Via Pam’s House Blend…  In a blog post titled, Is San Diego’s Gay Community Experiencing God’s Judgment – Violence, Disease & Death Overwhelming Local Gay Community, Professional Ex-Gay James Hartline makes it clear that as far as he’s concerned, homosexuals bring violence down on themselves, simply for existing…

While the vast majority of Hillcrest’s gay population rejects the Bible, it may prove useful to them to at least consider what the Bible has to say about the self-destructive choices they are making. The Book of Deuteronomy reveals the high cost to a community or group of people who reject God’s commandments and laws:

"But if you refuse to listen to the Lord your God and do not obey all the commands and laws I am giving you today, all of these curses will come and overwhelm you: You will be cursed with confusion and disillusionment in everything you do, until at last you are completely destroyed for doing evil and forsaking me. The Lord will send diseases among you until none of you are left in the land you are about to enter and occupy. The Lord will strike you with wasting disease, fever, and inflammation. These devastations will pursue you until you die.  The Lord will cause you to be defeated by your enemies. You will be oppressed and robbed continually, and no one will come to save you."

…and so on.  Ever get the feeling when you hear people reciting those verses that they’re not so much warning their neighbors about God’s wrath, as cheering it on…?   Anyway, Hartline’s post is pretty long and rant-rambling as you might expect from a babbling bible thumper, but here’s a couple passages from it that I think get to the meat of it.  First, Hartline recounts his crusade against the annual San Diego (his hometown) Pride Day festival, and how the defiant San Diego gays just kept listening to Satan rather then the prophet Hartline…

During the San Diego City Council hearing on July 25, 2006, over 90 gay activists and their supporters showed up to influence the council’s decision to issue a proclamation to honor the San Diego Gay Pride organization and its annual events. Rather than acknowledge the terrible decisions that the group had made the previous year when San Diego Gay Pride had hired the network of sex offenders, the multitude of gay activists used the city council hearing to lambast Christians opposed to the pornographic gay pride events. In speech after speech, gay and lesbian gay pride promoters attacked Christians and their beliefs. It had now become perfectly clear that there would be no repentence on the part of those gay leaders who have been so determined to continue their rabid quest to indoctrinate San Diego’s youth into their crusade of sexual anarchy.

Well of course they only have themselves to blame for what happened next…

Several days later, the San Diego Gay Pride Festival turned from a celebration of homosexuality and pornography into a tragic blood bath as several gay males were severely beaten outside of the gay pride festival grounds (www.gaylesbiantimes.com/?id=8193&issue=979). The assaults were so severe that one of the victims, Oscar Foster, remained in intensive care for two weeks due to a fractured skull and mutilple facial injuries. Baseball bats and a knife were used in the horrific attacks. James Allen Carroll received eleven years in prison for attempted murder on the victims after accepting a plea bargain with prosecutors. Two other adult attackers also received lengthy prison terms for their roles in the heinous attacks.

Yes…he’s saying their that God sent those thugs to beat the living crap out of the homosexuals to punish them.   A little further down Hartline makes it specifically and abundantly clear:

While there may not be any apparent moral conviction for embracing such anti-christian discrimination, is it possible that these same gay leaders will ever consider that their actions are reaping a judgment from God on their community? Is it actually possible that God is angry with their mockery of the Bible that has become a cornerstone of the gay community in San Diego? If so, will there be any reconsideration by San Diego’s gay community for their anti-god, anti-christian behaviors? Is Hillcrest being warned by God? What will happen if they don’t heed such warnings?

Although leaders of the San Diego homosexual movement have rejected any Biblical references to homosexuality and lesbianism as being a sin, perhaps it is time for them to rethink their conclusions. The Bible teaches a premise that the wages for sin include death. While most in the gay community reject that premise, is it possible, that in doing so, they could be wrong? Is it possible that God does judge those that harm children? Is it possible that God is now judging San Diego’s homosexual community for its continued promotion of rebellion against the Bible?

The wages of sin are death…  But it wasn’t God striking down peaceful festival goers that day, it was a gang of gay hating thugs acting out in an atmosphere that had been charged for months with Hartline’s venomous accusations that San Diego Pride was facilitating pedophilia, and indoctrinating children into homosexuality.   Hartline stoked a climate of hate in San Diego in which violence toward homosexuals attending Pride Day became practically inevitable.   And now that it’s happened, he’s telling gay bashers yet waiting in the wings that they’re not responsible.  Even if the blood of gay people is literally on their hands, Hartline says as far as God is concerned, that blood is upon the gays themselves.  That club isn’t in your hands…it’s in God’s hands…so swing away because you’re only doing God’s will…God smites them through you…   Black market arms dealers selling explosives to terrorists for money probably give more thought to the human lives they’re putting at risk then Hartline does. 

This is how the game is played below the radar of the mainstream news media, that accepts at face value the protestations of the main religious right celebrities, that they love the sinner, and only hate the sin.  It isn’t true.  To a man, they all believe what Hartline so blatantly shouts there in that blog post: that violent attacks on homosexuals represents God’s judgment upon them…that violent attacks on homosexuals fulfill the will of God.

Sorry…

Unforgettable…That’s What You Are…
Unforgettable though near or far
Like a song of love that clings to me
How the thought of you does things to me
Never before has someone been more

Nat King Cole is singing on my iPod and it’s drizzling freezing rain outside and I’m nursing a glass of Kahlua and there is a face and a name that I just can’t get out of my thoughts, and it’s been like that for days now and I’m sorry.  I had a couple of cartoons I wanted to get finished before today and I just haven’t been able to put pen to paper for days now.  This is why I stopped drawing, stopped painting, stopped working with my cameras, for over a decade…it’s why I’m a software engineer now, and not the graphic artist or photographer everyone from Woodward assumed I’d become someday…this bundle of feeling that I have to deal with every time I walk into that space inside of me where all my creativity comes from.  There’s a piece missing from what should have been my life and before I can sit down and do anything in my art room I have to deal with that and sometimes I just can’t.  There’s a bit of that loss, that quiet, waiting, life-on-hold emptiness, in Everything I’ve Ever Done since 1975 and by the late 1980s I just got so sick of seeing it staring back at me from my artwork that I just stopped doing anything…I took my easel down, put my oils, my pens and charcoal sticks, my drawing pads away, put my cameras away, and just plinked on a computer (just like I’m doing now) for creative release. 

I want that part of me back.  I really want it back.  But it’s a struggle.  I have my ups and downs now…and this week has just been particularly bad.  I’m sorry.  Nothing more for now.  I just can’t.  I guess this is why I’ll never be a professional cartoonist or artist.  I’m sorry.  I just can’t.  I’m sorry.

I remember skies
Mirrored in your eyes
I wonder where you are
I wonder if you
Think about me
Once upon a time
In your wildest dreams

Since all the other kids seem to be doing it…   Here’s the first ten I get when I do a shuffle play on my iPod:

Woodsong – R. Carlos Nakai
Nixon In China, Act I, Scene II – John Adams
Looking At Heaven (Tombstone) – Bruce Broughton
Up The Cathedral (Batman) – Danny Elfman
Rachmaninov – Symphony #1 First Movement – Andre Previn
Silbelius – Tapiola op.112, Largamente – Herbert von Karajan
In The Bath (Pleasantville) – Randy Newman
In The Bulrushes (The Ten Commandments) – Elmer Bernstein
Marcia Without Hope (The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly) – Ennio Morricone
Points To Port/End Titles (The Blue Lagoon) – Basil Poledouris

(shrug) From Batman to Rachmaninov to The Ten Commandments to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly…that’s me…

I’d just bought readymade pancake mix until recently, when I decided to try my hand at mixing up my own.  For the first time Fanny Farmer let me down with one of her recipes.  I just didn’t like the buttermilk pancake one she had.  So I tried a little experimentation.  My second try was pretty good, so I’m sharing…

1 cup all purpose four
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt (I use sea salt)
1 egg (I use jumbo from free range non-drugged chickens)
1 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup melted butter
Some whole milk

Generally, I try to get the best organic non-chemically treated basic ingredients I can find.  Usually that’s at Whole Foods.  I think that’s particularly important when it comes to the dairy stuff here…

Mix dry ingredients in one bowl.  In another, beat the egg in the buttermilk.  Then mix the dry ingredients with the wet and add the butter.  Add just enough whole milk to make the batter the right consistency…not too thick or thin. 

Fry over medium heat until the bottoms start turning golden. 

You can probably substitute your favorite sweetener and non-butter-butter if the calories here are disturbing to you.  But I’m still doing alright on my diet, which is really more a just-watch-what-you-eat-from-now-on kinda thing then an actual diet.  On a cold weekend morning, if I’m doing pancakes I will usually make myself a small stack with a side of eggs (over easy) and sausage links.  I use maple syrup but not so the pancakes are drowning in it.  That’ll be my big meal for the day.  The rest of the day is light eating.  I can eat stuff like this on weekends and still maintain a decent weight (I’m down to 148 pounds now…I had been 170 a few months ago), simply by not snacking on junk food between meals. 

For those of you who have been following it (which is likely only those of you who read the gay news sites), the 72 year old gay man who was beaten with a pipe the other day, by a man on his bus who asked him if he was gay, has died…

Anthos, Capitol’s ‘dome man’, dies after attack

Andrew Anthos died Friday of injuries sustained during an attack last week outside his downtown Detroit apartment building. Family members said he was a victim of an anti-gay hate crime.

Anthos was on a city bus Feb. 13 when a man asked him if he was gay. The man followed Anthos off the bus at the stop in front of his building and beat him with a metal pipe.

Anthos, whose family said he was gay, was taken to a hospital and later fell into a coma.

Local and national gay rights groups condemned the attack. Police told The Detroit News in story published Friday that the department was investigating whether the attack was a hate crime.

Dig it.  His attacker asked him if he was gay and then followed him off the bus and beat the living crap out of him with a pipe so badly it left him paralyzed from the neck down and then he died, but we’re not sure it’s a hate crime.  But…never mind.  Actually, it isn’t a hate crime in Michigan, It can’t be, because sexual orientation isn’t covered in Michigan’s hate crime statutes.  Somewhere, Richard Cohen is nodding approvingly.

This is what Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin, looks like in practice, or as one of Bill Donohue’s nemesis, Shakespear’s Sister, points out…

This shit doesn’t happen in a void. Like the sexualization and objectification of women in the media being psychologically damaging to girls, the constant drumbeat of negative stereotypes and exploitative hatred issued by the GOP and social/religious conservative leaders is dangerous for members of the LGBT community. And the hatemongers’ faux-naïveté at the reality that you can’t continually put a target on someone’s back but expect no one to shoot at it is growing really goddamned old. The hate-the-gays schtick isn’t just infuriating and spiteful and wrong; it’s irresponsible.

But it’s effective.  It keeps winning them elections.  It keeps the cash flowing in.  And it keeps the gays fearful.  A fearful homosexual is a good homosexual.  Not perhaps, as good as a dead one, but it will do.

The reference to "Dome Man" comes from Anthos’ campaign to light the Michigan Statehouse dome in red, white and blue colors one night a year…

Photo by Lansing State Journal file photo

So he loved his country, and he loved his state.  Too bad they couldn’t have loved him back.

Ugh.  More sleet and freezing rain early tomorrow morning and then sleet and freezing rain all day tomorrow and then some more Monday morning.  I’m serious…I’d rather have three feet of snow then half an inch of ice.  Snow you can at least shovel.

That last batch of sleet and freezing rain left a ground cover that looked like just a little snow but was as hard as concrete and slippery as all hell.  You just couldn’t walk on it…you got zero traction.  There’s still patches of it out there now as I type this, but the streets and sidewalks had just gotten clear enough that you could move around outside almost like normal.  Now it looks like it’s going to happen all over again. Urgh!  I hate ice!

I spent the day at the grocery store and Costco stocking up on non-perishables, and at Whole Foods for a few things that will last a few weeks: a couple blocks of aged Vermont Cheddar…the jumbo brown free range eggs I like, and some buttermilk and regular milk so I can make some pancakes while I’m stuck inside…some lean ground beef and some deli meats.  Olive Oil for cooking.  Some peanut oil for the deep fryer.  I also restocked on all purpose flour and some other baking stuff.  But it isn’t entirely the pending ice storm that’s driving it.

Every November I buy a lot of bulk items so I won’t have to hassle with the crowds at the supermarkets every time there’s a snow forecast.  I’m not into that survivalist thing, I just hate crowds.  After I buy all that stuff I just feed off it until my stocks are back down to normal levels again in the spring.  But it’s stories like this that have made me consider making that four month supply of food and sundries a permanent feature here at Casa del Garrett.  Obviously I’m down to late February levels here…I normally only plan on having my overstock last through March.

I’m typically very skeptical of all the doomsday scenarios that scream at me from the papers.  But my maternal grandmother used to tell me stories about the great flu epidemic of 1918 (she was a nurse’s aid back then) and maybe that’s why I’m a tad nervous about this one.  During the cold war I always figured those of us who lived near Washington were all toast anyway if the missiles starting flying, and my folks and I never got caught up in that fall out shelter craze.  Nobody I knew bothered with it either.  Now I’m seriously thinking about keeping a four month supply of food here at home all year long.  Welcome to the twenty-first century.  Lets hear it for Spam.

I was checking over my web server logs recently and was pleasantly surprised to see that for another year This Cartoon got a lot of hits from people searching for Valentine’s Day cartoons.  It’s still somewhat of a puzzle since there is no text on the page identifying it as a Valentine’s Day cartoon, and even the image filename, "by_the_way.jpg" doesn’t give any indication.  Yet it turns up pretty reliably in the Yahoo search engine for Valentine’s Day cartoons.  Either they’re OCR-ing the image itself, or they’re keying on the link to it on my archives page, which does say "Happy Valentines Day".

You can see the search strings people use to get to you in the server logs, so I know that many folks who found the cartoon, were searching on the string "valentine’s day cartoon".  However, there were also a few cranky grouches in the mix:

homo valentines day
fuck valentine day
pervert valentine cartoon

Let’s just say none of you will be getting Valentine’s Day cards from me anytime soon.  And then there was this from someone who needs a lover worse then I do: 

valentines day on drugs

Oh, cheer up. 

Anyway, there’s nothing quite like looking though the search strings that lead to your web page to give you a somewhat unsettling glance at the human psyche.  So here’s another installment in our What The Hell Were You Thinking When You Googled That series. 

Naturally, I get a lot of hits from people searching for cartoons of one sort or another…

nude cartoon sex
cartoon sex
sex cartoons
cartoons having sex
gay cartoons having sex

I’m sensing a pattern here…

homosexuality cartoon

Okay…I have a few of those…  But I do politics, not pornography.  I think you’re going to be disappointed.

republican gay cartoon

Now that’s disgusting!

Then there are the ones who just want sex, never mind the cartoon…

mothers caught on tape having sex and fucking
niece uncle wimp incest
fucking brides at their weddings story
kink questionaire

Next time some homophobic crackpot starts yapping about how sex is all that gay men ever think about I’ll direct them to my server logs…

"sandra jones" sex
solar woman is stripped and raped fantasy stories

Who the hell is solar woman?  Well at least I’m not getting hit on by Sailor Moon fetishists.  On the other hand, this post will probably attract them like flies now…

does sally fields wear bikini underwear?

If this is about The Flying Nun I don’t want to know. 

"moan during sex"

I’m picturing a cute little geeky guy who just had his first sex ever and noticed his lover moaning and he’s searching Google to make sure that’s what’s supposed to happen.  In a few more years we’ll all be wondering how humans ever had sex before the Internet.  Like these folks who just seem to be searching for a clue as to what its all about… 

having sex
sex=sex

Well that’s been my experience.  If I was better looking and a lot more  shameless it might equal money, but on the whole I think I’d rather sex just equaled sex.  It’s complicated enough as it is.

nude gay boys in a sleeping bag

Have you tried one of Justin Lookadoo’s ex-gay summer youth camps?  Wait…  That you Justin…?

wierd men’s underwear

That the underwear that’s weird, or the men?  Or is it you? 

alien impregnation stories

Okay…we’re in the Twilight Zone now. 

how to undress a client with multiple trauma 

I ran across this one in the server logs and thought, I’ll just assume that’s really a healthcare professional asking that.  Then I thought, why would a healthcare professional be searching for instructions on Google?  Okay…who the hell was asking that? 

Behold the pure randomness of human curiosity…

plans for building reflex water distiller   
free "brochure template", industrial monitoring
sombrero brontosaur

We must be on the alert for illegal aliens from the Jurassic…

can i take my big screen tv apart so it can fit in my basement

Sure.  Try the hammer.  I bet the hammer will work.  Try the hammer.

show paragraph about drafting job what kind is job

Those who can’t write, draw…

inventor of the bowling ally
what do you think about aging

Compared to dying?  Well I’m not all that keen on dying.   Compared to bowling?  I’m not so sure.  Would I rather go bowling or get older?  Hmmmm….   That’s a toughie…

rocket to venus baltimore

Venus Baltimore is that other Venus, where the aliens wear beehive hair-dos, live in a lot of tightly packed rowhouses, keep pink flamingos on their lawns and ceramic cats on their walls and call everyone ‘Hon’.  You from earth, Hon? 

how hamburger pattie is digested in the body

Bile.  Probably.

plot summary of lot mine eyes have seen the glory by anita bryant

Bile.  Probably.

how did ricard nixon abuse power?

Now this person came in from Google…and I just now verified that Google will prompt you with "Did you mean: how did richard nixon abuse power?", yet this individual persisted with "ricard" anyway and they got one of my blog pages in a search result that clearly indicated I was talking about Ricard Wagner.   Yet they clicked on the link anyway.   Go figure.  But here’s a poor frustrated soul who really needs a few lessons in not only how to use a search engine, but when…

i give up all im asking is a simple question.i live in a house with a basement door in the front hallway gas furnace in basement now is it okay for door to be open

Ask.  Your.  Gas.  Company.  Questions.  Like.  This.

I’ve had the camera bug since I was an elementary school kid, but it wasn’t until high school that it began to get really serious, and the finger candy really expensive.  Luckily mom was pretty forbearing about my turning the one bathroom in our little two bedroom apartment into an occasional darkroom.  She always encouraged my creative outlets.

I’ve been going through my old high school negatives recently for a couple projects I’m working on here and I came across a few shots I took of myself in my bedroom mirror with the latest prized camera.  Here are three documenting my climb up the SLR latter, from my first Petri FT to the professional grade Canon F1 I spent a summer working at a fast food joint to buy. 

The Petri FT, circa 1970. I’m 16.

The Miranda Sensorex, circa 1971.  I’m 17.

The F1, circa 1971.

Note the little plastic film canisters I’d taped to the camera straps.  That was the style back then among us camera kids.  It kept your spare film handy and it made you look hard core.  But when I got out into the world and tried to make a living at it I found that they just got in the way…so I ended up taking them off. 

Both the Petri and the Miranda had front mounded shutter releases instead of the usual top mounted, which was and is unusual (I don’t think any camera maker does that anymore), but I found I preferred it.  The Miranda had full aperture semi-spot metering and a removable pentaprisim.  But when I saw that first Canon F1 in the store I knew that was the camera I could spend a lifetime taking pictures with. 

The flash you see on the F1 is just for show in this picture.  I very seldom used a flash, even back then.  Once I started developing my own film I pretty quickly gravitated to Kodak’s Tri-X Pan which was high speed for the time, but if you were careful about how you developed it you could get pretty nice not-so-grainy available light images off it.  All these images are from Tri-X negatives.  The only time I every really used the flash back then was when I was covering sports events for my school newspaper (it was called The Advocate… (grin))  Note how the flash hot shoe actually clipped on over the rewind knob on the original F1.

The Petri and the Miranda got sold, each one to help fund the purchase of the next.  But I still have that F1 and I still use it and it’s been with me just about everywhere.  It took all the 35mm color shots you see in my current photo gallery.  That camera’s the best.  I’d sell the house before I’d sell that camera.

Oh…and I still have the little stuffed tiger you see there perched in front of my dresser mirror. 

I should just stop reading the news first thing in the morning…

Gay Marriage Critic Tried on Lewdness

The lawyer for a former Baptist church leader who had spoken out against homosexuality said Thursday the minister has a constitutional right to solicit sex from an undercover policeman.

The Rev. Lonnie W. Latham had supported a resolution calling on gays and lesbians to reject their "sinful, destructive lifestyle" before his Jan. 3, 2006, arrest outside the Habana Inn in Oklahoma City.

Authorities say he asked the undercover policeman to come up to his hotel for oral sex.

His attorney, Mack Martin, filed a motion to have the misdemeanor lewdness charge thrown out, saying the Supreme Court ruled in the 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas that it was not illegal for consenting adults to engage in private homosexual acts.

"Now, my client’s being prosecuted basically for having offered to engage in such an act, which basically makes it a crime to ask someone to do something that’s legal," Martin said.

Both sides agree there was no offer of money, but prosecutor Scott Rowland said there is a "legitimate governmental interest" in regulating offers of acts of lewdness.

Latham’s lawyer has a point.  And as a card carrying member I am happy to see that the ACLU filed a brief on his behalf.  But if the government is poking its nose where it doesn’t belong, its louts like Latham who’ve made that inevitable.  The pulpits bear a heavy responsibility for our culture’s dysfunctional attitudes toward sex and sexuality.  I can see where people might not like having to navigate through a gauntlet of men out looking for sex when they’re just trying to walk down a street or though a park but that’s what you get when you treat sex like its something that’s radioactive, instead of a normal part of our flesh and blood lives.   Here in America sex is either dirty or its cheap, but it isn’t allowed to be wonderful.  And it’s mostly pulpit thumping jackasses like Latham who are to blame for that.  They’re the ones who’ve made sex another three letter word for sin.  They’ve taken what should be a wonderful, playful, joyful, part of our lives, and tainted it with guilt and shame.  Then they cash in on the damage that does.  It’s unforgivable.

I remember watching Phyllis Schlafly on TV babbling about how all you need to teach teenagers about sex is don’t touch anything inside your bathing suits.   Well if that’s all you teach them, then don’t be shocked, shocked, when they grow up to be adults who troll the streets at night for random cheap anonymous sex, because an instinct they never learned how to deal with honorably, that’s hundreds of millions of years older then the human race itself, is dragging them out there by the cords on their bathing suits and they don’t have clue one why they can’t stop themselves.  Just on principal I hope Latham wins his case, but I don’t feel sorry for him in the least.  So called men of God like him have a lot of human misery to answer for.

…and…a blender?

Here’s Peterson Toscano and Lance Carroll on the Montel Williams show, briefly discussing how they came to find themselves in reparative therapy. Two things are worth noting here: Peterson went in of his own free will, while Lance was forced into it by his parents. Peterson left of his own accord, finally accepting himself just as he was, and remained very close to both his parents. Lance is now estranged from both of his. 

This conversation is all too brief, but I guess that’s the format of the Montel Williams show, to flit from one topic to another to another during the course of an hour. Someone should sit those two down together for a long talk on camera where they can talk about their experiences in more depth, how it felt, what it did to them, what their lives are like now: the one who went in of his own accord out of devotion to God, and the one who was forced in against his will.

And here’s a clip from a Boston Legal episode about a man suing his ex-gay ministry. Great line at the end…

John…are you reading this? Have you given Lance’s parents back their money yet? Bring families together do you? Ever tell Lance you’re sorry? Ever find where you buried your conscience? You had one once…didn’t you? Do you remember what it was like…way back then…to have a conscience…?

Kevin-Douglas Olive responds to this post and to all your comments and mine, and he implores us all not to hate the Groffs.  Quakers are some of the most decent people I’ve ever met in my life.

I’ll post my own response later…I want to take some time to think over what he wrote.  But in the meantime you should go read his comment, and remember that a Christian wrote it, the next time you hear the kook pews hollering out for war and vengence and hate in the name of Christ.

Here’s a remarkably sane bit of commentary about the Anglican schism-in-progress over at the London Times Online: Pray Lift Your Eyes Above The Belt.  The author, Libby Purves, notes that this isn’t the first time there has been outrage in the pews over inclusiveness.

We have seen this crab-scuttle towards Rome before. When the Anglican Synod accepted women priests in 1992 numbers of high-profile Anglicans turned Catholic in disgust. The other theological differences — the Real Presence in the Eucharist, Papal infallibility, priestly celibacy — seem suddenly no longer to matter, compared with the horrible prospect of women priests.

The following is the sound of a nail being squarely hit by a hammer…

It would be refreshing if the Churches would step back from this stance, and make it clearer that the evil in adultery is not the sexual act but the betrayal of trust, the cruelty, the endangering of children’s happiness. The deep wickedness of rape and paedophilia is not about desire but about misuse of power, invasion, oppression and injury. The sinfulness of promiscuity and prostitution is not about sex but about using another human being for transient pleasure without caring for the physical and emotional damage you do. The Church’s ministry to gays could preach only honesty, gentleness, and commitment, rather than agonising about genital practices. Christianity could just grow up, and stop treating sex as if it were innately toxic or radioactive and yet irresistibly interesting.

Yes.

Let the Churches concentrate on condemning promiscuity, infidelity, exploitation, predation — whether gay or straight. Nobody asks them to go the full Gay Pride, bathhouse-culture route; but let them recognise kindness and mutual support as virtues, and bless all honest unions. Let them condemn proselytising from either side, making it clear that there is nothing cool or clever about random sexual tourism, any more than there is anything evil in being born gay. It just happens. Being gay can, without doing any violence to the Gospels, be accepted as a potential route to holiness.

It won’t be. They’ll squabble and fudge and cling to their hierarchies and their terrors, and some will scuttle to Rome and Rome will feel smug. And the rest of society will sigh and turn away, thinking that Christianity has nothing to offer. Howl, howl, howl!

Yes, yes, yes.  Go read the whole thing.  This has been your morning dose of Yes There Is Sanity In This World Now Go Get On With Your Own Life…

Friends who betrayed me with their votes for George Bush while the republicans were busy waging one of the most vicious anti-gay campaigns in American history.  Family members who love the sinner while hating the sin.  They smile in your face, and they stab you in the heart.  In the wake of Tim Hardaway’s very public bellyaching about much he hates gay people, Arthur Silber posts a first-rate fire and brimstone sermon up on his blog titled, We Are Not Freaks.   It’s addressed to all the ersatz liberals and progressives out there that Truman Capote was talking about when he said that "A faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room", but he could just as well have been speaking for me on the day after I watched a gay teenager being shoveled into an ex-gay program simply for liking himself just as he was.  That day I turned my back on all the people in my life who graciously extended their tolerance to me, but not, not really, their friendship and love.

My emailers agreed with my outrage, and they understood, at least in general terms, the source of my anger. Still, they wondered: "But, Arthur, why are you so angry? Do you think expressing that kind of anger will help to change anyone’s mind, or encourage others to try to look at these issues from a different perspective?" To explain my answer in part, I reposted yesterday an essay from two years ago: Living on the Inside…and Living on the Outside. In that piece, I detailed how and why it is undeniably true that those who enjoy the most privileged position in our culture — those who are white, heterosexual and male — cannot possibly understand, not completely, what it is like to be one of those who is shut out in different ways, and to varying degrees.

But even that essay is written from a perspective of some distance. It doesn’t fully capture the emotional reality of being marginalized, being excluded, and very often being ridiculed, and even demonized. This realization hit me once again with great force as I read a comment recently added to that lengthy thread at TAPPED. Here it is:

oh this is tedious, yet as mortally debilitating as any of the thousand cuts. what i feel, down to the core, is that i have again been brought to the fore of the class, denuded, so that the students can point and discuss the freakish example that i am, as if this were the anatomy class of In Human Bondage. except you are the freaking freak, pal. it makes me sick to hear you confess your elastic confusions, because i suffer them daily, but the primary sickness is your entitlement, your entitlement to be a jiving idiot, to muse in public about me, that I am expected to stand here as you cheerfully enumerate the social failings you participate in, do not regret, and therefore have no intention of changing. do you imagine that i live in any state of happiness because you have found room for me in your untested world view, or that I don’t know, every day of my life, that when push comes to shove you and your joshing buddies would shove me? do you somehow think, because a gay man describes your haircut, it somehow balances the force with which an entire being is declared revolting, and violently threatened, beginning with his very first memories? For your information you have not described me in any respect that is insightful, you have simply corralled me into a cage, whereby rudely pointing at me you demonstrate your limited understanding of the human heart and mind: I promise you that you are far from original in that enterprise. In fact, by so doing, you have described yourself. It is one thing to be ignorant, as we all are when it comes to fully understanding the prejudice that minorities we are not members of endure, but it is another to brag of it, which is the essence of your tone.

When you strip away all the verbiage, all the intellectual tap dancing, and all the efforts to "understand" and be "tolerant," that is the inescapable, the terrible bottom line: many of you think we are Freaks. Speaking for myself with regard to these issues, I don’t want you to "understand" me or to be "tolerant" of me. I don’t want you to "study" me, and try to graph all the various points of similarity and difference between us: I want you to recognize that I am completely and entirely a human being, just as you are. And I want you to understand fully what that means, and to genuinely mean it.

It is one thing to be openly hated and despised, as gays and lesbians are by many on the right. We’re used to that, and we got used to it a long time ago. As was required, we manufactured intellectual and emotional armor to protect ourselves. In the current climate, we have to put it on every single damned day. It weighs a great deal, and it exacts an awful price. But without it, we would suffer injuries too grievous to be borne.

But how much worse it is to be cajoled into taking off that armor — to hear you tell us that you understand we’re "just like you" in all the ways that matter, and that we’re really "just the same" — and then to read or hear about "how easy" you think it is to "make fun" of us, especially when our status as Freaks is too obvious. How much worse it is when we believe you, when you tell us you think we’re all equal — except that you can get married, while almost every leading Democrat will say, well, no, we can’t get married. But we can have "civil unions." Because, you see, Freaks don’t get married.

But we had believed you, so we took off the armor — and then you plunged the sword deep into our guts. You revealed that many of you actually do think we’re Freaks. Many of you don’t believe we’re really "just like you."

If you want to know exactly where I’m coming from these days, go on and read the whole thing.  We are not freaks.  We are human beings.  What should have been the most wonderful, magical, life affirming moments of our lives…falling in love…finding that soulmate…making a life together…has been turned into a brutal nightmare for some of us, and a difficult, heartbreakingly painful experience for most of us, and I’m beyond asking why.  The promise of love has been systematically ripped away from us for generations, and there are those who would take it away from us still, when we’ve only just begun to take it back for ourselves.  We can cut your hair.  We can decorate your house.  We can be the butt of TV jokes.  We can even have sex now.  But we can’t love. 

We can’t so much as kiss or hold hands in public without danger to our lives.  This from a New York Times article on the controversy following the Snicker’s Superbowl ad…A Kiss Too Far?

Yet gay-bashing still occurs routinely, Mr. Patton of the Anti-Violence Project said, even in neighborhoods like Chelsea in Manhattan, where the sight of two men kissing on the street can hardly be considered a frighten-the-horses proposition. “In January some men were leaving a bar in Chelsea,” saying goodbye with a kiss, Mr. Patton said. “One friend got into a taxi and then a car behind the taxi stopped and some guys jumped out and beat up the other two.” One victim of the attack, which is under investigation by the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, was bruised and shaken. The second had a broken jaw.

“The last time I was called a faggot was on Eighth Avenue,” said Joe Windish, a longtime New Yorker who now lives in Milledgeville, Ga., with his partner of many years. “I don’t have that here, and I’m an out gay man,” said Mr. Windish, whose neighbors in what he termed “the reddest of the red states” may be fundamentalist Christians who oppose gay marriages and even civil unions, but “who all like me personally.”

Tolerance has its limits, though, as Mr. Windish found when he and his partner took a vacation on a sleepy island off the coast of Georgia. “I became aware that if I held my partner’s hand, or kissed him in public, the friendliness would stop,” he said.

Imagine living in a world where you could not so much as hold the hand of the one you love without being attacked.

Reward Upped In Arizona Gay Bashings

(Scottsdale, Arizona) The reward for information leading to the arrest of a gang of men who attacked a gay couple outside a Scottsdale restaurant last December has been raised to $12,000 thanks to a donation from PFLAG.

Andrew Frost and Jean Rolland were set upon by as many as seven men as the couple walked out of the restaurant hand-in-hand.

Frost, 19, needed more than a dozen stitches to close wounds on his head and face. Rolland, 28, suffered many bumps and bruises.

Frost said that as he and Rolland exited the restaurant he heard someone yell "fag". He said he turned and saw two men. 

Frost said that he replied to the slur and one of the men punched him. He said that at least five others rushed from the restaurant and joined the attack.

Frost and Rolland have filed a police report, but no one at the restaurant seems to have seen anything. The couple said they had never seen their attackers before.

…but no one at the restaurant seems to have seen anything.  And that’s why I am not speaking now to a lot of people in my life that I used to speak to on an almost daily basis.  Lovers are viciously attacked for daring to love openly and joyfully and as a warning to the rest of us not to even attempt it.  It happens on the streets, it happens in the courtrooms, it happens behind the pulpit and in the pews, it happens on the campaign trail, it happens on the floor of congress and in the Oval Office and you don’t seem to have seen anything.  May you be dammed.

My first thought upon hearing this was, Okay…what happens to OutQ…?

To: SIRIUS Subscribers

Today is a very exciting day for SIRIUS customers. As you may have heard, SIRIUS Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio are merging to form the nation’s premier audio entertainment provider.

This combination of our two offerings will benefit you – our loyal listeners. As a single company, we’ll provide superior programming to you every day with the best of both SIRIUS and XM. Currently, XM and SIRIUS broadcast a wide range of commercial-free music channels, exclusive sports coverage, news, talk, and entertainment programming. Howard Stern. Oprah and Friends. The NFL. MLB. NBA. ESPN. CNBC. Fox News. Additionally, the combined company will be able to improve existing services such as real-time traffic information and rear-seat video as well as introduce new ones.

You see what’s missing from that list.  No, no…  Not just OutQ, but any indication that they’ve been providing something for people to listen to, who are sick and tired of all the right wing pap being broadcast out there, posturing as non-partisan news and information.  Fox News?  They tell us about Fox News (sic) and not Talk Left?  But Clear Channel owns a major stake in XM.

I have a Honda Accord, and since it came with a factory installed XM radio, the first thing I did was bellyache to XM about their lack of a gay channel like Sirius had.  I could have been shouting my complaints up at one of their satellites for all it mattered.  So shortly after I bought the Accord I yanked the factory radio out and spent $180 plus the cost of a new radio plus the cost of installation so I could listen to OutQ on Sirius.  

At the time Sirius had two other channels going for it that XM didn’t:  Swing Street and Air America.  But then Air America defected to XM and Sirius dropped Swing Street when they picked up Howard Stern, merging it’s programming into the god awful American Standards channel, which I think they call the Old Fart’s Channel internally.  Now it’s a sickening combination of big band swing and 1950s lounge music and I hate it. 

The Trance channel is now more a electro-pop channel except some evenings when it gets back to being hard core trance.  The only thing that hasn’t changed for the worse since I subscribed to Sirius is OutQ.  Well…and the 60s channel and the New Age channel (elevator music for my generation).  Basically I’m paying their subscription fees now just to listen to Michelangelo Signorile and Sunset Cruse and a couple other channels I wouldn’t have yanked the old radio out for since XM carried them too.  Actually, XM’s 40s channel is much better then Sirius’ god awful American Standards channel.

For me the promise satellite radio wasn’t so much that you could drive from one end of the country to the other without having to constantly retune your radio all the way, but that niche content that wasn’t profitable regionally, could work on a national scale.  Radio that actually spoke to gay audiences only happened in some large cities, and then only for a few hours at week at most.  But with the ability to reach the entire country from a satellite, my hope was that we’d finally have something that regarded us as its primary target audience, instead of "oh…yeah…and you gays too."

Ironically, there’s not a lot I actually like on OutQ.  Derek & Romaine are way too crude for my liking.  I just won’t listen to that.  OutQ in the Morning is almost as bad sometimes.  But I can forgive any gay channel that kind of crap that broadcasts Signorile and Sunset Cruse.  Especially Sunset Cruse…which is a lovely gay dedicate-a-song-to-your-sweetheart program.  I just love it.  After a long week of reading about one goddamned attack on the gay community after another in the news, Sunset Cruse is just the thing I need to remind me that love still has a chance in this world.

My fear right now in this proposed merger is that all that will simply vanish just like my Swing Channel did when either the bean counters decide it isn’t pulling in enough listeners, or the stock block that belongs to Clear Channel (they own a major stake in XM), decides they don’t want any of that faggot stuff on their airwaves.  The reason competition is a good thing isn’t to drive down prices, but to encourage producers to exploit markets their competition isn’t, and to keep the top dogs responsive to All their customers.

From The San Francisco Chronicle…   An evangelical Christian minister from Missouri, has come to San Francisco to teach gays and lesbians how to become straight.  And how to lie for Jesus …

The Brodeurs — who do weekly outreach in the Castro to encourage gay people to re-evaluate their sexual orientation — said they invited Desert Stream to use their church for the seminar. It cost $35 and drew participants from congregations around the Bay Area.

"Their message is about bringing the love of Jesus into people’s hearts," she said. "It’s not ‘Don’t do this. You’re evil, you’re going to hell.’ "

Well that’s certainly a welcome change from the usual hellfire and damnation spew isn’t it?

Not… 

But a workshop handout written by Desert Stream founder Andy Comiskey ticked off a list of "wickedness," including lesbianism, sexual violence and child molestation, and stated: "For those who overcome the darkness, a rich and eternal inheritance. For those who refuse to overcome, eternal judgment."

Feel the love.  One of the protesters outside the seminar related his story of how he’d been in an ex-gay program for eight years and it nearly drove him to suicide.  But what you have to understand about these ministries is that what happens to the people in them doesn’t matter.

"I went through depression, major anxiety, panic disorder and attempted suicide."

They didn’t take him in to cure him.  They took him in to use him in their little dirty war on the ability of people to freely love and be loved with or without the permission of the tribal witch doctor.  There is no reverence for the sacred that begins with a lie.  That seminar wasn’t about letting love come into a human heart, whether it’s the love a same sex couple find in each other or the love of Christ or the love of God Almighty.  Love knows no authority but itself.  That’s the problem with it.  That’s why they want it out of our hearts altogether.  Our hearts have to be emptied.  So that they can fill them with their will.  If it kills a few of us…so what?