The villains weren’t there as a nod to the gay community or to add diversity, of course. They were coded gay to heighten their wickedness and make it that much more satisfying for straight audiences when they met their usually violent death at the hands of the hero. After all, as Zack Snyder, director of 300, said about his movie’s version of the villainous god-king Xerxes, “’What’s more scary to a 20-year-old boy than a giant god-king who wants to have his way with you?”
Oh…I dunno… A roving pack of gay bashers walking up behind you and shouting "Hey Faggot"….?
The new film 3:10 to Yuma delivers yet another coded gay villain to add to the already crowded pantheon. A remake of the 1957 film starring Glenn Ford, Russell Crowe plays the role of outlaw Ben Wade. Christian Bale co-stars as Dan Evans, the down on his luck Civil War veteran desperate enough to try to bring Wade to justice despite the near certainty he’ll die trying. And Ben Foster stars as Charlie Prince, Wade’s villainous henchman and second in command who oozes gay subtext.
…
When we first see Charlie Prince, he is astride his horse, one hand draped delicately over the other with the limpest wrist this side of the Mississippi river. He is by far the nattiest dresser in the entire cast, and if that isn’t mascara he’s wearing when we first meet him then I’m Buffalo Bill.
…
Within the first five minutes of Prince’s appearance onscreen, one character refers to him as “missy” and “Charlie Princess,” a nickname usually not uttered to his face, but apparently widely used behind his back. Naturally, Prince is utterly ruthless, killing anyone who gets in his way, and showing no emotion at all – not unless he’s interacting with Ben Wade, who clearly makes Charlie swoon.
The Ben Foster character has a thing for his outlaw boss. But in the end decent family values prevail, and the outlaw learns what it is to be a Real Man from decent family man Christian Bale character who was sent out to apprehend him…
Shortly thereafter, Wade is captured and Christian Bale’s Evans signs up to help convey Wade to the town of Contention where he’ll be put on board the 3:10 to Yuma, a prison train. Prince pretty much disappears from the middle part of the film, except for long shots that show him glowering menacingly at Wade’s captors or ruthlessly shooting or burning to death anyone standing between him and his beloved Ben Wade.During this section of the film, Wade and Evans get to know each other and even bond, although without any of that icky homoerotic subtext. Rather, this is two men getting to know and, to a certain extent, respect each other as real men ought to do. Crowe’s outlaw especially comes to admire this determined family man trying to bring him to justice in order to keep safe his wife and two sons back on the farm. In fact, Wade admires Evans so much that he ends up helping him complete his quest.
This fits so nicely pat with the current crackpot theories about homosexuality now being peddled by the ex-gay movement that it’s hard not to wonder if director James Mangold or writers Halsted Welles, Michael Brandt and Derek Haas didn’t ask Richard Cohen to help them research the characters of Wade and Prince. But this is a story as old as the first fag bashing on the silver screen. Just as every lesbian needs a Real Man to make a woman out of here, every wild and reckless young man needs a Real Man to teach him how to deal with a faggot. Especially one that has a crush on him…
The film’s climax is appropriately dire, with bullets flying every which way. Of course, the odds against Evans’ succeeding seem impossibly high, and I won’t give away the ending (except to say that it is improbable at best), but of course Charlie Prince does figure prominently.
He arrives at the very end, riding in to rescue Wade from Evans’ heterosexual clutches. Naturally, that involves putting a bullet into Evans, an act that so infuriates Wade that he in turn pumps Prince full of bullets himself. Shocked at the actions of the man he adores, the dying Prince looks like nothing so much as a dog being put down by his master.
And what is the moral of the story children…?
As Wade watches Prince die, I couldn’t shake the feeling that thanks to the influence of Evans, he now sees Prince clearly for the first time. It is only then that he understands what friendship between two men should be like and it doesn’t involve what Prince yearned for. He may have been an outlaw and a murderer, but make no mistake – that isn’t the reason Prince has to die at the end of the film.
But it gets Even Better. 3:10 to Yuma is a remake of a 1957 film starring Glenn Ford as Wade, Van Heflin as Evans and Richard Jaeckel as Prince. And in That prior version of the story, there was no gay subtext. None.
In the original movie, Prince is played by character actor Richard Jaeckel (The Dirty Dozen, Starman). At no point is his character called “missy” or referred to as "Charlie Princess". In the saloon scene where Wade flirts with Emmy, Prince also spends time talking with her. Nor is it made to seem that Prince is pining over his boss, jealous over the attention he gives to others. At one point, he even discusses his having a wife.
One thing does remain the same in both movies: Prince dies in each, but in the 1957 version it’s at the hands of Evans, not Wade. Thus there is no message sent that Prince is being punished for his “queer” transgressions against Wade (which aren’t even present).
Dig it. Less then two years after Brokeback Mountain, about the lead time for these major Hollywood films, we have the loathsome faggot character back front and center in the Hollywood’s toolkit, dying horribly so the film’s star can avenge his heterosexual manhood. Teenage boys and young men will leave the theaters where this film is playing, knowing that real men pump faggots who have a crush on them full of lead. And James Mangold, like every other gutter crawling maggot willing to exploit the anti-gay fear and loathing of their young male audience for a buck, gets a little richer, thanks in part to the labors of all the gay people they personally know who work in Hollywood.
See how groundbreaking Brokeback Mountain was? Oh look…John Wayne isn’t rolling in his grave anymore…
Strange How Emotionally…Empty…The Fundamentalist Reality Is…
Fred Clark has, for I think the past year or so if not longer, been doing a running, chapter by chapter review of the first book in the apocalyptic fundamentalist hit book series, Left Behind. If you haven’t checked in on it yet you should, because while it may seem that taking a serious, critical look at Left Behind is like shooting fish in a barrel, Fred not only brings to it his editorial knowledge (he works for a local newspaper where he lives), he also brings to bear his own sincere and deeply held Baptist faith (he’s a Baptist in the sense that I once, in a world long ago and far, far away, thought of the word…), and with it a humanity utterly absent from the scribblings of LaHaye and Jenkins. It must be a painful chore, but after so long his readers can tell Fred’s committed to it, because it’s important to him that people see what the likes of LaHaye and Jenkins have done to his faith, and are doing, still, to their followers.
I bring it up, because this week’s episode finds Fred, once again, pounding on the one, overreaching flaw in the series, the thing that taints every word of it from the get-go. And you see that flaw in how strangely indifferent the characters of the novels are, to the sudden disappearance of millions of people…
Buck Williams and Steve Plank have been watching the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11 on CNN. They don’t wear sackcloth and they don’t shoot fire out of their mouths, but two guys who tried to kill them tripped, fell over and died, then one of them claimed to be the Messiah before they both settled back into chanting that Jesus was the Messiah. CNN’s Dan Bennett, bored already with the chanting, signs off, promising to record anything else that happens and to report on it after the fact.
Marge and a few others on the staff had drifted into Steve’s office during the telecast. "If that doesn’t beat all," one said. "What a couple of kooks."
If you ever met someone, in real life, who talked like the characters in Left Behind, it would become a story you told for the rest of your life. "No, for real," you would say to your friends, who had heard this story a dozen times, but still enjoyed it while half-doubting that it really could have happened. "It was six years ago, at the airport, and the guy actually said, ‘If that doesn’t beat all, what a couple of kooks,’ just like that. And then he said something about ‘coming on like gangbusters.’ …"
But it’s not that they don’t talk like real people talk…it’s that they’re missing something that real people, mostly, have…
Buck decides to stick up for the kooks:
"… What a couple of kooks."
"Which two?" Buck said. "You can’t say the preachers, whoever they are, didn’t warn ’em."
Actually, you can say they didn’t "warn ’em" because they didn’t warn ’em. Instead, they started out with a lethal little object lesson — kill the first two and the others will get the idea. It was only after killing those two that they informed the rest of the crowd that this is what would happen to anyone who tried to harm them. That’s a rather vivid warning, but it came a little late for those first two dead guys.
The authors have gotten confused here. They have read Revelation 11:5, which says of the witnesses that "anyone who wants to harm them must die." That warning seems to be what they have in mind when they have Buck weirdly assert that the preachers "warned" their attackers that they would be devoured by flame and/or trip and die. But the authors seem to forget that Buck and Dan Bennett and, most importantly, the two trip-and-die guys, have not read Revelation 11:5 and thus were not privy to this warning.
The central conceit of the Left Behind books, is that it’s a future history according to the Dispensational Millenialism theology of it’s authors. Events in the book of Revelations, taken at literal face value by crackpot fundamentalists, begin happening throughout the world, and are witnessed by the central characters in the book…a group of sinners who were "left behind" after the rapture.
There’s a problem here…and it runs throughout the book.
"What’s going on over there," someone else asked.
"All I know," Buck said, "is that things happen there that no one can explain."
Two weeks ago, Buck’s co-workers would have been impressed by that comment. A year before, you’ll recall, Buck had been "over there," in Israel, when the Ruso-Ethiopian Air Force launched a full-scale, doomsday nuclear assault, concentrating its entire arsenal on that tiny country. And no one was killed. No one was even hurt. And Buck was right in the middle of it, watching this According to Hoyle miracle unfold before his eyes. Buck had seen something happen "that no one can explain." Two weeks ago, that made him special.
But that was two weeks ago. He’s not special anymore.
Last Monday, a third of the planet vanished faster than you can blink, without a trace, without an explanation. The entire world has seen something "that no one can explain." There are no more children anymore and no one knows how or why or what happened. Compared to The Event, even Buck’s bona fide nuclear miracle seems a little less impressive. Compared to the confounding, incomprehensible, world-altering Event, a couple of guys tripping and dying scarcely registers on anyone’s personal list of unexplainable happenings.
Look at this. Really look at it. LaHaye and Jenkins are writing about events that have happened after what must be the greatest calamity that the human race has ever faced. Not only have millions of adults suddenly vanished from the face of the earth, but so has every single child. There are no children anymore! To everyone left alive after such a cataclysmic event, it would have to seem as if the world had suddenly ended. There is no future left for humanity. This is it. Finito. Done. End of story.
And yet the characters drawn by LaHaye and Jenkins seem utterly indifferent to that. They just go on about their lives.
There’s a reason for that…
"If that doesn’t beat all …" No, you moron, it doesn’t. Every child on the face of the earth simultaneously vanishing and no one knowing why beats all. With prejudice. All has been beaten, decisively, and all won’t be coming back for Round 2.
The next thing Buck says is, "I’ve got to get to JFK." In the context, I at first took this to mean that he had decided to fly to Israel to check out these preachers for himself. (Buck likes to fly all over the world investigating stories. Someday weeks from now, if he finds time, he may even write something about one of them.) But what he meant was that he had to get to JFK to meet a flight attendant he spoke with once, briefly, for a few minutes, so that he can take her to meet the president of Romania in his hotel.
As he leaves for the airport, Buck doesn’t give a second thought to any of the things that no one can explain. He’s not thinking about the witnesses and the trip-and-die guys. He’s not thinking about The Event, or about the international criminal conspiracy whose secrets he has promised not to reveal, or about his betrayal of his slain friend Dirk, or his likely complicity in the suspicious death of rival reporter Eric Miller, or about how he’s well on his way to missing his second consecutive weekly deadline. He is thinking, instead, of the promotion he has just been offered:
Buck knew Steve was right. He was going to have to accept the promotion just to protect himself from other pretenders. He didn’t want to be obsessed with it all day. Buck was glad for the diversion of seeing Hattie Durham. His only question now was whether he would recognize her. They had met under most traumatic circumstances.
In his article for Vanity Fair, American Rapture, Craig Unger tells of walking with a group of the faithful, led by their prophet LaHaye, to the very place where the longed for battle of Armageddon will occur…
On a scorching afternoon in May, Tim LaHaye, the 79-year-old co-author of the "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic thrillers, leads several dozen of his acolytes up a long, winding path to a hilltop in the ancient fortress city of Megiddo, Israel. LaHaye is not a household name in the secular world, but in the parallel universe of evangelical Christians he is the ultimate cultural icon. The author or co-author of more than 75 books, LaHaye in 2001 was named the most influential American evangelical leader of the past 25 years by the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals. With more than 63 million copies of his "Left Behind" novels sold, he is one of the best-selling authors in all of American history. Here, a group of about 90 evangelical Christians who embrace the astonishing theology he espouses have joined him in the Holy Land for the "Walking Where Jesus Walked" tour.
Megiddo, the site of about 20 different civilizations over the last 10,000 years, is among the first stops on our pilgrimage, and, given that LaHaye’s specialty is the apocalypse, it is also one of the most important. Alexander the Great, Saladin, Napoleon, and other renowned warriors all fought great battles here. But if Megiddo is to go down in history as the greatest battlefield on earth, its real test is yet to come. According to the book of Revelation, the hill of Megiddo – better known as Armageddon – will be the site of a cataclysmic battle between the forces of Christ and the Antichrist.
To get a good look at the battlefields of the apocalypse, we take shelter under a makeshift lean-to at the top of the hill. Wearing a floppy hat to protect him from the blazing Israeli sun, LaHaye yields to his colleague Gary Frazier, the tour organizer and founder of the Texas-based Discovery Ministries, Inc., to explain what will happen during the Final Days.
Like they’ve seen it in their dreams, a thousand times…
Once Christ joins the battle, both the Antichrist and the False Prophet are quickly captured and cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone. Huge numbers of the Antichrist’s supporters are slain.
Meanwhile, an angel exhorts Christ, "Thrust in thy sickle, and reap." And so, Christ, sickle in hand, gathers "the vine of the earth."
Then, according to Revelation, "the earth was reaped." These four simple words signify the end of the world as we know it.
Grapes that are "fully ripe"- billions of people who have reached maturity but still reject the grace of God – are now cast "into the great winepress of the wrath of God." Here we have the origin of the phrase "the grapes of wrath." In an extraordinarily merciless and brutal act of justice, Christ crushes the so-called grapes of wrath, killing them. Then, Revelation says, blood flows out "of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs."
With its highly figurative language, Revelation is subject to profoundly differing interpretations. Nevertheless, LaHaye’s followers insist on its literal truth and accuracy, and they have gone to great lengths to calculate exactly what this passage of Revelation means.
As we walk down from the top of the hill of Megiddo, one of them looks out over the Jezreel Valley. "Can you imagine this entire valley filled with blood?" he asks. "That would be a 200-mile-long river of blood, four and a half feet deep. We’ve done the math. That’s the blood of as many as two and a half billion people."
We’ve done the math… Read that again. "We’ve done the math." What kind of person goes to the trouble to calculate to the corpse, exactly how many human beings have to be crushed like grapes at the hand of the man who once said that to love God, and your neighbor as yourself, was the greatest commandment. I recall reading after the last book in the series was published, that someone asked LaHaye how hard it would be for God’s Chosen to go on living after having witnessed almost four fifths or more of the human race cast into hell for eternity…many of whom must have been family and dear friends…
Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again
-Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Glorious Appearing
…and LaHaye averred that God would probably, in kindness, erase the memory of it from everyone’s mind. But why would God have to, if the faithful are all as empty inside as LaHaye. Without a doubt LaHaye could go on living just fine after having watched all the heathens, all the intellectuals, all his betters, everyone he’s despised all his life for being more gloriously human then he could ever hope to become, cast into fire for eternity by a loving God. He’s the kind who, if he was a good Party Member in the Germany of the 1930s and 40s, he’d have shoveled Jews into the ovens and gone home to kiss his wife, tuck his children into bed, and listen to a little Bach before turning in for the night. All of them could. That’s why they’re fundamentalists. They have no inner compass for managing human relationships. No instinctive sense of sympathy and decency. They need rules. But even more, they need someone to blame for that inner void that keeps nagging at them, keeps reminding them of everything fine and noble and decent a human being can be, that they are not. They need scapegoats. They need someone to hate, so they don’t have to hate themselves.
This is why the characters in LaHaye and Jenkins novel can walk around in a world where all the children have suddenly vanished and worry about their job promotions. They act like they’re oblivious, because their creators are oblivious. But they know down to the corpse how many bodies it takes to fill the valley of Armageddon with blood up to a horse’s bridle.
Last night I had a weird dream about a Star Trek episode. You remember that one with the Horta? Yeah…that little blob like critter that could excrete some sort of powerful acid and melt its way through solid rock? Yeah… Anyway…in my dream, the Horta weren’t acidic. They were explosive. Instead of melting their way though the rock of their planet via caustic slime, they would hurl bits of themselves at the rock in the direction they wanted to go, and explode their way through the planet, eating the most delectable parts of the rubble as they went. So Spock is wondering all through the episode why such an old planet shows so many signs of a highly active geology. Fascinating Captain…until very recently, this planet was being continuously rocked by very small earthquakes…everywhere…
The Enterprise is called to help the mining colony on Janus VI when miners start mysteriously…exploding…for no apparently reason.
Kirk and Spock also notice that large portions of the planet’s surface are being constantly destroyed every fifty thousand years by some unknown process. You know the part about how the Horta all die off periodically? Yeah… In my dream, what happens is that the Horta population eventually gets so dense that a tragic accident is bound to happen, and a couple Horta accidentally bump into each other and set off a Horta explosive chain reaction that destroys most of the planetary surface. The few remaining Horta start laying eggs everywhere and eventually a new generation starts the process over again…
I remember telling the friend I was watching it with in my dream, that this episode of Star Trek was one of my favorites, because of all the pyrotechnics going off in it. You didn’t have five minutes pass without some sort of major explosion going off somewhere. Oh…and Dr. McCoy says "Dammit Jim I’m a doctor not a demolitions expert!" In my dream I had the TV connected to the stereo, which was cranked way up for added effect. Also, I had all the window blinds drawn so the room we were sitting in was dark, which made the explosions off the TV screen bright.
Ah…the simple pleasures of boyhood. Have I mentioned that my favorite muppet was Crazy Harry?
the oompa loompas used to scare the shiat out of me…
The Sleestacks from Land of the Lost. Those things were farking creepy…
no kidding. i used to hide behind the couch when they showed up…
Banabas Collins, Dark Shadows…
The cybermen from Doctor Who.
When I was a wee pup my Dad took me to a Doctor Who Tardis in Blackpool, and as soon as we had set foot in the door I ran out.
And The Twilight Zone freaked me out. Especially the one about the mannequin…
The Zantes from old Outer Limits…
Yes! Dear god, that episode scared the bejezus out of me when I was little. The Zanti..
…the floating vampire boy in the original Salem’s Lot…
The spaceman-ghost from Scooby Doo that lived in the abandoned airfield…
"My name is talking Tina, and you’d better be nice to me"
That freaky little doll in the original Trilogy of Terror…
The freaky little doll is getting a lot of votes in that thread. So were the Zanti Misfits from the Outer Limits, and the energy beings in the episode The Production and Decay of Strange Particles got one vote which I was happy to see, not so much because they gave me nightmares as because when I was a boy I thought those were the coolest monsters I’d ever seen. The Sleestacks got a lot of votes, which probably surprises me because Land of the Lost didn’t come to TV until I was well past the stage of being frightened by men in rubber suits. But that vampire kid in Salem’s Lot really creeped me out and I was a grown man when I saw those scenes. I can’t imagine any parent in their right mind letting a kid watch Salem’s Lot.
When I was a small kid, like 6 or 7, and we were on vacation, mom took me to a movie theater to see Darby O’Gill And The Little People. I guess she figured it would be fine for me to watch since it was a Disney flick. But some of those Disney films could be really scary at times, and mom always loved telling everyone later about how, when the banshee appeared on the screen my scream rocked the entire theater.
For the rest of that vacation I woke up everyone every night with my nightmares.
As for TV, again when I was very young, well before I’d even entered grade school, and they were still showing the old Max Fleischer black and whites on TV, it was this goddamned clown…
It’s interesting to note that clowns of one kind or another got a lot of votes in that Fark.Com survey. I’d have nightmares about this one trying to get inside our apartment…usually to the sound of something going thump-thump-thump in the background and I’d wake up screaming. It wasn’t until I’d been long grown up that I realized that thumping sound I’d heard in those dreams was my little heart pounding.
I think I must have blocked all that out of memory as I grew up. The clown eventually vanished from the TV screens as the old black and white cartoons lost their appeal to kids growing up on color TVs, and I never saw him again until well into adulthood, when the Max Fleischer cartoons experienced a revival. I was browsing a video store and saw a copy of old Betty Boop cartoons and remembered I used to love them. So I bought it, took it home and popped it in the player. Back in Betty’s "garter belt" days, pre Hays Code, the clown was one of her constant sidekicks, and when I saw him appear once more on the TV screen I felt a sudden chill reach all the way from childhood and tap me on the shoulder.
Damn! It’s that clown…I remember him…!
Same thing happened when I watched Darby O’Gill again after many, many years…but that time I knew the banshee was coming. No, they don’t give me nightmares anymore. Adult fears are different from kid fears. The last time TV ever gave me bad dreams was when I watched The Day After and had a really bad dream about slowly dying of radiation poisoning while laying, weak and utterly helpless, in the middle of a pile of rubble that was once the apartment complex I lived in. When you’re a kid, fear is much simpler and to the point. The Bad Thing Is Coming To Get Me…!
Back in the day, there was a saying about hallucinogens, and I would argue that it applies to any recreational drug, that what they do to you, depends on what you do to them. That is, things like that don’t give you courage, don’t make you more creative, don’t give you profound insights into the Cosmic All, don’t in short, make you anything you’re already not. They just bring things out of you, that were always there to begin with.
As we ‘re inundated with quotes from Robert Draper’s revealing book on Bush, I kind of enjoyed this one, on drinking:
Discussing his past battles with alcohol, he says he would never be able to make decision on war if he was still drinking.
“Exercise helps. And I think prayer helps,” he says. “I wouldn’t be President if I kept drinking. You can get sloppy, can’t make decisions. It clouds your reason, absolutely.”
Wasn’t the War on Terror modeled after the struggle against Nazism? And didn’t Sir Winston Churchill make a resounding re-entry in the daily lexicon after the events of 9/11? What would the world have looked like if Sir Winston had applied the same rigor to his alcohol consumption as GWB? Here’s a clue:
His drinking habits were admirably fetishistic – preferably Pol Roger, served at precisely the right temperature (he was delighted when the gift of a refrigerator from Beaverbrook in 1926 obviated the need to dilute it with ice) and interspersed with much brandy and port.
The papers of Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s lend-lease administrator, contain several good examples of the war leader’s zealous interest in his own consumption. For instance, Hopkins describes finding Churchill in January 1943 ‘in bed in his customary pink robe, and having, of all things, a bottle of wine for breakfast’. Viscount Alanbrooke made the same observation, and Eden’s diary mentions Churchill taking a ’stiff whiskey and soda, at 8.45 a.m’.
A Foreign Office official described a dinner with Churchill as ,a varied and noble procession of wines with which I could not keep pace – champagne, port, brandy, Cointreau: Winston drank a good deal of all, and ended with two glasses of whisky and soda.’
As one of his commenters noted, if drinking heavily was all that it takes to win a war, the Russians would have won the cold war because the Kremlin alone probably consumed enough vodka to float a battleship.
I like to think that my Baptist upbringing, combined with Dad’s side of the family’s cheerful hedonism, gave me a sensibility toward the pleasures of the flesh that isn’t so much neurotic, as reasonable. But my friends would probably disagree. I was a very inhibited little dweeb growing up, but by the time I was out of college I could let my hair down a bit and enjoy getting all stoned and silly with my friends and, as John Steinbeck said in Travels With Charlie, take my hangovers as a consequence and not as punishment. But my comfort zone with alcohol exists only to the degree that I feel I don’t really Need it in order to enjoy myself. It’s when I find myself feeling like I need a drink, that I absolutely won’t touch it.
There’s a practical, as well as self-righteous side to that: if I’m already miserable, then getting high will only make my misery grow to exalted proportions and I don’t need that when I’m having major life problems. Also, no matter how high I get, some part of my brain, probably the Baptist part, never stops nagging me about whatever it is that’s making me miserable, that I need to take care of. So I might as well fix whatever the problem is first, before I can even think about letting my hair down and enjoying myself. In Vino Veritas…and the truth is that drink can’t make you anything that you’re already not. The only thing that comes out of a bottle, is you.
And the thing is, a stinking drunken crawling on the floor blasted Winston Churchill is still Winston Churchill and drunk or sober Bush is still Bush. And given my druthers I’d rather be completely wasted in company with Churchill and Grant and Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken and Ben Franklin any of dozens of famous historical drinkers then in the company of a stone cold sober George Bush, even if I had a big bottle of Kahlua to take refuge in. There is no salvation in drink. It does not make life better. It does not improve morons. It does not unblock a blockhead. It sure as shit won’t put a conscience in an empty hole, let alone grow someone a brain.
After the plane filled, and the flight attendants began their safety spiel, Ebbert was asked to step off the plane by a customer service supervisor, identified by the airline only as “Keith.”
They walked out onto the jet bridge, where Keith told Ebbert her clothing was inappropriate and asked her to change. She explained she was flying to Tucson for only a few hours and had brought no luggage.
“I asked him what part of my outfit was offensive,” she said. “The shirt? The skirt? And he said, ‘The whole thing.’ ”
Keith asked her to go home, change and take a later flight. She refused, citing her appointment. The plane was ready to leave, so Keith relented. He had her pull up her tank top a bit, pull down her skirt a bit, and return to her seat.
There is a photo of the women to go with the column, and I’m a tad amazed there was any fuss at all made over what the lady was wearing. It’s not like Southwest is the Queen Mary of airlines where formal attire may be required. It’s the goddamned Greyhound Bus line of air travel. You want a better class of clientèle, raise your prices, make your seats bigger, serve champaign and compete for the first class crowd. Otherwise, don’t complain if your passengers are dressed for shopping for the blue light special at Target, let alone dining at Hooters (the lady in question was a Hooters waitress, but she was not in uniform. And considering what Stewardesses in the old Pacific Southwest Airlines company used to wear not all that long ago, I don’t see that they need to be bellyaching about their passengers wearing miniskirts).
What interested me was that the discussion on Fark.Com immediately focused on the woman’s looks, as being a factor in whether or not her dress was appropriate. It reminded me of a Scott Adams cartoon in Dogbert’s Clues For The Clueless. Titled "Public Displays Of Affection", it begins with Dogbert saying that, "depending on how attractive you are, people will experience varying levels of revulsion at your PDA…" What follows are three panels of a little old granny lady beholding various couples smooching. She looks on fondly while the beautiful couple embrace, scolds the average looking couple for getting too close, and tries to whack the ugly couple over their heads with her cane for even considering a kiss in public.
Which is to say, beauty has its own rules. Sometimes that gets really annoying, hence the popularity of blond jokes. And sure enough, someone in that thread posted a joke about a blond getting on an airplane.
When I first started hearing them, ages ago, I thought blond jokes were a tad cruel and a bit misogynist. But I soon realized that, with very little effort, you can translate blond jokes into Twink jokes…
A twink gets on an airplane and immediately sits down in the first class section. A stewardess asks to see his ticket and it’s a coach ticket so she tells him that he has to go back and sit in coach.
The twink winks at her and says "No. I’m young, I’m hot, and I’m going to California First Class."
So the stewardess gets the captain, and the captain walks over to where the twink is sitting and says, "Look young man, you buy a coach ticket, you sit in coach."
And the twink rakes the captian’s body over with his eyes, gives him a friendly smile, leans back in his seat, stretches indulgently and says "I’m young, I’m hot, I’m going to California First Class."
Then a steward walks up and says to the captain, "I’ll handle this." And he walks over to the twink and says "Honey, you’re young, you’re hot and you’re going to California in coach." And the twink looks up at him very annoyed and says "No, I’m young, I’m hot, and I’m going to California First Class." And then the steward leans over and whispers something in the twink’s ear.
The twink immediately jumps up and runs back to the coach section and sits down. The captain gives the steward a puzzled look and asks, "What did you just tell him?"
And the steward says, "I told him First Class wasn’t going to California."
This sort of thing is how the intelligent get revenge on the beautiful.
Ex-Gay Watch follows up on a previous post that…er…Questions PFOX…
As a follow-up to our previous post on this matter, we have gathered more information in our investigation of claims made by Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX) here.
Yesterday, we spoke with Jackie Abrams, Vice Chair of the Arlington County Fair. According to Abrams, no physical altercation occurred, police were never called and no one was ejected from the fairgrounds – she was emphatic and certain. “I was in radio contact with the other board members during the Fair, and definitely would have known if the police had been summoned. It did not happen [her emphasis],” said Abrams. She added that her calls to PFOX, and specifically to PFOX president Regina Griggs, had gone unanswered.
They got it out there…why on earth would they want to help anyone prove that it was bullshit? The faithful now have something to bark about…that some wicked militant homosexual activist had attacked their peaceful respectful effort to educate people about the truth of homosexuality…and just you never mind that it never actually happened. Since when does an organization that was born on lies, built on a bedrock of lies, and does nothing but lie through its teeth about homosexuals and homosexuality constantly, meticulously, relentlessly, suddenly stop lying?
???
Of course they lie. Does a bear shit in the woods? Is the pope Catholic? Does PFOX lie? Yes…it’s good, it’s necessary, to expose their lies whenever, wherever they pop up. But on the other hand if by now it’s surprising you that someone from PFOX would make such brazenly false accusations about something involving homosexuals, then I guess it must also be a constant surprise to you that the sky is blue and water is wet.
Meanwhile…via Ex-Gay Watch, Truth Wins Out has some food for thought for all you parents out there, thinking about sending your gay kids off to ex-gay camp…
Truth Wins Out is reporting that Chris Austin, a longtime ex-gay counselor from Irving, Texas, was convicted today of sexually assaulting a client. Austin, a previous speaker for both Evergreen International and the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), has been accused of sexual assault on a client before. In 2001, Mark Hufford made similar accusations:
Hufford accused Austin of engaging in improper sexual behavior that included “oral copulation and fondling” during counseling sessions that spanned more than a year. The psychologist, who also teaches in the church’s Sunday School, had convinced Hufford to participate in “touch therapy.” The therapy gradually progressed to nude sessions and physical intimacy, he said.
I’m assuming the victims in both cases were legally adults, but it’s worth bearing in mind that outfits such as Evergreen and Exodus and Love In Action all claim to be ministries so they don’t have to submit to the licensing and oversight regulations that real hospitals and doctors must. Literally Anyone can claim to be a professional in the treatment of Same Sex Attraction Disorder. It’s like being a palm reader, only you get to make your customers tell you their sexual fantasies and participate in touch therapy…
The Pentagon is investigating how a B52 bomber was mistakenly armed with six nuclear warheads last week and allowed to fly 1,500 miles across America before anyone noticed the weapons were missing.
Barksdale Air Force Base is being used as a jumping off point for Middle East operations. Gee, why would we want cruise missile nukes at Barksdale Air Force Base. Can’t imagine we would need to use them in Iraq. Why would we want to preposition nuclear weapons at a base conducting Middle East operations?
His final point was to observe that someone on the inside obviously leaked the info that the planes were carrying nukes. A B-52 landing at Barksdale is a non-event. A B-52 landing with nukes. That is something else.
Now maybe there is an innocent explanation for this? I can’t think of one. What is certain is that the pilots of this plane did not just make a last minute decision to strap on some nukes and take them for a joy ride…
Ya Think…? And in the comments at TPM Cafe’…
A mistake? To fly with any ordinance requires sign-offs from ground crew, chain of authority, etc. And nukes are far and beyond other ordinance.
The claim they accidentally forgot to remove the warheads and didn’t notice, after it was leaked they were moved, not plausible. It’s not like nuclear warheads are disassembled on the runway and left beside the fuel trucks. Removal of a warhead is going to set gears into motion, any number of which are sure to notice they don’t have the warheads.
Presuming these were nukes as alleged and this info was leaked, either by a whistle blower or a deliberate propagandist sending a message to someone, the probability of movement by mistake is close to zero.
…
The official story is that the missiles were decommissioned ACMs. Why they were mounted under the wings instead of being transported inside a cargo plane with the warheads removed is an interesting question. Pretty hard to believe it was all just an accident.
This could be saber rattling. But consider the man holding the saber.
The Fine Art Of Inciting Violence While Preaching Decency
Of course you knew that it isn’t only gay folk that the mayor of Fort Lauderdale is contemptuous of…
"Atheists and Criminal Lobbying Union" regarding the meaning of the acronym ACLU.
New Times, October 26, 2000
"I’m supposed to subsidize some schlock sitting on the sofa and drinking a beer, who won’t work more than 40 hours a week?" (On a proposed affordable housing ordinance)
Sun-Sentinel, May 20, 2006
Regarding a proposal to reduce greenhouse gases, calling it "hate-America stuff" concocted by "a bunch of scientists meeting in Paris who’ve had too much wine.”
Sun-Sentinel May 9, 2007
“The Scum-Sentinel is an advertising tabloid newsblog. They hire reporters and they make them churn out stories without making them get into anything in depth. They do that to feign a resemblance to a real newspaper so that they can sell advertising. And the Sentinel tries to lecture me about affordable housing? I tell people that the day I take advice from a company that has vagrants selling their products in the middle of the street, we’re all in trouble."
New Times, April 21, 2006
“I think a strong rope and a stiff tree would be better than wasting all that electricity.”
New Times (Broward Palm Beach Edition), October 26, 2000
As they say, scratch a homophobe and you find a rat’s nest of assorted other prejudices and cheap bar stool conceits. And given his steady and sure record of flipping the middle finger to his critics, I sorta figured he’d make some aggressive asshole comeback to the county commissioners act last week, of voting him off the tourism board. What I didn’t expect was that he’d surround himself with men dressed in paramilitary uniform, calling for a cleansing of sin from Fort Lauderdale…
Anti-gay Mayor Jim "250K robo-potty" Naugle has so polarized matters in Fort Lauderdale that press conferences and demonstrations are getting tense, according to Jeff Black of UNITE Fort Lauderdale, which is sponsoring a Faith Press Conference today, will feature speakers from many denominations and religions to discuss unity, inclusiveness, and acceptance.
Inclusiveness was not on the agenda on Tuesday as members of homophobic black churches, stood with Mayor Naugle at City Hall preaching they are going to take back the city, removing the sin and sinners. Religious men — in paramilitary gear — were also standing aside the mayor bleating that "the depth of sexual sin in Broward County necessitates an old-fashioned spiritual revival." From Jeff’s email to me:
They escorted me from the front door to the elevator when I entered the building today for this press conference, and stood ‘post’ at the elevator lobby. The video is frightening, worse was I was standing in the room with these people and worried what was going to happened next.
An initial check into who or what the Koinonia Worship Center is, turned up only a MySpace page…
I tried to find out information on the group but was only able to find a MySpace profile which included an audio track. The audio track is of a military leader talking to a subordinate and explaining how they are in the battle to take back what they have lost for the black man while in the background you hear gun fire and battle sounds.
What I’m hearing on this page is scary. "Special OPS (operations) Units" of the church. References to "Exercising Spiritual Authority"?
Nice. Until today I thought Naugle was just another homophobic barstool buffoon. But no…he’s a thug; a grown man with a schoolyard bully’s sense of justice and the moral scruples of your average drug syndicate gangster. Watching that video, there is no mistaking what he’s doing in it for what it is. Bracketed by men in paramilitary uniform calling for spiritual warfare, saying they will "take back the land" and that "God hates the act of homosexuality" and telling the mayor "we will fight with you", James Naugle stood in the mayor’s office and made a threat. He said to the Gay community, and to any heterosexuals who might be thinking of standing in solidarity with us, get off my back faggots…or you’ll be sorry.
How To End A Telephone Conversation Before It Even Begins…
…with Me at any rate. Once again I am expecting a phone call on the land line, and once again I don’t have my glasses handy when the phone rings, to check the caller ID…
Me: Hello?
Oh-So-Friendly Telephone Voice: Hello…am I speaking to Mr. Garnet?
Me (warily): Are you with the landscaping company…?
Oh-So-Friendly Telephone Voice: No…I’m calling on behalf of…
Me: CLICK!
Garrett. Garrett.gar-it . Two ‘r’s, two ‘t’s goddamnit.
An individual’s body motion and body type can offer subtle cues about their sexual orientation, but casual observers seem better able to read those cues in gay men than in lesbians, according to a new study in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
…
"We already know that men and women are built differently and walk differently from each other and that casual observers use this information as clues in making a range of social judgments," said lead author Kerri Johnson, UCLA assistant professor of communication studies. "Now we’ve found that casual observers can use gait and body shape to judge whether a stranger is gay or straight with a small but perceptible amount of accuracy."
Johnson and colleagues at New York University and Texas A&M measured the hips, waists and shoulders of eight male and eight female volunteers, half of whom were gay and half straight. The volunteers then walked on a treadmill for two minutes as a three-dimensional motion-capture system similar to those used by the movie industry to create animated figures from living models made measurements of the their motions, allowing researchers to track the precise amount of shoulder swagger and hip sway in their gaits.
Based on these measurements, the researchers determined that the gay subjects tended to have more gender-incongruent body types than their straight counterparts (hourglass figures for men, tubular bodies for women) and body motions (hip-swaying for men, shoulder-swaggering for women) than their straight counterparts.
In addition, 112 undergraduate observers were shown videos of the backsides of the volunteers as they walked at various speeds on the treadmill. The observers were able to determine the volunteers’ sexual orientation with an overall rate of accuracy that exceeded chance, even though they could not see the volunteers’ faces or the details of their clothing. Interestingly, the casual observers were much more accurate in judging the orientation of males than females; they correctly categorized the sexual orientation of men with more than 60 percent accuracy, but their categorization of women did not exceeded chance.
Emphasis mine. Why am I not asked to participate in experiments like these? This is the one area where my weak gaydar seems to work most reliably. I love to watch beautiful guys walk. There’s just something about the sight of the male body in motion. And in the gait, sometimes, I can just see it. Some guys just have a more beautiful, or at least a more attractive to my my eye, gait then others. The gay ones. Makes my heart beat.
There’s this Bob Segar song… I realize that, according to the story, he’s singing about about a specific person…but ever since it started playing on the radio, whenever I hear it I just mentally flip a pronoun and rock to it…
But oh, they love to watch him strut…
The play on words about how they all respect her, but…doesn’t quite work with the male pronoun so I end up mentally adjusting the lyrics further as the song goes on. But I seldom pay that much attention to the lyrics of a rock song anyway…it’s about the music, and the music of that particular song is just about right for watching beautiful guys walking. And sometimes you just find yourself following along…er…you know…to the rhythm of it…
But there’s a disquieting side to all this, that you also need to pay attention to…
The findings build on recent research that shows that casual observers can often correctly identify sexual orientation with very limited information. A 1999 Harvard study, for example, found that just by looking at the photographs of seated strangers, college undergraduates were able to judge sexual orientation accurately 55 percent of the time.
"Studies like ours are raising questions about the value of the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy," Johnson said. "If casual observers can determine sexual orientation with minimal information, then the value in concealing this information certainly appears questionable. Given that we all appear to be able to deduce this information to some degree with just a glance, more comprehensive policies may be required to protect gays against discrimination based on their sexual orientation."
The findings also are part of mounting evidence suggesting that sexual orientation may actually be what social scientists call a "master status category," or a defining characteristic that observers cannot help but notice and which has been scientifically shown to color all subsequent social dealings with others.
"Once you know a person’s sexual orientation, the fact has consequences for all subsequent interactions, and our findings suggest that this category of information can be deduced from subtle clues in body movement," Johnson said.
A lot of gay guys,,,myself included…just assume most of the time that we’re not really all that "obvious". In particular, those of us who grew up being fed a lot of stereotypes about swishing and limp wrists and lisping and that kind of crap, tend to assume that to the degree we don’t fit the stereotype, we’re probably passing. Well guys…it looks like they can see right through us anyway.
And in a world that’s been so relentlessly polarized, gays so relentlessly demonized by this kind of republican party crap…
…that can have, as the article points out, consequences.
Have you ever had a business interaction that all of a sudden just turned negative and you couldn’t quite put your finger on why? You’re talking to a clerk at a store somewhere, or trying to arrange to have some professional come and do some work on your house, or your car, or whatever, and suddenly they turn all cold and contemptuous and suddenly find a million excuses why they can’t sell you what you were looking for, or do the work for you that you need done? I’ve had that happen over and over again and usually I put it down to being a longhair in bluejeans and sneakers, and the lingering resentment some folks still feel toward the 60s counter-culture. But what if it really is homophobia?
It’s all too easy to fall into the suffocating trap of putting every negative reaction down to prejudice against gay people. But there’s another side to that coin and it’s called denial. I don’t think I have any obvious effeminacy to me, I’m no macho guy by any means, but I’ve always pictured myself internally as pretty much an average middle class, suburban American guy. Okay…so I don’t much care for sports. I love fast cars, firecrackers, and hard rock. I am a stereotypical male in so many ways, some pretty embarrassing. No…I don’t ask for directions. I hate shopping for clothes. Weekends when I’m cleaning house, I am always scolding myself for not picking up after myself like I should.
But maybe none of that matters anyway. Maybe none of it ever mattered. The clues are subtler, and they’re hard wired into us. The way we talk, the way we move, even according to this 60 minutes article, the way we sit…
Bailey and his colleagues set up a series of experiments in his lab at Northwestern University. In one study, researcher Gerulf Rieger videotaped gay and straight people sitting in a chair, talking. He then reduced them visually to silent black and white outlined figures and asked volunteers to see if they could tell gay from straight. The idea was to find out if certain stereotypes were real and observable.
Based on physical movement and gestures of the figures, more often than not, the volunteers in the study could tell a difference.
You can be flaming and you can be quiet and reserved and it doesn’t matter. You can be fabulous and you can be a geek whose clothes never seem to fit quite right and it doesn’t matter. The people we interact with on a daily basis may never even be aware consciously what it is they’re picking up on. They just know, somehow, that they’re dealing with a homosexual. And that can have consequences. Especially after so many elections where gay people were painted as the demons who were going to take over America, prey on children, spread AIDS and destroy marriage and family if the democrats won.
Uhm…I Don’t Think That Was God Telling You To Do That
Imagine a world where the major religions didn’t teach everyone that sex itself was innately wicked and sinful…that sin was only in hurting and taking advantage of others. Imagine a world where preachers didn’t teach people that their bodies are evidence of their fallen status, objects of shame, and not beautiful in their own right, to be taken care of and treated with respect.
SALAMANCA – A man cut off his own penis and threw it in a toilet ‘so he would stop sinning’.
The 30-year-old was recovering in the Hospital Clinico Universitario in Salamanca in western Spain.
…
The local newspaper La Gaceta reported when relatives called emergency services, he told ambulance workers he did it “so would not sin any more”.
…
He was bleeding heavily.
The newspaper said it was not known if the man’s penis could be sewn back.
There was also a suggestion he may be suffering from psychological problems.
I read crap like this and I just find myself shaking my head and wondering how the hell it ever came to this. What other creature on this good earth, besides us humans, punish themselves for feeling desire? I can’t believe that just having rational thought capable minds does this to us, because behavior like this just isn’t rational. If you could, in some imaginary laboratory, start the history of the human race over from day one, and run it as a simulation, would you still end up with the major faiths of the world teaching us to fear and loath our sexual nature, to the point where some people even mutilate themselves?
Trinity Preparatory School canceled its opening-night performance of La Cage aux Folles on Friday at the request of Bishop John Howe, head of the Diocese of Central Florida.
"His request was not to stage the production, and we decided to honor his request," said Headmaster Craig Maughan, who called off Friday’s and tonight’s planned performances. "I met with the cast and all the people involved in the production and announced the decision and explained it to them."
…
Howe, a leader of conservative bishops in the Episcopal Church, USA, has been vocal on issues of sexual orientation and in 2003 strongly opposed the election of an openly gay man as bishop of New Hampshire. That election, and the issue of blessing same-sex unions, has created a rift in the Episcopal Church.
I can appreciate Howe’s position regarding La Cage. The play has two central and very flamboyant gay characters in it. But the play is not about homosexuality. It’s about what happens when people are forced into pretending they’re something they’re not, to appease the cheapshit prejudices of others. It’s about the hypocrisy of the self righteous bigot. And even more unforgivably…it’s a comedy. It laughs at hypocrites. And as every pinched faced autocrat knows, it’s dangerous to allow students to laugh at hypocrisy.
I don’t know where, exactly, my copies of The New Yorker are printed, but I imagine it’s pretty far away. Yet somehow, each week, the magazine travels from the printer, to the warehouse, to the post office it is shipped from, then to my post office and, finally, to my personal mailbox. And then always, each week, as I take the new issue out of my mailbox, two subscription blow-in cards fall out onto the floor of the lobby.
I cannot figure out whether: A) the cards somehow know they’ve arrived at their final destination and refuse to fall out before then, or B) The New Yorker initially stuffs my magazine with dozens of these blow-in subscription cards and the others have all fallen out en route.
They aren’t stapled into the magazines of course, because the marketing departments figured out that when they fall out it makes you pay attention to them. Which really annoys me when they’re falling out of magazines I’m already subscribing to. And doubly so when it’s my monthly copy of Consumer Reports.
Warning…Fred’s blog post there also contains major earwormage. As you value your mental peace and quiet, Don’t Start That YouTube Video! Ask me how I know…
BROOMFIELD – It started with a simple question and ended with at least one student chanting "white power" in a classroom.
It happened Tuesday in a classroom at Holy Family High School, the Catholic school that sits at the corner of 144th Avenue and Sheridan Boulevard in Broomfield.
The classroom discussion started with the question: Why do students need to learn Spanish?
According to the Archdiocese of Denver, the conversation soon became about immigration and it turned ugly.
"It became a heated discussion and some rhetoric was used that was inappropriate for the classroom," said Jeanette DeMelo, spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Denver.
At least one e-mail sent to 9NEWS said that at least one student started a chant of "white power" and some said that all Mexicans should go back to Mexico.
There were Hispanic students in the classroom at the time. They asked to leave the classroom when the bigot explosion erupted. The school says they were allowed to leave. The students say they were forced to stay in the classroom and endure being trashed by the other kids.
The Archdiocese says they did not expect something like this to happen in their system, which has embraced its Hispanic students. Archbishop Charles Chaput has come forward several times in support of the Mexican community.
Right. Like you’ve embraced your gay students too I’ll bet. You teach contempt for one group of people, and next thing you know contempt just takes wing and flies wherever it damn well pleases, doesn’t it? Who’s your Jesus Charles…the one that loves all the children, or the one that loves some of them more then others?
Disgraced pastor Ted Haggard won’t be fundraising for a Monument nonprofit run by a sex offender, won’t be ministering to anyone and needs to get a job, his overseers said in a statement released this afternoon.
"Mr. Haggard’s solicitation for personal support was inappropriate," his church supervisors said in the statement.
The statement came one day after the four-member team of ministers responsible for overseeing the spiritual restoration of Haggard met with him in Phoenix.
Last week, Haggard had e-mailed a KRDO-TV reporter in Colorado Springs, asking that supporters send contributions to Families with a Mission, a Monument non-profit run by Paul Huberty…
Who upon further investigation, turned out to be…
…a twice convicted sex offender.
In his fundraising solicitation, Haggard said he was looking for people who would be willing to support him and his wife, Gayle, monthly for two years while they sought to obtain their counseling degrees from University of Phoenix.
Haggard had also told KRDO that he and his family were planning to move into the Phoenix Dream Center, a halfway house, where he and his wife, Gayle, would minister to the "broken people" there.
The overseers said Wednesday that Haggard will not be moving into the Dream Center.
"It was never the intention of the Dream Center that Mr. Haggard would provide any counsel or other ministry," wrote the overseers.
"Mr. Haggard will not be moving in or working with the Dream Center. He will not be doing any ministry. He will be seeking secular employment to support himself."
Take a bow, Dave Coffman. It was Coffman who discovered that Haggard had had directed his supporters to send him money via a convicted sex offender, and it was this revelation—which we broke here on Slog—that brought the wrath of Haggard’s overseers down on his head. Good work, Dave!
Oh, man. What a great day. I fucking live for the day when every asshole out there bilking gullible Christians out of their hard-earned dough—from the Nazi pope on down—is told the same damn thing: Get a fucking job, you parasite.
I’d just like to add that goes double for the folks who run PFOX, Exodus, Evergreen, and other assorted ex-gay ministries everywhere…and…especially you John Smid. Get A Fucking Job, You Goddamned Parasite!
Ninth Commandement? What Ninth Commandment…? (continued)
Oregon Magazine, they of such informative and thoughtful jourmalmalism like Hippies History Channel History is a Bad Trip ("They (the hippies) were all Leftists. Teenagers, young adults, old folks driving a spray-painted VW van — they were all the same."), the hard hitting online magazine bearing a picture of John Wayne standing in front of an American flag with the quote, "Now, just why in the HELL do I have to press ‘1’ for English?", brings us this alarming news about the Vast Homosexual Conspiracy…
Florida Mayor Jim Naugle has been under rapid fire assault from homosexual activists and liberal media for asking people simply to obey the law and to be responsible and respectful to families and children.
No shit…this crap showed up in Google News. And not just buried somewhere in the "all 3791 news articles" link, but right on the fucking news home page. I’ve noticed lately that whatever algorithm Google uses to determine what stories actually make the front page, it’s tracking a tad to the right…particularly when it comes to news regarding the gay community. Next thing I know I’ll be seeing press releases from PFOX. Oh…wait…I have. But more on that later…
Naugle, you may recall, is the prize jackass who in his last term as Mayor of Fort Lauderdale Florida, decided to go on an anti-gay jihad, accusing gay folks of making Broward County the nation’s AIDS capital and having public orgies in the beach toilets, despite being inconveniently contradicted on both counts by the Largest HIV/AIDS Healthcare Provider in the United States and his own police department. The Broward County Commissioners voted unanimously last week to remove the mayor from his seat on the tourism board for the damage he’s been doing to the attractiveness of the oceanside city to tourists, that they’ve worked so hard to cultivate since Naugle decided that Fort Lauderdale didn’t need to be a Spring Break destination anymore.
But the man has his defenders, at least in the "Now, just why in the HELL do I have to press ‘1’ for English" crowd, and Oregon Magazine would like us all to know that, in fact, having sex in public is just what the militant homosexual agenda is all about…
Members of the activist community in Fort Lauderdale and elsewhere are actually coming out in defense of public "gay"
sex. The homosexual legal group, LAMBDA Legal calls such public sex a civil right in their "little black book," and encourages such behavior.
The lousy formatting on that paragraph is theirs because I wouldn’t want to be accused of altering any of their breathless prose. And don’t bother clicking on the link they’ve provided because like the paragraph formatting and a lot of everything else that’s on the pages of Oregon Magazine, it’s a tad fucked up. But if you go to the Lamba Legal web site, and search for it, you can find the pamphlet they’re talking about, Here.
While Lambda Legal and other groups are fighting against the ways police target men who have sex with men, having sex where others might see you and take offense can subject you to arrest, publicity and other serious consequences. If you feel unsafe, you should leave.
Nowhere in that document is having sex in public called a civil right. The document is full of warnings about the risks involved, both legal and to your health, and the low probability of successfully fighting the charges.
Be aware that undercover cops may be “cruising” to arrest you. A cop doesn’t have to tell you he’s a cop, even if you ask. If you’re cruising for sex and an undercover cop hits on you, what you do can still be a crime. Don’t count on proving the cop “entrapped” you (which is difficult). Talk to your lawyer if you think you were set up.
How you can read the words "what you do can still be a crime" and think they say "public sex is a civil right", I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it has something to do with wondering why you have to press ‘1’ for English. And it doesn’t sound very encouraging to me either. On the other hand if you’re the kind that thinks that just telling the accused that they still have…you know…constitutional rights…amounts to encouraging crime then maybe your mileage varies. Or maybe you’re just a dickwad. Say…what was that you folks were saying about hippies ….? Oh…yeah…
Hey, hippie. You want to see an authoritarian style, regimented, intolerant government? They’re all over the place. One type is dedicated to the ideas of Marx. The other is dedicated to the ideas of Islamic extremism.
Oh heaven forfend America should become anything like a Marxist dictatorship where people don’t have…you know…the right to talk to an attorney or anything…
And speaking of lying conniving dickwads…over at Ex-Gay Watch, it looks like they’ve caught PFOX telling another whopper giving people the facts about militant homosexuality…
This past Tuesday, PFOX posted some disturbing news. While innocently offering “materials on same-sex attraction and tolerance for the ex-gay community to a hungry public” at the Arlington County Fair, Arlington Va (Aug 15-19), they claim their representatives were viciously attacked, both verbally and physically, by “gay activists” who had also set up a booth at the fair.
Wow…that’s just so…so Wrong! Damn those militant homosexuals!
Since PFOX stated that the police were “summoned” and that they “ejected the gay man off the fairgrounds” we decided to check with the Arlington County Police Department. Focus on the Family reports through CitizenLink that “Officers kicked the gay activists out of the fair and encouraged the PFOX volunteer to press charges, but he chose not to.” So depending on the account, we have one or more officers responding to a complaint of assault, recommending that the victim file charges, and then ejecting one or more “gay activists” from the fairgrounds. Surely the Arlington PD would know if one or more of their officers participated in such an action. What good would it do to eject them if others in charge were not also made aware so they could make sure they didn’t come back?
We contacted the Arlington PD and ended up speaking with John Lisle of the Media Relations/Legislative Affairs Office. He had no initial knowledge of such an incident. After checking briefly, he again said that no one was aware of such an incident. So we sent a copy of the PFOX statement to him at which time he agreed to check more thoroughly. After over two days of research, there was nothing he could add to his statement; no report exists and no one recalls such an incident.
Whoops!
Ex-Gay Watch was also rude enough to check with Denise Marshall Roller, the Event Manager for the fair, who said that their call was the first she had heard that there were any problems of that sort at the fair…and she was there. Most of the time she said, near the officer in charge. So it would appear that not only do militant homosexual activists go around attacking decent people who only want to expose the sordid truth about homosexuality, they can also warp the space time continuum to conveniently hide their evil deeds after the fact. Or maybe they have the power to cloud men’s minds…
You will remember nothing of this incident…there was no vicious attack…
the PFOX booth was not disturbed…no homosexuals were at
the PFOX booth…there is no such thing as a homosexual…
Next thing you know they’ll be bitching about Why The Hell Do I Have To Press ‘1’ For Heterosexual…?
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