moral struggle for liberty and justice, for the human status.  The struggle for freedom has always been a profoundly moral struggle.

So I’m scanning my Google News headlines this morning, and I come across a tantalizing fragment of what looks like a letter to the editor of the Associated Baptist Press…

Associated Baptist Press, FL – 1 hour ago
(ABP) — Thanks to Dr. David Gushee for his engaging article on Christian ethics as they relate to gay and lesbian Christians.

However, when I click on the link the Associated Baptist Press website tells me…

You are not authorised to view this resource.
You need to login.

I double check to see if it’s a subscription only site and it appears not to be.  So perhaps they’re just blocking incoming links.  A lot of head up their butt websites do that these days.  So I go to the home page of the Associated Baptist Press website and look for a handy search box.  There’s one at the top and I enter what I assume is the name of the columnist the person in the Google link is responding to, "David Gushee".  I get a handy list of entries, including this…

Editor’s note: The recent series of articles by David Gushee on homosexuality generated an unusual amount of response. 

I’ll just bet it did.  After all, we homosexuals are one of the seven seals of the tribulation aren’t we?  I blogged some time ago about how, according to the Left Behind books, the Antichrist will be the son of a gay male couple…

This came to mind last night, as I read (via Andrew Sullivan) the following Wikipedia entry on Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins Left Behind stories…

Born in the county of Cluj in Romania, Carpathia’s birth is the product of genetic engineering. His mother Marilena Carpathia, is convinced by parties who are followers of Satan, although she is kept unaware of this, to become the mother of a child who they assure her would change the face of the world. Marilena’s husband, Sorin, and his gay lover, Baduna Marius, provide genetic material to facilitate Nicolae’s conception.

Dig it.  LaHaye and Jenkins are telling their readers that the Antichrist is, literally, the spawn of a gay male couple.

And some days I sit here at my computer and wonder if this is what it was like to be a Jew in 1920s Germany, watching the horror coming on the horizon.  This is the kind of stuff that gets people killed.  Someday, it might well get me killed.  Someone with a baseball bat or a gun comes along and takes my head off, because he thinks that gay people are going to deliver the world to the Antichrist.

And LaHaye and Jenkins are hardly alone in this.  Variations on this theme are popping up all across the kook pews.  The Gays are in league with Satan…  Just last week James Dobson was telling his listeners on the Focus on the Family radio broadcast, that same sex marriage was an attack on the family by the very forces of hell itself (via Ex-Gay Watch):

…as you all very well know marriage is under vicious attack, now I think from the forces of hell itself. Now it’s either going to continue to decline, and as I told you in my office a few minutes ago, I believe with that destruction of marriage will come the decline of western civilization itself.

So…yeah…I’ll fucking bet David Gushee’s recent series of articles on homosexuality generated an unusual amount of response.  On the other hand, I have to wonder what the Associated Baptist Press expected.  Baptists haven’t exactly been in the forefront of calling out all the anti-gay hatemongering that’s been going on for the past few decades.  There’s a reason I keep the Baptist part of my own life history at arm’s length.

Anyway, I found the article Google News had linked to, clicked on it, and found I was actually allowed to read it from one of their own internal links…

Gay Christians can’t wait any longer
By Peggy Campolo
Wednesday, 13 August 2008

Editor’s note: The recent series of articles by David Gushee on homosexuality generated an unusual amount of response. ABP solicited these two representative responses — from Peggy Campolo, an advocate for gay Christians, and George Guthrie, a professor at Union University.

Both articles are worth the read, if you can actually get to them.  Maybe the links I’ve posted here will work.  If not, you’ll probably have to do what I did.  (Update: I’ve just tested them and they seem to be working for now…)  Gushee writes…

It is clear that insofar as "Christianity" or "the church" is primarily associated in people’s minds with rejection of homosexuals, as poll data shows, our mission as witnesses to the love of God in Jesus Christ has been badly damaged. There are very good missional reasons for Christian leaders to back off of public crusades against gay rights, whatever one may think about the merits of the particular issues under discussion. We must be known for what (who) we are for, not what (who) we are against.

The crux of his article is this, basically…

A church that is in the process of abandoning basic tenets of Christian sexual morality has no credibility as a moral voice in culture. And, ironically, it has no credibility if it decides to abandon the church’s traditional stance on homosexuality.

It’s almost an Only Nixon Can Go To China kind of argument.  The problem with it is that at it’s core it’s still pretty damn arrogant.  I don’t know of any church that’s saying Hey gang…let’s just throw sexual morality out the window so we can all just have some fun!  What’s happening is that some congregations and some church leaders are seeing the old moral codes being challenged by the reality of gay people’s lives and they are finding them wanting.  That is leaving many of them to ask questions they’d never thought in their wildest dreams they’d ever find themselves asking, because the Bible was supposedly plain as day about all that homosexuality stuff.  If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them… 

Simple, no?  God says, kill the homosexuals, and you get a free pass on that thou shalt not kill thing.  But it’s not so simple if you have a conscience.  You don’t see an abomination when you look at that kid who just came out to you.  You don’t see an abomination in the love and devotion of that same sex couple next door.  If anything, you see the same joy and peace and contentment you see in your own marriage.  And so the questions start tap tap tapping you on the shoulder.  Not all who wander are lost.  These people haven’t abandoned sexual morality.  It is in fact because they are moral people, that they are questioning what they’ve been taught all their lives about homosexuals and homosexuality.

Folks like Gushee, who I have no doubt is trying hard, and in good faith, to figure all this out, need to listen to themselves.  Because you are willing to willy-nilly toss out thousands of years of Christian sexual morality simply because you see in the love of same sex couples a reflection of God’s love too, you have no creditability as a moral voice.  I’m sorry?  It’s the folks who cling to ideology and dogma in the face of what their own two eyes can plainly see who have no moral conscience, let alone credibility as a moral voice.

And tucked into Peggy Campolo’s response is the moral truth in a nutshell…

A pastor friend of mine, who has conducted too many funerals for gay children of God who ended their lives because they could no longer live the lie that their churches and families demanded of them, tells of a suicide note left by a young Christian. He dearly loved the godly parents who had accepted him but could not bear the anguish felt when their church excluded them along with him. His final letter to his mother and father read simply, "I didn’t know how else to fix it."

Their blood shall be upon them…  No it won’t.

Via Box Turtle Bulletin…  Karen Klien of the L.A. Times editorial board writes of meeting with the Proposition Eight supporters…

Behind the gay-marriage talk

The Times editorial board formulates its positions on ballot measures not only by research, but by inviting representatives of both sides to (separate) meetings with the board. It’s a good forum for probing an issue, and the results sometimes are surprising.

Here is where we win.  When the only people who were engaging the gay haters directly were us, they were able to hide the depth of their hate from the rest of straight America.  They could claim they were only motivated by a desire to protect children.  They could claim that they were only out to protect the institute of marriage in a time of every increasing divorce rates.  They could claim they were only motivated by their sincerely held religious beliefs, and not merely animus.  That love the sinner hate the sin was always just a thin coat of paint over God Hates Fags was something the rest of America never really got much of a chance to see, as long as most heterosexuals kept their distance from the fight.  Now, as more sons and daughters, more friends and co-workers come out to them, they are taking a closer look…

So it went with the supporters of Proposition 8, which would amend the state constitution so that gay and lesbian couples no longer could marry. The board already has published its stand on the measure, but the editorial left out some interesting turns in the conversation.

The measure’s supporters are generally careful to avoid appearing anti-gay, probably because they realize that, for all the voter split on same-sex marriage, Californians generally support gay rights. They professed in our meeting to have no ill will toward gay people…until the talk went deeper.

And I expect it didn’t have to go very much deeper… 

At one point, the conversation turned to the "activist judges" whose May ruling opened the door to same-sex marriage, and how similar this case was to the 1948 case that declared bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional. According to one of the Prop. 8 reps, that 1948 ruling was OK because people are born to their race and thus are in need of constitutional protection, while gays and lesbians choose their homosexuality. So much for the expert opinions of the American Psychological Assn. and the American Academy of Pediatrics that people cannot choose their sexuality. Oh, those activist doctor types.

In any case, one Prop. 8 supporter said, gay rights are not as important as children’s rights, and it’s obvious that same-sex couples who married would "recruit" their children toward homosexuality because otherwise, unable to procreate themselves, they would have no way to replenish their numbers. Even editorial writers can be left momentarily speechless, and this was one of those moments.

Emphasis mine.  As Molly Ivins would have called it, a "whoa moment".  It isn’t so much the myth that children can catch homosexuality like a goddamned cold.  It’s the image of gay people as almost a separate parasitic species that shocks the conscience.  But for these people, it’s just common knowledge.  Homosexuals aren’t human. 

Aside from this notion of a homosexual recruitment plot — making it understandable where the word "homophobia" came from — this made no logical sense at all. Same-sex couples. whether married or not, already have children. Marriage wouldn’t change a thing about this picture except, perhaps, to model for children that parents tend to be married.

Exactly.  But it’s not about insuring that children have stable family lives.  It’s not about imparting the virtues of marriage to them.  It’s about cutting gay people out of the human family tree.  That’s it.  There is nothing more noble about their cause then that.  If you don’t believe that, spend some time talking to them.  Enough time for them to get all their spiels about loving the sinner out of the way, so they can get down to brass tacks.

So the Washington Post has an article up today about phobias.  Given they put a photo of a honking big spider on the article, you have to wonder if they’re trying to scare off their target audience before they have a chance to read it.  But never mind. 

I am not in favor of spiders.  But I have a much bigger phobia then those little eight legged dickens.  My phobia involves high bridges over water.  No kidding, I am scared to death when driving over those things, let alone trying to walk across them.  I was in Portland Oregon a few weeks ago and tried to walk across the Steel Bridge there and I could not do it for the life of me.  There is a really nice pedestrian-bicycle lane going across that bridge and I tried to do it and I could only get about a fifth of the way across before my legs simply would not take me any further.

So when these discussions of phobias come up every now and then they pique my interest.  Especially because, as it so happens, we have a really good fear inspiring bridge right here in Maryland.  It’s called The Chesapeake Bay Bridge.  Almost four and a half miles of white knuckle cold pit in the stomach heart pounding trembling breath goodness.  I will drive up to Delaware and back down the Delmarva to avoid having to cross that damn bridge…

Fear Factors
Understand Your Phobias (Rational or Otherwise).

There are plenty of people who coast across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge without even a flicker of anxiety, never giving a thought to any greater calamity than whether they forgot the sunscreen or made an error in judgment in packing the Speedo.

You don’t say… 

But for some people, the 4.3-mile span sparks feelings from mild consternation to outright panic. What if the bridge sways or collapses? What if an erratic driver forces them out of their lane and into the drink? Or worse still, what if they completely freak out and in a state of panic accidentally drive themselves into the bay?

Uh, hummm… 

Some can’t even express exactly what it is that terrifies them; they just know how they feel: heart racing, back of the neck on fire, irresistible urge to flee at the mere mention of the b-r-i-d-g-e.

You don’t say…

Generally speaking, people with intense fears or phobias know their reactions aren’t rational. They’re well aware that the plane probably won’t crash, the dog won’t bite, the elevator won’t get stuck. But throwing statistics at them won’t help. "They say, ‘I don’t understand why, but I feel like if I do it, I’ll die,’ " Ross says.

You don’t say…

Just what’s behind those feelings isn’t always clear, either, but phobias often are not rooted in reality, says Bethany Teachman, assistant professor of clinical psychology at the University of Virginia…

You don’t say…  Oh…look what’s in the Metro section today…

Truck Driver Dies In Bay Bridge Crash

Beachgoers and other motorists spent several frustrating hours stuck in traffic backups of more than 10 miles on both sides of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge yesterday in the aftermath of a deadly crash that sent a tractor-trailer hurtling through a concrete Jersey wall and into the water below, killing the truck driver.

I’m Never crossing that bridge again.  Ever.

I’m copying the following from Brad DeLong’s blog comments in their entirety.  Some days you read the news and you just want to write off the human race altogether.  When those moments hit you, it’s good to be able to keep things in perspective…

Hoisted from Comments: The Dawn of Humanity

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: The Dawn of Humanity: What astonishes me is the speed. They’ve got the origin date at -56,000, and the oldest modern human remains in Australia are -40,000. The route from East Africa across Asia to Northern Australia is 10K+ miles, which means humans were expanding at close to a mile a year. That’s just unbelievably fast.

We have all sorts of branches of homo surviving stably for a million plus years all over africa, asia, and europe, and this new branch comes out of Africa and by the end of the Great Migration, only a little over ten thousand years later, they are building boats to sail to Australia. And wiping out or out-competing every one of our homo sibling species on the way.

The Singularity is truly in our past.

Posted by: tavella | January 23, 2007 at 05:15 PM

From Forbes Magazine comes this account of Jerry Falwell’s money machine…

Biblical Bling

Hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the ministries of Bible Belt televangelists in the 1970s-80s. But these fortunes would never have materialized without a secular weapon from the North–a Massachusetts marketing outfit begun by a group of twenty-something Harvard business school grads called Epsilon Data Management. Falwell began using the company in 1976; he was the first televangelist to sign up. When his contributions exploded, other preachers like Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Oral Roberts and Rex Humbard contracted with Epsilon and made a pile, too.

Before Epsilon, Oral Roberts used punch tape-driven Friden Flexo-writers. Billy Graham handwrote every homespun fundraising appeal himself. "You could see the buckwheat flying off the paper," recalls Gaylord Briley, one of the top religious fundraisers of the era. In a few years Epsilon was doing work for 7 of the top 10 televangelists in America. 

Two threads joined together in the 1970s to produce the political machine we now know as the religious right.  In the early 1970s, the feds began challenging the tax exemption of many fundamentalist schools over their race segregation policies.  I’ve blogged about that previously Here…

But the spark that lit the roaring fire that eventually consumed the republican party wasn’t integration specifically…

In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right’s genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court’s ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.

While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. Their resentment was compounded in 1971 when the Internal Revenue Service attempted to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until that year.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."

Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His implorations initially fell on deaf ears.

"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

Dig it.  It wasn’t abortion.  It wasn’t militant homosexuality.  It wasn’t rampant sexual hedonism.  It wasn’t the secularization of America’s schools.  It wasn’t even racism, that lit the fire the brought the fundamentalist leadership charging into our political system in a blind destructive frenzy.  It was their tax exemption.  It was money.

The second thread is the advent of computerized direct marketing.  Richard Viguerie was a pioneer in its use for the republican party.  Viguerie had more then a mailing list.  His genius was in applying computerized database analysis techniques to it, tracking the giving patterns of the names in his database.  He paired that with a ruthless analysis of which marketing campaigns worked, and which did not.  Viguerie, a right wing extremist, wasn’t interested in informing the republican base so much as in pushing their buttons so they would open their wallets and go to the polls.  And he got results.  With his database and direct mailing technique, Viguerie almost single-handedly turned around the fortunes of the Republicans after Watergate. 

Remember, this was a time before the Internet, before the widespread use of cable TV and the appearance of 24 hour cable news, before even talk radio as we know it today, with its national audiences and personalities.  Viguerie showed the republicans how they could bypass the news media of that day, and not only get their their message out on their own terms, but do it below the radar of the popular culture.  His mail appeals were Targeted.  The message was tailored and precise, and didn’t have to appear in any newspaper or television ad where the rest of the country could see it too. 

Falwell saw the success of Viguerie’s technique, and revamped his own direct mailing effort…

Computerized database marketing turned the late 1970s into an era known as the golden age of direct mail prospecting. Direct mail was still an almost clandestine medium. The content of such correspondence was rarely exposed to media scrutiny. Falwell crafted his letters with theological abandon, hitting his mortal enemies with blunt force. Epsilon led Falwell to discover that the secret to steady income is consistency; getting lots of donors to give a little, but regularly. Epsilon also taught Falwell that most donor lists contain "compulsive contributors"–usually amounting to four percent of the list, says Briley. 

These twin threads of course, have a common root.  Money.  It was all about the money.  That is why there is a religious right today.  And that is why they’ve made common cause with the corporate world, the world of Caesar, the world of mammon, that they once disdained.  When Carter went after their tax exemptions, they found had a lot in common with those kings of business after all.

And how do you push the rube’s buttons enough so they’ll give you money, over and over and over again?   Well…here’s one way…

Besides Epsilon, Falwell had the formidable talent of Jerry Huntsinger. Then 45, he was a former minister who lived on a farm near Richmond who had been taking advertising concepts from the for-profit world and applying them to nonprofit religious ventures. Huntsinger brought a novelist’s touch to direct mail. He considered every fundraising letter a first cousin to the short story. "A short story has a problem that seems insurmountable, a sympathetic character that is a victim of the problem, complications and obstacles, but finally, a resolution." He advised his clients that emergency appeals work best because they give donors a feeling of "excitement at coming to the rescue."

Huntsinger was also a master at fine tuning the mechanics: the color of the envelope, the position of the address window, which paragraphs to indent, which sentences to underline. He knew how to lure a reader’s eye just to where he wanted.

Huntsinger encouraged Falwell to focus on wedge issues in his mailings, excoriating the feminist movement and attacking homosexual rights, often equating both with the dangers of communism. As one letter stated: "Dear Friend: Homosexuals are on the march in this country. Homosexuals do not reproduce, they recruit, and many of them are after my children and your children….This is one major reason why we must keep "The Old Time Gospel Hour" alive…So don’t delay. Let me hear from you immediately. I will be anxiously awaiting your reply."

The sense of impending doom the letter conveyed fit perfectly with Huntsinger’s operating credo. It turned a pitch into a storyline (gays on the the march) with sympathetic characters (children) under threat from sex offenders (gay pedophiles). It was an emergency appeal that sought to panic his audience into coming to the rescue.

The Forbes excerpt ends on the note that the gay bashing appeals actually raised very little money.  Given the history of the religious right’s move into politics, I don’t believe it.  Before Anita Bryant showed them that waving the gay menace at people could practically stampede them to the polls, the Falwells and the Robertsons actually did very little gay bashing.  But on the day Falwell stood by her side in front of reporters and declared that "a homosexual will kill you, soon as look at you", he knew she was on to something.

Falwell and his kind didn’t create the climate of fear and contempt toward gay people.  But in the 1970s they began to whip it into a frenzy.  For money.  Never mind all that love your neighbor as yourself crap.  The harder you push their buttons, the more they open their wallets.  And the best button of all was the Homosexuals Are On The March And They Want Your Children button.  It worked.  The money came rolling in.  For Falwell.  For Robertson.  For Dobson.  And for all the other crusaders for Christ.  The money came rolling in.

And here’s the color of money…

My friends are oblivious.  Just…oblivious.  Either that, or they think I’m hopeless and I need to give up trying to find a lifemate because they’ve decided I never will, and they just don’t have the nerve to tell me so.  I’m not good looking enough.  I’m too geeky.  I’m too old.  They checked my Use-By date and it’s expired.  It must be that.  Or they just don’t care.  I can’t believe they don’t care.  So they must be oblivious.  Or they think I’m hopeless. 

Last night I made another attempt to get some people I know to introduce me to someone they’d told me about months ago.  He was a guy that they’d noticed was yanking my chain at The Miss Gaye Universe DC Ball some months ago.  I found out later they’d tried to get us together in the same room at one point but it didn’t happen for some reason.  They told me about it afterward, and everything they told me about him seemed too good to be true.  He was they told me, single, an IT geek like myself, a really nice guy according to his friends, and into older guys…which alas I guess I am these days.  In the weeks becoming months that followed, I’ve been nudging and cajoling my friends to Fucking Try Again! and it never happened.  If I had any contact info for him myself I’d have taken this matter into my own hands long ago but I don’t.  He’s just a first name to me, and a few photos I took of him at the ball.  Last night I brought it up again to one of them and the initial response I got just floored me because it seemed at first he didn’t even know what I was talking about.  And then he realized.  Oh…him…

WTF???  And then I get The Advice every lonely person who ever fucking lived gets…  You need to lower your standards…broaden your view…   Blah, blah, woof, woof.  Wow.  Great Advise there!  Just imagine the happy couple years later, whose significant other followed that advice, strolling hand-in-hand down the beach one romantic evening…  "I love you…"  "I love you too…but that’s because I lowered my standards…"

It’s like they’ve made up their minds that I’m not making any effort myself to find a boyfriend.  It’s frustrating.  I have to assume it’s because it was so easy for them, and that it’s excruciatingly difficult for me can only mean I’m making it difficult somehow and I just need to stop doing that.

I’ve tried the bars and clubs.  But I am shy.  When it comes to approaching people cold I just keep drawing a blank, and all the more so when it’s a beautiful guy that’s yanking my chain.  Tell me I need to get over it all you want but that’s the way I am, and any successful strategy for finding a mate either takes that into account or it’s doomed to failure, plain and simple.  Or to put it another way, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  I may be shy, but I’m not crazy.  The bar scene is a great place to socialize with my friends.  But it is simply not somewhere I can go to Make friends.  Unless I have other friends with me and they’re willing to help me break the ice.  Which…they’re not.  Well…one of them seems to be.

I need someone willing to introduce me to potential boyfriends.  What I’ve found actually, is that most people find their other half that way.  Most Heterosexuals that is.

I did an informal survey of my heterosexual neighbors some time ago, asking them how they’d found their other half.  I only asked the ones in long term relationships.  What I discovered, unsurprisingly, was that about three fourths of them had been introduced to each other by mutual friends or by a friend of the family.  Sometimes it was at a party.  Sometimes it was a church or community social.  Sometimes it was some other activity.  But almost all of the couples had found each other via the networking of friends and family and community. 

Obviously, because of the enormous cultural hostility we have to live our lives in, this isn’t how a lot of gay couples are going to find each other. If the gay son is the shame of his family, they’re probably not going to introduce him to the gay son of a neighbor or friend.  If a heterosexual’s gay friend is merely the "some" in "some of my best friends are", then obviously they’re not going to give a flying fuck how lonely their "friend" is, or even notice that he might be a good match for that other gay guy another friend of theirs told them about.  The very thought of getting two gay guys together for a date probably squicks them out enough they don’t even consider it, and meanwhile their gay "friend’ spends one day of his life after another alone.  The social network heterosexuals live in every moment of their lives and take for granted just doesn’t willingly want to work for us.  But the damnable thing is often our own networks fail us too when it comes to relationships.  And I think that’s because so many of us seem to have internalized the message of the haters, that homosexual relationships either don’t really exist, or they only really amount to brief, barren assignations. 

Stanley Kurtz bastardizes a Dutch study to prove that same sex couples don’t last very long and are never monogamous. The Family Research Council bastardizes statistics on domestic violence so they can claim that same sex couples are more likely to assault each other then love each other.  Orson Scott Card claims same sex couples are only playing at house and insists that acceptance of bogus same sex marriages will lead to the end of the human race.  We get angry and counter with real science.  We laugh and mock the haters.  We fight back however we can.  But the assault on our human dignity is relentless and we as a people, need to look, really and honestly look, at how much of that crap we’ve internalized despite ourselves.

We need to, as a people, stop and look at all the ways that hate has made our love lives desperate, and fight it, because there is no more noble a fight then that one.  In the face of a venomous hostility that insists, absolutely insists, that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex, we can wage no greater battle then, in addition to proudly embracing our sexual nature, nurture relationships, and nurture as well a social ecology where lovers can find each other, and make a home for themselves in a world that keeps throwing up every barrier it can to their love.  You want to wage the radical war on homophobia?  Next time you see two lonely hearts who might be right for each other, bring them together.  Even if they don’t find that place of joy and contentment within each other, every time, every opportunity you take to nurture love, you defeat hate.

So much, so obvious.  At least to me.  But not apparently to everyone.  So on the way home last night, finding myself taking yet another drive back to Baltimore no closer to finding my other half then I was last week, I tried to think of what I could do differently now.  Hanging out in a bar is never going to work for me.  My friends won’t help, frustratingly even when they happen across someone who might make a good match.  So once more my thoughts turned to dating services.  It’s one of the bitter ironies of my life, that I’ve probably spent as much on dating services as some gay guys have spent on ex-gay therapy.  Yes, it runs into the thousands over the course of my life.  And like the ex-gay ministries, the dating services charge you up front for something they don’t even promise to deliver.

And a thought came to me, as it has often lately when I reconsider dating services…This is backwards isn’t it?  Imagine going out to a restaurant and having to pay up front just to look at a menu with only the Possibility of getting anything on it.  Imagine having an attack of appendicitis and having to pay the entire hospital bill for only the Chance of getting a qualified surgeon to operate.  Here’s a list of surgeons we’ve matched you up with Mr. Garrett…  Dr. Hideo has a degree in floor waxing from the Johnson and Johnson Institute…  Dr. Albatross has performed many successful tattoo removals.  Dr. Dustbunny is an expert on the biology of nose hair in south American primates…   We’re sorry you find our matches unacceptable…perhaps you should lower your standards…

Has anyone actually done a study of the success rates of dating services?  They all seem to have so many happy couples in their testimonials, but somehow I’ll bet the odds of winning the MegaMillions jackpot are way better. 

Suppose instead of us paying them just to throw a random list of other lonely people at us, they only got paid for the matches that actually worked?

I’ve been turning that thought over in my head for years now.  Bitterly.  But then it occurred to me last night that nothing was stopping me from doing just that myself.  Why not create my own dating service that works the way I think they should, and use it to help me find my other half…?

Some months ago I read a sad story of an elderly British man who offered to pay someone to be his drinking companion at a local pub.  Perhaps that sort of thing would work for that sort of companionship.  But for staringly obvious reasons you can’t just offer people money to go on a date with you.  The true heart would take offense, and the cheats would flock to your door.  And the prostitutes escorts.  You can’t buy love with money.  But you can buy introductions, which is what the dating services have been marketing to lonely people for ages.  Last night I realized something:  If Mr. Right is really out there, looking for someone like me, then all of Mr. Right’s friends are that dating service.  I just need to get them to work for us.

So. Instead of throwing myself at yet another dating service, I’m going to create my own.  And you’re it.  Maybe.  Possibly. 

Do you know someone who might be a good match for me?  Do you know someone who knows someone?  Probably you don’t.  But maybe I can interest you in looking over my dating profile and thinking about the single gay guys you know.  Probably you will draw a blank then anyway.  But maybe I can interest you in keeping an eye out for him.

Here’s how it works: I’m going to post my dating profile page here soon.  When I do, take a look.  If you think you know somebody that might make a good match for me, write me about him.  Don’t introduce us right away.  You tell me about him.  If I’m interested I’ll say so.  If not, I’ll honestly say why and maybe that gives you a better idea of what I’m looking for.  Feel absolutely free to ask me questions if you feel you need to know more about me before you introduce me to one of your friends. But probably the best source of information about the kind of person I am is my blog.  It goes back years.  Read it.  And the cartoon pages.  And the photo galleries.  Between them they really should tell you everything you need to know about me, about the kind of person I am and whether you want to introduce me to a friend of yours.  By all means, show it to him too.

So let’s say we agree your friend and I should meet each other.  You introduce us…maybe at a nice club or restaurant some place where we can all chat informally and have a nice evening out.  Maybe nothing more comes of it then we all have a nice dinner at a good restaurant.  But maybe what comes of that is I like him and he likes me.  So maybe we start dating.  One date.  A second date.  You can’t really tell if the spark has found tinder after only a few days, or even weeks.  But if it lasts at least six months…you get a thousand dollars. 

Another six months, another thousand.  And another.  And another.  The longer we keep dating, the more you get, every six months, up to six grand.  So, we date for at least three years, you end up with six grand. 

The point is this: I don’t want to be matched up with someone who isn’t looking for, or isn’t emotionally equipped for a long term relationship.  So, hopefully, stipulating that we have to both be interested enough in each other to date for at least half a year filters out the one night stand guys, and the cheats who only want the money.  But on the other hand even given the best intentions all around it won’t always work.  Dating isn’t an exact science or there wouldn’t be so many lonely people.  I can’t expect people to make an effort on my behalf if I make the rewards seem difficult to impossible to win.  So you don’t have to find me Mr. Right to get some money out of this.  All I’m asking for are the kind of good matches I never got from commercial dating services.

But wait…there’s more..!  If our dating manages to move us to the stage where we move in together and set up a household for ourselves, you get five grand more.   And if we ever decide to tie the knot (married legally, not civil unioned), you get ten grand. This is in addition to the five grand over two and a half years.  So for example, if we date the full term and then say it’s another two or three years later before we decide to move in together, you still get that five grand.  If it takes us several more years to work up the nerve to marry, you still get that ten grand.  Because you introduced us.  Because without you, we might never have met.  Because I made you this bargain.  Oh…and you get a wedding invite too.  And a standing invitation to every summer back yard barbecue we throw.

So.  Introduce me to someone and you could eventually end up with twenty-one grand out of it (and my eternal gratitude).  But even if it doesn’t go there, as long as it went Somewhere you could still make a thousand or more out of it, and I will still be grateful because even if it didn’t last more then half a year or so, as long as it was honest and real it will have been worth the try.  And I can still keep this deal out there for you, or someone else to give it another try.

I’m going to spend the next week working on a dating profile page I can send around, along with a more formal statement of the bargain I’m willing to make here, in exchange for an introduction that leads to serious dating.  And I’ll post progress reports, for better or worse, on the blog.  I’ve tried just about everything else.  Maybe this will do the trick.  And yes, my oblivious friends are welcome to participate.  Stay tuned. 

Thanks to the Internet, YouTube, Amazon and iTunes, my iPod’s "TV Theme" playlist is starting to hold a bunch of kidhood memories…

The Cisco Kid – Ending
The Outer Limits – Ending (First Season)
Burke’s Law
Twilight Zone – Ending (Herrmann)
Cimarron Strip
The Green Hornet
Route 66 – Ending
Mysterious Universe
I Spy
The Avengers – 1968
Lassie – Ending (1966)
Ranger Hal
Captain Kangaroo
Courageous Cat

And much more…

I was able to snag a copy of the Green Hornet theme with Al Hirt’s fantastic trumpet playing, and without the hokey voiceover, off of some fan’s web site.  Same for the really nice copy of the end music to Route 66.  I got the end music to Lassie off of YouTube, where I was pleased to see other fans were just as taken by its simple and beautiful sentimentality as I was long ago.  From YouTube I also got the end title music for The Cisco Kid.  It was music that promised a kid way more adventure then TV back then could deliver unfortunately.  It’s amazing looking back on it, how low budget TV was in those days, and yet how good some of the music was.  When I was a kid I’d try to record some of this stuff and always had to contend with the local TV station blaring something over the music as it played.  It was frustrating.  Now I’m finding tons of this music on YouTube.  Amazingly, I’m also finding clips from the local morning and afternoon kid’s shows I used to watch once upon a time.

I found clips from Ranger Hal and set about trying to locate the happy-go-lucky title music they used for that show.  I figured it was some easy listening song and I was right.  Some YouTube poster identified it for me as an old Mitch Miller song, Whistle Stop.  It wasn’t available on Amazon or iTunes but Googling around I found an mp3 of it on another fan site and I’ve been grooving to it for the past couple of days, letting it take me back to a time when life stretched out in front of me wide open and so very very large.

The clip Mysterious Universe, was used as background music to The Space Explorers, which I used to watch raptly on Ranger Hal’s show.  Long after Ranger Hal went off the air, and The Space Explorers faded into distant memory, I would hear that music whenever I looked up at the stars.  I found out a couple years ago that it’s actually from a library of canned music and not available for sale anywhere.  How I got my copy I am not at liberty to say, and I made a promise not to pass it around, but I will be forever in that person’s debt.

I would pay serious money for a copy of the background music they used in the Courageous Cat cartoon series.  It was composed by Johnny Holiday and it’s serious 1950s detective show jazz…the kind of thing you’d more likely expect to hear on a show like Peter Gunn or 77 Sunset Strip then a kid’s cartoon.  Holiday and his orchestra were Smoking when they recorded that music!  Why he didn’t do more stuff like that I’ll never know.

Some people may have forgotten by now, that Rowan Williams became Archbishop of Canterbury bearing a history of progressive thinking on homosexuality…

Rowan Williams: gay relationships ‘comparable to marriage’

Rowan Williams believes that gay sexual relationships can “reflect the love of God” in a way that is comparable to marriage, The Times has learnt.

Gay partnerships pose the same ethical questions as those between men and women, and the key issue for Christians is that they are faithful and lifelong, he believes.

Dr Williams is known to be personally liberal on the issue but the strength of his views, revealed in private correspondence shown to The Times, will astonish his critics.

The news threatens to reopen bitter divisions over ordaining gay priests, which pushed the Anglican Communion towards a split.

But this isn’t new, and that needs to be emphasized.  What is being reported here are Williams’ correspondence on the issue Prior to his becoming Archbishop…

As Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Williams recommitted the Anglican Communion to its orthodox position that homosexual practice is incompatible with Scripture at the Lambeth Conference, which closed on Sunday.

However, in an exchange of letters with an evangelical Christian, written eight years ago when he was Archbishop of Wales, he described his belief that biblical passages criticising homosexual sex were not aimed at people who were gay by nature.

He argued that scriptural prohibitions were addressed to heterosexuals looking for sexual variety. He wrote: “I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.” Dr Williams described his view as his “definitive conclusion” reached after 20 years of study and prayer. He drew a distinction between his own beliefs as a theologian and his position as a church leader, for which he had to take account of the traditionalist view.

The letters, written in the autumn of 2000 and 2001, were exchanged with Deborah Pitt, a psychiatrist and evangelical Christian living in his former archdiocese in South Wales, who had written challenging him on the issue.

In reply, he described how his view began to change from that of opposing gay relationships in 1980. His mind became “unsettled” by contact as a university teacher with Christian students who believed that the Bible forbade promiscuity rather than gay sex. 

This wasn’t unknown to church reactionaries at the time of his appointment.  They kicked up a fuss over Williams precisely because of what they knew his thinking on same sex relationships was.  The question is, does Williams still think this or did he, upon becoming head of the church, revert back to his previous beliefs.  Because Williams, despite the hysterical protestations of the haters, has been anything but a friend to gay people.  At every juncture on the road to the schism that sure looks inevitable to me, Williams has consistently, Consistently, ratcheted up official hostility toward gay people.  He has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to bring gay people more into the heart of the church.  Everything, absolutely everything that he has actually done, has pushed gay people further away from it.  It’s hard not to conclude that he’s had a profound change of heart regarding the sanctity, the reflection of God, in same sex love.

If the stiff arm he’s giving to gay Anglicans is his way of trying to mollify violent haters like Bishop Akinola enough that they won’t bolt from the church, he’s worse then merely an idiot.  And not simply because Akinola and his kind won’t be satisfied with anything short of a purge of homosexuals from the face of the earth, so they sure as hell aren’t going to accept them in the church pews, let alone in the leadership.  Those who were hopeful when William’s took office need to consider that the man never really had his heart in affirming gay people as his neighbors.  His "definite conclusion" simply melted away when they put the Archbishop’s robes on him, leaving behind only the bedrock that preexisted it. 

Because, if the love between a same sex couple Does reflect the love of God, then isn’t the man who strikes at those lovers for bearing that love within their hearts guilty also of striking at God’s love?  Either Williams still believes what he wrote or he doesn’t, or worse…he thinks the structure of the church is more sacred then the love of God, reflected in the hearts of the faithful. 

It might well be the latter.  And if that’s the case, it’s unsurprising that he’s loosing the battle for the soul of the church to the likes of Akinola.  Take the love of God out of the church, and Akinola is exactly what you have left.

At some point Akinola is going to lead his flock away from the church of England.  If that hasn’t been staringly obvious before now his current argument that the Church of England is a relic of colonialism should I think, decisively settle the question.  He is going to do it.  And at some point after that…soon I would guess…Ratzinger and Akinola are going to publically shake hands.

Five weeks.  That’s how much vacation time I have accrued.  My employer allows us to store up to three months worth and then you begin to loose it.  I doubt I’ll ever get that much stored away, but a couple years ago when the layoffs were pending I had two months stored, because if they lay you off you get your unused vacation time as part of the severance.  A lot of us back then were hording our vacation time in case we needed it to tide us over between jobs.  I’m not willingly hording mine now…I just can’t afford to take the kind of vacation I like…the extended road trip.  The cost of gas is forcing me to hold off until I get some actual money saved up, as opposed to vacation time alone. 

But saving that money has become unaccountably hard lately.  Well…not…  I know what’s happening.  I only think I’m cutting down on my gas expense.  In reality, I’m just nibbling at it.  You may think you’re saving money by not driving as much too.  Well…no.  You aren’t.

Oh yes…I see the price of gas creeping back down a tad at the local gas stations, and the corporate news media is waving that around.  Whoop-de-do.  Oh look…it’s back below four dollars a gallon now!  Sweet!   But you need to keep in mind that you’re paying for fuel every time you buy something.  What’s that you say?  Your grocery bill hasn’t risen all that much?  Hahahahaha…

Here’s a fun little mystery for you guys. How can taking away 4 oz of coffee produce more cups of coffee? We’ve been thinking about it ever since Blueprint for Financial Prosperity sent us this photo the other day, and we just can’t figure it out. Could it be magic? Some strange new property of the Grocery Shrink Ray?

Click on that last link…the one marked Grocery Shrink Ray.  Go ahead.  In the meantime, I need to add The Consumerist to my blog roll.  They’re kinda like the Upfront and Selling It pages of Consumer Reports, but more pissed off.