I’m heading out to The Guest House at Lost River in West Virginia with some pals of mine from D.C. It’s a gay resort (straight couples occasionally go there too) tucked away in the hills near Dolly Sods wilderness area, which I’ve backpacked a time or two. They say there is wireless there now, but last year the cell phones didn’t work, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to post over the weekend, and anyway this is a mini vacation, so I don’t plan on posting much. Just guy watching mostly. And a little warm-up to my annual southwestern/California road trip.
My friends say the pool there is heated, which it damn well better be that close to Dolly Sods, and there is a hot tub, and they insist on my joining in. Diet notwithstanding, I’m not sure I’m ready to let anyone see my stomach yet. It still needs a little work. But they insist and so I went out yesterday looking for a decent pair of swimming trucks. All I could find at the local stores were either Speedos, which I don’t quite have the figure for again yet (getting there though) and the god awful Bozo The Clown trunks American heterosexual males have been wearing at the beach now for over a decade. Crap that goes down to your knees and is big enough to fit three sets of legs in. Fuck that. I was looking for a nice pair of Brazilian cut trucks…something like this…
…ideally in some nice colors. I am not wearing Bozo The Clown trunks to the pool, or the beach, or anywhere else! So I guess I’m mail ordering swim suits now too. In the meantime I bought a couple Speedos anyway, more for motivation to stick to my diet then anything else, and a close-to-decently fitting set of white Fila trunks that apparently aren’t being made anymore so they had them on clearence. I’ll probably wear the Fila’s this weekend. At least they fit fairly well and they don’t hang down around my knees, but just above mid-thigh.
Swear to God…it ought to be illegal for men to wear this sort of thing in public…!
Max Blumenthal writing for The Nation has an article up about the career of Jerry Falwell that is must reading while the republican candidates for president are busy singing his praises. Most folks know the man’s recent history all too well…
In 1984, Falwell called the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church "a vile and Satanic system" that will "one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven." Members of these churches, Falwell added, are "brute beasts." Falwell initially denied his statements, offering Jerry Sloan, an MCC minister and gay rights activist $5,000 to prove that he had made them. When Sloan produced a videotape containing footage of Falwell’s denunciations, the reverend refused to pay. Only after Sloan sued did Falwell cough up the money.
Falwell uttered countless epithets over his long life…
…but it’s his beginnings that the republicans who are calling him a saint now, would probably like us all to utterly forget. Point of fact, the religious right itself has been busy rewriting that part of their history for the past couple decades. For generations after the trouncing fundamentalism got during the Scopes trial, fundamentalists held themselves apart from the secular world. Falwell himself said that "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners", though at the time he was hurling that one at Martin Luther King Jr. But it was the sensibility of the breed for generations.
They would all have us all believe now, that it was largely Roe v. Wade that brought fundamentalists into politics. It wasn’t.
Falwell started his career like a lot of them did, preaching segregation…
Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church. This opening episode of Falwell’s life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naïvely unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race–not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called "values" issues–that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.
As with his positions on abortion and homosexuality, the basso profondo preacher’s own words on race stand as vivid documents of his legacy. Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled "Segregation or Integration: Which?"
"If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made," Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. "The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line."
Falwell’s jeremiad continued: "The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race." Falwell went on to announce that integration "will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city," he warned, "a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife."
As pressure from the civil rights movement built during the early 1960s, and President Lyndon Johnson introduced sweeping civil rights legislation, Falwell grew increasingly conspiratorial. He enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI manufactured propaganda against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "civil wrongs."
In a 1964 sermon, "Ministers and Marchers," Falwell attacked King as a Communist subversive. After questioning "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations," Falwell declared, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed."
But the spark that lit the roaring fire that eventually consumed the republican party wasn’t integration specifically…
In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right’s genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court’s ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.
While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. Their resentment was compounded in 1971 when the Internal Revenue Service attempted to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until that year.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."
Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His implorations initially fell on deaf ears.
"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."
Dig it. It wasn’t abortion. It wasn’t militant homosexuality. It wasn’t rampant sexual hedonism. It wasn’t the secularization of America’s schools. It wasn’t even racism, that lit the fire the brought the fundamentalist leadership charging into our political system in a blind destructive frenzy. It was their tax exemption. It was money.
Seen in that light, a lot of things fit nearly into place. Their exaltation of the profit motive over helping the needy, their outright contempt for the poor, like spitting in the face of the man who said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle then for a rich man to enter heaven, their private jets, their mansions, their palace like mega churches, their weighty investment portfolios. And that stunningly blind eye all these righteous men of God have been turning to the massive corruption of the Bush administration. They’re not hypocrites after all. It was about money right from the beginning. It’s still about money.
Sometimes, It’s The Things That Surprise Them That Are The Most Telling
Andrew Sullivan apparently missed out on a wee little bit of gay American history, as he had to go look it up…
The same people who have been telling me for years that Jerry Falwell is an anachronistic irrelevance are now singing his praises as a pivotal figure in American politics and culture. Presumably that’s why all the Republican candidates had to bow the knee at the moment of his passing. Dean Barnett recommends this reminiscence by Al Mohler. Money quote:
As a 16-year-old boy, I was in the crowd at the convention center in Miami Beach when Dr. Falwell joined singer Anita Bryant in holding a rally to involve Christians in the struggle against a gay rights ordinance adopted by Dade County. I had never heard of Jerry Falwell until that night – and after that experience I would never forget him.
Er…Wiki?? I don’t think there’s a gay American who was past puberty and self aware at the time who would fucking need to look thAT one up. Yes, Andrew, that was the Dade County non-discrimination ordinance she waged an all-out war on. Yes, all it did was protect us from being fired, simply for being gay. And yes, she based a large portion of her campaign on calling gay people pedophiles. She fucking named her campaign Save Our Children after all, didn’t she.
And that rally that Albert "Let’s Exterminate Homosexuality In The Womb" Mohler says he’ll never forget? I suppose there are a lot of people who won’t forget it. I saw some of the news footage of Falwell and Bryant standing together at the podium. I remember vividly Falwell looking solemnly at the gathered reporters and saying "A homosexual will kill you, as soon as look at you."
Just a few years after Falwell and Bryant were standing together at the podium with Falwell telling everyone what a bunch of blood thirsty killers gay people are, Ronald Reagan was courting him in his presidential campaign. The elephant has made gay bashing one of its primary vote getting tools ever since. I guess if you’d actually lived through that part of our history Andrew, you’d know why so many of us feel nothing but contempt for the republican party. Lame and cowardly as the democrats often are, they’re haven’t been busily inciting fear and hate toward us for the past few decades, simply to win elections. How many gay people have died Andrew, because of the climate of hate the republicans have actively stoked in this country? How many gay kids sent off to ex-gay camps? How many kids growing being hated by their peers, growing up hating themselves?
Yes…it’s the party of torture now, isn’t it? But you had to know this day was coming Andrew, when they threw innocent lovers to the wolves back in the 1980s, because it won them elections. Lovers, Andrew. Not terrorists. Not murderers. Not jihadists. Lovers. Because it won them elections. A race to the bottom is always won by the people who are already there.
I thought he was clear. He does not believe in trial by jury, or the presumption of innocence, or the right to counsel, or an independent judiciary, or the right to liberty. He believes that the government should be disappear people from their homes and send them to prison camps where brutal guards will beat them up at their leisure. He thinks we need more Gitmos and bigger Gitmos. He wants to recreate the gulag. You saw how excited the audience was. They understood it. Why don’t you?
Apparently the only thing Milt isn’t willing to sell out on his quest for the presidency, is his religion. He’s certainly willing to sell out his country.
This debate is a window into what really drives the GOP id. The biggest applause lines were for faux tough guy Giuliani demanding Ron Paul take back his assertion that the terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom, macho man Huckabee talking about Edwards in a beauty parlor and the manly hunk Romney saying that he wants to double the number of prisoners in Guantanamo "where they can’t get lawyers." There’s very little energy for that girly talk about Jesus or "the culture of life" or any of that BS that the pansy Bush ran ran on. (Brownback’s position, forcing 14 year old girls who’ve been raped by their fathers to bear their own sibling, will have to suffice for the compassionate "life" crowd tonight.)
…
Update: Amato has the "torture" segment. Dear God.
Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first;
nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.
-Charles De Gaulle
The American Legion is busting an artery over John Edwards’ suggestion that Americans celebrate this coming Memorial Day by speaking out against the war. Heaven forfend we should take an interest in the welfare of our troops during memorial day. But the Legion is yap, yap, yapping that Edwards is violating a sacred day by injecting politics into it.
But the national commander of the American Legion isn’t happy about a solemn holiday being used for political purposes. In a posting on the legion’s Web site, Commander Paul A. Morin blasts Edwards’ suggestion that Americans bring anti-war signs to local Memorial Day parades, saying that Edwards "has blatantly violated the sanctity of this most special day."
"Revolting is a kind word for it," Morin writes. "It’s as inappropriate as a political bumper sticker on an Arlington headstone."
And you just know the mainstream news media is going to treat the American Legion like it’s some sort of hallowed representative of America’s war veterans, and not the republican party attack dog that it’s always been.
Digby and Jonathan over at A Tiny Revolution are exploring the history of the American Legion in the wake of their sanctimonious outburst. But Rick Perlstein over at Common Sense.Org, author of the forthcoming book Nixonland, remembers the American Legion I once knew…back in the days of Vietnam and good old Tricky Dick…
Historian Tom Wells writes about how, in the fall of 1965, as people were beginning to realize that the Vietnam War was insane, and started marching in the streets to stop it, the government, hiding its hand, organized a pro-war march down Fifth Avenue in New York, with the Legion in the front ranks. The Pentagon’s Paul Warnke lamented such efforts were "quite ineffective" in stemming the antiwar tide. Indeed, not all Legionnaires got with the program. Two weeks later the commander of the American Legion post in Jewett City, Connecticut marched in his uniform with a sign, "Withdraw U.S. Troops From Vietnam Now!" He and his fellow protesters were met by the sign, "You Fairies Couldn’t Pass the Physical." Eleven days later, one hundred members of Post 15 showed the Legion’s true, nonpolitical colors by crowding into a room with 36 chairs to vote him out of the organization, as 500 happy townspeople gathered outside to jeer him as he left.
…
My friend Tom Geoghegan tells me the story of attending Boys State, the Legion sponsored public-service camp for high school kids, that year in Ohio. The lads were to supposed vote unanimously on a pro-war resolution. Tom voted against it. He was promptly kicked out of Boys State.
It was hardly just Vietnam. Also in 1966, Congress debated a landmark civil rights bill that would have banned racial discrimination in housing (it failed). In July the chaplain for the Maryland Legion testified against it in subcommittee. This was what he had to say about Martin Luther King’s open housing movement:
The same church leaders who join subversive forces in demonstrations against the established social structure also agree to banning the Bible and prohibiting prayer in public places. They are the same advocates of the new morality of situation ethics, and of liberation of the moral laws governing sex and marriage.
Nice guys. You’d think this nation’s war dead all gave their lives for the rights of straight white republican males with good incomes to tell everyone else what to think, how to vote and what they could and could not say in public about their government, and not for a land of freedom of speech and liberty and justice for all. But that’s the American Legion. The same one that, as Perlstein notes, literally embraced fascism in the 1920s. No, you won’t see that side of them in the news media reports about John Edwards’ call to protest the war.
I see a lot of chattering around the blogs, more amongst the gay bloggers then the religious right might have credited, telling gay people that we shouldn’t rejoice in Falwell’s death. Fine. I’m not rejoicing. But if I’m sorry about anything, it’s that he had his chance to try and right the wrongs he so eagerly inflicted on this poor world, and on gay people, and he let it sail off into the sunset. Obviously I’m in no mood to forgive now. Atrios said, One hopes he finds that his God is a more forgiving being than he believed. But that’s what they all think. Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven. In his cups I’m sure Falwell always figured that God would forgive him. So he didn’t have to care about the damage he caused.
I have to admit, writing about Falwell’s death poses an awkward challenge for me. When I worked at Americans United for Separation of Church and State for several years, I read Falwell’s materials, I listened to his speeches, I watched his interviews, and got a real sense for who this man was and what he devoted his life to.
In literally every instance, I was repelled and appalled. But is it not callous to bash a man just hours after his death?
I have another idea — I’ll document Jerry Falwell’s professional life and let his record speak for itself.
Great Idea! I’m going to steal most of his post…because in the midst of all the polite sermonizing over Falwell’s coffin, this needs to be said nonetheless…
March 1980: Falwell tells an Anchorage rally about a conversation with President Carter at the White House. Commenting on a January breakfast meeting, Falwell claimed to have asked Carter why he had “practicing homosexuals” on the senior staff at the White House. According to Falwell, Carter replied, “Well, I am president of all the American people, and I believe I should represent everyone.” When others who attended the White House event insisted that the exchange never happened, Falwell responded that his account “was not intended to be a verbatim report,” but rather an “honest portrayal” of Carter’s position.
August 1980: After Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith tells a Dallas Religious Right gathering that “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” Falwell gives a similar view. “I do not believe,” he told reporters, “that God answers the prayer of any unredeemed Gentile or Jew.” After a meeting with an American Jewish Committee rabbi, he changed course, telling an interviewer on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “God hears the prayers of all persons…. God hears everything.”
July 1984: Falwell is forced to pay gay activist Jerry Sloan $5,000 after losing a court battle. During a TV debate in Sacramento, Falwell denied calling the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Churches “brute beasts” and “a vile and Satanic system” that will “one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven.” When Sloan insisted he had a tape, Falwell promised $5,000 if he could produce it. Sloan did so, Falwell refused to pay and Sloan successfully sued. Falwell appealed, with his attorney charging that the Jewish judge in the case was prejudiced. He lost again and was forced to pay an additional $2,875 in sanctions and court fees.
October 1987: The Federal Election Commission fines Falwell for transferring $6.7 million in funds intended for his ministry to political committees.
February 1988: The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down a $200,000 jury award to Falwell for “emotional distress” he suffered because of a Hustler magazine parody. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, usually a Falwell favorite, wrote the unanimous opinion in Hustler v. Falwell, ruling that the First Amendment protects free speech.
February 1993: The Internal Revenue Service determines that funds from Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour program were illegally funneled to a political action committee. The IRS forced Falwell to pay $50,000 and retroactively revoked the Old Time Gospel Hour’s tax-exempt status for 1986-87.
March 1993: Despite his promise to Jewish groups to stop referring to America as a “Christian nation,” Falwell gives a sermon saying, “We must never allow our children to forget that this is a Christian nation. We must take back what is rightfully ours.”
1994-1995: Falwell is criticized for using his “Old Time Gospel Hour” to hawk a scurrilous video called “The Clinton Chronicles” that makes a number of unsubstantiated charges against President Bill Clinton — among them that he is a drug addict and that he arranged the murders of political enemies in Arkansas. Despite claims he had no ties to the project, evidence surfaced that Falwell helped bankroll the venture with $200,000 paid to a group called Citizens for Honest Government (CHG). CHG’s Pat Matrisciana later admitted that Falwell and he staged an infomercial interview promoting the video in which a silhouetted reporter said his life was in danger for investigating Clinton. (Matrisciana himself posed as the reporter.) “That was Jerry’s idea to do that,” Matrisciana recalled. “He thought that would be dramatic.”
November 1997: Falwell accepts $3.5 million from a front group representing controversial Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon to ease Liberty University’s financial woes.
April 1998: Confronted on national television with a controversial quote from America Can Be Saved!, a published collection of his sermons, Falwell denies having written the book or had anything to do with it. In the 1979 work, Falwell wrote, “I hope to live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!” Despite Falwell’s denial, Sword of the Lord Publishing, which produced the book, confirms that Falwell wrote it.
January 1999: Falwell tells a pastors’ conference in Kingsport, Tenn., that the Antichrist prophesied in the Bible is alive today and “of course he’ll be Jewish.”
February 1999: Falwell becomes the object of nationwide ridicule after his National Liberty Journal newspaper issues a “parents alert” warning that Tinky Winky, a character on the popular PBS children’s show “Teletubbies,” might be gay.
September 2001: Falwell blames Americans for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”
November 2005: Falwell spearheads campaign to resist “war on Christmas.”
February 2007: Falwell describes global warming as a conspiracy orchestrated by Satan, liberals, and The Weather Channel.
Father Charles Coughlin he wasn’t…but only because Coughlin didn’t have TV to vent his spleen on. Bad enough Falwell poisoned the American political dialog. Worse, he turned neighbor against neighbor. And worse still, he poisoned the relationship between parents and their gay children. But what is unforgivable is the war he waged on the human heart. He poisoned the deepest, most intimate reaches of the hearts of decent loving people against themselves, deliberately, out of pure unthinking arrogance that quickly turned into venom the moment the sacred purity of his motives were questioned. And afterwords, many gay people never loved wholeheartedly again.
Let God forgive him then, if that’s what will satisfy the Cosmic All. Passing judgment on a soul is not part of my job description anyway, though Falwell and his ilk think often enough that it’s theirs. I cannot forgive the Man. I just can’t. It is not within my power. Some things are unforgivable. Taking the possibility of love away from people is one of those things. Leaving a more barren and angry world in your wake is one of those things. I would strongly suspect doing all that in the name of the man who said Love Your Neighbor, is also one of those things. But that man had a much greater capacity to forgive then I do.
“A Homosexual Will Kill You, As Soon As Look At You.”
Death only closes a man’s reputation and determines it as good or bad.
-Joseph Addison
Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, wager of relentless Kultar Kampf on gay and lesbian America, who once stood beside Anita Bryant and uttered the words above, has died. He had many things to say to us in his lifetime…
If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.
God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve. (On the 9-11 terrorist attacks)
I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!
The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.
I do not believe the homosexual community deserves minority status. One’s misbehavior does not qualify him or her for minority status. Blacks, Hispanics, women, etc., are God-ordained minorities who do indeed deserve minority status.
We’re fighting against humanism, we’re fighting against liberalism … we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today … our battle is with Satan himself.
AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.
[Vice President Gore] recently praised the lesbian actress who plays ‘Ellen’ on ABC Television…I believe he may even put children, young people, and adults in danger by his public endorsement of deviant homosexual behavior…Our elected leaders are attempting to glorify and legitimize perversion.
Someone must not be afraid to say, ‘moral perversion is wrong.’ If we do not act now, homosexuals will ‘own’ America!…If you and I do not speak up now, this homosexual steamroller will literally crush all decent men, women, and children who get in its way…and our nation will pay a terrible price!
Bloomberg news reports laconically that Falwell "had a history of heart trouble." No fooling. Over at Ex-Gay watch David Robers says,
The Rev. Mel White, founder of Soulforce, was once associated with Falwell as a ghost writer among other things. He has devoted a great deal of time and effort into convincing Falwell to change his anti-gay views, as he remembered Falwell changing his anti-civil rights stance for African Americans decades before. Now we will never know how far this change of heart may have gone.
And that’s nobody’s fault but his. I suppose he died thinking he was headed for that great reward in the sky. We know what he left behind. An America deeply divided, families torn apart where there should have only been love, and all the young gay people, who could have brought love and joyful laughter and smiles into someone’s life, and instead let Falwell’s bitter hate stick a knife into their own hearts, killing the lover they could have been. All the joy lost to this world now. All the quiet intimate moments of peace and contentment and fulfillment…gone. Never to be. Because of him. This world is poorer and meaner for his having walked on it. His name is written in a lot of empty places where there should have been joy. It didn’t have to be that way. But it was what he worked for, all his life.
And now, the reputation is closed. People need to think less about the hereafter they’re going to, then about what it is they will be leaving behind when they’re gone. If you seek this man’s legacy, here it is: This world is minus a lot of love, because of him. It’s a little colder, it’s a little meaner, for his having walked on it.
I’ve told this story before, but those of you who’ve heard it will just have to bear up. In the 1992 election when I was making volunteer calls for Clinton, Mary Matalin made a major gaffe she had to apologize for quite publicly. (Doesn’t matter what it was.) I was riding down in the elevator with a high level political consultant (who didn’t know me from Adam, of course) and I smugly mentioned that Matalin had really stepped in it. He looked at me like I was a moron and said, "she got it out there, didn’t she?"
There is a naucent movement happening out in the gay blog world, to hold anti-gay groups like Focus On The Family and their Ex-Gay puppet organizations like Exodus and Love In Action accountable for the use of hate propaganda in their materials, and in their rhetoric. Specifically, their use and promulgation of the anti-gay junk science of Paul Cameron.
Cameron’s bogus factoids, like the greatly shortened life span of gay males, have become so thoroughly embedded in the political discourse that you almost cannot have a discussion about homosexuality in America, without that discussion stumbling over one of his filthy lies about homosexuals and homosexuality. But if Paul Cameron is the source of the lies, it’s been people like James Dobson, William Bennett, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other right wing luminaries who have worked diligently to give them life.
As Cameron has gained greater notoriety, and his deceptive practices given more exposure, the routine for anti-gay groups now is to either use his data second-hand, or without direct attribution. When confronted with unmistakable evidence that they’re citing something of his, the pattern is to first say that Cameron isn’t the only person saying it. When backed into a corner with proof that, in fact, Cameron is the one and only source of the data, they sometimes simply take down the cite, and claim it was just an honest mistake. But They Got It Out There.
It’s time we get something of our own out there…something that, unlike Paul Cameron’s junk science, is actually true. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified Paul Cameron’s group as an active hate group, ranking it right up there with the Ku Klux Klan and various white supremacy groups that actively spread fear and hate toward minorities. They based their findings on a careful study of the whole of his work and career and it is not hyperbole to compare his attitude toward homosexuals with that of the Nazis (Mike Godwin take note), because, as Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin shows us, that comparison actually comes from Cameron himself…
In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report saying, “[Paul] Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany in that these disparaging descriptions of homosexuals are reminiscent of themes found in the ugly history of anti-Semitism…” It turns out that the SPLC didn’t know half the story.
You need to go read Burroway’s article, Paul Cameron’s World. It is a careful gathering together of Cameron’s pronouncements on homosexuality, and his March 1999 report, Gays In Nazi Germany, into one very dark and grim whole, where his thinking, and his approval of the Nazi solution to homosexuality, becomes clear and unmistakable for what it is.
Burroway begins by underlining, using Cameron’s own papers and statements, just what it is he believes about homosexuals, and homosexuality. Unlike even many anti gay groups nowadays, Cameron categorically rejects the idea that there is any biological component to homosexuality at all. It is a choice, he insists, and a corrupting one both to the individual and to society. Therefore, it must be contained. And to do that, it must be not only criminalized, homosexuals must be driven from public life, and kept under quarantine. Homosexuals operate in secret societies, according to Cameron, surreptitiously placing themselves in positions of power or areas where they can recruit new homosexuals to their ranks. Homosexuals according to Cameron, are parasites on society, draining it of resources, and contributing nothing in return.
And it doesn’t necessarily end with quarantining homosexuals. In Cameron’s world, extermination is worth considering too. Yes…you read that right…
And how can we forget this, which Mark Peitrzyk reported in 1995?:
At the 1985 Conservative Political Action Conference, Cameron announced to the attendees, “Unless we get medically lucky, in three or four years, one of the options discussed will be the extermination of homosexuals.” According to an interview with former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, Cameron was recommending the extermination option as early as 1983.
A year later, when Paul Harkavy asked Cameron whether he endorsed extermination, Cameron replied, “That’s not true. All I said was a plausible idea would be extermination. Other cultures have done it. That’s hardly an endorsement, per se.”
But where on earth does he get the idea that extermination would ever be “a plausible idea”? In all of Anglo-American history, I can find no precedent whatsoever for extermination for medical reasons. He says “other cultures have done it,” but we know there is only one other western culture to have sunk to such depths of criminal depravity. Nazi Germany provides the only precedent for such an idea in all of Western Civilization — the very same example that Cameron upheld in 1999 to lend credence to his theories.
Emphasis mine. Burroway makes a clear and utterly matter-of-fact connection between Cameron’s beliefs regarding homosexuality, and his 1999 article where he cites the Nazi persecution of homosexuals as evidence that he is correct.
And remember too, that Cameron proposed that everyone who was HIV-positive should be tattooed — just as everyone who entered Höss’ concentration camps were made to bear the indelible marks of their “undesirable” status.
But now it all seems to come together, doesn’t it? Cameron’s description of Höss’ accounts casts a dark shadow on his own fascination with exterminations, quarantines, tattoos and capital punishment. And yes, while his recommendation for recriminalizing sodomy omitted capital punishment (just as Germany’s Paragraph 175 did), he nevertheless invokes it twice in his manifesto alone. First, there’s this:
An excellent — but by no means isolated — example of the long-term decline is provided by the District of Columbia. When the District was established in 1790, sodomy was a capital crime. Today, homosexuals have more legal rights in D.C. than non-homosexuals.
And again later:
It took 300 years for the Christian paradigm to triumph and express itself in social policy. A law punishing homosexual activity with death appeared in A.D. 342. About 50 years later, the emperors Valentinian II, Theodosious, and Arcadius decreed that “All persons who have the shameful custom of condemning a man’s body, acting the part of a woman’s… shall expiate this sort of crime in avenging flames.” …
… But over time, the Christian truths about God’s hatred of homosexual activity, Sodom and Gomorrah, etc., diminished in the law. As well, punishments for same-sex activity declined in severity — from death to imprisonment to fines.
Burroway has followed this article up with the beginnings of a list of organizations that use Paul Cameron’s data in their anti-gay political campaigns. This follows in the footsteps of work that Ex-Gay Watch has done in the recent past, castigating Ex-Gay groups like Exodus for their use of Cameron’s junk science. It’s time to call all these groups to account for their spreading the lies of this one man, for embedding them so deeply in the political discourse.
To repeat: The Southern Poverty Law Center put Paul Cameron’s group in the same league as the Ku Klux Klan, Neo Nazis, and other active hate groups in America. It’s time, it’s long past time, to call citing Paul Cameron for what it is: pure and unadulterated hate mongering, no different from burning crosses, and painting swastikas on people’s houses. If groups like Focus on the Family, NARTH, Evergreen, The Family Research Council, The American Family Association, Renew America, and others who use Paul Cameron’s data in their political campaigns against gay equality, want to keep on using it, then they need to know they are doing nothing more noble then burning crosses, and painting swastikas. In Paul Cameron’s own words, the Nazis had it right when it came to homosexuality. In Paul Cameron’s own words, the extermination of gay people is a "plausible idea."
When the SPLC said, “Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany,” I dismissed that statement as mere hyperbole even though I found the rest of the report informative. Whenever anyone is compared to Nazism, they all too often wind up diminishing the horrors of what really happened there. The truth is, there was only one Hitler, and there was only one Holocaust. The world looked Evil in the eye during those darkest of hours, and history since then has rendered its just judgment on that unimaginable scourge. So whenever someone invokes Hitler or the Nazis while expressing their outrage over something, it’s usually a good indication that they’ve run out of ideas for their argument.
But what I didn’t know then (and apparently neither did the SPLC, since they didn’t mention Cameron’s newsletter article), was that Cameron himself drew a direct line between his own theories and those of Nazi Germany. I didn’t do it, and neither did the SPLC. These are Cameron’s own theories, expressed in his own words and backed by examples of his own choosing.
Cameron is neither a Hitler, Himmler nor Höss. He’s not even close. He is his own man, and he bears his own unique responsibility for the vile agenda he proposes for our nation.
But that responsibility doesn’t rest with him alone. If no one else were to spread his messages or cite his “research,” he’d quickly disappear into the fog of irrelevance. But that hasn’t happened. He continues to be quoted by anti-gay activists and the conservative press. His reputation is built on the fact that others find his bogus statistics useful to feed their anti-gay animus.
No more excuses. Citing Paul Cameron is like burning a cross. It’s time for the religious right, for the virtuous warriors for Christ, for the noble crusaders for morality and virtue, to decide to either wear the hood proudly, or denounce it. They get it out there, they own it. No more excuses.
These were all taken on my circle through the Four Corners area during the summer of 2004. I developed them as soon as I got home, but for some reason they’d just sat in my library until this week, when their turn came up in the Big Scan. What’s so great about this new photographer’s software I’m using now (Aperture), is that I don’t need to make contact prints of everything anymore. I can get a real good sense of what I have on film right after I’ve scanned it all in, which I’ll be doing more frequently here now that I’ve got a system set up for it.
Sometimes you just overload when you visit a place like the Four Corners, where everywhere you look there are stunning views. By the time I came back home in 2004 I’d completely forgotten about some of these images. My jaw was literally dropping the other day when I looked at them after scanning them in after several years had passed. My next photo gallery here will probably be of some of my Four Corners stuff.
Yes, the republicans are horrible on the issue of GLBT equality. Absolutely horrible. I’ve been a yellow dog democrat ever since Connie Morella voted for the Defense Of Marriage Act. Morella, a so-called moderate republican, absolutely did not have to cast that vote to hold onto her seat…if anything casting it helped lead to her eventually being turned out of office. To add insult to injury she said, when questioned about it she averred that the entire same sex marriage issue was too much. She said it was like the world being turned upside down. I wanted to scream in her face, "Lady, spend a few days in Sharon Bottom’s shoes…and you’ll know what a world turned upside down looks like!!!"
But having said all that, we need to remember that not all democrats can be trusted either. Some of them will look us right in the eye, and lie through their teeth. One blogger asks our forgiveness, for supporting one of them…but I don’t think he has anything to apologize for…
Blue America doesn’t ask much of our prospective endorsees. On GLBT issues, for example, we don’t ask them to promise to support a gay marriage bill; we just ask them if they will fight for gay equality, even if they have to exhibit some leadership in a tough environment. If they can’t do that, we may still root for them to beat a much worse Republican, but we don’t raise money for them. We expect the candidates we endorse and raise money for to support a woman’s right to choice, to support serious campaign finance reform, to favor serious proposals to end the occupation of Iraq, to support gay equality– and, like I said, to be willing to exercise leadership on difficult issues. I mean, sure, we want candidates who are for the minimum wage and who oppose the dismantling of Social Security, but those should be the easy issues for Democrats.
Fair enough. But the word of some politicians isn’t even worth the hot air it took them to speak it…
We don’t expect the men and women we support to necessarily support the same position we do on every single vote. But even in the short time Carney has been in Congress, he has moved further and further away from all the other Blue America endorsees who won seats. In terms of supporting progressive issues in general, he has established himself at the bottom of the barrel among the freshmen, along with candidates we chose not to endorse, like Jason Altmire (PA), Rahm Emanuel’s Heath Shuler (NC), Nick Lampson (TX) and Brad Ellsworth (IN). Some of us were disappointed but none of the writers at DownWithTyranny, Firedoglake or Crooks & Liars chose to castigate Carney. And then something happened that has made us decide to speak up. We realized Chris Carney lied to us. When he wanted our support he told us he favors equality for the GLBT community, something he also made clear to the folks at Project Vote Smart, when he checked the little box that indicates he would like to "Require that crimes based on gender, sexual orientation, and disability be prosecuted as federal hate crimes."
So weren’t we in for a surprise a few days ago when Congressman Carney joined 13 of the most die-hard reactionary Democrats in the House– near-Republicans who almost always support a reactionary social agenda– to vote against the Hate Crimes bill. The bill passed 237-180 and all but 14 Democrats supported… well, supported exactly what Carney promised in his campaign he would support, "that crimes based on gender, sexual orientation, and disability be prosecuted as federal hate crimes." I felt betrayed– like I had been kicked in the stomach. Based on my research and interview with candidate Carney, Blue America had endorsed him and hundreds of our members had donated effort and money to his campaign. Some of these donors are members of the GLBT community and others have friends and family who are part of that community and others just like to think that the candidates they contribute to will support equality as a core value. Chris Carney let us down, violently.
I requested an opportunity to speak with him and went back and forth with his office a few times until they finally sent me this e-mail:
Hi Howie, I have a short statement for you that I hope will be sufficient. This statement has been issued exclusively to you. Please let me know that you received it. Thanks.
Congressman Carney has not wavered from his original position of equality. Treating people the same is one of his core values, creating separate constitutional classes detracts from that goal. This was overarching legislation that created too many classes of people, and Congressman Carney could not support it.
This was a difficult decision and some of our supporters will disagree. As always, Congressman Carney voted with what he saw to be the best interests of Pennsylvania’s 10th District.
I explained that sending me the Republican Party talking points — which have long and routinely been used by the party of hatred and bigotry to try to please their rabidly homophobic base while covering their asses is not satisfactory.
Tough shit…he’s in office now. To get him out you’re probably going to have to allow a republican to take the seat back unless you want to put up a scorched earth fight during the primary.
But at least we know. Chris Carney (PA-10). Remember this man. He will look you right in the eye, and lie through his teeth.
I’m copying the whole of this post by Atrios because I think he really hits it as to what has changed fundamentally now about many American’s relationship to the news media…
In the post below I had meant to prominently include the 2000 election recount/selection as a cause of a major online lefty boom. While that was the time when I began to turn to the web for news/perspectives I couldn’t find elsewhere, it wasn’t actually until the inauguration that I finally concluded that something was seriously messed up, and that the problem was the media. I never had any illusions that Supreme Court Justices were noble people above reproach or that politicians could be trusted. I did at some point, however, have the sense that the mainstream media – CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, network news – while imperfect wasn’t completely broken. It was the coverage of the inauguration that did it for me.
You may remember that this was a cold and rainy day, truly miserable. Nonetheless thousands of protesters had gathered. However, most Americans would have no idea this was happening. Switching back and forth between coverage by the television networks, and the somewhat more raw footage carried by C-SPAN, it was apparent just how much effort the networks were expending to hide this fact from their viewing public. They would frequently cut away from the parade, provide odd camera angles, and do anything to maintain the illusion that the coronation was proceeding blissfully. The following day, for its inauguration coverage, the New York Times published a photo of George W. Bush walking the parade route. As discussed in Dennis Loy Jonson’s The Big Chill, this was an entirely staged photo. Bush had been unable to follow in the tradition established by Carter and carried on Ronald Reagan, Bush’s father, and Bill Clinton. The presence of the protesters prevented this, and it wasn’t until after Bush had left the public parade route, and was behind a barrier, that he could briefly hop out of the limousine and wave for the cameras. The Times had established a practice which impacted much of the media’s reporting on the activities of the Bush administration. They signaled a willingness to report things not as they necessarily were but as the administration wished to present them.
Emphasis above are mine. For me, the moment when I finally came to the conclusion that something is seriously messed up and the problem is the media, came at the tail end of a slow steady accumulation of small observations that they were becoming part of the spin. And that was preceded by many years of watching the quality of the news broadcasts getting thinner and thinner, as the right wing became more and more skilled at intimidating and undermining the press.
For decades, literally, I’d watched the news media cover the gay rights movement with that faux even handedness that demands that gutter crawling bigots be granted equal stature while on camera, even when it meant they could spread one filthy lie after another about gay and lesbian Americans without any of it being challenged as nonfactual, because to do so would be "taking sides" in a "controversial topic." I’ve been writing here for years now that this behavior, this faux even handedness on the part of the news media was probably more painfully familiar to gay America then to straight. Even so, my jaw kept dropping again and again during the Bush years, as staringly obvious Bush white house lies were simply passed along without comment by the press.
I don’t know when exactly I’d finally concluded that the media had embedded themselves in the Bush spin machine, but the ghastly performance during MISSION ACCOMPLISHED day was what finally convinced me that they really were part of the problem. As a gay man, all the fawning adoration of Bush’s "masculinity" on that carrier deck by the news media and the Washington pundocracy that day, and in the weeks that followed, struck me as…weird. Very, very weird.
The tail hook caught the last cable, jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds. Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.
He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics.
Compared to Karl Rove’s ”revvin’ up your engine” myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies look like ”Lizzie McGuire.”
This time Maverick didn’t just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MIG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning.
–Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, May 4, 2003
……
MATTHEWS: What do you make of this broadside against the USS Abraham Lincoln and its chief visitor last week?
LIDDY: Well, I—in the first place, I think it’s envy. I mean, after all, Al Gore had to go get some woman to tell him how to be a man. And here comes George Bush. You know, he’s in his flight suit, he’s striding across the deck, and he’s wearing his parachute harness, you know—and I’ve worn those because I parachute—and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those, run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn’t count—they’re all liars. Check that out. I hope the Democrats keep ratting on him and all of this stuff so that they keep showing that tape.
…..
MATTHEWS: Let’s go to this sub–what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo op in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I’ve got to say.
Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on–onboard that ship loved this guy.
Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I’m not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn’t do it for me personally, especially not when he’s in a suit, but he arrived there…
MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.
Ms. KAY: …he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn’t he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.
MATTHEWS: I want him to wa–I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.
It was only later I heard from other pilots that the usual thing is to take off your parachute harness once you’re out of the airplane. But you knew he was deliberately calling attention to his genitals the moment you saw it. Bush kept the parachute harness on and swaggered around that carrier deck in pure frat boy jock sneerage, like some alpha ape wagging his dong around looking for a fight after he’s just beaten the crap out of another poor ape half his size. It was amazing. Another time, it seemed long long ago, I might have been appalled. But the longer its gone on, the more desensitized I’ve become to it. There is a sizable portion of America that a man like that really does adequately represent. And they really do enjoy making the rest of us flinch at the sight of that open sewer they call a conscience.
We are sexual beings, yes. And brazen male sexuality can be an awesomely thrilling thing to behold. This gay boy has beheld lots of defiantly brazen sexual posturing among human males. But there is a difference when it’s meant to get you all hot and bothered and when it’s sneering and disdainful and meant only to intimidate and threaten. And even then, even in the old human struggle for status and power and glory, the sexual posturing of the more recently evolved alpha males among us is more a subtext then a crude locker room joke. But for those males among us with small frontal lobes, the sexual component of aggression takes center stage the minute the chest thumping begins.
"Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out."
It was always obvious what kind of man Bush was. It was clear to me after November 2000 that there were enough people in this country just like him to take the nation straight into the gutter if the rest of us didn’t start fighting back hard, and quickly. What really bothered me that day, and in the weeks that followed, was watching how many people in the mainstream news media were actually turned on by the sight of Bush swaggering around that carrier deck all but flashing his dick at the world…
I had the most astonishing thought last Thursday. After a long day of hauling the kids to playdates and ballet, I turned on the news. And there was the president, landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, stepping out of a fighter jet in that amazing uniform, looking–how to put it?–really hot. Also presidential, of course. Not to mention credible as commander in chief. But mostly "hot," as in virile, sexy and powerful.
-Lisa Schiffren, The Wall Street Journal 5/9/2003
So I’m watching all this gushing and fawning, all these media big shots getting the vapors over Junior’s Manly Characteristic, along with thugs like G. Gordon Liddy and I’m getting that same smarmy feeling I’ve had a time or two, stumbling onto something going on in the bathroom stalls at the back of some really seedy gay bar I’d been dragged into. When sex gets dragged into the toilet you don’t know whether to cry or puke. You just want to look away and get the hell out of there. Except the shadowy figures in the toilet stalls have more dignity then these goddamned news media talking heads. At least there is honest desire going on in there. I watched the American news media having hot flashes over Bush all but wagging his dick at the world after he’d just started a war and I think that was when I knew that far too many media big shots nowadays were part of the same open sewer that Bush had risen from, and that was why they were cheering him on, why they thumped their chests for war too, why they hate democrats, why they treat all that bleeding heart liberal peace love and understanding stuff with sneering contempt. It wasn’t that they were stupid. It wasn’t that they’d been co-opted. It was that the smirking boob really was their kind of guy.
It’s not just the news media either. Ever notice how, on the prime time TV cop shows, the good guys can threaten suspects and witnesses with prison rape unless they cooperate, and still remain good guys?
Digby, riffing off Glen Greenwald, smacks around the cutlure of High Broderism.
Joseph Kraft defined "Middle America" as a blue collar or rural white male, "traditional in his values and defensive against innovation." Ever since then, the denizens of the beltway have deluded themselves into thinking they speak for that "silent majority." (And what a serendipitous coincidence it was that this happened at the moment of a right wing political ascension that also made a fetish out of the same blue collar white male.) The converse of this, of course, is that they also assume that the "fringe" liberals from the coasts are way out of the mainstream, even to the extent that editors of Time simply make up data to conform to Kraft’s outdated observations.
It reached the zenith of synergistic absurdity during the Lewinsky scandal when the cosmopolitan beltway courtiers finally went all in and portrayed themselves as as the salt-of-the-earth provincial town folk who were appalled by the misbehavior ‘o them out-a-towners from thuh big city:
When Establishment Washingtonians of all persuasions gather to support their own, they are not unlike any other small community in the country.
On this evening, the roster included Cabinet members Madeleine Albright and Donna Shalala, Republicans Sen. John McCain and Rep. Bob Livingston, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, PBS’s Jim Lehrer and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, all behaving like the pals that they are. On display was a side of Washington that most people in this country never see. For all their apparent public differences, the people in the room that night were coming together with genuine affection and emotion to support their friends — the Wall Street Journal’s Al Hunt and his wife, CNN’s Judy Woodruff, whose son Jeffrey has spina bifida.
But this particular community happens to be in the nation’s capital. And the people in it are the so-called Beltway Insiders — the high-level members of Congress, policymakers, lawyers, military brass, diplomats and journalists who have a proprietary interest in Washington and identify with it.
They call the capital city their "town."
And their town has been turned upside down.
Here you had the most powerful people in the world identifying themselves with Bedford Falls from "It’s A Wonderful Life" when the court of Versailles or Augustan Rome would be far more more apt. The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking. Thirty years after Kraft’s epiphany, this decadent world capital that had recently seen the likes of Richard Nixon’s crimes and John F. Kennedy’s philandering (and corruption of all types, both moral and legal at the highest levels for years), were now telling the nation that they themselves were small town burghers and factory workers upholding traditional American values. And even more amazing, the rest of America was now morally suspect and needed to be led by these purveyors of Real American values:
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