I’ve said it before.   Over and over.  The shit doesn’t really start hitting the fan, until the republicans start loosing power…

LA CROSSE, Wis. (AP) — Some of the anger is getting raw at Republican rallies and John McCain is mostly letting it flare. A sense of grievance spilling into rage has gripped some GOP events as McCain supporters see his presidential campaign lag against Barack Obama. They’re making it personal, against the Democrat. Shouts of “traitor,” “terrorist,” “treason,” “liar,” and even “off with his head” have rung from the crowd at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies, and gone unchallenged by them.

Everyone is starting to notice now, the frenzy of hate the republicans are whipping themselves into.  From Sullivan:

The Dangerous Panic On The Far Right

To some, a president Obama is simply unimaginable. From a McCain supporter in Wisconsin yesterday:

"We’re all wondering why Obama is where he’s at. How he got here. Everybody in this room is stunned we’re in this position."

There was always going to be a point of revolt and panic for a core group of Americans who believe that Obama simply cannot be president – because he’s black or liberal or young or relatively new. This is that point. As the polls suggest a strong victory, the Hannity-Limbaugh-Steyn-O’Reilly base are going into shock and extreme rage. McCain and Palin have decided to stoke this rage, to foment it, to encourage paranoid notions that somehow Obama is a "secret" terrorist or Islamist or foreigner. These are base emotions in both sense of the word.

But they are also very very dangerous. This is a moment of maximal physical danger for the young Democratic nominee. And McCain is playing with fire. If he really wants to put country first, he will attack Obama on his policies – not on these inflammatory, personal, creepy grounds. This is getting close to the atmosphere stoked by the Israeli far right before the assassination of Rabin.

For God’s sake, McCain, stop it. For once in this campaign, put your country first.

But Garrison Keillor was right…they’re republicans first, and Americans second.  And they have a history of this, which goes right back to Kennedy.  When King was assassinated in Memphis, they were calling him a traitor too…

The Unthinkable

And really the unsayable. But I’ve been thinking about this McCain-Palin Obama "palling around with terrorist" idea more lately. The saddest thing about many Republicans isn’t just that they disagree with liberals on race–it’s they are largely ignorant on race. When the McCain campaign cast the spell of diabolical jingoism, they have no idea of the forces they are toying with. We remember Martin Luther King’s murder as a sad and tragic event. Less remembered is the fact that ground-work for King’s murder was seeded, not simply by rank white supremacy, but by people who slandered King as a communist.

This was not some notion bandied about by conspiracy theorist, but an accusation proffered by men who were the pillars of the modern Republican Party:

As late as 1964, Falwell was attacking the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "civil wrongs" legislation. He questioned "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations." Falwell charged, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed."

Falwell was not alone. These men didn’t kill Martin Luther King, but they contributed to an atmosphere of nationalism, white supremacy and cheap unreflective patriotism that ultimately got a lot of people killed. Confronted with Aparthied South Africa, men like Helms and Falwell used the same "communist" defense. While Mandella wasted away in prison, they dismissed the whole thing as a communist plot.

Let me be clear–This is the ghost that McCain Campaign is summoning. This is the Ring Of Power that they want to wield.  The Muslim charge, the "Hussein" thing is nothing more than today’s red-baiting, and it is what it was then–a cover for racists. You may say I’m overreacting, and I really hope you’re right. 999,000 out 1 million times we’ll go on like normal and proceed to Election Day. But if some shit pops off, the thug and thug-mongers will not be able to throw up their hands and say "How could I have known?" Ignorance will not save them. Their stupidity is a scourge on us all.

Let me smack the subtext here out into the open: they’re trying to get him killed.  As recently as a few days ago I was content to believe they just wanted to lay the groundwork for the scorched earth campaign against President Obama and a democratic congress.  But that’s naive and anyone of my generation should know better…really…

I still remember vividly the day president Kennedy was assassinated.   I was home from school, very very sick with a flu and a high fever.  I was drifting in and out of sleep with the bed stand radio on, playing soft music.  I woke up, to the sound of a man’s voice saying over and over again, "The president has been shot…The president has been shot…The president has been shot…"..

Two days before President Kennedy’s trip to Dallas, right-wingers began circulating around the city some 5,000 anti-Kennedy handbills.  Entitled “Wanted for Treason,” these leaflets were designed to look like a police “wanted” poster, with front and profile photographs of Kennedy’s head.

The handbills shrieked:
    “This man is wanted for treasonous activities against the United States:
    1.  Betraying the Constitution (which he is sworn to uphold):
         He is turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations.
         He is betraying our friends (Cuba, Katanga, Portugal) and befriending our enemies (Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland).
    2.  He has been WRONG on innumerable issues affecting the security of the U.S. (United Nations-Berlin wall-Missile removal-Cuba-Wheat deals-Test Ban Treaty, etc.).
    3.  He has been lax in enforcing Communist Registration laws.
    4.  He has given support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.
    5.  He has illegally invaded a sovereign State with federal troops.
    6.  He has consistently appointed Anti-Christians to Federal office:
         Upholds the Supreme Court in its Anti-Christian rulings.
         Aliens and known Communists abound in Federal offices.
    7.  He has been caught in fantastic LIES to the American people (including personal ones like his previous marriage and divorce).”

On the very day JFK visited Dallas and died, the local newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, featured a full page, black-bordered anti-Kennedy advertisement prepared and paid for by persons affiliated with the John Birch Society, one of the most infamous right-wing extremist organizations of the 1960’s.  The ad claimed to be the work of “The American Fact-Finding Committee,” in reality a nonexistent organization.  Bernard Weissman, listed on the ad as the chairman of the Committee, however, did exist; he was the person who actually placed the ad.  Weissman later testified before the Warren Commission.  He was one of the few witnesses before that body who deemed it prudent to appear accompanied by an attorney.

The ad began with a sarcastic “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas,” a city which had been the victim of “a recent Liberal smear attempt” and which had prospered “despite efforts by you and your administration to penalize it for non-conformity to ‘New Frontierism’.”  The ad then posed a series of belligerent, insulting loaded questions, including:

• “Why has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party, praised almost every one of your policies and announced that his party will endorse and support your re-election bid?”
• “Why have you ordered or permitted your brother Bobby, the Attorney General, to go soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you, your administration, and your leadership?”
• “Why have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the ‘Spirit of Moscow’?”

Later that morning there were disparaging protests by right-wingers against JFK along the route of the presidential motorcade as it traveled from the airport to downtown Dallas.  As the motorcade drove through the suburbs, with President Kennedy only minutes from death, an unfriendly-looking man in a business suit stood on a sidewalk in an aggressive posture holding a protest sign which screamed: “Because of high regard for the presidency I hold you JFK and your blind socialism in complete contempt.”  (A photograph of this right-wing protester with his sign, taken by Dallas newspaper photographer Tom Dillard, is reproduced on p. 438 of Richard B. Trask’s Pictures of the Pain: Photography and the Assassination of President Kennedy (1994).)

In Dealey Plaza, at the time of the actual assassination, there was at least one right-winger present publicly expressing his scorn for the president.  On the sidewalk near the Stemmons Freeway traffic sign, only a few feet from the slow-moving presidential limousine during the very moments rifle bullets were slamming into JFK’s body, a mysterious man stood wearing a suit and, unlike anyone else there, holding up an open, black umbrella on this warm, sunshiny day.  (The “Umbrella Man,” as this enigmatic character soon was dubbed, is visible in the Zapruder film.  He also can be seen in a famous still color photograph of the assassination taken by amateur photographer Phil Willis.  The Willis photo is reproduced on p. 190 of Robert J. Groden’s The Killing of a President (1993).)

The identity of the Umbrella Man remained a secret for 15 years.  Then, in September 1978, a man named Louie Steven Witt appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and admitted that he was the Umbrella Man.  He told the Committee that he been there in Dealey Plaza to heckle JFK, and that he displayed the umbrella because he was under the impression that brandishing an umbrella would irritate JFK.  He testified: “I was going to use this umbrella to heckle the President’s motorcade. … Being a conservative-type fellow, I sort of placed him [JFK] in the liberal camp, and I was just sort of going to kind of do a little heckling. … I just knew it was a sore spot with the Kennedys. … I was carrying that stupid umbrella, intent [on] heckling the President.” Witt denied that the umbrella he had in Dealey Plaza symbolized the appeasement practices of English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (who often sported a black umbrella), or that the umbrella was intended to suggest that JFK was appeasing Communism the way Chamberlain had appeased Hitler.  This denial is not credible.  Among right-wingers, it was an article of faith that JFK’s supposedly soft, weak-kneed policies against the threat of Communism were the equivalent of Chamberlain’s futile attempts to appease Adolf Hitler.

Not even Kennedy’s death at 1 p.m. at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas stopped right-wingers from publicly displaying their loathing of JFK.  As William Manchester notes in his classic The Death of a President (1967): “At 3:05 p.m., when 80 percent of the American People were in deep grief, an NBC camera panned toward a group of spectators outside Parkland’s emergency entrance and picked up a young man with a placard that read, ‘Yankee, Go Home.’”   (In a wealthy Dallas suburb, Manchester reminds us, “pupils of a fourth-grade class, told that the President of the United States had been murdered in their city, burst into spontaneous applause.”)
-JFK Blown Away-Hooray! – D. Wilkes, University of Georgia

If you think the McCain campaign is playing with fire you are sadly mistaken.  They Are of the fire.  America, and the American Dream, lives or dies depending on how many of us are left, who still believe in it, and will defend it against the mob.  Democracies don’t die at the hands of foreign enemies.  They die when the mob overwhelms the dream of freedom and liberty and justice for all.  The gutter cannot tolerate and will not willingly endure a world, where they have to witness what free men and women are capable of when the chains are cast off, and their dreams take wing.  They will burn it all down if they have to, so they don’t have to know what humanity is capable of, that they might have been…

Well after all, California isn’t the only state fighting an anti-gay same sex marriage amendment.  Florida and Arizona are also fighting.  So in the spirit of we’re all in this together, if you donate to the fight in any one of those states too (any amount), and email me the acknowledgment of your contribution (sans any personal info like SSN or credit card numbers…of course) I will honor the offer I made below to No On 8 in California. 

…or photograph.  To repeat from the previous post…here’s the deal:

Donate Here to the fight against Proposition 8…the California referendum that would take away the right of same sex couples to marry.   You must be a U.S. citizen to contribute.  If you donate between now and election day to No On 8 online (for any amount), send me your confirmation email, and I will draw an editorial cartoon on the topic of your choice. Or…alternately…a Mark and Josh cartoon on the topic of your choice.

Or…if my cartoons don’t do it for you…I’ll gladly mail you a signed 11 by 19 print of the image of your choice out of any of my photo galleries.

In a world that can’t seem to hate enough, please do what you can to help same sex couples keep their marriages secure.  This poor angry world needs a lot more of this…

And a lot less of this…

Here’s a handy database form you can query to see who is donating to the fight over California proposition 8 (for and against).  It’s probably incomplete though, as it says it was updated on the 7th and my donation of $500 dollars (to the folks fighting against of course) doesn’t show up…

You can donate Here to the fight against Prop 8.   You must be a U.S. citizen to contribute.  Between now and election day, anyone who donates to No On 8 online (any amount) and sends me their confirmation email, can commission from me an editorial cartoon on the topic of their choice. Or…alternately…a Mark and Josh cartoon on the topic of your choice.

Or…if my cartoons don’t do it for you…I’ll gladly mail you a signed 11 by 19 print of the image of your choice out of any of my photo galleries.

Via Benz Insider… Yes. I know. Mercedes sedans are owned by senile old rich guys. With trophy wives no less…

I’m really not sure who Audi is trying to sell their cars to here, but I’m guessing it’s people who don’t already own a BMW, Mercedes or Lexus. I have to say though…the two girls in the back of that Lexus SUV do the best Wednesday Adams since Christina Ricci in the Adams Family movie. That Lexus family should get its own show. The Adams Family, only instead of everyone being disturbed the same way, everyone is disturbed in their own special way.

As for the old guy in the Mercedes…look…I’ll gladly endure senility, if the ‘S’ class, the mansion, a hot young guy and a good cigar go with it. Was all that supposed to be a disincentive?

I can tell how unsettled my head is, by how odd my dreams get. 

Last night I was in a large vacation home with other random friends from various parts of my life.  We’d all gathered there for some reason I couldn’t remember.  You were there too, but in an upstairs room all by yourself.  Of course after yesterday I had to be having a dream about you last night.  I didn’t want to disturb you.

My friends are all stringing Christmas lights around the door frames to their rooms…it seems like some sort of project we’d all gotten ourselves into…everyone is decorating their doors with Christmas trimmings.  I am trying to untangle a favorite set of Christmas lights from my school days to put it up around the door to my room.  But the others all keep telling me to just grab a new set from the stack of unopened ones in the corner.  I am wasting time trying to untangle mine they all say, and they probably don’t even work.  But I know my old set still works because it is lit up…even though it isn’t plugged in yet.  Which is strange but sometimes you just accept strange things in your dreams as though they’re perfectly normal.  And the new lights are that style I just hate…all transparent wiring and no colors.  My old set has all the colors in it.  But try as I might I can’t get it untangled from the knot it’s in.

Then I notice my old collection of 45rpm records was scattered all over the place and I start gathering them up off the tables and chairs and off the floor and putting them back in their carrying case.  A friend walks over and asks me if I want to take them back home with me now and I tell him not yet, because you hadn’t heard them yet.  I tell the friend they can listen to my 45s too…all they wanted…but they needed to take a little better care of them because they could get scratched up and broken laying around like this.  That earns me a shrug.

Then I start hearing footsteps from the floor above us.  Another one of my friends tells me that it’s probably one of my co-workers at the Institute getting up for a meeting later.  My co-workers are here at the house too…some of them…and we all have a conference to go to later that day.  I can hear them walking around upstairs now, getting ready to go.

Suddenly I’m worried you’ve left the house and I didn’t see you go.  I walk upstairs and I’m relieved to see the door to your room is still closed, which means you’re still here.  But I don’t knock.  I don’t want to disturb you.  I just want to see you before you go.  I’m waiting for you to walk out of your room, so I can talk to you before you leave.  You’re still here, but the door is still closed.  I notice there are no Christmas lights strung around your door.

I see some more of my friends milling around in another room and more of my 45 collection scattered all over the place.  So I start gathering it back up and stacking them neatly.  A friend walks over and asks why I’m doing that and I tell him they need to be more careful with my records.  Then I notice some of them laying by a window in the sunlight and I move them away and tell my friend not to do that because they’ll warp if they’re left laying in the sunlight.  I’m starting to get a little pissed off at the careless way my friends are treating my 45s.

And then…I wake up…

Sometimes, you just have to figure a dream is your mind’s way of sorting out the clutter of your day.  Of course you were there…after yesterday’s conversation you pretty much had to be…and I get the closed door and the fear that you were already gone, and the relief that you weren’t…yet.  I think I get the Christmas lights.  But laying in bed this morning I couldn’t figure out where my 45rpm colleciton fit into it. 

Then I remembered…

I look at my record collection from back then…mostly the 45rpm singles I bought in my middle teen years because back then I wouldn’t spend the price of a whole album unless it was a band I really liked a lot, and I see almost nothing but love songs among them.  Granted, that’s mostly what rock has always been.  But there was a lot of it back then about life and politics, the war and the struggles our generation was going through.  Songs I loved like For What It’s Worth, and Incense and Peppermint…and interestingly enough in retrospect, Hold Your Head Up.  

And if it’s bad
Don’t let it get you down, you can take it
And if it hurts
Don’t let them see you cry, you can take it

Hold your head up, hold your head up
Hold your head up, hold your head high

And if they stare
Just let them burn their eyes on you moving
And if they shout
Don’t let them change a thing what you’re doing

Hold your head up, hold your head up
Hold your head up, hold your head high

I don’t think I need to analyze very much why I liked that one.  But the songs I turned to again and again alone in my bedroom were the love songs, and what is amazing to me about that in retrospect is that at that age I really didn’t care much for all that gushy love stuff.  I was going through my stacks of 45 rpms  the other day and it just floored me how much of it was surgery sweet love songs.  As I remember that part of my life, I didn’t have much interest in all that love stuff.  But then, nobody told me I could fall in love with a guy either.

I wasn’t paying much attention to the lyrics in those songs, but something in the music itself spoke to me, in a way that the lyrics, speaking only to the straight boys in the audience, never could.  I would connect with it instantly when I heard it on the radio, and like a flash I was down to the record store to by the single.  It would be years before I would find myself listening to the lyrics.  I had to grow into myself as a gay man first, and then learn the trick a lot of gay guys have to learn in this world, of mentally changing a pronoun as I listen…

You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
[Girl], we couldn’t get much higher
Come on baby, light my fire
Come on baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire

I never really paid much attention to those lyrics at first.  Just the music, and the sultry sound of Morrison’s voice.

You are all the [woman] I need, and baby you know it,
You can make this beggar a king, a clown or a poet.
I’ll give you all that I own.
You got me standing in line
Out in the cold,
pay me some mind.
Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me,
Long as you love me, it’s all right
Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me,
You got the power to turn on the light.

Something in the music spoke to me, in a way the lyrics just didn’t.  My record collection is full of these kinds of songs.  Bubblegum pop mostly, as they called it back then.  In another world, there would have been some that spoke directly to gay guys, or at least was gender neutral enough that I could have taken the lyrics to heart as much as I did the music.  But even back then, well before I came out to myself as a gay man, I had a soul for sweet love songs.  Perhaps…a tad too sweet. 

Okay…now the 45s make sense.  Especially the part about my friends (the ones that were there in the house anyway…they weren’t all there…), treating them so carelessly.  That was my heart they were treating so carelessly.  And of course, what I was trying to save for you.

You said over and over to me yesterday that a relationship between us would happen someday.  "It’ll happen", you said.  "It’ll happen."  Over and over you said that.  But "now isn’t a good time".  It was more then I’d ever expected to hear from you in my wildest dreams.  Okay.  Fine.  I can wait, if that’s what you want.  Whenever you are ready, I’ll be here.  But I think something else needs to happen too.  You need to love yourself.  There’s nothing wrong with you.  There was never anything wrong with you.  "Maybe after we’re retired", you said.  Waiting for age to take desires you’ve always hated having away isn’t a plan. 

Okay…I had a crush once upon a time.  Okay…I guess I still do.  Back then you knew how to push my buttons.  And you did.  And I loved it.  Even if I didn’t have the words to say so back then.  Life was sweet…so very very sweet.  But we went our separate ways, time passes, the universe expands, and now our lives are what they are.  I understand this.  I don’t want to complicate the life you have now and I’m not a home wrecker.  But I guess coming back into your life has complicated it after all and I’m sorry.  I just had to find you. 

All I wanted now after all these years was to just be friends, at a distance, since you have your life where you are and I have mine here in Baltimore and nothing can change now without causing a lot of problems for both of us and the last thing on earth I’d ever want is to cause you hurt in any way.  But I figured maybe I could come see you and chat over lunch or dinner or something every now and then.  But you’re afraid of what might happen.  And I was afraid that might be the case.  But…as it turns out…you’re not afraid of what I might do, so much as what you might do.  Let me guess…you don’t want to turn a friendship into something dirty.  Where have I heard that before?

I’m a grown man now and so are you and we both understand the risks here.  That’s why I’ve never suggested anything more happens then we just remain friends at a distance.  There are perfectly good reasons for me to stay away.  I know this.  I accept it.  But there is nothing wrong with you.  Or me.  There are plenty of very good reasons why I should keep my distance now, and maybe even forever…but that isn’t one of them. 

I should note this day for posterity on my calendars from now on.  It’s been the bitterest day of my life, for a reason I won’t go into here.  I mean…I’d actually Love to go into it…the blog has been a kind of therapy for me ever since I started it, since I live alone here in Baltimore and don’t have a companion I can actually…you know…talk to.  But there are certain someones out there I just don’t want to let see that particular small corner of my heart anymore.  I feel abused.  So I can’t really talk about what happened today, even here.  Much as I’d like to really get it out.  I’ve been wandering around in an all too familiar daze all day since it happened. 

It’s almost exactly like it was back in the late 1980s, when I fled every creative outlet I had because I just didn’t want to look to closely into my heart anymore, and I started plinking around with computers because I could be creative writing code and I discovered that code could be beautiful and elegant and crafting these beautiful and elegant algorithms didn’t involve my heart but only my brain.  All afternoon I was just completely zoned out and yet I was coding like mad.  Like the only existence I had was in the code.  The code was a safe place.  I didn’t have to have a life there, didn’t need a heart, just a brain capable of parsing structured syntax and thinking logically, and some problems to solve.

No I didn’t get laid off…although I’m always expecting that will happen eventually.  With the coming post-Bush budget woes NASA certainly will be facing heavy cutbacks, probably of the sort it felt in the 1970s and 80s after Apollo ended.  I have no idea what I might do with myself after Space Telescope, when and if that ever happens.  But for now I’ll be slightly amazed if I even survive the coming winter.

If only I had companionship…

Be careful what you search for…you might find it.

Be careful what questions you ask…they might be answered.

Be careful what you dream…it might come true.

Be careful most of all, of your heart’s dream…

Be careful of every new threshold you find yourself standing upon.  It may be you are standing on the edge of forever…

The wind never seems to stop here on the plains.  It is October in Wyoming, and the wind carries with it a chill now.  The first tentative breath of winter dances restlessly over rolling hills of sage.  The days have grown short, the nights cold.  And long.  Very long.  And quiet, save only for the sound of the wind. 

Take a walk tonight across the rolling hills of Wyoming sage.  Leave the town lights twinkling in the distance behind you.  Walk toward the mountains in the darkness ahead.  There is only you here tonight.  You, and the wind, and the stars in the sky, so far away.  So very far away.  Around you are only rolling hills of grass and sage, fading into the night.  There are remnants of what looks like a small wooden fence here, that was torn down some time ago. 

Listen to the wind.  Listen carefully.  There are ghosts here on the plains.  Hear them talk tonight among themselves…

No one knows why Matthew was determined to go to the Fireside that night, or why he left with Aaron and Russell. It was karaoke night, which would not ordinarily have interested him. There was some speculation that he was buying drugs from Aaron and Russell, but his friends find that implausible. A close friend thinks that depression may have weakened his judgment, and wonders if he had taken a heavy dose of Klonopin before he went to the bar. "When he was depressed," she says, "he would just grab a handful." Romaine Patterson remembers how in the coffee shop where she worked Matthew "would just talk to anyone-people no one else would talk to, like this weird old man…. He had no discrimination in his person."
-Vanity Fair

Shortly after midnight on October 7, 1998, 20-year-old Shepard met McKinney and Henderson in a bar. McKinney and Henderson offered Shepard a ride in their car. Subsequently, Shepard was robbed, pistol whipped, tortured, tied to a fence in a remote, rural area, and left to die. McKinney and Henderson also found out his address and intended to rob his home. Still tied to the fence, Shepard was discovered eighteen hours later by a cyclist, who at first thought that Shepard was a scarecrow. At the time of discovery, Shepard was still alive, but in a coma.
-Wikipedia

Aaron Kreifels first met Matthew Shepard in a dream last Thursday night, the night after he discovered his fellow University of Wyoming student badly beaten, barely alive and tied up to a fence outside of Laramie.

Although Shepard was in Fort Collins by then, kept alive by an array of life-support machines in Poudre Valley Hospital’s intensive-care unit, Kreifels said the gay student, who was beaten beyond recognition, allegedly by two young Laramie roofers, perhaps because he was gay, came to visit his rescuer in a dream that night. Kreifels doesn’t remember much of the dream, but he said Wednesday that he awoke the next morning comforted by the vague sensation of having met the person he found in such bad shape two days before.

Although early reports indicated that two mountain bikers had discovered Shepard on the crude fence on an old, double-rutted road, Kreifels was alone that evening, struggling on his mountain bike through deep sand and for some reason ignoring a desire to turn back and find another, easier way back to town. Before he knew it, he had fallen. He was on the ground, his front wheel broken beyond repair. He was unhurt, but what he saw as he got up struck him cold.

"I got up and noticed something out of the corner of my eye,” he said from his room in a freshman dorm at the University of Wyoming on Wednesday. "At first I thought it was a scarecrow, so I didn’t think much of it. Then I went around and noticed it was a real person. I checked to see if he was conscious or not, and when I found out he wasn’t, I ran and got help as fast as I could.”

As the former high school crosscountry runner traversed the quarter- to half-mile of scrub prairie between him and the nearest house in the nearby Sherman Hills subdivision, his thoughts froze before quickly accelerating.

"It was distressing. I was panicked for a couple minutes, because I wanted to make sure I could do all I could do to help save him,” he said.
-The Denver Post

Officer Reggie Fluty: When I got there, the first – at first the only thing I could see was partially somebody’s feet and I got out of my vehicle and raced over – I seen what appeared to be a young man, thirteen, fourteen years old, because he was so tiny, laying on his back and he was tied to the bottome of the end of a pole.

I did the best I could.  The gentleman that was laying on the ground, Matthew Shepard, he was covered in dry blood all over his head.  There was dry blood underneath him and he was barely breathing…he was doing the best he could.

I was going to breath for him and I couldn’t get his mouth open – his mouth wouldn’t open for me.

He was covered in, like I said, partially dry blood and blood all over his head – the only place that he did not have any blood on him, on his face, was what appeared to be where he had been crying down his face.
-The Laramie Project

 

Shepard suffered a fracture from the back of his head to the front of his right ear. He had severe brain stem damage, which affected his body’s ability to regulate heart rate, body temperature and other vital signs. There were also about a dozen small lacerations around his head, face and neck. His injuries were deemed too severe for doctors to operate.
-Wikipedia

At the Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, Matthew lay in bed down the hall from Aaron McKinney. Matthew was comatose; his brain stem which controls heartbeat, breathing, temperature, and other involuntary functions – was severely damaged. He also was suffering from hypothermia and had a red welt on his back, a red mark on his left arm, bruised knees, cuts on his head, neck, and face, and bruising in his groin. 
-Vanity Fair

Dr. Cantway:  I was working the emergency room the night Matthew Shepard was brought in.  I don’t think, that any of us, ah, can remember seeing a patient in that condition for a long time – those of us who’ve worked in big city hospitals have seen this.  Ah, but it’s not something you expect here.

Ah, you expect it, you expect this kind of injuries to come from a car going down a hill at eighty miles an hour.  You expect to see gross injuries from something like that – this horrendous, terrible thing.  Ah, but you don’t expect to see that from someone doing this to another person.

The ambulance report said it was a beating so we knew.
-The Laramie Project

Exactly a week after his tragic discovery, Kreifels, 18, an architectural engineering major from Grand Island, Neb., said he tries not to think about the condition in which he found the classmate he had never seen before. Authorities say Shepard’s assailants repeatedly beat him with the butt of a .357 Magnum, fracturing his skull. Kreifels doesn’t talk about it.

"I don’t really want to go into details about that,” he said.
-The Denver Post

Aaron Kreifels:  I keep seeing that picture in my head when I found him…and it’s not pleasant whatsoever. I don’t want it to be there. I wanna like get it out. That’s the biggest part for me is seeing that picture in my head. And it’s kind of unbelievable to me, you know, that – I happened to be the person who found him – because the big question with me, like with my religion, is like, Why did God want ME to find him?
-The Laramie Project

[Edited a tad…]

Your sermon for Sunday, October 5, 2008…

Potential Saint, Cardinal John Henry Newman, was probably gay

”They were inseparable, they lived together for half a century, effectively like husband and wife. There were repeated allegations during [Newman’s] lifetime about his circle of homosexual friends. It is uncertain whether their relationship involved sex. It is quite likely that both men had a gay orientation but chose to abstain from sexual relations. But abstinence does not alter a person’s sexual orientation.”

Peter Tatchell, a British gay rights activist, remarking on the life of the late Cardinal John Henry Newman, an influential Catholic thinker, who may be granted full Sainthood by the Catholic Church despite the probability of a homo-relational life spent with his male companion, Ambrose Saint John.

At his own request, Newman was buried in the same grave as Ambrose St John. He had stated on three occasions his desire to be buried with his friend, including shortly before his death in 1890: "I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John’s grave – and I give this as my last, my imperative will", he wrote, later adding: "This I confirm and insist on."
–Wikipedia Entry on John Henry Newman

Was a Would-Be Saint Gay?

The long-running battle between gay rights activists and the Vatican has moved into the realm of the dead. With 19th century Anglican convert Cardinal John Henry Newman, arguably the greatest Catholic thinker from the English-speaking world, moving ever closer to sainthood, trouble is brewing over where his final resting place should be. The London-born historian and theologian died in 1890 and, following the instructions in his will, was buried beside his lifelong friend and fellow convert Ambrose St. John, who had died 15 years earlier. Newman’s deep expressions of grief after St. John’s death, along with other writings, have led some historians to ask whether the two men, who lived together for many years, lived much like common-law spouses.

Newman, whose ideas on conscience and faith have influenced Christian theology ever since, is expected to be beatified next year following the Vatican’s recent certification of a Newman miracle — when a Boston man’s cure from a crippling spinal disease could not be explained medically. The final step of canonization — full Sainthood — will require proof of an additional miracle achieved through the intercession of Newman’s spirit. The Vatican announced plans this month to move Newman’s remains from a small gravesite in the central English town of Rednal to a specially built sarcophagus in the Oratory Church of Birmingham, where, officials say, they will be more accessible for venerating faithful.

-Time Magazine

Although the passionate love between them was entirely chaste, the campaigners were seeking to claim — extravagantly — that Newman’s was a "same-sex relationship" which the Catholic Church was trying to suppress, an accusation Rome felt the need to scotch. But even those who did not believe Newman was a "closet homosexual" were still concerned that Newman’s body was going to be dismembered to extract relics. For such an English saint — the first non-martyr since the Reformation to be raised to the altars – it all seemed a little, well, Mediterranean.

(It has also been a running joke for religious correspondents, who have been proposing a "graveside webcam" to cover the disinternment, and speculating at the embarrassment that would follow from the discovery that the body of St John, not Newman’s, had been preserved.) 

–Austen Ivereigh, Writing For The National Catholic Weekly

No body in exhumed Newman’s grave

The grave of the 19th Century Cardinal John Henry Newman did not contain his body, the Catholic Church has revealed.

The plot, at the Oratory House, Rednal, near Birmingham, was excavated on Thursday at the Vatican’s instruction.

His remains were to have been moved to the Birmingham Oratory, in preparation for Newman’s anticipated beatification.

Newman’s body may have decomposed, as his coffin was not lead-lined. Its absence will not affect the progress of his cause in Rome, a spokesman said.

In a statement released on Saturday, Peter Jennings from the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory, said: "Brass, wooden and cloth artefacts from Cardinal Newman’s coffin were found.

Newman was actually laid to rest, per his wishes, in St. John’s tomb.  That’s what makes the joke Ivereigh mentions of particular interest.   Regardless of whether their relationship ever became a physical one, Newman clearly and deeply loved St. John.  That’s why his body had to be removed from St. John’s tomb before he could be canonized.  The dehumanization of homosexual people proceeds not from a denial that sex between same sex lovers is natural, but from a denial that we love.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  It isn’t the suggestion that Newman ever had sex with the man he loved that outrages the likes of Ratzinger.  It’s the fact that he loved another man, and was loved by him, and that their love was vital to both of them.  That is what simply cannot be.  Not that they had sex, but that they loved each other.  That is why Newman’s body had to be dug up, and separated from St. John’s.  In his jihad on gay people, Pope Ratzinger isn’t one to let mere death prevent him from separating same sex lovers.

But when the tomb was opened they found no remains.  Both men were gone.  No Newman, No St. John.  The tomb was empty. 

From Pam’s House Blend…

Pizza To Go at the North Carolina 2008 Pride parade.  Well that sure makes me want to start going to church again…

Reader Chris left a comment to This Post the other day, about his own experiences making friends of German visitors.  I can relate.  The landscape is full of landmines…but its rewarding.

I made friends, briefly, with a British kid some years back.  We were both working in a custom plastic shop, and he knew a family in the apartment complex I lived in, so we had some points of contact between us.  The kid, Paul, who was so goddamned cute, first told me the joke about how England and America were two nations separated by a common language.  And it’s true.  You really couldn’t assume that even words we both shared in our language meant the same things.  Once, when he cut himself at the shop, and asked for a ‘patch’, all the good old boys at the shop laughed their butts off.  ‘Patch’ is the word they use for what we referred to as a ‘bandage’ over on this side of the Big Pond.  And ‘torch’ for ‘flashlight’.  And so on.  But beyond the meaning of words, there were dozens of little cultural differences all the good old boys could not have cared less about, when they weren’t laughing at them, but which I tried hard to pay attention to, because he was cute, and because he was decent and good-hearted, and I really wanted to be his friend.

You have to work at it.  But it’s worthwhile.  There are landmines and you have to be careful.  Even if you speak the same language.  Especially if.  Where the language barrier exists you kind of know you they’re there.  But even where you’re both speaking the same tongue you have to take care to reach across the fence.  The key is trust.  You have to hold it like a precious thing, and always take the extra step to keep it.  Paul and I lost touch after he went back to England.  But I hope he still thinks of me from time to time.  He opened my eyes a tad to some of the British stereotypes I grew up with.  Swear to God I can’t even watch Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins anymore since I knew Paul.  It’s so…embarrassing. 

I so very much want to be the friend to my crush from my high school days that I was too shy to be back then.  I think its coming along.  I hope it is.  Maybe I’ll get a chance to see him later next month.  Maybe not.  But I’ll keep trying.  He means a lot to me.  So I try to learn this and that of his culture and background.  It’s worthwhile, even if we remain mostly apart.  It’s opened my eyes to a bit more of the world, and that’s always a good thing.

I ordered some books on German history and culture from Amazon.  I’m going to read through them when they come.  Even if it doesn’t bring us closer together, it’s having a broadening effect on me.  This poor angry world could use more of that in all of us.  If I could change one thing about the American educational system it would be this: every kid would have to spend a year abroad…somewhere…before graduating.  My countrymen are a bit too insular.  We need to see more of the world first hand while we’re still young.  Maybe we’d be better neighbors if we did.

Actually…I tried mayonnaise on my fries just the other day.  They were…delicious.

A friend calls…and during the conversation we discuss our working lives, and how it is good to have a job that engages you completely…thoroughly.  A couple friends of mine are taking the Big Detour off their career paths after years, because they aren’t sure they want to spend the rest of their lives in them.  Some friends have been laid off.  Some don’t know what they are going to do with their lives.

Fine.  But that’s not my issue.  Career isn’t crap.  It isn’t.  Neither is money.  Some time ago I did one of those cute little MySpace surveys…and one of the questions was…

28. Would you rather be rich and smart or young and beautiful?
(sigh) Whatever comes with smart. Stupid is not worth being beautiful for. Or rich either.

Okay…  I have another question.  Would you rather have the job of your dreams and be single, or wash dishes at some cheap dive and have your soulmate.

But it’s not rocket science.  Not at all.  Whatever comes with the soulmate, that’s what I want.  That’s all that matters.  That’s it.   That’s everything.  Everything.   I work on the Hubble Space Telescope project.  I make good money.  I own my own house now…and a Mercedes-Benz.  I get five weeks of paid vacation every year.  I make really good money.  I should be counting my blessings.  I should be relishing the good life fate has given me.  And I am miserable.  I’d trade it all…in a heartbeat…for the minimum wage dishwasher job and the soulmate.  In a heartbeat.   In a heartbeat.  And think myself so goddamned lucky.  So very very goddamned lucky…  But life hasn’t given me that choice.  I don’t think it ever will.

I feel like a failure.  I feel like a leftover part.  My friends…they just don’t understand that.  They think I’m making a big deal over nothing.  Some of them have found their other half.  Others have loved and lost, and loved again, and maybe lost again, and are bored with the whole dating and mating thing.  They think I should be so glad to have a good job, and be making good money, and be able to do whatever I want with my free time…because I’m single…

And it’s all the worse when you begin to realize that your friends are telling you all this, because they figure you’re really not boyfriend material, and so they’re trying to be kind to the love cripple.  Just accept being single Bruce…it’s for the best…  You’re not really all that good looking…and let’s face it…you’re getting old…

I hate my life.  I just…hate it.  Thank you god for Tequila..

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the sky over Maryland open up like it did just now.  For a moment it felt like a waterfall had perched over Casa del Garrett.  I’ve never heard rain pound my roof like it did just now.  And half the sky is bright with sunshine.

I was laying in bed…my energy levels have been really weak lately…and I heard what I thought was hail smacking down on my aluminum window awnings.  I rolled over and looked out and it wasn’t hail but those big fat raindrops that sometimes portend a sudden tropical downpour.  Lots of them.  And sure enough, what followed was a torrent of rain.  No kidding…my neighborhood street had almost dried out from the past couple days of rain, rain, rain, and in under a minute it was soaked again with a fast moving stream of water rushing toward the Jones Falls creek bed.  Then it stopped. 

The sky to my east is dark as slate.  To my west it’s all sun-shiny.  Everything is soaked again.  My poor front yard is a swamp.  I’d been thinking about a certain someone who lives in Florida when I laid down and then I suddenly get a downpour that reminds me of the weather down there.  I wish I could believe in that omen.  But here’s what my logical analytical brain is telling me: If this is going to be a wet winter, better hope it’s a warm one or I could be digging out of three or four feet of snow every few weeks. 

Every November I make a point to stock my basement supply shelves with things to last me through the winter so I don’t have to be going to the store all the time when the weather’s bad, and especially when it snows, because the people here in Maryland just dogpile on the stores whenever the forecast so much as breaths the word ‘snow’.  I buy my entire November through March supply of non-perisable items and pick through it until winter goes away.  I also make sure I have plenty of things on hand like batteries and over the counter remedies, soaps and cleaners and things for doing ad-hoc repairs.  I’m not a survivalist, I just hate going outside when the streets are all snowed up and iced over, and everyone is dog piling on the stores because ohmygodit’sgoingtosnoweekeekeek…  Winter is what bulk warehouse shopping was made for.

Oh look…the sun is out again…daring me to go for a walk…

Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been watching this for decades.  Decades. 

Lies, half-truths and contradictions: the significance of McCain blowing off Letterman

The recap: McCain was supposed to stop by Letterman’s show Wednesday. But Dave explained to his audience that McCain "was nice enough to call me on the phone and said that he was racing back to Washington." But part of the way through his late-afternoon taping, Dave learned that Johnny Mac was still a few blocks away in New York — taping an "excloo" with Katie Couric.

…

Dave’s anger gradually built through the show. He got truly incensed when he showed his audience the internal CBS News feed of McCain getting his makeup dabbed on before his Couric interview. "He doesn’t seem to be racing to the airport, does he?" Letterman said. Then he shouted at the television monitor: "Hey, John, I got a question! You need a ride to the airport?"

Okay…so he blows off a late night talk show host.  Big deal…right?  On the other hand, Mr. Straight Talk Express could have given Letterman a little…you know…straight talk.  Something like, "I’m sorry to have to do this to you Dave, but with this terrible economic crisis developing I can’t really be doing late night comedy shows now.  I’m going to be talking with Couric on CBS news instead…

Straight talk.  Letterman would have accepted that.  He might not have liked it, but he would have accepted it.  But that’s not what he got, and if you think the busting he gave McCain that night was pique you are sadly mistaken. In her novel The Charioteer, Mary Renault wrote that "some events are crucial from their very slightness; because circumstances have used no force on them, they are unequivocally what they are, test-tube reactions of personality."  McCain just flat out lied to him and the casually unnecessary nature of it shocked him. 

You get the feeling that the sight of this…indifference…to telling lies…on the part of so many conservative moralists is starting, finally, to shock a lot of people…

McCain Lies: "I’ve Bought American Literally All My Life"

Yesterday, we learned that not only does McCain own thirteen cars, but that the McCain fleet includes imports, a VW from Germany and a Honda from Japan. (His wife drives a Lexus, but that car is owned by her beer distributorship.)

And now it turns out that earlier this month he lied to Michigan voters about his car purchases, telling them "I’ve bought American literally all my life" during a September 7 interview with Detroit’s WXYZ-TV. Earlier in the interview, he had told the interviewer "Cindy and I own an automobile that’s American-made" which was about best an extremely misleading statement.

McCain Lies About Social Security Privatization

In March, after ThinkProgress caught Sen. Joe Lieberman lying to cover up Sen. John McCain’s support for Social Security privatization, I posted video (with the help of reader Tom M.) from 2004 of McCain, in response to an audience question, explicitly backing Social Security privatization by name.

Q: Will privatizing Social Security be a priority for you going forward?

…

McCAIN: Without privatization, I don’t see how you can possibly, over time, make sure that young Americans are able to receive Social Security benefits.

Today at a Nashua town hall (his best forum!), McCain himself lied about his position, saying:

I’m not for, quote, privatizing Social Security. I never have been. I never will be.

As Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler once tersely said, "This is the operative statement.  The others are inoperative."

Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been witnessing this behavior on the part of the kook pews for decades.  Decades.  We’ve watched them grow in power from the backwater gutters to the heights of power.  And they’ve never changed their spots.  What’s happened is that the republican party has been utterly corrupted by them, by their holy war, by their Kulturkampf.  It got them votes.  It won them elections.  But the price was their souls…

Conservative "Christians" Misrepresent Scientist’s Beliefs

Bob Sith, the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC’s) National Strategist for Gender Issues, has recently misrepresented the scientific conclusions of Dr. Francis Collins (of the Human Genome Project) in the Baptist Press‘s Did God create Ray Boltz gay?. Here’s how he described Dr. Francis Collins’ conclusions:

…For example, in 2003, the International Human Genome Consortium announced the successful completion of the Human Genome Project, which, among other things, identified each of the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA. The press release read: "The human genome is complete and the Human Genome Project is over."

While this accomplishment was widely reported, almost no one reported the words of Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the project. Collins, arguably the nation’s most influential geneticist, said, "Homosexuality is not hardwired. There is no gay gene. We mapped the human genome. We now know there is no genetic cause for homosexuality."

Somehow the major media missed that little tidbit. Collins and others acknowledge that genetics can predispose but not predetermine. This supports other studies that clearly document the possibility of change for people who struggle with unwanted homosexual desire.

Dr. Collins apparently never actually said this; this quote is taken from a OneNewsNow article by Jim Brown — Brown quoted self-identifed former homosexual Greg Quinlan, who appears to have made up the statement whole cloth. Bob Sith apparently quoted the statement verbatim — putting quotation marks around the statement that Jim Brown hadn’t put around the statement — without checking to see if the quote had any veracity. Apparently, it didn’t have any verasity at all.

David Roberts of the Ex-Gay Watch has been following the repeated twisting of Dr. Collins’ words for awhile. As Roberts documented in his post Major Geneticist Francis Collins Responds to NARTH Article, this isn’t the first time Dr. Collins words have been twisted by conservative Christians…

It would hardly be the first time the religious right has built carefully crafted deceptions with the material provided to it by science.  Some weeks ago Jim Burroway debunked a beaut from the Family Research Council , purporting to show that statistics gathered by the CDC on domestic violence proved that same sex relationships were much more violent then heterosexual ones…

The third point the brochure is built on is this:

Intimate partner violence: homosexual and lesbian couples experience by far the highest levels of intimate partner violence compared with married couples as well as cohabiting heterosexual couples. Lesbians, for example, suffer a much higher level of violence than do married women

They base this claim on the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Violence Against Women Survey (PDF: 62 pages/1,475 KB) If you want to see how they construct this particular distortion, I encourage you to download the report yourself and we’ll go through it step by step. Believe me, it’s worth it because this is a classic example.

On page 29, you will find that when you only look at victims with a history of same-sex cohabitation and compare them with those with a history of opposite-sex cohabitation, then it’s true, gays and lesbians experience higher levels of intimate parter violence. But that’s not true for gay and lesbian couples.

To see this, go to the next page. Among women with a history of same-sex partnership:

• 30.4% were raped, assaulted or stalked by their husband/male partner
• 11.4% were raped, assaulted or stalked by their wife/female partner.

And among men with a history of same-sex partnership:

• 10.8% were raped, assaulted, or stalked by their wife/female partner.
• 15.4% were raped, assaulted, or stalked by their husband/male partner.

So here is what it all means. Many women with a history of same-sex partnership also have a history of opposite-sex partnership. Because of that, they are far more likely to report being raped, assaulted or stalked because it is the men in their lives who are doing the raping, assaulting or stalking, not the women. Same-sex cohabiting women were nearly three times more likely to report being victimized by a male partner than a female partner.

And here is where the statistic gets really interesting: 20.5% of women in opposite sex relationships were raped, assaulted or stalked by their husband or male partner. That compares to 15.4% of men who were raped, assaulted, or stalked by their male partners. In other words, gay men are safer around their same-sex partners than straight women are around their husbands or opposite-sex partner.

For decades now…decades…your gay and lesbian neighbors have watched the moralists of the religious right, in the name of virtue, in the name of fighting amoral secularism, in the name of decency and family values, in the name of the man on the cross who they claim to venerate as their holy savior, lie through their teeth every chance they get, and then lie again, and then lie again, and then lie again, Amen.  We have watched their hatred of ecumenicism, their hatred of secularism, their hatred of the American Dream of liberty and justice for all and especially their vitriolic hatred of gay and lesbian people, eat everything within them that could ever have been good and decent and noble, rot every moral fiber that was ever inside of them, that might once have kept them from looking their neighbor in the face, and lying through their teeth.  All that’s left of them now, are the slogans, and the bellicose religiosity.  And the hate.  If you ever need to know what hate will do to you, to your soul, and why you need to fight it more then any other enemy you will ever face, behold Sarah Palin.  If you ever need to know why you have to look hate in the face directly, unflinchingly, and see it for what it is, and never, Never, grant it any excuse or pity, behold John McCain and the party that is now owned by America’s multitude of Sarah Palins.

These are not moral warriors.  They say they are, but they are not.  They are runts.  Cowards.  Not even rising to the level of gangsters, because a gangster knows what he is, and embraces it with a smirk.  The culture warriors are hollow shells, who discarded virtue and morality long, long ago, at the first touch of shame.  And the last thing on earth they want now is for the rest of us to embrace morality, reach for the higher purpose, be virtue.  Because that would mean we’d have to hold them accountable for all their pathetic lies, all their squalid cheats, all the damage they’ve done to America all these years.

For decades we’ve watched this movement of cheats grow into a political powerhouse, and take the republican party down into its gutter.  And we’ve been speaking out, trying to warn the rest of America what was happening.  But in the end, people really can’t be expected to believe a betrayal of this magnitude without seeing it for themselves. 

"Hey, John, I got a question! You need a ride to the airport?"

Morality.  Values.  The soul of a nation isn’t in its leaders, but in its grassroots.  The soul is in the millions and millions of us who wake up every day and choose whether to cheat our way to tomorrow or try and make the best of it, as best as we can, as best as we can understand what the good is, and how to get ourselves there.  It’s not making the grand gesture for Truth, Justice and the American Way.  It’s not declaring your devotion to God.  It’s flinching away from the easy lie, because for better or worse you still need to look at yourself in the mirror the next day.  It’s not wearing your moral values on your sleeve, or putting a little halo around your head.  It’s keeping a little nugget of pride deep down in your heart, that simply won’t let you cheat a friend or a neighbor, because the trust in their eyes matters to you.

Picture someone for whom cheating a friend is less important then winning an election and you have what the religious right has done to the republican party in a nutshell.  They fought for the soul of the party.  They got it.  Look at what they did with it.  Look at it.  They have said for decades that they are fighting for the soul of America.  Think of what they did to John McCain, the man who wouldn’t leave Vietnam without his brother soldiers, as an example of what they think winning means.