As Grant Cogswell pointed out in his feature piece last week, there once was a man called Anton LaVey, and Anton LaVey, whilst he lived, tried really, really hard to be The Evilest Man Who Ever Was. Mostly he was just bald and vaguely douche-bag-ish: Like a martini-sipping Fu-Manchu in a priest suit who looked like he had to crap a walrus. But still. He tried really, really hard.
Indeed, Anton wanted to be evil, seriously evil, so he did the only evil thing an evil person in his evil position could do: He poured himself a stiff drink, sat down, and thought really really hard about, well, evil.
…
His conclusions and the crux of his Satanic philosophy ran thusly: We humans are, in every sense, rotten, rude, paranoid, and less than fresh. People are wicked and untrustworthy animals. All so-called “virtues” and “good deeds” are self-delusive ego-kicks, hip, hip, hooray. That’s the whole thing in a devilicious nutshell.
Sound familiar? Well…yeah actually. Ryan points us to a Colbert interview of George Will, who obligingly goes on just as he’s done for decades now about the difference between liberals and conservatives…
That’s right. Straight from the horsey mouth of the “leading pundit of conservatism in the nation”: The difference between conservatives and liberals is that liberals are fools who believe in the goodness of human nature and the basic equality of all people. Like in the, uh, Declaration of Independence and junk. (And, if you’ll pardon the expression, “The Bible”.) They believe misguidedly that “something straight” can be made out of the “crooked timber” that is humanity. Man is clearly rotten and selfish by design. There can be no myth of equality…um….it only translates to “mediocrity”, and…uh…Satan? Is that you? It’s me, George Will.
Of course you could argue that conservatives would strongly disagree with LaVey that this broken human nature means we should just go ahead and give in to our basest nature. On the contrary, we need a strong government based on strong moral values to keep our base nature in check. Well…actually…Your base nature. You. The common folk. The rich and powerful are another story. What Reagan and Bush have made pretty clear is that They get to indulge their every selfish greedy, crooked, broken desire to their heart’s content. After all…they’re on top. And isn’t that pure LaVey after all?
1. Blessed are the strong, for they shall possess the earth. Cursed are the weak, for they shall inherit the yoke!
2. Blessed are the powerful, for they shall be reverenced among men. Cursed are the feeble, for they shall inherit the yoke!
3. Blessed are the bold, for they shall be masters of the world. Cursed are the righteously humble, for they shall be trodden under cloven hoofs!
4. Blessed are the victorious, for victory is the basis of right. Cursed are the vanquished, for they shall remain vassals forever!
5. Blessed are the iron handed, for the unfit shall flee before them. Cursed are the poor in spirit, for they shall be spat upon!
-Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible, The Book Of Satan, Chapter 5.
…and so on. Yes, I have a copy…bought back in the early 70s just out of shear curiosity. It never dawned on me until now to really look at how closely this guy’s ideas map to Ayn Rand’s and the greed is good conservative movement she spawned. And if you think Rand would have been outraged at being compared to the likes of LaVey, you’re probably right. She often claimed that her philosophy regarded predators as parasites, whereas the truly selfish man did not simply take from the weak, but rather created his own wealth. But Rand was hardly averse to stealing outright from the weak. In point of fact, she really did believe that was the prerogative of the powerful…
On the 125th anniversary of the Dred Scott decision, Ayn Rand — who surely would have approved of its fearless pronouncements on inequality — died at the age of 77. The right-wing cult philosopher and high priestess of tedium somehow managed to sell millions of copies of her nearly unreadable novels from the 1950s onward, including paperweights such as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. On 6 March 1974, following a speech to the Army cadets at West Point, Rand was asked about the dispossession of American Indian land. In short, she approved of the idea.
They didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using . . . . What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.
Blessed are the strong, for they shall possess the earth. Cursed are the weak, for they shall inherit the yoke! When they talk to you about morality, and Christian values, laugh in their face. They don’t want to get government off your back, so much as get it out of the way so they can put a leash around your neck and a brand on your forehead and call you their own. They are less Christ, then LaVey.
We are not devils. We are not angels. We are not destroyers, we are not creators. We are not lords nor are we peasants. We are human. We are all of these. There is no dark, there is no light, there is simply what we are. The abyss isn’t our destiny any more then heaven is. But the path to oblivion is paved with lies. We neither sustain ourselves nor make a future possible by throwing ourselves into the arms of gurus who tell us we are something that we are not. Ask the shades that walk the battlegrounds on this poor earth, where we killed each other by the thousands to appease the bottomless greed of the few and their hatred of everything fine and noble a human being can be. Blessed are they who question, for they will wear no chains.
What is truth? Can you spot the real from the nicely packaged fake? Could you walk into a shop in some quaint little village in some far-away land, and know whether the friendly man behind the counter is offering to sell you an authentic Rolex or just trying to pass off a slick looking facsimile that won’t keep time worth a damn to a naive tourist? Just how good a judge are you of Authenticity anyway?
Calling him "just plain wrong," Bishop William Murphy has blasted Gov. David A. Paterson for ordering state agencies to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions.
…
Murphy wrote, "I fail to understand how" a homosexual union "can be called marriage. … No matter how much some may wish to apply the term ‘marriage,’ it does not fit because it fails the test of truth and authenticity."
Authentic:
In response, diocesan spokesman Sean Dolan said Murphy "is not imposing his will. He is exercising his responsibility as the shepherd of this diocese to teach the faith.
"That said," he added, "the message should not be misconstrued as an attack on the human dignity of homosexual people. The church teaches that we must treat homosexuals with dignity and love, as we would all God’s children."
Their love is fake. But ours is real. Easy payments too.
Your toy balloon has sailed in the sky
But now it must fall to the ground
Now you’re sad eyes reveal
Just how badly you feel
‘Cause there is no easy way down
The view from the cliffs
Must have been exciting
(Exiting, exciting, exciting)
And up to the peaks you were bound
Now you’re stranded all alone
And the path leads unknown
And there is no easy way down
No it isn’t very easy
(No easy way down)
When you’re left on your own
(No easy way down)
No it isn’t very easy
When each road you take
Is one more mistake
And there’s no one to break your fall
And lead you back home
LOS ANGELES – A federal judge suspended the obscenity trial of a Los Angeles porn distributor Wednesday following a newspaper report that the judge had sexually explicit material on his own Web site.
Judge Alex Kozinski on Wednesday granted a joint motion to suspend the trial after the prosecution said it needed time to look into the issue of the judge’s Web site.
The judge told the jury to return on Monday. The panel spent hours at the Pasadena offices of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals watching videos depicting bestiality and extreme fetishes.
Kozinski is chief justice of the 9th Circuit but is serving as a trial judge in the obscenity case. Kozinski said he thought the material on his Web site couldn’t be seen by the public, the Los Angeles Times reported on its Web site. The images included a video of a "half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal," the newspaper reported.
This is…not what I needed to be reading in the news feeds first thing in the morning. Human sexuality is a…strange thing to behold…sometimes.
Like…here… (via Dan Savage at SLOG) I probably didn’t need to be reading this before bedtime last night…
Hey, Cracked, this just arrived in my mailbox—and I actually don’t think it’s the 11th most terrifying guide to sex. I think it belongs somewhere in the top three. I certainly think it’s scarier than your #1 pick, A Hand in the Bush: The Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting, and way, way scarier than your #2 pick, Intimate Invasions: The Erotic Ins & Outs of Enema Play. I give you… The Toybag Guide to Ageplay…
I get asked all the time what Age Play is. It can mean a thousand different things to a thousand different sexual adventurers or curious roleplaying enthusiasts, but there are key threads that run through it.
Age play is any interaction or roleplay between consenting adults (or enjoyed solo by an adult) involving the concept of age as a dynamic… Age play incorporates a sensual or sexual element, buy many "age players," "kidz," babiez," or "littles" enjoy "pure" age play that is just about the role and not about any hanky panky.
Age play is not pedophilia, child porn, or individuals interested in playing with actual biological children. Age Players may use the props of "bio kids," but we are into the props and trappings, not the kids themselves in any way.
Go check out the cover of that book Savage has on display in that post. It’s…disturbing all right…
…and I suppose because I am a geek, my mind starts wondering about where the link might be between this behavior, which really squiks me out, and how we humans are always bestowing fond diminutives on the one we love. Ever call your darling ‘baby’? Now, you didn’t really mean that literally did you…and yet that got in there somehow. We use words like ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ even though we’re referring to grown adults. And then…again probably because I am a geek…the words of physicist Richard Feynman bubble into this train of thought…
Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, “But how can it be like that?” because you will get “down the drain”, into a blind alley from which no one has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.
Feynman was talking about quantum mechanics, but there are lotsa more rabbit holes a brain can go down besides that one. Human sexuality for one. I guess it’s what you get when you plop that rational logical thinking brain down on top of the old primate brain, down on top of the old mammalian brain, down on top of the lizard brain. And God only knows what’s below that. It bears close examination only by interested scientists, anthropologists and other researchers with steady nerves. The rest of us are probably better off not knowing what our neighbors are up to.
I am the last person on earth to be surprised to read that a judge in a bestiality case has a web site where he’s posted videos of himself some guy cavorting with animals. Squiked out, yes, but not surprised. And probably a tad more resigned to it then most of you. I am a romantic. I really don’t like seeing this…really don’t like watching sex being dragged into the gutter. But I know better then to expect it won’t be. When I was a young man, only a few years out to myself, I had to walk a gauntlet of hard core heterosexual peep show magazines just to buy a copy of The Advocate or get a copy of the local free gay paper, because respectable news stands back then wouldn’t carry them. I was a Baptist boy and it was an education. Nothing I ever heard on the school yard playing ground, no dirty joke told among the rude boys, prepared me for what I saw in those adult bookstores. I consider it one of the few benefits of growing up in more oppressive times because ever since then, whenever some gay hater starts yap, yap, yapping about how perverted homosexual sex is (Hi Pete!) I instantly find myself thinking that they’re either naive, stupid, a liar or all of the above.
Strange? Strange? Well I’m here to tell you heterosexuals know how to get their strange on too and if you haven’t seen it that’s because you haven’t looked. The human family is just plain strange period. Gay people have no monopoly on that, and there are plenty of us who find all of that stuff positively bizarre too.
[Update…] According to Slashdot, the files on that judge’s web site also included …images of masturbation, public sex, contortionist sex, a transsexual striptease, and a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows… Wasn’t that a Monty Python skit…?
[Update…] It wasn’t a video of the judge apparently…my bad…
Those were just a few of the terms hurled my way in 2003 when I said that the Supreme Court’s Texas sodomy decision opened the door to the redefinition of marriage.
When I wasn’t ducking the epithets, I was being laughed at, mocked, and given the crazy-uncle-at-the-holidays treatment by the media. Or I was being told I should resign from my leadership post by some Senate colleagues.
Five years later, do I regret sounding the alarm about marriage? No.
I’m just saddened that time has proved right those of us who worried about the future of marriage as the union of husband and wife, deeply rooted not only in our traditions, our faiths, but in the facts of human nature: as Pope Benedict said, "The cradle of life and love," connecting mothers and fathers to their children.
So sad… So sad… So tell us how were you proven right Rick…
The latest distressing news came last week in California. The state Supreme Court there ruled, 4-3, that same-sex couples can marry.
No kidding? Wow…
Look at Norway. It began allowing same-sex marriage in the 1990s. In just the last decade, its heterosexual-marriage rates have nose-dived and its out-of-wedlock birthrate skyrocketed to 80 percent for firstborn children. Too bad for those kids who probably won’t have a dad around, but we can’t let the welfare of children stand in the way of social affirmation, can we?
OSLO, Norway (AP) – Two Norwegian opposition parties on Thursday backed the rights of gay couples to marry in church, adopt and have assisted pregnancies, effectively assuring the passage of a new equality law next month.
The ruling three-party government proposed a law in March giving gay couples equal rights to heterosexuals but disagreements within the coalition cast doubt on whether it would receive enough votes to pass.
But two opposition parties announced Thursday they were backing the proposals, a move welcomed by gay rights groups, which should ensure a parliamentary majority and allow the law to be passed.
Okay…in other words… Norway suffered a staggering rise in out of wedlock births and an equally staggering decline in heterosexual marriages since it began allowing same-sex marriages in the 1990s, and just one week after your column warning us about that Norway’s parliament announces it is ready to give same sex the right to marry. No you drooling sack of Santorum, Norway hasn’t had same-sex marriage since…it was 1993 since you couldn’t be bothered to check the actual date either. It’s had a form of civil unions.
Okay…fine…so it was civil unions that caused the decline in Norway then…right? Erm…no… You’re waving Stanley Kurtz’ claptrap years after it was debunked you moron. Here…let some fellow republicans slap some wake up upside your head…
Some on the far right claim that the experiences with same-sex marriage in the international community prove that same-sex marriage destroys the institution of marriage. This claim, however, is unsupported by the facts. Stanley Kurtz, of the Hoover Institution, insists, in an article for The Weekly Standard, that same-sex marriage has undermined the institution of marriage in Scandinavia. (Scandinavia includes the countries of Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Much debate on this issue also has included the Netherlands.) An examination of the facts severely undermines Kurtz’s assertion. Professor M.V. Lee Badgett from the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently authored a study examining Kurtz’s conclusion. Click here to read the entire study. Among the report’s key findings:
"There is no evidence that giving partnership rights to same-sex couples had any impact on heterosexual marriage in Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands. Marriage rates, divorce rates, and non-marital birth rates have been changing in Scandinavia, Europe and the United States for the past thirty years. But those changes have occurred in all countries, regardless of whether or not they adopted same-sex partnership laws, and these trends were underway well before the passage of laws that gave same-sex couples rights."
"Divorce rates (in Scandinavia) have not risen since the passage of partnership laws and marriage rates have remained stable or actually increased."
"Non-marital birth rates have not risen faster in Scandinavia or the Netherlands since the passage of partnership laws. Although there has been a long-term trend toward the separation of sex, reproduction, and marriage in the industrialized west, this trend is unrelated to the legal recognition of same-sex couples."
"Non-marital birth rates changed just as much in countries without partnership laws as in countries that legally recognize same-sex couples’ partnerships."
"The legal and cultural context in the United States gives many more incentives for heterosexual couples to marry than in Europe and those incentives will still exist even if same-sex couples can marry. Giving same-sex couples marriage or marriage-like rights has not undermined heterosexual marriage in Europe, and it is not likely to do so in the United States."
The main evidence Kurtz points to is the increase in cohabitation rates among unmarried heterosexual couples and the increase in births to unmarried mothers. Roughly half of all children in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are now born to unmarried parents. In Denmark, the number of cohabiting couples with children rose by 25 percent in the 1990s. From these statistics Kurtz concludes that " … married parenthood has become a minority phenomenon," and—surprise—he blames gay marriage.
But Kurtz’s interpretation of the statistics is incorrect. Parenthood within marriage is still the norm—most cohabitating couples marry after they start having children. In Sweden, for instance, 70 percent of cohabiters wed after their first child is born. Indeed, in Scandinavia the majority of families with children are headed by married parents. In Denmark and Norway, roughly four out of five couples with children were married in 2003. In the Netherlands, a bit south of Scandinavia, 90 percent of heterosexual couples with kids are married.
Emphasis mine. And you can be sure Kurtz knew that when he published his dire warnings about the effect of same-sex marriage in Scandinavia. After all…he had to have poured over the data in his search for evidence damning gay people. He’d have looked at the entire marriage rate data, never doubt it, and he had to have seen that part. He withheld it because it effectively took away his ammunition.
But more specifically with respect to civil unions, look at what the data tells us:
Before 1993, the percentage of births outside of marriage grew steadily by an average of about 9% per year.
After civil unions were enacted in 1993, the growth of that birth rate slowed dramatically. The the growth rate fell from 9% per year to an average of less than 1.5% per year between 1993 and 2006.
Which means that if there were a cause and effect between Norway’s birth rate outside of marriage and providing civil unions for same-sex couples, the data suggests that civil unions actually had a dramatic affect in slowing the rate of births outside of marriage.
The chart Burroway provides shows the rate climbing since the mid-70s, and then suddenly tapering off after civil unions were enacted. Of course, coincidence is not causality, and the plain fact is that civil unions were probably of utterly no consequence in any sense. Since when did heterosexuals decide how to live their intimate lives based on what homosexuals do with theirs? Is this rocket science?
What happened to change how heterosexuals lived their lives in the 1970s wasn’t gay liberation, but women’s. The pill happened. Women became more independent of men. They could have their own lives. Marriage wasn’t a foregone conclusion for them, the home not the only life they were allowed to have anymore. Given all that, of course the patterns of marriage would change. Opposite sex couples still marry…they just go down a different road to it now…both of them, together, as equals.
And make no mistake…that’s what Santorum and his kind want to change. This isn’t about same-sex marriage. It’s about the prerogative of powerful males. It’s about taking us all back to a day when certain males of a certain class had power and status simply by virtue of their being males of a certain class, and the rest of us, women, minorities, laborers, heathens, knew our place and our lives only had context in service to them. It was once their world, and the rest of us just lived in it. That’s why they fight. Because in this world of ever expanding knowledge, freedom and justice, they are the biggest losers. Where status doesn’t count, you actually have to be something, and all they know how to be, is 18th century privileged males.
Actually Rick, the voters of Pennsylvania gave you a wake-up call when they booted your ass out of office last election. And you’re still walking though life half-asleep, half comatose, aren’t you?
When Smirk entered the White House in 2001, the price of gasoline was bumping around the $1.80 mark. Crude was bumping around the $30 a barrel mark. You can’t blame that jackass and his idiot henchmen for all of the increase, but his splendid little war is one factor exacerbating it. The other is actually more Reagan’s fault then Bush’s. Reagan began the financial deregulation process that led straight to the sub prime mortgage meltdown we have now, and the resulting credit crunch. Investors, worried that all of a sudden real estate isn’t the safe haven for money it used to be, are putting their dough into buying commodities like…er…crude oil…which drives up the price.
Why it is that people assume republicans are better at managing an economy then democrats is beyond me, other then I guess people think that if you’re rich you must know how to make money. Some rich people do. Some rich people absolutely love to make money. And those people rise the standard of living for everyone. Their energy makes the world a better place. But others are rich because they merely hunger for wealth and they don’t care how they get it. The ones of low ambition turn to petty crime. The really ambitious ones build empires, corrupt governments, and legally rape everyone and everything around them blind. Guess which sort gravitate to the republican party.
After more than five years of petroleum price increases, American consumers appear to be expecting the worst. A CNN poll taken last week showed that 59 percent of Americans believe it is very likely that they will pay $5 a gallon for gasoline before the end of the year and that an additional 27 percent say it is somewhat likely.
Economists say these expectations make it more probable that people will change behavior rather than simply wait for a turn in the traditional up-and-down cycle of commodity prices. "People now realize that prices may come back down, but they’re not going down to where they were," said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com. "We’re going to have to live with higher energy prices for a while. And that’s affecting their behavior and what they buy and don’t buy."
For Rusty Davis, a handyman from Arlington, the high cost of gasoline is changing the way he runs his business. He has started to refuse jobs outside the county. When he does travel to jobs, he now takes his fuel-efficient car and leaves behind his work van, which gets only 12 miles to the gallon. He also used to do free estimates in person. Now he does them over the phone.
My brother does that kind of work for a living, and when I read that I thought of him. He doesn’t do estimates over the phone for the obvious reason that you need to see the situation you’re getting into before you bid on it if you don’t want any unpleasant surprises gulping down your profit margin. I would expect he just adds in the higher cost of gas to his bids now, if he has to go far afield. But much of his work is local so I doubt he drives very far, very often to a job. But I don’t think he’d turn down a job outright simply because it involved driving a distance. The thing to do is bid it for what it will cost you and if you don’t get it…well…you can’t work a job that’s going to cost you more then you make back from it.
My brother has a big Ford truck, but he also has a smaller one he can use when he doesn’t need the capacity of the big one. I expect that one’s getting a lot more use now. I remember when all those air foils started appearing on tractor-trailer rigs back in the late 70s and 80s. Before the first oil embargo it didn’t matter how much fuel one of those things burned because it was so cheap, and the profile of most of those big rigs was like a fist going down the highway. Then suddenly the truckers were having to find ways to squeeze out every little bit of milage they could and there was a new appreciation for air drag. Now you see them all the time on the big trucks. Something else I’m starting to see more of on American highways are the mid-sized and smaller European trucks and vans.
More fuel efficient automobiles will come and that’s a good thing, but if you really want to keep the cost of living down, investing in more fuel efficient trucks will do a lot more for the economy.
So I’m hitting up Google Images for Maybach photos like This One to dream over…
…because a photo is about as close as I’ll ever get to sitting behind the wheel of a Maybach in this life. This is why my TV gets so little use anymore, other then to play the occasional DVD. At the end of my day instead of lounging on the sofa flipping channels, I sit at the computer and wander around the web for a bit. Maybe it was because of all the news stories I saw yesterday about how the skyrocketing cost of gasoline is changing our lives, and I am afraid I’m living to see the end of the open road, but for some reason I started googling images of my fantasy car.
I wonder if I’m going to live to see then end of that breed too…the supercars…the high powered sportscars and the sumptuous luxury sedans that only the fabulously rich can afford. For me they’re not so much symbols of wealth, as icons of human engineering and craftsmanship. This is the best of the best of automotive engineering and craft. This is what you do when you set out to build the absolute best and no compromise anywhere. Every car maker should make one of these, as a statement of how serious they are about automobiles. It’s been the disillusionment of my lifetime, that none of the American car makers can be bothered to build one of these. A guy who ran the Cadillac division of GM once tried to…but the boardroom shot him down. Here in America, a luxury car is a status symbol first, and an automobile second…if that. Mechanical quality? Engineering? Hon…if the rubes staring at you as you drive past can’t see it, it doesn’t matter.
The Rolls used to be my fantasy car. In my teen years I had a brochure photo of the dashboard of a Silver Shadow tacked up to my bedroom wall. But the new Rolls is ugly. The Bentley is far and away the more beautiful car now in my opinion. But I just love the new Maybach. It’s not only sumptuous but state of the art technically. I just love it. Not the tank of a limousine 62, but the 57, which is for a driver not a chauffeur. Why anyone would buy a fantasy car and hand it over to a chauffeur is beyond me. Unless the rich can’t even be bothered to get their driver’s licenses.
So my eyes are roving all over the photo above…lingering on the leather upholstery and the burl walnut wood on the center console and the wheel, while my fingers are wondering what it would feel like to wrap themselves around it…and the geek in me eyeballs the video display…and I notice that the radio is set on a…huh…a shortwave band? Well in Europe the shortwave bands were used by broadcasters much more so then here in America. But I’ve got some old high school pals who would have had the same laugh I did seeing that…
Well listen you haven’t heard nothing yet! I’ve got right here in this car for your transatlantic driving pleasure, this fully alacrafted sea mattress shortwave radio, in this non-returnable non-disposable sinkline carrying case!
Ayutthaya – A body of a 40-year-old man with a cobra carcass in his head was found on a roadside here Sunday morning.
An preliminary autopsy also found that Wiroj Banlen, 40, was wearing a condom although he was putting on his trousers. No semen was found inside the condom.
His body was found on the side of a dirt road in Tambon Lamsai of Ayutthaya’s Wangnoi district at 7 am.
He was bitten several times by the snake on his right leg and on his cheeks.
His hands were clenching the dead cobra, whose body was bitten several times especially on its stomach.
The preliminary autopsy found scales of the snake in his mouth.
His body was sent for a full autopsy at a hospital.
This story is from Thailand, and the translation may be a tad…off. So I’m trying to unpack this. His body was found by the roadside. He was bitten several times by a cobra. Some of the bites were on his right leg, the others on his cheeks. I assume the cheek bites happened while he was trying to eat the cobra. His pants seem to have been at least partly undone and he was wearing a condom as though he was about to have sex, but hadn’t yet. I’m sitting here thinking that if there is a God it must have created human beings because a universe that obeys quantum physics just wasn’t strange enough.
Military engineers defused a giant bomb from World War II that was discovered in East London during construction for the 2012 Summer Olympics, a military spokesman said. The 2,200-pound bomb… started to tick at one point while being defused by a team of Royal Engineers from the British Army. Thousands of bombs fell on East London during World War II.
It strikes me as odd that this necessarily short “World Briefing” item avoids mentioning just who it was that dropped all those bombs on East London during WWII. Those bombs decide on their own to fall all over East London.
Er…what’s your point Dan? You think the American readers of the New York Times might not know where that bomb came from without being told? Hmmm… World War II bomb… East London… Now where the hell could that thing have come from… think… think… think…
Well it probably wasn’t the Japanese. Maybe the Times should have told its readers what that ticking sound signified too because goodness they might think the British had dug up a 2,200 pound Soviet era kitchen timer some poor East German refugee family brought back with them during the cold war, and promptly threw in a ditch when they saw how much better the kitchen timers in the west are. You never know. Maybe there’s a Trabant buried somewhere nearby…
I had work to do for a deadline this coming Wednesday and I figured I would be staying home Friday, and most of the weekend. Friday is my usual telecommute day, and at the end of it I usually drive down to Washington to gather with some friends at the 30 Degrees bar for drinks and a nice restaurant later. But this Friday I couldn’t make it because I had to spend that time at the computer in my home office instead.
When I came home last Thursday my little neighborhood street was packed almost solid with cars. This should not be a hard city street to find parking on because it’s a little dogleg of a side street that only has rowhouses on one side of it. On the other side are four widely spaced detached homes, some of which have their own parking pads anyway. So that side of the street is usually open. But we have two households here now on my end of the street, on the rowhouse side, that like to hog the available parking like they’re the only people who live here. One of them is a little gay diva who rents his house out to two other people and between them and their friends parking on the street there isn’t much space left. The other is a straight couple who just had a baby…so they’ve had family and friends over all week long. Another guy is moving and he’s had friends over helping out. The net result is that my little out of the way city street is suddenly hard to find parking on. Last Thursday I had to park halfway up the street, and then wait for a space near my house to open up. It wasn’t until Friday morning that I was finally able to park in front of my house.
So I started the weekend feeling reluctant to move the car anyway. Having to fight for a parking space here is something I’m not used to. In point of fact, I bought the house here on this street specifically because parking seemed to be no problem here, as opposed to some of the other densely rowhouse packed streets in the neighborhood. Now I’m seriously considering putting a parking pad in the back yard, which would eliminate the only yard I’ve ever had in my life. I kinda like having that little 8 by 15 foot patch of green grass back there…tiny as it is. But I need a place to park my car, and there is always the even smaller front lawn I can always make a fuss over.
I’ve been busy at the computer most of my waking time this weekend, getting stuff done for work. But I live within walking distance of two nice grocery stores, and Saturday evening after it had cooled down a bit, and then again early this morning, I was able to take a short walk to buy some food. I also took a brief cigar walk around the neighborhood late last night, when I started getting cabin fever. It’s a nice neighborhood to stroll around in, when it’s not sweltering.
But my cigar humidor is getting a tad empty. I toyed briefly this afternoon with the thought of taking a quick drive to my favorite cigar store in Cockeysville and loading up. So a few moments ago I checked outside to see what the parking situation looks like. It’s still bad, but not horrible. I thought it over for a moment. There were just a few spaces on the street, but later, as guests go back home for the work week, more will probably open up. But did I want to drive all the way out to Cockeysville just to buy cigars with gas prices being what they are now? I still have a few good cigars left in the box to tide me over until I need to buy something else out in Cockeysville.
Now…see what happened? I would probably be on the way home from my favorite cigar store right now, were it not for the price of gasoline. It is making less and less sense these days to drive somewhere for just one item. I can walk to two good grocery stores and a handful of drug stores to get most of my day to day necessities. The things I need to drive outside the beltway to get I now find myself carefully planning out. Instead of making several trips out there I try to make only one.
The net result being that car sits in front of my house a lot more then it did when I bought it. I’m still in new Mercedes love. I still go outside periodically and just…stare…at that car like I just brought it home. But you know…I’m finding I appreciate it all the more when I drive it less often. Driving it has become something of a special occasion now. The last time I bought gas was almost two weeks ago.
I doubt I’m the only person making these sorts of calculations because gas has become so expensive. I’ve noticed now for several weeks that traffic has been much, much lighter on the highways then usual. Thing is, I haven’t actually started spending less on things like food and other necessities. I’m holding off until I can combine trips, instead of getting stuff on an as-needed basis. If that’s what other people are doing, then this isn’t necessarily hurting retail too badly. On the other hand, I’m not shopping and impulse buying either. I’m just buying things I need. That’s probably hurting business. But the housing bubble burst would have done that without the gas price spike.
DEAR AMY: I am a gay man living in California. My partner and I have raised a family and have been together for 26 years.
The California Supreme Court recently stated it is illegal not to allow gays to marry. We are thrilled.
Now that we are aging Baby Boomers, we need the protection and rights that married couples have. A proposition to change the California constitution to state that marriage "is between only a man and a woman" will appear on the November ballot, and it only needs a simple majority to pass.
The problem is that four of my best friends are women. It is important to me to know that I have their support of gay marriage. If they vote "no," it will be impossible for me to continue these friendships. I need help on how to handle this situation. — California Gay Guy
DEAR CALIFORNIA: Perhaps you should ask people how they intend to vote on the question of gay marriage before you befriend them. It would save you the trouble of having to sever the relationship later.
I understand your need to have people in your corner, but your friends are already in your corner. That’s what makes them your friends. Demanding that your friendship hinges on what people choose to do in the privacy of the voting booth is offensive.
Furthermore, you seem to assume that your women friends might not support gay marriage. Is this because they’re straight or because women are somehow more likely to want to limit the bounds of marriage? This is a sexist assumption.
I’d suggest that you tread very lightly.
Dear Amy…maybe people should be more honest about what they really think before turning us into the ‘some’ in "some of my best friends are…"
That this guy isn’t sure how his friends will vote told you all you needed to know. I’ve no idea why he’s making a point of their gender…it could be he’s as sexist as you think, or it could be that all his male friends are gay like himself, and he simply said "women" when he meant "straight". I’ve met gay guys who have absolutely no straight male friends at all, but pal around constantly with their straight female friends like they’re all sisters. But the point is he’s not sure how they will vote, and that says it all when it comes to their friendship.
This isn’t about how they’ll vote. This is where push comes to shove and what he wants to know is if they’re with him…in other words, are they really his friends. I’d Suggest that it was treading lightly that got him into that situation to start with. I’ve been there myself and I know the feeling. All through the 70s and 80s and 90s I treaded lightly among my straight friends when I should have been fucking loud and proud and on November 2000 it bit me in the ass, and then again on November 2002 and then again on November 2004 by which time I’d finally wised up and dumped the bastards.
Oscar Wilde was right about true friends stabbing you in the front. I have a lot fewer straight friends now then I did before, but I don’t need to ask them how they’d vote on a same-sex marriage amendment. The people in my life who could only go so far as extending me tolerance because they just couldn’t bring themselves to regard a homosexual as their equal are gone and suddenly I don’t have to wonder who has my back in a political knife fight. Offensive? Reducing this to an issue of voting booth privacy is offensive you drooling lifestyle page hack. This isn’t about how people vote. It’s about friendship. When a gay man has to wonder if his friends might vote to cut off his ring finger come November he needs to know he’s been treading too lightly around them for his own good. If they really were his friends, he would already know.
California Gay Guy needs to live a little louder and prouder around his straight friends. Tell them he’s thrilled. Tell them how much it means to him and his partner and his family of 26 years. He needs to let his excitement be loud and proud. He needs to openly and clearly make his fears about the upcoming referendum known. Then he won’t need to ask his friends how they’ll vote. They’ll tell him, by their expressions of joy and happiness for him and his family, and with their absolute solidarity. Or they’ll tell him with their polite silence on the matter.
Treading lightly is exactly what he needs to stop doing. And if you think gay people shouldn’t get pissed off at "friends" who vote away their basic human rights then you need to grow a soul. Friendship is love, not tolerance.
You know it’s going to be hot and sweltering here in Baltimore when the temperature is reading 92 in the shade and it’s only 9:30 in the morning. I was going to take a short walk to the store to get some hot dogs but decided to just walk around the neighborhood a bit and then retreat to my air conditioning. It wasn’t this bad in Mexico. Puerto Vallarta is by the Pacific ocean, and hot as it got out in the streets, wherever you had shade a nice cool ocean breeze made things actually very lovely. Here in the city all you get is the breeze off acres and acres of asphalt.
I have some Institute work to do to meet a deadline next week so I was planning on staying inside this weekend anyway. I had to boot the Windows XP drive I hadn’t touched in over a year and I’ve been spending time between coding updating this and that on it. It feels…strange…to have to refer to the mounted drives as letters again. But I have Cygwin installed so I can still do most things in a terminal the way I’m now used to. I actually used to love running Windows. But that was back when it’s quirks were tolerable, and there was still a Microsoft Basic to code in. Those were good times…
I’ve heard it said from time to time on various blogs, that the republicans are re-fighting the battles of the 1960s. The sense is that they’ve never gotten over their resentment toward all the dirty hippies who fought against the war and got Nixon impeached. But the upheaval in American politics back in the 1960s and early 70s wasn’t about the Vietnam war and it wasn’t about the hippies. And we’re about to see if America has grown enough in the time since, to start putting that past behind us and heal the wounds.
Over at Pam’s House Blend, Pam writes about Michaelangelo Signorile’s bad day on the radio yesterday, fielding callers who were adamant that they would rather vote for McCain the Obama…
This whole call needs to be transcribed and circulated because we seriously need to have a discussion about the underlying issues here that are hitting on the third rail. Mike challenges the caller to explain these positions, given the huge political gulf between McCain and Obama on nearly every issue. The caller ends up admitting that his decision to vote for McCain is not based on logic.
Caller: My arguments aren’t logical…this is what my gut is telling me; I don’t consider myself a racist or bigoted…there’s just something about the man I don’t like and I’m not going to vote for him."
Mike: It’s funny that you say your gut is telling you this and then you go on to say that you’re not a racist, funny how that works, right? Because maybe your gut is telling you something that you’re not wanting to admit…but listen, but you should be voting based on logic, based on rationality. What Republicans want is for you to vote on emotion. And you are a perfect example of how they get votes from people who are voting against their own self interest.
Just so. And it started with Nixon and the so-called "southern strategy". There are liberals and democrats who blame the Reagan years for the undoing of the vibrant middle and working class economy we had in America since the New Deal. I can remember a time when your basic retail and service workers made a living wage. They had affordable health care and they had pensions to retire on. No more. And it was Nixon and his gang who put the machinery in motion to undo all that. Goldwater ran on his principals, and as conservative as his view of government was, he was a principled man and he campaigned straightforwardly. Nixon always played from the gutter while posing as a respectable cloth coat republican. He was a man of the people, standing up for the silent majority, surrounding himself with gutter crawling thugs like himself. And the weak point where they found they could drive a wedge right through Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition wasn’t the war, it wasn’t religion and it wasn’t anger toward all the dirty hippies…
Rick Perlstein is a national treasure. Buy his Nixonland. Buy it now:
The Meaning of Box 722 | OurFuture.org: art of the narrative. They’d never really been examined in-depth before, but by my reckoning they were the crucial hinge that formed the ideological alignment we live in now. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson—and, apparently, liberalism—achieved such a gigantic landslide victory that it appeared to pundits the Republican Party would be forever consigned to the outer darkness if they ever entertained a Goldwater-style conservative law-and-order platform again. Two years later, most of the new liberal congressmen swept in on LBJ’s coattails—the congressional class that gave us Medicare and Medicaid, the first serious environmental legislation, National Endowments for the Humanities and Arts, Head Start, the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the end of racist immigration quotas, Legal Aid, and more—was swept out on a tide of popular reaction. That reaction, I hope I demonstrate effectively in NIXONLAND, rested on two pillars: terror at the wave of urban rioting that began in the Watts district of Los Angeles; and terror at the prospect of the 1966 civil rights bill passing, which, by imposing an ironclad federal ban on racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing—known as "open housing"—would be the first legislation to impact the entire nation equally, not just the South. (What that reaction most decidedly did not rest on: fear and loathing of "hippies," which were unknown, except in California, to most of the nation until 1967; or anti-war activists, which were not associated with either party, because Republicans and Democrats had about an equal number of hawks and doves in 1966.)
When I learned that the papers of Senator Paul Douglas were at the Chicago Historical Society (as it was known then; now it’s cursed with the decidedly more prosaic name the Chicago History Museum), I decided to make Douglas’s 1966 loss to Republican Charles Percy a key case study for my hypothesis. Douglas was a popular liberal lion first elected in 1948 and a civil rights champion, whose wife Emily Taft Douglas (a one-term congresswoman herself) had strode proudly across Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 arm in arm with Martin Luther King. He was also, as an economist, one of the architects of many of the New Deal ideas and programs that created the world’s first mass middle class.
In the summer of 1966, as debate over open housing raged in Congress, King marched not in Alabama but in Chicago, to implore the city to enforce its own open housing ordinance, passed in 1963—which, if Chicago did, would be a first. It was the most segregated city in the north. As I put it in NIXONLAND (drawing on this classic study):
You could draw a map of the boundary within which the city’s seven hundred thousand Negroes were allowed to live by marking an X wherever a white mob attacked a Negro. Move beyond it, and a family had to face down a mob of one thousand, five thousand, or even (in the Englewood riot of 1949, when the presence of blacks at a union meeting sparked a rumor the house was to be "sold to niggers") ten thousand bloody-minded whites. In the late 1940s, when the postwar housing shortage was at its peak, you could find ten black families living in a basement, sharing a single stove but not a single flush toilet, in "apartments" subdivided by cardboard. One racial bombing or arson happened every three weeks…. It neighborhoods where they were allowed to "buy" houses, they couldn’t actually buy them at all: banks would not write them mortgages, so unscrupulous businessmen sold them contracts that gave them no equity or title to the property, from whcih they could be evicted the first time they were late with a payment.
And in 1966, a teenager answering a job ad walked over the border from Chicago into the all-white city of Cicero, and for that sin and no other was beaten to death. That was what Martin Luther King came to fight in Chicago.
At the Chicago History Museum, the Douglas collection covers seven hundred "linear feet"…. I stumbled upon Box 722, which contained all the letters Senator Paul Douglas received about open housing and Martin Luther King’s presence in Chicago….
Republican Charles Percy had gone into the race a civil rights liberal: "Chuck, do you have to talk so much about open housing?" one suburban Republican official complained to him. But by October, following Jerry Ford’s talking points to the letter, he went on ABC’s "Face the Nation" and said that while he still supported the "principle" of open housing, he disagreed with Senator Douglas on one thing: including "single-family dwelling" would be "an unpassable and unenforceable" attack on property rights. "Right now, we aren’t ready to force people to accept those they don’t want as neighbors," he said in tones of rue.
Long story short: Douglas soldiered on, imploring his constituents to remember the favors they had received from the Democratic Party—entree, for one thing, into the world’s first mass middle class of factory workers. To no avail. Percy won in an upset. Pundits said it was because Percy’s daughter had just been brutally murdered; it was a sympathy vote. But if people voted for Percy because he was a grieving father, the ratio of the sympathetic to the callous was suspiciously high in the Bungalow Belt neighborhoods where Martin Luther King had marched. A ward analysis demonstrated that in Chicago neighborhoods threatened by racial turnover, new Percy voters were enough to account for Douglas’s 80 percent decline in the city since 1960. Pundits also pointed to people’s unwillingness to vote for such an old man. But in the backlash wards younger Democrats declined almost as significantly.
No, it was voters like this, from 4315 W. Crystal:
A few years ago I had written you a letter stating how I and my family would welcome the opportunityy to vote fyou in to the highest office in the land–The Presidency. Since that time however your support of the open occupancy bill has caused me to change my support of your candidacy for senator of Illinois, and believe me sir there are many more in my category who are changing in their support of you.
Here is the fundamental tragedy of the backlash: voters like this empowered a party that decided they didn’t need protection against predatory subprime mortgage fraud. Didn’t need affordable, universal health insurance; made it easier for companies to rape their pensions; kept on going back to the well to destroy their social security; worked avidly to shred their union protections. Fought, in fact, every decent and wise social provision that made it possible in the first place for mere factory workers to live in glorious Chicago bungalows, or suburban homes, in the first place.
Now a black man from the city King visited in 1966 and called more hateful than Mississippi is running for president, fighting for all those things that made the midcentury American middle class the glory of world civilization, but which that middle class squandered out of the small-mindedness of backlash.
This post is for Chicago. This post is for America. This post is for our future. This post is for our history—that we may, this November, redeem it. This post is for a man who, had he walked down the wrong street in his own city 42 years ago, might well have been beaten to death.
Emphasis mine. At a time when the nation needed healing from racial strife, Nixon and the republicans embarked on a deliberate campaign to inflame those wounds because they figured that would finally break up the New Deal coalition and restore the prerogatives of the rich and powerful. Nixon paved the way for Reagan, who began his successful campaign for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been kidnapped and murdered for helping black citizens register to vote, by making a speech on state’s rights. Reagan knew exactly what he was doing then, was following the playbook laid down by Nixon and his henchmen a decade before, of inciting race hatred in poor and working class whites, so they would vote for men who would later line their pockets with the money from their pension plans. Everything since then has been a variation on that theme set by Nixon. Find out what scares middle class and working class whites and wave it in their faces so enough of them won’t vote democrat. And never mind the damage it does to America. The more the people hate each other, the better that is for us.
And now the factories are closed, the unions either dissolved or paper shells of their former selves. The pensions are gone and your 401K is monopoly money for Wall Street to play the stock market with. Lincoln said you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but not all the people all the time. But race is the gift that keeps on giving in this country. Look at the gay callers to the Signorile show saying they’d rather vote for an anti-gay republican then Obama. It isn’t all about bitterness in the Hillary camp. I don’t think it’s even mostly that. When we saw the statistics saying more Obama voters would vote for Hillary then Hillary voters would vote for Obama, that wasn’t about her base being cheap and vengeful. Nobody likes it when their candidate looses, especially if they’ve invested a lot of their dreams for the future in that candidate. Obama’s supporters would have been just as disillusioned if he lost. But if Obama was white you wouldn’t have seen that difference.
I have had anti-gay prejudice shoved in my face often enough to know that most people who act that way don’t regard themselves as being prejudiced. I don’t have anything against gay people…I just don’t want them teaching my kids… I don’t have anything against gay people…I just feel marriage should be between a man and a woman. I don’t have anything against gay people…so long as they don’t flaunt it… Prejudice doesn’t always burn crosses. Sometimes it burns bridges. Divide the country, said Pat Buchanan to Nixon, and we’ll have the bigger piece. For decades now, the republicans have been pushing our buttons, making us afraid of each other, waving scarecrows in our faces to keep the middle and working class divided and weak. So they could raid our pensions. So they could raid our standard of living. So they could get us to accept living in a nation where government can conduct its business in secret, and tap your phones and your mail without a warrant. Iraq. Katrina. The Patriot Act. Torture. Guantanamo Bay. Look closely at the face of the scarecrow they are waving at you. It is yours.
As we experience it today, the romantic fallacy is a transparent curtain of ingenious weave with a warp of rationality and a woof of sensation that hangs between ourselves and reality. So transparent is its quality that we cannot perceive its presence. So bright in outline do men and affairs appear beyond the curtain that we cannot doubt but that reality is what we observe. Yet in truth every color has been distorted. And rare is the conclusion based on such observations that would not bear re-inspection if the curtain were lifted.
Ardrey’s talking there of what he called elsewhere, the illusion of original goodness. That being his shorthand for the enlightenment notions of human nature which influenced thinkers as diverse as Marx and Rousseau and Jefferson. In it, the default human nature is assumed to be peaceful and good, and the simpler agrarian past from which we emerged is our natural condition. In this view, civilization has separated us from the circle of life and all the plagues which befall us, violence, poverty, sickness and war, are the result of our being divorced from our natural state by this artificial construct we live our daily lives in. If we could only return to our agrarian roots again, live more as nature intended us to live, then the default human nature which is peaceful and good would once more reassert itself and all would be well. It is the secular flavor of the much older banishment from Eden story, and it is just as poisonous.
Steven Pinker would some decades later debunk The Blank Slate model of the human identity…that human kind is so distinct and apart from the rest of the animal kingdom that its ancient tides pull and tug on us not at all. We are, for all intent and purpose, what we are taught to be. A human being is all rational mind, and our emotional state is simply the logical end result of how our rational mind processes the world around us. For humankind there is no nature, only nurture. Ayn Rand thought of human nature in exactly this way, and it is just as false as the romantic fallacy. In Fact, the false premise of both the Romantic Fallacy and the Blank Slate model is one and the same. Back when I was a teenager, this passage from the beginning of Ardrey’s book, African Genesis, opened my eyes…
We are not so unique as we would like to believe. And if man in a time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march.
Ardrey was much criticized later for, among other things, the overwrought image of the "killer ape" that arose from his writings. But he was a dramatist by trade when he took up the search for our ancient origins. If the bloodthristy image he served up of our not-yet-human forbears was a tad emphatic, you can argue that it had to be to jolt the popular culture into rethinking it’s model of human behavior. We are not fallen angels. Neither are we blank slates. We are humans.
We are still in a process of learning what that really is. Perhaps, like any individual journey of self discovery, that learning will be an endless process. I would like to propose the existence of another self destructive popular fallacy. Call it, The Heterosexual Premise. In it’s simplest form, it states that since heterosexual sex is necessary to continue the human species, heterosexuality is the natural condition of our kind. Let me paraphrase Ardrey here…
The Heterosexual Premise stands in relation to the entire human species as the conviction of central position stands in relation to the individual human being. Both in their most naked aspects rest on assumptions of special creation, of special blessedness, of unique destiny and innate sovereignty; and both are false…
As we experience it today, the heterosexual premise is a transparent curtain of ingenious weave with a warp of rationality and a woof of sensation that hangs between ourselves and reality. So transparent is its quality that we cannot perceive its presence. So bright in outline do men and affairs appear beyond the curtain that we cannot doubt but that reality is what we observe. Yet in truth every color has been distorted. And rare is the conclusion based on such observations that would not bear re-inspection if the curtain were lifted.
Obviously in any species that reproduces sexually, via opposite sex pairs, opposite sex pair bonding is necessary for reproduction. But it does not follow then that sex serves only that one single purpose, vital though it is. Nor does it follow that everyone born of a heterosexual relationship must therefore be heterosexual themselves, any more then that right-handed people must be the result of right-handed parents.
An entire cosmos of conclusions follow from the heterosexual premise, which all seem perfectly reasonable, yet are utterly false. That homosexuality amounts to some sort of damage to our nature…a biological mistake as the talk radio host Laural Schlessinger once averred. That homosexuals experience neither desire nor love as fully as heterosexuals do. That homosexuals must be, can only be miserable deep down inside, frustrated, angry at the world, resentful toward normal heterosexuals, because of their condition. If homosexuality is a kind of mental damage, then homosexuals may well be mentally damaged in other ways too…possibly dangerous ones. Since humans don’t reproduce homosexually, homosexuals must reproduce in some other way, more like a disease then by natural reproduction. Homosexuality must be a kind of perdition. Homosexuals then don’t so much seek out partners, as prey. And every person turned away from heterosexuality is one less to carry on the species. So homosexuality damages the species ability to reproduce. It must be contained or else the human race will die out. Homosexuals prey on heterosexuals, and in doing so make war on humanity itself.
Add religion into the mix, and you have gay people waging war on God almighty too. If God created the human race, then homosexuals are attacking God’s own creation and God himself. By…being homosexual…obviously. But even among people who reject out of hand the notion that gay people represent any sort of threat to the survival of the species, the heterosexual premise nonetheless prevents them from seeing us as being quite as human as they. We are still damaged goods. Because the natural condition of a human being is heterosexual. Yes, we should treat the gays with decency and respect. But there is something wrong with them. There must be. They are not heterosexual, and heterosexual is the natural state of a human being.
Larry Niven, author of the Ringworld and Known Space stories, with that effortless self assuredness granted by the heterosexual premise, once wrote that giving the homosexuals what they want would be a good way of breeding it out of the species. Yet it exists in all sexually reproducing species that have been studied. Why has it not already been bred out of those then? The heterosexual premise has no answer, only a requirement that whatever the answer is it must fit the premise. Perhaps it is because humans are crowding the rest of animal kind out of their natural habitats. Perhaps homosexuality spreads from species to species. Perhaps homosexuality is such a gross distortion of nature that it’s impact cannot be confined to just the humans. Perhaps the other animals who engage in homosexuality are a warning sign that our own dalliance with it as gone too far and now we have polluted the rest of nature with it like we have with our greenhouse gases. Nature is not telling us we’re wrong about sexuality and sexual orientation. Nature is telling us how bad our own behavior is. See how easy that is?
Heterosexual sex is what makes babies. Therefore heterosexuality is the natural condition of our kind. Therefore something must be wrong with homosexuals. But it is not so simple. The two-legged thinking creature that stands before you asking for directions with a smile, or ringing up your purchase behind the checkout counter, or delivering your newspaper in the morning, carries with them every moment of their day, in their blood and bones, the entire history of life on earth. As do you. Ironically, the ex-gay gurus are right about one thing; we are more then our genitals. On the other hand, there they are. And if sex is simply for reproduction and nothing more, then why does every human male alive today have an erogenous zone up their ass? For maybe nine-tenths of the male population that makes no sense at all. But there it is.
It wasn’t civilization that did that. It wasn’t godlessness. Somewhere back in our distant, probably pre-human past, possibly even well before that, same sex pair bonding among some individuals began making enough sense that our bodies adapted to it. If it was destructive it would have been bred out. If it had no benefit whatsoever that erogenous zone probably would not be. There had to have been some selection For it. But what? I give my own hypothesis Here. Others may have better ones. The point is you make your model of human behavior fit the evidence, not make the evidence fit the model, which is what the heterosexual premise demands. Our bodies are adapted to both opposite-sex and same-sex pair bonding. So heterosexuality cannot be the natural state. It is just the most likely one.
Yet in truth every color has been distorted. And rare is the conclusion based on such observations that would not bear re-inspection if the curtain were lifted. Lift the curtain. Look at us as we are, not as what your conceits tell you we must be. We are your neighbors. We are your sons and daughters, your parents, aunts and uncles. Look at us. We are as human as you. We bear within us the same story of life on earth you do. The ancient tides pull and tug at as just as they do you. The exaltation of love and desire burns within us as it does you. We love. We cherish. We long. We need. There is nothing wrong with us. Look at us.
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