I don’t know why so many people seem so surprised about this…

The Enemy At Home – Dinesh D’Souza

Publisher Comments:

Whenever Muslims charge that the war on terror is really a war against Islam, Americans hasten to assure them they are wrong. Yet as Dinesh D’Souza argues in this powerful and timely polemic, there really is a war against Islam. Only this war is not being waged by Christian conservatives bent on a moral crusade to impose democracy abroad but by the American cultural left, which for years has been vigorously exporting its domestic war against religion and traditional morality to the rest of the world.

D’Souza contends that the cultural left is responsible for 9/11 in two ways: by fostering a decadent and depraved American culture that angers and repulses other societies — especially traditional and religious ones — and by promoting, at home and abroad, an anti-American attitude that blames America for all the problems of the world.

Islamic anti-Americanism is not merely a reaction to U.S. foreign policy but is also rooted in a revulsion against what Muslims perceive to be the atheism and moral depravity of American popular culture. Muslims and other traditional people around the world allege that secular American values are being imposed on their societies and that these values undermine religious belief, weaken the traditional family, and corrupt the innocence of children. But it is not "America" that is doing this to them, it is the American cultural left. What traditional societies consider repulsive and immoral, the cultural left considers progressive and liberating.

Taking issue with those on the right who speak of a "clash of civilizations," D’Souza argues that the war on terror is really a war for the hearts and minds of traditional Muslims — and traditional peoples everywhere. The only way to win the struggle with radical Islam is to convince traditional Muslims that America is on their side.

(emphasis mine)  Note the appeals to traditional cultures scattered throughout.  There’s a glaring problem at the core of the book, and what’s remarkable to me is that so many people see it, and yet they don’t.  D’Souza’s book, which places the blame for the 9-11 terrorist attacks squarely on Liberals and western liberal democracy, has been disturbing the comfortable clubhouse atmostphere on the right ever since it came out.  That’s not surprising.  Here’s Stanley Kurtz, dancing around it…

Not only does D’Souza downplay and deny the profound influence of Islam on our current dilemma, he ignores an array of non-religious, or only marginally religious, factors that his own explanation is (or ought to be) directly tied to.

With all the post-9/11 attention to Islam, for example, we’ve given short shrift to Middle Eastern kinship structures-like the Muslim preference for marriage to the father’s brother’s daughter (see “Root Causes”). These marriage and family patterns inhibit political and economic development, block immigrant assimilation, and are indeed directly threatened by the sort of cultural productions D’Souza decries. Yet, while Islamists may seize upon Hollywood films and international productions of the Vagina Monologues as symbols of their underlying objections to modernity, the more important sources of conflict are the distinctively Muslim social practices that generate such complaints to begin with.

In other words, if immigrant British Muslims weren’t secluding their daughters in hopes of preserving family honor and protecting an already promised marriage to a cousin back in Pakistan, they’d be far less upset with Western movies in the first place. What’s driving the distress is less the movies that a daughter sees at college than the fact that British daughters go off to college at all, freely meet men there, and freely choose their husbands from among those men. Other British immigrant communities, with less restrictive family practices, may occasionally grouse about cultural depravity. Yet the complaints are less frequent, less deeply felt, and far less deadly. It’s the marriage practice, not the movie, that counts.

Not quite Stanley…but close.  Here’s Hugh Hewitt, also nearly getting it…

To give us insight into the Jihadist loathing for American culture, D’Souza relies on the writings of the father of modern Radical Islam, Sayyid Qutb. Qutb spent two years in America and then returned to the Middle East thoroughly disgusted by American culture. He spent the rest of his life chronicling his hatred for America’s decadent society.

Here’s where D’Souza is dishonest or careless: He informs the reader that Qutb died in 1966. He fails to inform the reader that the time Qutb spent in America was between 1948 and 1950.

Since D’Souza blames our culture for much of the Islamic world’s animus towards America, this is no small matter. The culture of the 1940’s wasn’t what it is today. Perhaps Qutb was scandalized by pop culture products of the time like the overt raciness of “The Best Years of Our Lives” or the raw sexuality contained on the typical Bing Crosby record; the man was after all a lunatic. But the culture of the late 1940’s contained none of the things that D’Souza so obviously deplores and that he postulates are inflaming the Muslim world. The 1940’s had no filthy hippies, no gangsta rap, no gay weddings.

D’Souza may think it would be a swell thing for us to turn our cultural clock back to 1949. No big deal there – to each his own. The point is that even if D’Souza were able to wave a wand and pull off such a trick, the Jihadists wouldn’t care. Qutb briefly immersed himself in our late 1940’s incarnation and emerged full of hatred.

To his everlasting credit, Hewitt specifically denounces D’Souza’s central claim:

Second, and this is also no small thing, it’s not liberals’ fault. Radical Islam hates a respectable Church-going Presbyterian family man every bit as much as it hates a spoiled libertine like Paris Hilton. As far as radical Islam is concerned, the two are in the same basic class; they’re both infidels. Short of conversion or surrender, there is nothing our society can do to appease radical Islam.

This is all true…but the problem civilization faces today isn’t specific to radical Islam. 

I think the best review of The Enemy At Home I’ve read so far is Bruce Bower’s over at The Stranger.  But Bower, while conservative, isn’t a winger, and he is willing to name the nature of the betrayal that D’Souza’s book represents…

D’Souza (who says he is Catholic) invites us to “imagine how American culture looks and feels to someone who has been raised in a traditional society… where homosexuality is taboo and against the law…. One can only imagine the Muslim reaction to televised scenes of homosexual men exchanging marriage vows in San Francisco and Boston.” Let it be recalled that D’Souza is referring here to a “traditional society” in which girls of 13 or 14 are routinely forced to marry their cousins, and in which the groom, if his conjugal attentions are resisted on the wedding night, is encouraged by his new in-laws to take his bride by force. Such are the sensitivities that, D’Souza laments, are so deeply offended by the American left…

He’s quick to warn, moreover, that in discussing potentially troubling aspects of Muslim culture, “we should be on guard against the blinders of ethnocentrism.” In short, while inviting conservative Christians to buy the idea that Muslim family values are essentially equivalent to their own, he wants them to overlook the multitudinous—and profoundly disturbing—ways in which they aren’t. He labors consistently to minimize this value gap—and thereby reinforce his argument that today’s terrorism (far from perpetrating a centuries-long tradition of violent jihad) is, quite simply, a reaction to America’s post-’60s moral dissipation. He would have his readers believe that if only the U.S. returned to the values of the Eisenhower era, our Muslim adversaries would let us be. But he deliberately obscures the mountains of evidence that for “traditional Muslims,” even small-town 1940s America wouldn’t do.

The question is, would it even do for D’Souza and his neighbors in the kook pews.  I’m not being melodramatic here.

For those who cherish freedom, 9/11 was intensely clarifying. Presumably it, and its aftermath, have been just as clarifying for D’Souza, whose book leaves no doubt whatsoever that he now unequivocally despises freedom—that open homosexuality and female “immodesty” are, in his estimation, so disgusting as to warrant throwing one’s lot in with religious totalitarians…the book he’s written is nothing less than a call for America’s destruction. He is the enemy at home. Treason is the only word for it.

Yes.  Yes it is.  And yet…how many times have we heard the pulpit thumpers of the religious right calling down God’s wrath on America for it’s sins?  Didn’t Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwall state flatly, while the rubble that was once the World Trade Center was still smoldering, that America, specifically American immorality, was to blame for 9-11?  Isn’t there a traveling preacher named Fred Phelps running around the nation hoisting signs at the funerals of dead American soldiers (like he did the funerals of gay people like Matthew Shepard), that praise the terrorists for killing them?  The threat America, the threat civilization itself faces today, isn’t radical Islam, it’s religious fundamentalism.  But you can appreciate why Kurtz and Hewitt are loath to say so…that’s a key part of the republican base nowadays after all isn’t it.

Critics on the right dance around one of the key distinguishing features of that fundamentalism, preferring to refer it delicately a reaction to "immodesty", but note that it isn’t the immodesty of males that’s the issue.  Kurtz nearly says it when he talks about the culture of arranged marriages in Middle eastern cultures.

…for D’Souza, it’s enough to note that the virtues praised by most traditional cultures make up “pretty much the same list.” D’Souza goes so far as to equate “the traditional morality that holds sway in all traditional cultures” with the “virtual moral consensus in America prior to the 1960’s.”

That would certainly have surprised the 1878 Supreme Court, which unanimously rejected the practice of polygamy on the grounds of its incompatibility with democracy. (See “Polygamy Versus Democracy.”) Polygamy, the court said, embodies a “patriarchal principle” characteristic of societies in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa — a principle incompatible with the American system of government.

Now polygamous relationships where they’re entered into freely by both men and women don’t necessarily embody that patriarchal principal.  But where it becomes an enforced polygyny that regards women as the property of men then it isn’t just incompatible with our system of government, it is anathema to the principals of individual liberty and equal justice that is its philosophical bedrock.  You simply cannot sustain a democracy where people are literally regarded as property, as the United States found out during the horrors of our civil war.  That includes women.  And where you find this deeply entrenched religious fundamentalism, you inevitably find a bedrock of hatred toward sexual freedom.  Fundamentalism hates all freedom, but in particular, it absolutely despises the sexual freedom of women. 

And D’Souza has made it abundantly clear in the past, what he thinks of that…

After his 1983 graduation from Dartmouth College, D’Souza moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked for Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a conservative organization strongly critical of coeducation, affirmative action, and campus access to birth control. As writer and editor-in-chief for Prospect, the organization’s magazine, D’Souza wrote a March 1984 cover story identifying a Freshman undergraduate who had begun a sexual relationship with another student against her mother’s wishes. D’Souza offered details of the woman’s sex life, and criticized Princeton University for paying the student’s tuition fees after the student’s mother withdrew financial support.

The ensuing scandal was reported in The New York Times.  D’Souza claimed that the woman’s name had been published as the result of a "proofreading error" and that he "care[s] about the girl; that’s why [he] wrote the story."

No, no…I strongly doubt that was any kind of accident.  What D’Souza was doing there was little different from what the Saudi morality police do every day when they see women who, in their considered opinion, are behaving immodestly and smack them upside the head if they’re feeling good, or cut it off altogether if they’re feeling…well…traditional.  

If you want to know where someone stands in the war between civilization and fundamentalism, their attitudes toward the dignity and equality of women is a good place to start looking.  The fundamentalist hatred of modernity points back, time and again, to its core contempt for women.  And the republican base is just brimming with it.

A few days ago I posted this cartoon about Bill Donohue (he of of the Catholic League) bellyaching that the Edward’s campaign had hired two "trash talking" bloggers, who in his esteemed opinion were anti catholic bigots.  What had apparently set him off was the writing of one of them, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, about the Catholic Church’s war on contraception and abortion.  Well…you can see where this is going…right?

Because I had the nerve to be critical of the Catholic church’s stance on birth control and abortion—nevermind their political opposition to distributing condoms to fight HIV, a stance that has helped usher thousands and possibly millions to their untimely deaths—I’ve gotten a number of letters from people who call themselves “Christians”, as Bill Donohue also calls himself.

Bill managed to get his faithful up in arms over what this woman wrote.  Here is a sampling of what they wrote back…

Andy Driggers from Dallas, TX was also so moved by my criticisms of religious anti-choicers, that he wrote:

Problem with women like you, you just need a good fucking from a real man! Living in Texas myself, I know you haven’t found that real Texan yet. But once your liberal pro feminist ass gets a real good fucking, you might see the light. Until then, enjoy your battery operated toys b/c most real men wouldn’t want to give you the fucking you deserve b/c the shit that would come out of you ears.

An example, from Paul Bernard of Scottsdale, AZ:

i like the way you trash talk i don’t particularly want to have sex with you but i would like a blow job.

Bud Phelps, another person who opposes "bigotry", as defined by right wing shill Bill Donohue.

It’s just too bad your mother didn’t abort you. You are nothing more than a filthy mouth slut. I bet a couple of years in Iraq being raped and beaten daily would help you appreciate America a little. Need a plane ticket ?

Romanco De Leone was also moved by Donohue’s poignant claims about insulating the Catholic church from legitimate criticisms.

YOU RACIST WHORE. FAT UGLY BITCH. SUCK MY LONG COCK ASSHOLE I HOPE YOU KIDS NEVER LIVE AND YOUR PARENTS DIE A TRAGIC DEATH YOU ASSHOLE BITCH!
I HOPE YOUR WOMB IS BARREN AND YOUR CAREER PLUMMETS TO HELL YOU BITCH

Whore.  Bitch.  Slut.  You just need a good fucking from a real man.  There’s the enemy civilization is facing today.  There’s the enemy civilization has always faced.  And there’s the burning core of hatred it feels for it.  We’ve taken their wimmin away from them.  And with that comes all the primitive instincts for survival and aggression of the cornered savage.  They despise civilization, because it frees women from obedience to them; and with that goes the only way they know how to sire children, and acquire status. 

You can argue that American fundamentalists aren’t as violent as Islamic radicals in the grand scheme of things, but I would argue that’s because they don’t feel quite so powerless against their own societies as the Islamists do against the west.  A decisive victory in the culture wars by liberals and moderates against fundamentalism, particularly in the struggle against the independence of the courts, a decisive shift in power toward the democrats and against the republicans, and I believe we’ll all be singing a different tune about that.

And Hewitt, perhaps, is more right then he knows.  The church-going Presbyterian family man, provided he has even a vaguely live and let live attitude, is hated every bit as much, and regarded as no different at all, from the spoiled libertine in the eyes of the Fundamentalist.  He could be opposed to abortion, and yet if he  does not object to contraception then he might as well be an abortionist.  He could be opposed to same-sex marriage and if he is willing to grant gay couples Any kind of legal status, even merely hospital visitation rights, then he might as well be a homosexual himself.  If he is willing to grant people any kind of sexual freedom, no matter how limited, then he is the enemy, and he must be destroyed. 

You can argue that the entire religious right mindset is one of assumed priviledge and status over others.  That, we are the people of God and the rest of you are the devil’s tools attitude.  Nationalism.  Racism.  Homophobia.   But I am convinced now that it all reaches its climax in its need to dominate women.  Reading the rhetoric and watching all the flag waving going back and forth between the middle eastern radicals and our own home grown ones since 9-11, I am convinced now that at its core the war between civilization and fundamentalism is a fight who owns women’s bodies.  Everything else about it springs from that one central obsession.  The attacks on science, the attacks on liberal democracy, public education, science, contraception, sexual license, pop culture…anything that enables a world where women might even want to choose for themselves is the enemy, and must be destroyed. 

Even I think, the war on homosexuality.  Notice how it’s almost always male homosexuality that they bellyache the most about.  People smirk that it’s because lesbians titulate them, but in the kook pews lesbians are thoroughly destested too, because they reject men.  But with gay males the hatred seems to burn a tad hotter, and I think it’s more then their regarding us as traitors to our gender.  We’re the ones whose sexuality demonstrates that males can take their lovers as equals, that a male doesn’t have to be dominant, that he can be taken and well as take, can give themselves wholeheartedly to their mate as well as recieve, can…well…be fucked after all…and still be gloriously, assertively male.  How do you beat into a woman’s head that men were created by God to be the head of the household, to which they must Gracefully Submit, when that kind of thing is going on?  We are males whose sexuality completely denies the theology of natural male dominance.  The street punk may feel his brittle manhood threatened by the sight of two guys holding hands and lash out, but this is why the mullahs say we have to be stoned to death.  We break the sexual pecking order.

At the core of its hatred, with all it’s higher principles stripped away, fundamentalism is about women, of that I am currently convinced.  Western civilization and its liberal democracies have taken their wimmin away.  For that they have to be destroyed.

Is it really so surprising that a man who plastered the intimate details of a female college student’s sex life across the pages of his magazine because she was defying her parents, that rails against birth control, co-habitation and women who find fulfillment outside of the home, would write a book essentially siding with terrorists from a "traditional culture" that views rape as a legitimate means of controlling its women?  No.  Not really.  What’s surprising is that more of them don’t say so outright like he did.  I’ve been waiting now, pretty much since 9-11, for someone on the far right to write the book D’Souza did.  If I’m surprised about anything, it’s that it’s taken so long.

I got a phone call a few moments ago from a local newspaper concerning one of my posts and the follow-up comments to it.  I’m at home, telecommuting today because the roads here in Baltimore are in pretty bad shape after all the sleet and freezing rain we had last night and this morning.  I heard the answering machine pick up and a voice ask if they’d called the guy who runs this blog.  There seemed to be some slight confusion over what kind of a blog this is and I just want to take a moment to clarify that for some of you who may have tuned in late.  I can understand the confusion.  Blogging isn’t what it was back when I started doing it.  It’s becoming it’s own big business now.  But that was never what I intended with mine.

My name is Bruce Garrett and I live in Baltimore, Maryland.  I’m a 53 year old single gay guy.  I’m a senior software engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins here in Baltimore.  I paint and draw, have an insatiable camera bug, and spend too much time in front of a computer, or at my drafting table, and not nearly enough out looking for a boyfriend.  But I’m a deathly shy sort, and probably that’s why I do a lot of my socializing on the Net.  I’ve been addicted to the online world since the mid 1980s, and the first PC BBS systems.  As a gay man especially, this technology has always appealed to me.  I am certain in my own mind, that PC networks have been a powerful force in the struggle for gay civil rights ever since the Reagan years.  They allows us to see ourselves, to see our lives, in our own words, in our own stories straight from the source and not second hand, filtered through the media of the heterosexual majority.  When I was a teenager back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the only things I knew about gay people, was what I was told by heterosexuals.  But we no longer have to see ourselves through the eyes of heterosexuals anymore.  I thank the personal computer for that.  But then, I’m a bit of a computer geek too.

This is my blog.  I started it way back in 2000 as a personal online diary of thoughts and stuff going on in my life that my scattered-all-across-the-country family and friends could tune into whenever they wanted to know what was up with Bruce.  Back then, blogs were still a pretty new thing, and mostly the kind of personal online diaries that I started here.  And that’s basically how I still think of this one, except it’s become a tad more political now then I’d thought it ever would be.  Chalk that down to the times we live in.  I had one other thought in mind when I started it, and that was by putting my day to day life out there for strangers to see, I might make some small difference in how they saw gay people, and perhaps how some gay folk might see themselves.  The more openly we all live our lives, the less effective the hate monger’s tales about us are.

At first I my site was just a basic web site account I got with my yearly Newsguy Usenet News account.  It was located at extra.newsguy.com/~bgarrett.  In December 2001 I was talking with my friend Jon Larimore, who used to run the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS in Arlington Virginia.  He was running the Zzapp Internet Service at the time, and I asked him how hard it would be to set up my own web site with my own domain.  Not hard at all says he, and there and then he offered to host me free of charge on his servers because he felt my words should have a place of their own on the web.  We sat down together and checked the domain registry at Network Solutions and lo and behold brucegarrett.com and brucegarrett.net were available.  I was surprised and delighted that nobody had taken them yet, and I snapped them up.  Then Jon set me up with space on his servers and I moved my pages from Newsguy to their new home at brucegarrett.com.

I started my blog fresh the following January, because I wanted a better look to it then the bare text file that it was previously.  And I added a cartoon page.  In my high school years, my political cartoons about Nixon and Vietnam were all over the school.  I decided to take up political cartooning again, in part for something to set my web site apart from the others, and in part because it’s an art form I love, and I’d been very disappointed that the mainstream political cartoonists were so skittish about tackling the gay civil rights struggle (though some of them have become more willing to lately).  I figured I’d add a photo gallery and some of my fiction later.  Some of you poking around here may occasionally see references to The Skywatchers of Aden.  That’s a fantasy/Alternate Earth series I’d created some years ago.  At one time I had about a half dozen short stories in the series, and two novel length stories posted here.  I’ve since taken them down for some major re-writes, and to add illustrations when I manage to find a few more hours in a day.

Jon has since retired, and Zzapp was sold, and last year I moved my web site to Winters Web Works, the folks who also host This Modern World.  Jonah Winters runs a great web hosting service, I’ve been with him a year now, and I would recommend him to anyone. 

Apart from the cartoon page, I never intended this blog to be primarily a political thing.  It’s just sort of turned out that way, because there is so much in the news nowadays that makes me angry and I need a place to vent.  For years that place was the Usenet newsgroup alt.politics.homosexuality.  I was a regular participant in that newsgroup from 1992 to 2002, and then my online venting pretty much took up residence here.  I think the reason for it is that I can more easily link to stuff on a web page then in a Usenet posting, which ideally should be plain ascii text only.  I can’t for example, easily include images of crap like this…

…in a Usenet post.  But it’s the sort of thing I think people need to see to understand what’s happening to their gay and lesbian neighbors in this country now, and why we fight.  So now I pretty much vent exclusively on my blog.  Occasionally I vent in the comments of other people’s blogs.

So that’s it.  This is the personal online space of one middle aged (there…I said it) gay guy.  That’s still really all I visualize it as being.  It isn’t topical, in the sense that Eschaton or Daily KOS or Pam’s House Blend or Box Turtle Bulletin or Ex-Gay Watch are topical.  This is my soapbox, my message board to the world and my art gallery.  I have a fairly small, but it seems very regular set of readers here, judging from my server logs, most of whom don’t email or leave comments but keep coming back all the same and I am just amazed and gratified by that (thank you!).  My brother in Oceano pings this place regularly.  Some old classmates and friends do also.  My regular traffic here seems to break down mostly between folks who come to read the blog, and folks who ping my cartoon page.  I keep trying to nudge folks from the one to look at the other with cross links but it seems that some people just want to look at the cartoons, and some just want to read the blog.  That’s fine.  I’m pleased and amazed that complete strangers can come here and find something they like enough to keep coming back.  I don’t advertise this blog like some others are doing now.  I doubt I ever will.  If I ever get around to producing cartoon books or photo books I’ll probably advertise those.

You gotta love this technology.  Once upon a time the only way we had of seeing ourselves was through the news media and commercial pop culture.  Now we can talk to each other, listen to each other, firsthand.  Via other people’s blogs I’ve discovered so many things about my world I would never have discovered otherwise.  I’ve found new music.  New artists to watch.  Books and essays I would never have heard of otherwise.  Places to visit.  Things to think about.  Often, when news is breaking somewhere, I can find local bloggers and get the local take on things firsthand. These are amazing times to be living in.  They say the world is a much smaller place now, but I can remember when my world pretty much ended at the horizon line.  If I wanted to know what was going on beyond it, I had to wait for the evening newscast, or the morning paper.  Now I just go find out.  My world, and yours, is bigger now.  Much, much bigger, and vastly more engaging.  Lets hear it for blogs.

You want to know how much the bigots hate us?   Have a look at this latest tract from winger puppy Ben Shapiro on how the homosexuals are plotting to destroy the institution of marriage…

There are those who do not believe that the institution of marriage is under assault. There are those who do not believe that same-sex marriage is a knowing attempt to undermine the nature of marriage. There are those who do not believe that many homosexuals bear a particular animus for heterosexual marriage, and have designs beyond mere tolerance.

Then there are those of us who live in the real world.

You need to pay attention to what Shapiro is saying because it’s all there, plain as day. Gay people in his reckoning want the right to marry Specifically in order to destroy marriage. And because we hate it so much we’re willing to throw our very selves at it to destroy it.  Dig it.  According to Shapiro, our ultimate weapon of choice for destroying marriage is…us.  Shapiro isn’t merely saying in his Human Events article that we want to destroy marriage, not merely that we hate the institution of marriage because we know that it represents a spiritual state that only heterosexuals can enter into, he’s saying that we know just how depraved and unfit our relationships are, so we want to have our relationships embraced by it, in order that our depravity will destroy it.  If you still have trouble believing how thoroughly the gutter has demonized homosexual people in their own minds, read that article. It says it all. When Ben Shapiro looks at gay people, he simply does not see human beings. He can’t. He sees only monsters. This is how bigots think.

What provokes him is the initiative filed in Washington State recently, in the wake of the supreme court ruling last year that the state had a legitimate interest in restricting marriage to opposite sex couples for the welfare of children. Activists in the state have simply called the heterosexual majority on it, by filing a referendum of their own to make having children mandatory in order to be married. No children, no marriage. Of course no one expects it to pass, but that’s not to say there won’t be a lot of fun to be had watching the religious right argue that the ability to bear children is only a barrier to marriage for same sex couples.

Shapiro sees the weakness here. Basing the arguments against same-sex marriage on children makes no sense if you’re going to let opposite sex couples who will not or can not have children marry anyway. The exception disproves the rule, and makes it clear that the issue isn’t children at all, but homosexuality. The problem for Ben and his kind, is that in defending the exclusion of same sex couples from marriage simply because they are same sex couples, the argument then becomes chillingly honest in its core bigotry.

Shapiro’s article rises to almost Orson Scott Card levels of contempt for the inner lives of homosexual people in its matter-of-fact exaltation of heterosexual coupling as something sacred and divine.  But as usual with the right, the rhetoric of the sacred is merely excusing not devotional.  A squirt or two of Righteous Men Of God perfume sprayed over the stench of that open sewer they call their conscience, in the hope that it will be a tad less obvious to anyone with a nose…

Advocates of same-sex marriage argue that gender is literally meaningless. It is for that reason that they compare gender to race in legal contexts…

Well I don’t know anyone supporting same-sex marriage who thinks gender is literally meaningless, only that in this particular context, a legal, secular covenant of marriage, it’s irrelevant. There is just no factual basis for asserting otherwise.

It isn’t children…

If gender is meaningless, children do not need both mother and father; a father and a father, two mothers, six fathers and a mother — any or all may suffice. To homosexual marriage proponents, the fact that only the sexual union between men and women produces children is an unfortunate accident of nature.

But, this is exactly what Washington State referendum throws back in the faces of crackpots like Shapiro. In fact, children have no bearing whatsoever on the ability of a couple to marry or not. You are not required to have children, you are not required to be fit to raise children, you are not even required to be Capable of having your own biological children. All you have to be, is an opposite sex couple. And here Ben illustrates perfectly the reason why that’s purely an animus based form of discrimination…

Gender is not meaningless, of course. The radical individualism that denies all distinction between men and women is deeply pernicious. It denies the spiritual in mankind. It denies the obvious physical and spiritual bounty springing from traditional marriage…In one sense, Washington’s same-sex advocates do us a favor: They make clear that in order to deny homosexual marriage, we must uphold the beautiful and natural distinctions between men and women. They also make clear that we must uphold the value of heterosexuality over homosexuality. We must take up the gauntlet and, in doing so, vindicate the possibility of a higher spiritual elevation through the deepest possible human relationship.

(emphasis mine) 

And there it is: Homosexuals don’t love…they just have sex…

Shapiro’s position is that marriage is a sacred institution that same sex couples are simply incapable of entering into, not merely because they don’t have the right combination of genitals, but because they do not, Can Not, love one another as deeply, as wholeheartedly, as devotedly as heterosexuals do.  Heterosexual love is spiritual.  What homosexuals do is merely carnal.

This isn’t exactly the first time I’ve heard this argument. I’ve had people tell me to my face as far back as my teen years that they flat-out didn’t believe that a same sex couple could possibly be capable of loving each other as deeply or as wholeheartedly as a heterosexual couple.  And this is the unspoken (sometimes spoken outright) premise behind ever dolled up statistic you’ve ever read about how promiscuous homosexuals are.  Homosexuals don’t love…they just have sex…  Now…re-read that first part I quoted you…

There are those who do not believe that the institution of marriage is under assault. There are those who do not believe that same-sex marriage is a knowing attempt to undermine the nature of marriage. There are those who do not believe that many homosexuals bear a particular animus for heterosexual marriage, and have designs beyond mere tolerance.

Then there are those of us who live in the real world.

A particular animus for heterosexual marriage… So…follow the thinking here: Homosexuals are depraved. So depraved they cannot possibly enter into the kinds of loving and devoted intimate relationships that heterosexuals do. To even consider putting their dirty, brief, barren sexual assignations on the same plain as heterosexual love amounts to a despicable attack on the very human capacity to love and cherish, body and soul, ’till death do you part. Heterosexual love is spiritual. Homosexuality is just empty lustful rutting, utterly devoid of any deep spiritual meaning for the people involved.

But here’s the problem with all this: if homosexuals are incapable of feeling that kind of tender, cherishing human love, then why are they so damn insistent about having the right to marry? What is all this crap about securing their relationships, providing for one another, hospital visitation and all that? Why would homosexuals even care about all that? Why aren’t they all just laughing it off that they can’t get married? Oh…look at all those silly heterosexuals, going on about that love thing again…how boring and pointless… Why do they fight for their sterile relationships so fiercely? What could their cheap tricks, their empty, barren assignations, possibly mean to them?

It must be envy. It must be envy turned to hate. Homosexuals must be so utterly depraved that they want to drag everyone else down into their gutter too. Because they can’t bear to witness the sight of that higher spiritual elevation, that deepest possible human relationship that they can never enter into themselves.

Next time someone hears this little gutter crawling maggot use the phrase "Love the sinner, hate the sin", or something like it, please laugh in his face. If any side in this fight is incapable of experiencing the emotion of love, it’s the one that keeps insisting that love is something you feel for a gender, not a person. No Ben…lust is what you feel for a gender. It’s how we’re wired as sexual beings.  And yes…most people mate to the opposite sex.  But some of us mate to the same sex.  Love is what transcends all that, and takes it to that higher plain that you know absolutely nothing whatsoever about, because you can’t see the person, for the gender.

Advocates of same-sex marriage argue that gender is literally meaningless.

That’s simply ignorant. What the right asserts is that gender is everything. What anyone with half a brain knows is that there is more to a person then their gender. But this kind of thinking past surface appearances has always been hard for right wingers to get their minds wrapped around. Consider the difficulty they’ve always had comprehending that there is more to a person then the color of their skin. Get one of these drooling morons started on The Bell Curve sometime. Go ahead. It’ll be fun.

It’s probably somewhat easier for a gay person to see the confusion here then a straight person. Because heterosexuals mate to the opposite sex, it’s all too easy for them to mistake the intimate and spiritual complementary nature of two lovers for their gender. But the complement isn’t the gender, it’s the person. Otherwise, any two random opposite sex pairs must be equally capable of experiencing that same spiritual intimacy and clearly that just simply isn’t true.   Some people are not only incompatible, but explosively so.  And most of us know all this from our day to day experience in that real world right wingers can’t bear to look at because their cheapshit conceits wouldn’t survive it.   Some people just plain don’t get along.  And some people…just can’t live without each other.

If homosexual sex wasn’t rewarding and satisfying to homosexuals then we wouldn’t do that.  So much so goddamned obvious…right?  Yes you babbling idiot, the parts fit.  And I’m here to tell you they work very well in that configuration thank you.  The first time I put my hands on a guy I desired, felt the muscle and bone under his skin, something deep down inside of me Just Lit Up.  I had no idea what the word ‘passion’ meant before that.  I sure as hell knew what it meant afterward.  If homosexual sex wasn’t rewarding and satisfying to homosexuals then we wouldn’t do that.

But it takes more then sex to make a marriage.  It takes more then a sexually compatible gender.  Any couple, gay or straight, whose only common ground between them is sex, isn’t likely to last long.  Sex can seal an intimate soul-to-soul bond between two people.  It can join a couple together where there is love, and lift them both to that higher spiritual plain.  But it cannot put love someplace where it isn’t. You cannot make sex the basis of a marriage, it simply won’t work.  What makes it work, is the way two people complement each other deep down inside. It is the people, not their gender, that make a marriage.

It doesn’t take a radical individualist to see how this works, just someone with even a meager regard for the essential beauty and dignity of the human race. We are not ants in an anthill, or bees in a beehive, each of us predestined to live out the measure of our lives according to our biological caste. We are human beings, each of us endowed with our own unique personality and consciousness. That diversity among individuals is what has made us so successful as a species. But it also means that we have somewhat complicated love lives. It’s easy to jump in the sack for a one night stand with a willing date…that’s just an instinct that’s older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates. It’s much, Much harder to find a soulmate and make a life together with them. If gender was all there was to it, that wouldn’t be true.  The country music singers would have to find something else besides broken hearts and lonely nights to sing about.

But human cultures for generations and even today some cultures still, have tried to behave as if it Were true. Arranged marriages. Strict rules on marrying outside your faith, or your class, or your race. As if the human heart knows these things more then it knows the beloved person within. If anything destroyed marriage the way the Ben Shapiros of the world knew it, it was the Enlightenment, and Democracy. But then religious fanatics and secular totalitarians have long despise both of these human events.

The ironies here are monumental. You have a political movement that ostentatiously stands for individual freedom against big government and the so-called nanny state, that categorically rejects the fact that the most spiritual and intimate of all human relationships is between two individual people, and not a couple of faceless gender stereotypes. You have them arguing in all seriousness that this most intimate and spiritual of human relationships only exists to benefit society, rather then the two people whose lives are at the center of it. You have a political movement that stands squarely against Darwin, and puts on a really swell show of moral outrage at the very idea that human beings are part of the animal kingdom too, arguing that a biological fact we share with nearly every other vertebrate species on this good earth counts for more then the unique humanity of the individuals who make up a couple. And, most amazingly of all, here is a political movement that avails itself of every excuse it can grab to bellyache about the sexualization of America, telling us that it’s the sex a couple has that makes a marriage, not the love they feel for, and give to, each other. How much more of this do people have to see before they finally get it, that the religious right and their American conservative enablers are to marriage, as brothels are to chastity?

They don’t give a good goddamn about marriage. They care about power.  They care a Lot about power.  Here’s their spirituality: They want to tell us how to worship, what churches we can go to, and when and what God to believe in and how to pray to it. They want to tell us who we can marry, and why, and when we can have sex with them, and when we can’t and why. They want us to understand that how much we may love someone it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether or not we get their permission.  Their permission to worship.  Their permission of have sex.  Their permission to love.  And above all else they want us to understand that our fulfillment in life isn’t to be found in the arms of the one we love, but in how well we serve them.

Think I’m being overwrought here?   Two Words:  Radical.  Individualism.

That’s not just how Ben is putting it these days, that’s a catch phrase now all throughout the kook pews. Radical Individualism.  And a radical individualist is someone who holds…

…these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It is not merely the human rights of gay people that are at stake here. It is not merely the intimate lives of gay people that are on the chopping block if these people get their final way.

Take one last look again, at how completely certain in his own mind Ben is, that same sex couples are incapable of loving as completely, as wholeheartedly, as opposite sex couples are. There is the unmovable prejudice.  But you have to understand, it’s not just about homosexuals.  We are not human beings in their regard.  But most people who walk this earth aren’t either.  Ben and his tribe are the True Humans. The rest of us are the mud people. Only True Humans feel. Only True Humans have needs. The rest of us have our place. That is what they believe. That is the world they inhabit. That is why appeals to basic human decency do not reach them.

The forecast for Tuesday evening From NOAA just now…

.TUESDAY NIGHT…FREEZING RAIN. RAIN POSSIBLE AFTER MIDNIGHT. ONE
QUARTER OF AN INCH OF ICE ACCUMULATION POSSIBLE. LOWS IN THE UPPER
20S. NORTHEAST WINDS 10 TO 15 MPH. CHANCE OF PRECIPITATION NEAR 100
PERCENT.

Ice is the worst.  I’d rather have three feet of snow then a quarter inch of ice.  Snow you can shovel.  Ice you practically have to take a pick axe to.  And that much of it will start bringing down branches and powerlines for sure and leave a lot of dead trees behind come spring.  We could be in for a bad week in February here…

From the Cartoon Page…

NEWS ITEM: Bill Donohue Demands The Edwards Campaign Fire Two Liberal Bloggers For "Trash Talking"

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League demanded this week that presidential candidate John Edwards fire two liberal bloggers his campaign had hired. In a statement on Tuesday, Donohue accused Amanda Marcotte, a regular contributor to the blog Pandagon and Melissa McEwan, of Shakespeare’s Sister, of expressing "anti-Catholic opinions". "John Edwards is a decent man who has had his campaign tarnished by two anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots", said Donohue.

Donohue has his own history of trash talking, which the news media has consistently glossed over when giving him a platform to complain about "anti-Catholic opinions". A few examples can be found at the media watchdog site, MediaMatters.Org. Among his Greatest Hits…

"Name for me a book publishing company in this country, particularly in New York, which would allow you to publish a book which would tell the truth about the gay death style." [MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, 2/27/04]

"The gay community has yet to apologize to straight people for all the damage that they have done." [MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, 4/11/05]

Addressing former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) in a press release, Donohue said: "[W]hy didn’t you just smack the clergyman in the face? After all, most 15-year-old teenage boys wouldn’t allow themselves to be molested. So why did you?" [10/4/06] "We’ve already won. Who really cares what Hollywood thinks? All these hacks come out there. Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? And I’m not afraid to say it. … Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism. We have nothing in common. But you know what? The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost." [MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, 12/8/04]

Since all the other bloggers seem to be doing it.  Here’s possibly the most bizarre Betty Boop cartoon ever made, and that’s really saying something for the old, pre-Hays Code Betty Boop cartoons. This one is from September 1932.

It’s interesting to consider that this was just before the third and most brutal wave of Great Depression bank failures were about to hit. Times were pretty bad when this cartoon was made. These cartoons were produced under mostly grind-them-out conditions as inexpensive “shorts” for the movie houses to run between features. Before the Hays Code the film industry in the U.S. was pretty free-wheeling and it was all still new enough that creative producers felt free to experiment. All that would soon be crushed by the Hays code, not to be rediscovered in America anyway, until the 1960s.

This cartoon pokes fun at a patent medicine and health craze that was sweeping the country at the time. Anyone could sell anything as a wonderful cure for damn near everything that ailed a person. Considering a lot of those little bottles contained opiates and cocaine it’s no wonder a lot of the customers felt simply marvelous afterward. But most of them did absolutely nothing. Kinda like the zillions of pill bottles you see in the Diet Supplement section of your grocery store today. Betty’s sales pitch for Jippo is a hilarious take-off of the song Now It’s Time to Fall in Love

The ukulele riff at the end of the cartoon…when things Really start getting weird…is Nobody’s Sweetheart by either Billy “Red Pepper Sam” Costello or Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, who voiced the character of Jiminy Cricket in Disney’s Pinocchio – my sources disagree here. I had no idea until recently that this song was about a prostitute (I told you this was pre-Hays Code). Which shouldn’t have surprised me because at the end of Betty Boop’s Snow White (another very surreal cartoon) the clown sings (and dances to a rotoscoped Cab Calloway) The St. James Infirmary Blues, which is about a man dying of syphilis he’d caught from an unfaithful lover. Take that Cartoon Network…

The kid at the end who gulps down Jippo is turning into Frederic March’s Mr. Hyde. That film had just been released and was a big hit. It probably gave all the kids in the audience nightmares. But then that damn clown gave me nightmares. Those old Max Fleischer cartoons were like that. They had a gritty feel to them that the Fleischer’s lost when they moved their studios from New York to Florida. And they could peer into our dark fears in a way that Disney never went near. A really good example of that is Play Safe, about a kid who likes trains too much for his own damn good. The dream sequence in it is very, very creepy.

A conversation with a co-worker reminded me just now of the fact that I haven’t ever traveled overseas and I really should.  The continental U.S. is the only place I’ve ever roamed. 

I need to visit Europe one of these days, before I’m too old to travel.  And South America.  And Australia or New Zealand (New Zealand probably, as long as the government in Australia is so goddammed homophobic…).  The only thing is I’m afraid of the language barrier most places.  I’d absolutely love to visit Rio at least once in my life.  From the pictures I see of it, it’s beautiful.  And the Netherlands.  And Germany.  And Italy.  And Switzerland.  I really want to go see them.  I want to see the Alps.  I want to see the places that Van Ruisdael painted.  I want to see Rio.  I want to look up at night and see the other half of infinity that I don’t see here in the northern hemisphere.  But I’d need a guide.  I guess I’d have to do a travel package or something.  Problem with those is you probably don’t get to talk to the locals, or see the day-to-day environment too much. 

But then I can’t speak Portuguese anyway.  Or German.  Or Dutch.  Or Italian.  Or Swiss.  Or French.  Or any of the other languages in the places I’d like to visit.  Too bad I’m not living far enough in the future where they have translation devices you can buy and wear.  Something like one of those little Blackberry things maybe.  And with a geo-positioning thing built in too, so you can find your way around a foreign city all by yourself.  Then all the tourists can walk around looking like Borg.

They caught a serial rapist who was preying on guys in the Houston area. I’d seen this story some weeks ago while they were still looking for him and found it disturbing enough to be on the lookout for any follow-ups. Today there was…well…first the good news…

Texas Police Arrest Suspect in Male Rape

BAYTOWN, Texas — A man arrested on suspicion of rape may be a suspect in the rapes of several men in the Houston area over the past year, police said Wednesday.

The man, whose identity was not released, faces charges of kidnapping and sexual assault in a case from May, said Baytown police Capt. Roger Clifford. He said police were withholding the identity until other victims are able to see the suspect in a lineup.

Police for months have been investigating five cases in which young men were surprised at or near their homes by a gunman demanding money. The last reported attack was in November.

One of the victims pointed investigators to the man, Clifford said.

The suspect was arrested late Tuesday after DNA tests linked him to the victim in a May attack, Clifford said.

…and now the bad…

The investigation was complicated, in part because profilers don’t have a basic standard for investigating male-on-male rapes, Clifford said.

No fooling?  And why would that be?  Let me guess.  Because male on male rape is a homo thing and so it’s really not worthy of police attention.  And especially not the attention of the Texas police.  Am I close?

I can’t find the reference now, but a book I was reading some years back, I think it was a Randy Shilts book, either And The Band Played On or Conduct Unbecoming, contained a brief scene of a young gay man who’d gone to get medical attention after being sexually assualted by gay bashers, and after he confided in the doctor what happened to him, the doctor simply looked up at him and said "Well, you’re a homosexual aren’t you?"  The attitude was, and in a lot of places still is, that if you’re gay and you’re violently assaulted, well it’s your fault for being gay in the first place isn’t it.  That’s why they don’t have clue one in Texas about how to profile serial male on male rapists.  For decades nobody gave a flying fuck.  Assuming they do even nowadays.

Via The Daily Gotham…  Are you a republican candidate facing a tight race?  Well then play the gay bogyman card for a few quick last minute votes…

Note in particular, this comment from a poster in Wisconsin…

Be aware that above brochure is the exact same template used against several Democrats in campaigns around the country over the last several election cycles, including here in Wisconsin. I believe the "source" for the brochure template ("just add your name and you opponent’s one the respective dotted lines and print") is Donald Widemon’s AFA.

They probably have a print shop dedicated to turning out those, and other anti-gay pamphlets.  When I refer to the anti-gay religious right as a hate machine I am not being melodramatic.  I’m serious.  It’s a big business with them, and they treat it exactly like a business would, complete with dedicated subsidiary operations that exist only to support the parent’s business operations.  They have "think tanks" and publishing houses and consumer research operations that do nothing but work on demonizing gay people in order to bring money into their bank accounts, and votes to their chosen political candidates.  And its all funded by the same handful of right wing billionaires.  I often wonder if the Holocaust came to Germany and Europe via similar means.

Via a friend…  From the Daily Mail…this is just an amazing image:

Locked in an eternal embrace
Their loving embrace has lasted an eternity – well 5000 years to be precise

It is the city where the exiled Romeo dreamed he died and Juliet’s kisses breathed life back into his body…Yesterday at Mantua, in an amazing echo of that heartrending story, archaeologists revealed the discovery of a couple locked in a tender embrace, one that has endured for more than 5,000 years.

The find was unearthed by experts digging at a neolithic site at a less than romantic industrial estate

… 

"They are face to face and their arms and legs are entwined and they are really hugging."

Five thousand years ago the area around Mantua was marshland and criss-crossed by rivers and the environment has helped preserve the skeletons in their near perfect state.

The tribes of the area thrived through hunting and fishing and travelled along the waterways in boats but even then the simple hunter gatherer lifestyle was being replaced by livestock rearing, weaving and pottery.

There’s a bit more detail on the Daily Mail site, including a completely unnecessary linkage to the story of Romeo and Juliet.  We don’t know how these lovers died or why.  The archaeologist opines that the female was sacrificed after the man was killed, but they died of arrow wounds in random places and that suggests to me that it was some sudden violence that got them.  Perhaps tribal warfare or thieves.  But look at the position of the two bodies, and in particular their faces.  Those bodies were not posed for burial.  They died holding onto each other.  And thousands of years later, we understand perfectly what they meant to each other.  Even if we never know another thing about these two, we know that.  Love lives on.

Even John Smid says he needs at least eight weeks…

Haggard says he is not gay

The Rev. Ted Haggard emerged from three weeks of intensive counseling convinced he is "completely heterosexual" and told an oversight board that his sexual contact with men was limited to his accuser.

…

[Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur] said three weeks of counseling at an undisclosed Arizona treatment center helped Haggard immensely and left Haggard sure of one thing.

"He is completely heterosexual," Ralph said. "That is something he discovered. It was the acting- out situations where things took place. It wasn’t a constant thing."

Why Haggard chose to act out in that manner is something Haggard and his advisers are trying to discern, Ralph said.

I’ll hazard a guess…because he’s gay. This is the guy after all, who said he didn’t even know the guy he was paying for sex, right up to the moment the answering machine tapes came out. Not your most trustworthy source, this guy.

On the other hand, this could also just be the usual ex-gay double-speak too. Haggard isn’t gay, because according to ex-gay dogma nobody really is anyway. He’s just in therapy to control his acting out behavior. But the human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will upon. His acting out was on the order of seeking sex under less then wholesome circumstances. But that was because of denial, not homosexuality.

Sex is one of the strongest of all instincts, and you can’t bottle it up inside a person without damaging consequences. Haggard’s adventures with the prostitute were eminently predictable. You see that kind of behavior all the time in married, closeted homosexuals. The ex-gay solution is merely to bottle it up even more. So it looks like Haggard’s first step out of therapy is taking him right down the same old road he was on before he got caught with his back being rubbed. No wonder they were encouraging him to stay out of the ministry.

Theo Hobson, writing in the Comment Is Free section of the Guardian Online, makes an interesting argument as to why the fight over gay rights is different from others.  He’s speaking to the struggle within various religious denominations, but he could just as well be speaking to the fight in society as a whole…

What emerged from the gay adoption business is that the issue of homosexuality is terribly dangerous to the Roman Catholic church. It comes away from such a debate with its public image damaged. And of course this is true of the Anglican Church too. Indeed, it seems to me that the debate about homosexuality poses such a serious threat to organised religion in this country that it is not absurd to compare it to the reformation of the 16th century.

Some will reply that the churches have always faced difficult moral issues, and they have muddled through: the gay issue is nothing unusual. Until quite recently I would have agreed. But it becomes ever clearer that the issue of homosexuality really is different. It has managed to tie the finest Anglican theologian of his generation in knots, effectively disabling him from leadership. And more widely and more seriously it is undermining the churches’ claim to the moral high ground.

…

Firstly, this is an issue that shuns compromise. It has a stark "either/or" quality. Either homosexuality is a fully valid alternative to heterosexuality or it is not. There is no room for compromise, no third way: poor Rowan Williams is trying to make himself a perch on a barbed-wire fence. You don’t find such absoluteness in other moral debates, such a complete absence of shared assumptions and aims.

I think you do, and the obvious example of it is the fight over abortion.  But here’s the critical difference, even with that bitter struggle:

The public change in attitudes towards homosexuality is not just the waning of a taboo. It is not just a case of a practice losing its aura of immorality (as with premarital sex or illegitimacy). Instead, the case for homosexual equality takes the form of a moral crusade. Those who want to uphold the old attitude are not just dated moralists (as is the case with those who want to uphold the old attitude to premarital sex or illegitimacy). They are accused of moral deficiency. The old taboo surrounding this practice does not disappear but "bounces back" at those who seek to uphold it. Such a sharp turn-around is, I think, without parallel in moral history.

These factors have combined to make the gay issue the church’s perfect storm, perhaps even its nemesis. Because previous shifts in public morality have been slower, and more amenable to compromise, the Church has been able to move its clunky stone feet, and keep standing. This shift has floored it. By resisting the new moral orthodoxy on homosexuality, and hardening against it, the church is fast losing the aura of moral authority it has more or less retained all this time. When a bishop defends discrimination against homosexuals he is, in the eyes of most of the population, displaying a lamentable moral deficiency.

So the issue of homosexuality has the strange power to turn the moral tables. The traditional moralist is subject to accusations of immorality. And this inversion is doing terrible damage to the Christian churches.

(Emphasis mine) And there it is.  At least in the abortion fight, there are two plausibly moral sides to it, that of concern for the life of the unborn, verses concern for the lives of women.  And there is a more general question of who decides how your own body is to be used.  But in arguments over homosexuality, there is only the judgment that same sex relationships are either damaging in some way, damaging enough to justify acting against them, or they are not.  You can take a stand for the rights of women to decide for themselves how and when to give birth, and still be forced to concede that the other side in the fight may well feel compelled to fight for the lives of the unborn, even against the lives of the living.  You can disagree with it, you can disagree profoundly with it, but there it is.  But in the case of homosexuality, there is only the damage that is done to gay people.  Either homosexuality is destructive or it is not.  And if it is not, then what have you been doing all this time to homosexual people?  Every same sex relationship torn asunder is either two souls saved, or two loving hearts cut to ribbons. 

One side in this fight, has a lot of human misery and grief to answer for.   And the time is long past for claiming that you couldn’t have known the damage you were doing.  Back in the 1950s, when gay people were still living their lives in the shadows, and at least plausibly throughout the 60s and much of the 70s, when gay people were just beginning to step forward in society and demand their place at the table, you could argue that you didn’t really know any gay people, nor much about their lives other then what you heard in the newspapers and from the guy thumping his pulpit in church.  But there is no excuse from ignorance today.  

And yet you see otherwise decent and intelligent people digging in their heels over it, to ridiculous lengths nowadays, and in the face of overwhelming evidence that not only there is nothing necessarily damaging about homosexuality, but that same sex romantic love and intimacy is just as necessary and life affirming for gay people, as it is for heterosexuals.  It’s startling to look at sometimes.  The opposition to this is essentially boxing itself in the same coffin made of junk science and religious dogma that the creationists have.  Why?  For some I’m sure it’s fear of loosing their brittle faith, the only thing keeping them afloat in a rapidly changing world.  But for others, the ones who are otherwise more flexible in their spirituality, more able to cope with change, it’s something far more disturbing then the loss of one’s inner bearings.  They can feel a mountain of guilt hanging just over their heads. 

What have we been doing to these people all this time?  What have we done?  What have I done? 

…I think I have enough material now, both in the cartoon archive, and in stuff I never posted to the site because it wasn’t topical when I did it, to consider doing my first book of political cartoons.

A co-worker who also cartoons recently showed me a book he’d done, using a printer who takes small job orders (100 or so copies).  For the past several years I’ve been gathering material on how to go about getting an ISDN number and such.  The mainstream media won’t review stuff by self published creators, but this is a new world now, and I can simply bypass the commercial publishing world if I want to.  And there are online sellers, big ones including Amazon.Com, who will take orders for books from self publishers.  Scribus is an open source page layout program that I keep hearing good things about.  My co-worker used it to do his book.

Typically, a book of political cartoons is just one page after another of recent cartoons, with the occasional explanatory text written beside them.  What I want to do is something more like what Herblock did with his books.  Every four years, during a presidential election cycle, Herblock would publish a book of his previous four years work, organized into chapters by topic that started out with his really killer essays about the times he was living in.  He was every bit as good a writer as he was a cartoonist.  I may not be at his level, but I’ve always thought that was the way to do a book of political cartoons. 

I probably need to re-work some of my early stuff, and that will take some time.  I need to figure out how to divide the material into chapters, and what I want to say in the essays for each one.  But I’ve already got a title for it, and a cover page.  It’ll be the cartoon I did for March 4, 2002, reworked a tad to fit on a book cover.  The title of the book will be Deviant Signs. 

From the Cartoon Page…

NEWS ITEM: Michigan Court Of Appeals Says No To Benefits For Same Sex Couples.

The judges said that a the ban on same sex marriage, voted into the state constitution back in 2004, applies to domestic partner benefits. "The marriage amendment’s plain language prohibits public employers from recognizing same-sex unions for any purpose," the court said.

This wasn’t exactly what the voters were being told would happen back in 2004. Marlene Elwell, campaign director for the Amendment was emphatic, stating that "This has nothing to do with taking benefits away. This is about marriage between a man and a woman." But that was double talk. The clear intent of the groups working to pass the amendment, was to insure that same sex couples could only be legal strangers in the eyes of the law, and the language of the amendment reflected that intent precisely. When they told the voters that their intent wasn’t to take benefits away, they were only telling a half truth, if that. Their intent, was to take everything away from same sex couples that the law might legally provide…not benefits specifically.

Their rhetoric during the campaign was tactical and dishonest and it worked. And the proof of that is their silence now, as the rights they kept insisting would not be taken from same sex couples are now being stripped relentlessly away by the courts, who are only following the plain and unambiguous language of the amendment.