"Father, give us grace and mercy. Father, help us this next week and a half as we go into national elections, and Lord we pray for our country. Father, we pray that lies would be exposed. We pray that deception would be exposed."
Be careful what you ask God for. Because you might get it.
I keep plugging Fred Clark’s blog, Slacktivist, because he’s a really decent guy, and in these times of religious right triumphalism this nation needs more voices like his. Had there been more Baptists like him in my life growing up, I might still regard myself as one.
Haggard has waged this political battle against homosexuality while living a lie. That requires two, related responses. The first is on a political level. Haggard and his allies have been fighting a political fight — they have been trying to wield power to force others to comply with their wishes. And it’s perfectly legitimate to respond to power with power…
…
But the second response — which I can’t ignore — has to do with Ted Haggard the person who is, among other things, my "brother in Christ." There’s a script for how this will play out in the evangelical community — a script written out on that very same NAE page cited above:
… homosexuality [is] a sin that, if persisted in, brings grave consequences in this life and excludes one from the Kingdom of God.
Individual Christians, ministers, and congregations should compassionately proclaim the Good News of forgiveness and encourage those involved in homosexual practices to cease those practices, accept forgiveness, and pray for deliverance as nothing is impossible with God. Further, we should accept them into fellowship upon confession of faith and repentance, as we would any other forgiven sinner.
All that language — forgiveness, deliverance, confession, repentance — really means here only that Haggard needs to go back to living a lie. If he agrees to live that lie, and with clenched teeth to continue proclaiming that others must join in living that lie, then Haggard will be "accepted" back "into fellowship."
Haggard is now seeking "spiritual advice and guidance," and there are tens of thousands of Very Nice Christian people praying for him. But his spiritual guides and advisors are all going to tell him to follow that script. Those people praying for him are all praying for him to follow that script. And that script is evil. That script is a lie.
For Christ’s sake, enough with the lies. The last thing Haggard needs is to be "accepted" into a fellowship that cannot accept who he really is. Both he and that fellowship have just been given an opportunity to abandon lies. I’m praying that they will recognize that opportunity and take it.
Go read the whole thing. I ping Fred’s blog often. You should too. At the end of her novel about the life of the poet Simonides, The Praise Singer, Mary Renault writes, "In all men evil is sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men." It’s a moral roadsign we can all try to keep in view, regardless of our spiritual or political beliefs. And it is the touchstone by which you can see, clearly, what distinguishes the militant religiosity of the right. This country desperately needs more people like Fred in the public discourse, who keep doggedly trying to rouse within others, their better nature.
It is the tragedy of these times, not only for the Christian faith in America, but also the American Dream, which once upon a time offered the promise of religious freedom to the oppressed people of the world, that the arousal of ugly passions that turn neighbor against neighbor has become nearly synonymous with Christian politics in America. And the religious right is not completely to blame for it either. Secular and cynical politicians, republicans largely, have been using the fierce hatreds of that one strain of American Christianity as a crowbar to break this nation into ever smaller and smaller warring factions, the better to win elections. And they’re supported in that, by secular and cynical big businesses, who don’t give a good goddamn about religion, but about keeping big business friendly republicans in power.
Regardless of our spiritual beliefs, simply as American citizens, we all have a stake in making sure other Christian voices can be heard too. We can demand that our news media not routinely accept the pronouncements of the Dobsons, the Falwells, and the Robertsons, as "the Christian point of view". We can demand that whenever religion is brought into the public discourse, that the religious right is not given a free pass to define Christianity in the popular culture. Every one of us, whether we ourselves are Christian or not, have a stake in how broadly the Christian experience is represented in the media. Because the voices of peace and reconciliation must not be shut out of the conversation. Because a house divided against itself cannot stand.
I’m stealing this from Steve Gilliard, because I want to make sure you read it. But then he reposted from Wonkette. Late Night Shots is a young republican social networking website. Next time you hear some republican halfwit on Captial Hill bellyaching about welfare moms and raising the minimum wage, remember this…
As we’re sure you know by now, Late Night Shots is a closed social networking site for DC’s best and whitest. We turbos have a lot to learn from them. Their message board is home to some of the best entertainment on all the internets — but because of the closed nature of the site, not everyone can join in the fun. Thankfully, Intern Lauren is a card-carrying LNS member, and she’s gathered excerpts from some of last week’s best posts on the LNS forum. See what the fuss is about, after the jump.
My boyfriend’s dad
Posted By: HHHS00 on 10-23-2006 12:40 pm
I recently found out that the dad of the guy I am hooking up is a dentist. Where I come from dentists are looked at as sheisters. I think this guy may have been hiding it from me, and in my mind he lost some serious points after this revelation.
Lying about Greek affiliation
Posted By: very concerned on 10-19-2006 11:20 am
At age 29 if you’re dating a chick, how big of a problem is it if you’re digging through her desk and you find out that she was lying about what sorority she was in. This happened to a friend of mine.
RE: Lying about Greek affiliation
Posted By: problem on 10-19-2006 11:23 am
I think that’s a bit of an issue. More than the lying, you don’t want to date a girl who couldn’t get into a good house. It spells problems down the road.
Interview Mentality
Posted By: Williams College on 10-26-2006 1:49 am
Am I wrong to think it is a big advantage to go into an interview on the hill with a chief staff assistant knowing that he was an R.A. during college and that you were a D3 varsity athlete. It has always given me a leg up, both in terms of toughness and maturity, and I feel like it always will.
what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: cashmoney on 10-25-2006 6:21 pm
gifts? education? do you draw your line at maintenance?
RE: what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: taxman on 10-25-2006 6:23 pm
Someone should receive absolutely no more than 30 k/yr and car payments from parents. If you’re above that, you really have problems. Girls may be entitled to a bit more than that with shopping and everything, but I feel like 30k is pretty reasonable.
RE: what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: the cleaners on 10-26-2006 11:07 am
What is an acceptable allowance to give your girlfriend. $200 per week?
Absolutely no more the 30k a year. And car payments. Absolutely no more. Geeze pal…I guess you’d have committed suicide or something if you’d had my childhood, and mine wasn’t so bad by comparison. I never went to bed hungry. Never. But I wore a lot of second hand clothes until I was about 12 or so. And it wasn’t until I was 14 that we even had a car in the household. Color TV didn’t come into the house until I was about 15. A fine night eating out was a trip to Howard Johnson’s or Hot Shoppes. Vacations were to Ocean City New Jersey or Rehoboth Beach. The most exotic vacations I had when I was a kid were the two trips we made by train to Fort Lauderdale Florida when I was 7 and 8. I lived in apartments my entire life, until June of 2001 when I settled on Casa del Garrett, the little Baltimore rowhouse I have now. Home ownership did not come into my life until I was 47. And for all that, I’ve had it good compared to a Lot of other Americans.
My first real job was flipping burgers at a fast food joint. There was no money for college but I did manage three semesters of community college until dad died and I had to work full time to keep the household afloat. Mom was able to co-sign for the loan on my first car when I was 20, but I had to make the payments myself. Does it really hurt that much to have to buy your own goddamned car when you’ve clearly had the best education money can buy and on top of whatever golden job the republican network has dropped in your lap, your parents are throwing 30k a year at you too?
If I hear one more jackass pundit bellyaching that democrats are out of touch with America’s working families I’m going to fucking scream.
I Was Just Looking For A Massage And Your Name Happened To Come Up…
Okay…he’s saying that he just had a massage. No sex. Question: why is the head of one of the biggest mega churches in the country going to a guy like Mike Jones, who advertises himself as offering a "Swedish style massage with the pleasure of the man in mind. If you like a strong muscle man to bring pleasure to you then please call me. I am a muscle stud with a friendly personality…" and says among his other attributes, that his thighs are 24 inches? What the hell does thigh measure have to do with giving you a massage? And Jones is in Denver, not Colorado Springs. Why isn’t Haggard going to one of the many fine (and professional) massage clinics that a simple google search turns up right in Colorado Springs? Because they wouldn’t sell him Meth?
And… Where did Haggard find this guy? I doubt it was in the Yellow Pages. Here’s his web site (via Raw Story/PageOneQ). Compare this guy’s advertising with the Colorado Springs Search For Fitness page I linked to above and tell me they’re both in the same line of business.
"Hi Mike, this is Art. Hey, I was just calling to see if we could get any more. Either $100 or $200 supply. And I could pick it up really anytime. I could get it tomorrow or we could wait till next week sometime and so I also wanted to get your address. I could send you some money for inventory but that’s probably not working, so if you have it then go ahead and get what you can and I may buzz up there later today, but I doubt your schedule would allow that unless you have some in the house. Okay, I’ll check in with you later. Thanks a lot, bye."
He must have bought some and then thrown it away, and then decided to buy some more so he could throw that away too. And he wanted to give Mike some money for inventory so Mike would have even more that he could buy…and then throw away.
Oh…and…
Haggard says he bought the meth from a gay escort, 49-year-old Michael Jones, after contacting him for a massage.
Right. And maybe he wanted to be escorted somewhere too. Like…back to where he left his brain.
Hot damn! I just wandered over to the Freeper HQ, and scanned the recent thread about Haggard. Some Freeper posted…
"To: UncleJeff
Produce the voicemessages and emails ASAP. Let’s see them. I call Bull$*&T
15 posted on 11/02/2006 4:42:57 PM PST by sappy
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ]"
So, naturally, I created a profile and immediately posted a response linking to the (alleged) audio of the voicemails (I think the link was posted here somewhere, but I could be wrong…) and then waited for my post to be ‘reviewed’.
Within minutes, the entire thread had been taken down and my posting privileges revoked…
I feel like I’ve accomplished something today. :)
This has been another episode in the Adventures of Obviousman…
(Denver, Colorado) Evangelist Ted Haggard, one of the leaders of a proposed amendment to ban same-sex marriage in Colorado, stepped down from the ministry of his 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs after a male escort alleged he had a three year pay-for-sex affair with Haggard.
Haggard denies the affair, but in an afternoon news conference said that he was stepping down to allow church elders to conduct an investigation. Haggard also said he was voluntarily resigning as president of the multimillion- member National Association of Evangelicals.
After a day of whirlwind controversy surrounding New Life Church and its leader Ted Haggard, who went on administrative leave earlier Thursday, the acting Senior Pastor, Ross Parsley tells KKTV 11 News that Pastor Haggard has admitted to some of the indiscretions.
Thursday morning, Mike Jones went on a Denver radio talk show and said Pastor Haggard paid him for sex over the past 3 years. Jones also claims Haggard did drugs with him. Pastor Parsley says Haggard admitted that some of the allegations are true, but not all of them. The church is not saying what Haggard admitted to.
That’s the way this dance usually goes. First, denial. Then what Nixon aid John Ehrlichman once called the modified limited hang out. Coming next…the tearful confession and rehab.
Harper’s Magazine did a profile of Haggard in an article back in May 2005, titled Soldiers Of Christ …
The city’s mightiest megachurch crests silver and blue atop a gentle slope of pale yellow prairie grass on the outskirts of town. Silver and blue, as it happens, are Air Force colors. New Life Church was built far north of town in part so it would be visible from the Air Force Academy. New Life wanted that kind of character in its congregation.
“Church” is insufficient to describe the complex. There is a permanent structure called the Tent, which regularly fills with hundreds or thousands of teens and twentysomethings for New Life’s various youth gatherings. Next to the Tent stands the old sanctuary, a gray box capable of seating 1,500; this juts out into the new sanctuary, capacity 7,500, already too small. At the complex’s western edge is the World Prayer Center, which looks like a great iron wedge driven into the plains. The true architectural wonder of New Life, however, is the pyramid of authority into which it orders its 11,000 members. At the base are 1,300 cell groups, whose leaders answer to section leaders, who answer to zone, who answer to district, who answer to Pastor Ted Haggard, New Life’s founder.
The picture that emerges of Haggard isn’t of just your usual babbling pulpit thumper, but an archetype of the new breed of confrontational, militant and coercive Dominionist. Haggard fancied himself, a Spirit Warrior…
He was always on the lookout for spies. At the time, Colorado Springs was a small city split between the Air Force and the New Age, and the latter, Pastor Ted believed, worked for the devil. Pastor Ted soon began upsetting the devil’s plans. He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church; his whole congregation pitched itself into invisible battles with demonic forces, sometimes in front of public buildings. One day, while he was working in his garage, a woman who said she’d been sent by a witches’ coven tried to stab Pastor Ted with a five-inch knife she pulled from a leg sheath; Pastor Ted wrestled the blade out of her hand. He let that story get around. He called the evil forces that dominated Colorado Springs—and every other metropolitan area in the country—“Control.”
Sometimes, he says, Control would call him late on Saturday night, threatening to kill him. “Any more impertinence out of you, Ted Haggard,” he claims Control once told him, “and there will be unrelenting pandemonium in this city.” No kidding! Pastor Ted hadn’t come to Colorado Springs for his health; he had come to wage “spiritual war.”
So Haggard, there in the shadow of Cheyenne Mountain, built himself a command base of his own from which to wage spiritual warfare…
The Prayer Center—a joint effort of several fundamentalist organizations but located at and presided over by New Life—houses a bookstore that when I visited was called the Arsenal (its name has since been changed to Solomon’s Porch), as well as “corporate” prayer rooms, personal “prayer closets,” hotel rooms, and the headquarters of Global Harvest, a ministry dedicated to “spiritual warfare.” (The Prayer Center’s nickname in the fundamentalist world is “spiritual NORAD.”) The atrium is a soaring foyer adorned with the flags of the nations and guarded by another bronze warrior angel, a scowling, bearded type with massive biceps and, again, a sword. The angel’s pedestal stands at the center of a great, eight-pointed compass laid out in muted red, white, and blue-black stone. Each point directs the eye to a contemporary painting, most depicting gorgeous, muscular men—one is a blacksmith, another is bound, fetish-style, in chains—in various states of undress….
In the chapel are several computer terminals, where one can sign on to the World Prayer Team and enter a prayer. Eventually one’s words will scroll across the large flat screens, as well as across the screens around the world, which as many as 70,000 other Prayer Team members are watching at any point in time. Prayers range from the mundane (real-estate deals and job situations demand frequent attention) to the urgent, such as this prayer request from “Rachel” of Colorado: Danielle. 15 months old. Temperature just shy of 105 degrees. Lethargic. Won’t eat.
Remember that passage from the Bible, where the devil tempts Jesus with kingdoms of the earth, and all the worldly power therein? There is no poor sucker more vulnerable to the temptations of power, then someone who wants to save the world. Particularly one who needs desperately to save the world, because they’re utterly unable to save themselves. Control won, and it wasn’t much of a contest. The hook was already in him when he arrived aimlessly in Colorado Springs, and when he saw that vision of a glittering city of spirit warriors his own magnificent redemption in the making of it was too much to resist and Control just reeled him in. It was his own spirit he needed to worry about. But you have to know yourself to win that battle, and Haggard, apparently, didn’t want to know.
This is from an interview with Haggard, quoted on Ex-Gay Watch…
The biblical argument could be made, but not in this particular case. In Washington, D.C., our argument has to be the fact that the greatest benefit to society and to our culture and to the children of our nation would be to instill in our Constitution that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. It would be devastating for the children of our nation and for the future of Western civilization for us to say that homosexual unions or lesbian unions or any alteration of that has the moral equivalence of a heterosexual, monogamous marriage.
So that needs to be inculcated into the Constitution, otherwise we run the risk of a Supreme Court decision that will say that a gay couple living together and a heterosexual couple living together have the same standing under the law.
If the only same sex intimacy the man ever permitted himself to experience was secretly with anonymous call boys, then it isn’t surprising that he’d feel that heterosexual coupling was a superior, more wholesome form of human union. You see the same thing happening over and over with these closet cases. Consider Mark Foley…
In 1992, as a Navy lieutenant, Thorne-Begland announced he was gay during a nationally televised interview, helping to lay the groundwork for the military’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy. Four years later, after Foley voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, Thorne-Begland called to complain.
"I said, how could you vote against me, my family, your own self-interest?" recalled Thorne-Begland, now an attorney for the city of Richmond, Va. He said Foley responded, "I could never compare any relationship I have ever had to the nature of my mother and father’s relationship."
When you see your sexual nature as something innately broken and unwholesome, then you’re going to seek out broken and unwholesome sexual encounters. It’s not a matter of proving to yourself that being gay means having nothing but brief, barren assignations. It’s because you don’t believe down in your gut that it could ever be anything more.
And when you see other gay people fighting for equality…well…you just know in your gut that those kinds of relationships aren’t equal, can never be equal. Because that brokenness inside of you is all you know. But you’re not broken because you’re gay…you’re broken because you threw your sex life into the gutter. Just like the gay haters told you to.
And when you see other gay people holding on to their spirituality, steadfastly insisting that God does not condemn them, or their love, you just know in your gut that they’re deceiving themselves. God condemns them, because you condemn yourself. Just like the gay haters taught you to.
I have a YouTube posted in the previous blog, that’s a satirical salute to all the closeted gay people in Washington working to deny equal rights to gay Americans. The list is amazingly big, and as the film makers go through one name after another, with Judy Garland singing "Over The Rainbow" in the background, you really realize how much damage these people are doing, not only to the gay community as a whole, but to the American Dream as well. At the end of it, a banner on the screen reads, "It’s okay, boys… A closet is just a bedroom, with no self respect."
This is beautiful! A stirring testimonial to all those hard working gay republicans in Washington…the congress critters…the gay staff of anti-gay congress critters…all who work diligently every day to deny equal rights not only to themselves, but to all gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Americans.
Via Ex-Gay Watch… University of Minnesota researchers used a technology to embed images on computer screens that were, in a sense, hidden or more properly, camouflaged, to see how their subjects subconsciously responded to them. What makes this study particularly interesting is that some of the "hidden" images were of naked human bodies…male and female…and their subjects not only included heterosexual men and women, but homosexual men and women too…
Nothing focuses the mind’s eye like an erotic picture, according to the results of a new study. Even when such pictures were actively canceled out, subliminal images of female nudes helped heterosexual men find the orientation of a briefly shown abstract shape. Such nudity-driven focusing worked almost as well for women, as long as the image accorded with their sexual preference.
Cognitive neuroscientist Sheng He of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues gathered groups of heterosexual men, heterosexual women, homosexual men and bisexual women numbering 10 each. Each viewed special images pointed directly at each individual eye. The researchers could cancel out vision of one eye’s image by presenting a specific high contrast image to the other eye. Such an image, called a Gabor patch, consists of a series of contrasting lines that form an abstract–and visually arresting–shape. "Normally, the two eyes look at the same image. They don’t have any conflict," he explains. "We create a situation where the two eyes are presented with two images, and then they will have binocular competition. One image is high contrast [and dynamic], the other is static. You basically just see the dynamic image."
Into the canceled out image slot, the researchers slipped an erotic image; for example, a naked woman displayed for a heterosexual man. To ensure that subjects did not consciously detect the invisible image, they were asked to press a specific key if they noticed any difference between the left and right images. Over the course of 32 trials, men were significantly better at detecting the orientation of Gabor patches when they appeared in the slot formerly occupied by an invisible image of a nude woman.
The heterosexual men, however, had a more difficult time detecting the same orientation when it was located where an invisible picture of a nude man had been; this was not the case for heterosexual women when viewing their own sex naked. And the homosexual men’s response was similar to that of the heterosexual women, as were the bisexual women’s and heterosexual men’s.
(Emphasis mine). Mind you, they couldn’t see the images enough to process them consciously. But at a level below consciousness something was clearly clicking in the subjects. And it clicked differently for the gay subjects.
Now isn’t that interesting. The research wasn’t into sexual orientation, but to uncover the subconscious mechanisms the brain uses to processes visual information. More here from Science Daily…
When subjects become conscious of images, the sequence of steps in brain processing becomes very complicated because neurons engage in all sorts of feedback and crosstalk–especially with emotionally charged information. The researchers were studying the flow of visual information at an earlier stage, while it is still traveling along a one-way path.
"We’re trying to reveal what happens when one doesn’t have a conscious visual perception. That is, how the brain processes visual information independent of consciousness," said He.
The researchers chose to generate brain activity by using erotic pictures because they promised to elicit strong responses and clear patterns in the data. But the researchers believe the mechanisms by which the brain processes such images are universal.
"This definitely doesn’t just work for erotic pictures," said He. "But erotic images stand out in terms of potency to generate a response."
Which makes sense considering how ancient and powerful the sex drive is. And this also makes sense…
The strongest shift in attention toward the area where the image had been was in heterosexual men who had been shown nude female images. Those subjects also tended to be repelled by nude male images. Among heterosexual women, nude male images induced a less strong attention shift toward the image site but no significant shift in response to nude female pictures. Gay men behaved similarly to heterosexual women, and gay/bisexual women performed in between heterosexual men and women.
The divergent results among the groups of study subjects provide evidence that the subjects’ brains were processing the visual information in a selective manner.
It also pretty well shows, once more, that sexual orientation isn’t a matter of conscious choice, or even self identification, as some in the kook pews keep insisting. Gay or Straight, you are drawn to the attractive sex in ways your conscious mind plays only a supporting roll in. In computergeek speak…it’s down in the kernel. We are drawn to the sex we are hard wired to mate with, and for some of us, that is the same sex as we ourselves are. It isn’t Godlessness. It isn’t rebellion. It isn’t sexual immorality. It is simply the way some of us are. We mate to our own sex, because that is how we are made…
Now…I wonder how all those folks at Exodus and Love In Action…who claim to have been cured of their homosexuality, would fare on this test, were it given to them. I propose an experiment along those lines, but with a mixture of images of nude bodies and random other objects that might also provoke a strong emotional response…so they couldn’t game their responses.
Run the experiment with three groups of men…straight, gay and ex-gay men who are absolutely convinced, or at least say they are, that not only their behavior but their sexual interests have changed. The person administering the test cannot know if they are testing a straight man, a gay man, or an ex-gay man. The person evaluating the results doesn’t know who administered the test. We can start with all those ex-gays that Spitzer claims have changed.
It makes me so angry that gay and lesbian people have this need to fully define themselves by their sexual preference. Is there nothing else about their lives that is worth talking about? Honestly, most homosexuals I have known are the most creative, energetic people. Can’t they think of themselves as something other than "gay?"
Hey lady…maybe we should think of ourselves the way this online pal of yours does…
Homosexuals are *not* "ordinary people" nor are they or ever will be "normal". They are biological, genetic, sexual, and cultural, defectives.
Lady…we’re not defining ourselves by our sexual orientation…your kind are defining us by it. You brick-brained jackasses just can’t see the people for the homosexuals, can you? And for that reason a lot of us by the time we are adults can’t think of ourselves as anything other then biological, genetic, sexual, and cultural, defectives…let alone gay. But most of those are living desperately in the closet and they take great pains not to bother your delicate sensibilities. You don’t actually have a problem with homosexuals that can’t see themselves as anything other then homosexuals. It’s those of us who Do think of ourselves, mostly, as something other then gay, that you have a problem with…because we’re living our lives openly and proudly. Human beings do that.
Lady…you think the closet is such a great place…you fucking live there then.
There is no line this President has not crossed — nor will not cross — to keep one political party, in power.
He has spread any and every fear among us, in a desperate effort to avoid that which he most fears — some check, some balance against what has become not an imperial, but a unilateral presidency.
And now it is evident that it no longer matters to him, whether that effort to avoid the judgment of the people, is subtle and nuanced — or laughably transparent.
Senator John Kerry called him out Monday.
He did it two years too late.
He had been too cordial — just as Vice President Gore had been too cordial in 2000 — just as millions of us, have been too cordial ever since.
Exactly right. We’ve been in a knife fight ever since the republicans took, let’s be honest here…Seized, power in 2000, for the fate of the American experiment in democracy. Perhaps some of us saw more clearly then others what was coming, your gay and lesbian neighbors especially, since we’ve been fighting the radicals on the right, both religious and secular, for decades now. But as Bush tore up one institutional check on his power after another, over and over again treating the constitution as a mere suggestion, if not a dirty joke, it should have become obvious what we were dealing with. These are not your grandfather’s republicans. I’ve heard them referred to as feral republicans. But really…they’re fascists. For some of us, the time for being cordial ended long ago. For the rest of America, it ended in November 2000.
There is tonight no political division in this country that he and his party will not exploit, nor have not exploited; no anxiety that he and his party will not inflame.
Why do they do it? Simple. United we stand…divided we fall. It really is all about that. When Pat Buchanan said to Nixon, "If we tear the country in half, we can pick up the bigger half," he wasn’t talking about the bigger half of a democracy. The right wingers want to govern…they want to rule…they have no interest whatever in letting the people govern themselves. Because then their power is less. Because then they’re merely citizens like the rest of us. It really is all about that. We are going to loose this democracy if more of us, and in particular the other political parties, are not willing to confront republicans as bluntly and as forcefully as necessary, and name what it is that they have become, and where they are relentlessly dragging this country. Garrison Keillor was only partly right…they are not merely republicans first, and Americans second. They are only republicans. It is not democrats and liberals they oppose. They oppose democracy itself. The stand solidly against the bedrock this nation was founded upon: liberty and justice for all. To them it is a dirty joke. That needs to be said now. No more cordiality.
[Update 2]… In comments, Peterson Toscano gives a link to the original. I can’t embed it here, apparently it’s supposed to be a commerical, not for a video, but for the services of Dr, Corvino and other lecturers at Kirkland Productions and they don’t want it floating around the net (and I want to vent about this kind of thing later), but the original is Here.
[Update…] Crap…this video is marked as being "no longer available". So I’ve taken it down. What the flying fuck is wrong with these people?
Via a friend on MySpace… Some excerpts from a lecture on the morality of homosexuality by Dr. John Corvino. He makes a lot of the same points I keep trying to make here, but I really like his approach to that Texas legislator who kept insisting whenever a gay rights bill came up that "animals don’t do that".
The Fifth Hubble Servicing Mission Is Given The ‘Go’
My co-workers and I just watched the presentation at Goddard (we got a remote feed into our auditorium) where NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced that he’d given SM4 (actually the fifth servicing mission) to the Hubble Space Telescope the go-ahead.
The main points were that: the shuttle engineers and astronauts had demonstrated they had a workable means of repairing the most likely sorts of damage to the shuttle in-flight, and a second shuttle would be waiting on the launch pad in case it was needed to rescue the first shuttle crew. That last scenario seems at this point to be a remote need, since the kind of damage that caused the breakup on reentry of Columbia can now it seems, be repaired in space. But the added safety factor still makes having that second shuttle ready worthwhile.
So (whew!) we’re good to go. And if the mission is successful, Hubble should be generating good science up to 2013.
A former LIA "client" and now booster takes issue with this post of mine. Here’s my reply…
—–
> I, having been a client at LIA (March, 2005), would like to know some of
> Lance’s horrendous experiences caused by his time there.
A client were you? Swell. You know the difference between being a "client" and being an inmate…right? There’s the beginning of the horror right there buddy, and what’s disturbing right off the bat about your comment is that you seem utterly unable to even notice it. So you my friend, are part of the horror.
Those kids are not in there by choice. Most of them had either made peace with their sexual nature, or were at least beginning to, when they were dragged into LIA by parents terrified from the cesspool of anti-gay propaganda that the religious right vomits into the public discourse, much of which John happily repeats. Joe Stark was on Pat Robertson’s 700 club, mindlessly babbling that gays only live an average of 36 years. Where the hell did he hear that claptrap, if it wasn’t John? Even Paul Cameron isn’t claiming 36 years. But John doesn’t seem to care where he gets his facts on homosexuality, as long as they’re sufficently ugly.
For months at least, if not longer, John was linking his LIA website to a group called The International Organization Of Heterosexual Rights, and using their bogus statistics to paint a picture of homosexuals and homosexuality that was relentlessly perverse and disgusting. After community activists started pointing out how unChristianly it was to be linking to a hate site, John pulled the link. But he kept their bogus fact sheet online. So at least for a time (I haven’t been there recently), people visiting his site were still being given this crap from a hate group…only they weren’t being told who the source of this information was. Dig it. John responded to the accusation that he was spreading hate rhetoric, not by taking it down, but by making it harder for people to discover that the facts on his website were coming from a hate group.
I think part of the reason he does it is because he knows that it frightens parents, and that’s his last best source of clients now: Helpless gay teens who cannot legally refuse his dangerous blend of anti-gay religiosity and junk psychology. As more and more comes to light about the practices of these ex-gay ministries, and their spectacular rates of failure, fewer and fewer grown adults are checking in. So the kids, who cannot legally refuse, are his last best source of income, which he needs to keep the operation afloat. Never mind what it does to kids, to their parents, to the bond between parent and child…John’s on a mission from God, and Gods don’t feel shame.
Imagine a teen who is left handed. Imagine they’re told that their left-handedness is unnatural, perverse, a God condemned abomination. Imagine sending that kid to a place that claims to be able to treat left-handedness through prayer and counseling, and establishing a closer relationship to Jesus. They claim that left-handedness is a form of addiction, that using your left hand to do things like writing is no different from people who use their hands to rob, assault, and murder, people and animals. Imagine that left-handed kid being forced to sit next to grown men who’ve used their hands to do all manner of cruel and perverse things to animals and humans alike, while the staff of this treatment facility is telling him, perhaps not so much in word but sure as hell in deed, that he’s no better then those men. Someday, his desire to use his left hand instead of the God ordained right hand, will lead him into all manner of brutish, deviant, ugly acts.
Imagine this kid trying desperately…trying, trying with all his heart and soul to pray away his left handedness. But he can’t…he’s left handed. And every time he feels the urge to use his left hand, it only serves to remind him that he doesn’t love God enough, that he’s headed for the same life that all those robbers, and murderers live. He’s going to become just like them one day…
What does that sort of thing to to a kid? Well we all know what it does to an adult because it happened. Does the name Jack McIntyre ring any bells? Or has John finally erased all memory of Love In Action’s bloody birth? McIntyre was one of LIA’s first clients (I say client because he went in of his own accord…a choice of free will that neither Lance nor Zach nor any kid in the horrifically misnamed Refuge "program" are allowed) A few months ago I finally stumbled on a copy of his suicide note. You want to know what the horror is my friend? Well…take a peek into the Pit then…
TO: Those left with the question, why did he do it?
I loved life and all that it had to offer to me each day.
I loved my job and my clients.
I loved my friends and thank God for each one of them.
I loved my little house and would not have wanted to live anywhere else.
All this looks like the perfect life. Yet, I must not let this shadow the problem that I have in my life. At one time, not to long ago, that was all that really mattered in my life. What pleased me and how it affected me. Now that I have turned my life over to the Lord and the changes came one by one, the above statements mean much more to me. I am pleased that I can say those statements with all the truth and honesty that is within me.
However, to make this short, I must confess that there were things in my life that I could not gain control, no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed.
It is this constant failure that has made me make the decision to terminate my life here on earth. I do this with the complete understanding that life is not mine to take. I know that it is against the teachings of our Creator. No man is without sin, this I realise. I will cleanse myself of all sin as taught to me by His word. Yet, I must face my Lord with the sin of murder. I believe that Jesus died and paid the price for that sin too. I know that I shall have everlasting life with Him by departing this world now, no matter how much I love it, my friends, my family. If I remain it could possibly allow the devil the opportunity to lead me away from the Lord. I love life, but my love for the Lord is so much greater, the choice is simple.
I am not asking you to sanction my actions. That is not the purpose of my writing this at all. It is for the express purpose of allowing each one who will read this to know how I weighed things in my own mind. I don’t want you to think that, ‘I alone,’ should have been the perfect person, without sin. That would be ridiculous! It is the continuing lack of strength and/or obedience and/or will power to cast aside certain sins. To continually go before God and ask forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and all He stands for in my life.
Please know that I am extremely happy to be going to the Lord. He knows my heart and knows how much I love life and and all that it has to offer. But, He knows that I love Him more. That is why I believe that I will be with Him in Paradise.
I regret if I bring sorrow to those that are left behind. If you get your hearts in tune with the word of God you will be as happy about my ‘transfer’ as I am. I also hope that this answers sufficiently the question, why?
May God Have Mercy On My Soul.
A Brother & A Friend.
No. May God have mercy on yours, because I don’t have any to spare for the likes of you. Jack McIntyre killed himself, rather then make one more promise to God he knew he could not keep. Bad enough John Smid is doing this to grown adults. Now he’s dragging kids into his little psych room, where he’ll sit them down right next to grown men who have engaged in the most extreme sexual perversions imaginable, and let them know that they’re just like those men are, that their sexual orientation will lead them into all of that and worse. This is what John is subjecting gay teenagers to. He takes in kids who are more or less fine with their sexual orientation, or getting there, and puts his crowbar to their self esteem and tries systematically to utterly destroy their deepest sense of their inner selves, to make them see their sexual nature as ugly and perverse and foul, and that only a relationship with Jesus can save them from their homosexuality. But it won’t. They’re Gay. What happens is that they loose their faith, and often enough, loose their family too. But as long as the checks clear, John doesn’t seem to mind.
> I speak on behalf of LIA, not only because I believe in what they’re doing, but also
> because I care a great deal about John Smid and the LIA staff.
If you care about any of them then you need to do whatever you can to convince them to stop tormenting gay people, and particularly gay teens who are content with who they are. John is trying his best to gut their ability to ever feel good about themselves as gay people, and ever experience what it is to love and be loved, body and soul. He is systematically trying to put as much fear and loathing into teens and adults of their sexual nature so that they’ll never be able to love wholeheartedly without feeling ashamed and dirty. To assault someones sense of self to the point where they cannot see one of this life’s most wonderful, beautiful, amazing things as anything other then ugly and perverse is a crime against them of absolutely staggering magnitude. To do that to children is a crime against humanity.
> Zach Stark’s opinion of "reparative therapy," as it’s being dubbed, variegated a
> great deal after his experience at LIA. "Love In Action has been misrepresented
> and what I have posted in my blogs has been taken out of perpective and context,"
> as Zach is quoted at 365gay.com on 8-1-05. My question to Lance is this: What
> specific occurrences at LIA made your experience so horrendous?
As for Zach…I’m a little fuzzy about how you expect a kid who was forced into ex-gay therapy against his will, and who said in an update to that blog post you’re quoting from there that he could only post blogs his father approved of, to speak out publicly against his treatment. Actually, I’m being sarcastic. You know damn well he couldn’t. Since he’s still underage, and cannot speak for himself without suffering whatever consequences his parents (you know…the ones who put him into LIA in the first place) can dictate, it’s unreasonable to expect him to get on a soapbox about his feelings toward LIA. If I were you though, I would strongly suggest that his silence on the matter since those first couple of posts speaks volumes.
I was with Lance at a protest against reparative therapy in Silver Spring, Maryland. John Smid was there too, but too cowardly to come out to the line and speak with Lance himself. One of the other LIA staffers, a new guy, did come out because, as he said, he wanted to hear from Lance himself why he was upset about what LIA did to him. Lance gave him an earful, the gist of which was that he resented being made to feel horrible about himself simply because he’s gay.
John likes to boast that he brings families together. What happened to Lance after he left LIA was horrible, and he finally had to move out because his mom had become so abusive. The day he moved out, his mom cornered him and started beating the crap out of him. He’s told this to reporters and gave a more detailed account to Morgan Jon Fox who is doing a documentary on the LIA protests. Morgan and Lance let me sit in on the interview to take some photographs and Lance’s story nearly brought me to tears and I had to concentrate on what I was doing and I almost couldn’t. John did nothing, nothing for that family, except tear it apart. Oh…and he cashed the check.
You care about the LIA staff do you? Then dig up whatever stunted whithered stump of a conscience any of them still have left in them, and make them see two things they really, really need to see. First, that they are committing a monstrous assault on the human identity of the people they’re "treating" and their capacity to love and accept love from another. Second, that John has no brakes, and one of these days he’s going to push a gay kid too far and then they’re be more then Jack McIntyre’s blood on the LIA account books, and if you think the judgment on LIA has been harsh up till now, you haven’t seen anything. Yet.
There are attributes of marriage that same-sex couples will never achieve. But in the minds of radical activists, getting the label and a piece of paper saying so will be close enough.
For instance, a woman who engages in lesbianism will never know the joy of lovemaking that creates within her the product of that union — an actual human life. She will never know the security of a true man protecting her from the dragons of the world and providing for her an environment where she can nurture and give love to that little life once it arrives, or the stamp of approval that God puts on such an experience. And because she and her partner know this, they must defy reason, biology and sexual function to create children and experiences that serve as faulty substitutes for that God-ordained picture.
You have to figure a true man is someone who prefers his women helpless, which somehow doesn’t make any sense but then expecting sense from a brick brained idiot like Kevin McCullough (the author) is a bit like expecting a pig to shit pearls. McCallough isn’t just pissing on the happy couplehood of lesbians there, but also every heterosexual couple that cannot have children of their own too. So any children they manage to have must also serve only as faulty substitutes for the God-ordained picture thing.
You need to notice this: What McCullough is saying there, is that Any Child not naturally brought into a family can only be a faulty substitute for the Real Thing. Adopted children cannot be loved and cherished like Real Children can. Children conceived by various medical means likewise cannot be loved and cherished like Real Children. Their families can never be as loving, as caring, as nurturing as Real Families can…they can only be faulty substitutes for the God Ordained picture thing. You have to love how, in attacking the households of gay couples, these gutter crawling maggots show just how much they regard themselves as holier then…well…just about everyone else, not just gays. And if you think they don’t mean their rhetoric to apply equally to childless heterosexual couples too, think again.
But even when it comes to reason, biology, and sexual function, McCullough doesn’t get it right.
Likewise, a man who seeks his perverse kicks by depositing the seed of life in, shall we say, non-life-giving cavities, may know orgasm, but never complete union, as he uses anatomy in ways for which the Creator did not create it.
It’s called the prostate gland Kevin. Massaging the prostate gland, which is what happens during a certain kind of male to male sex, can bring a human male to a right dandy orgasm. Now…I am unaware of any other gland in the human body that will produce such a result when it’s rubbed. In fact, most of them will probably produce a sharp stab of pain when you do that to them. But not that particular gland, in that particular location in the male anatomy. The conclusion is obvious. God did, in fact, intend for males to be fucked. It probably helps if they’re gay though.
I keep bringing up the prostate because it’s something worth paying attention to. It wasn’t lax moral standards that did that. It wasn’t hedonism. It wasn’t Godlessness. It was millions of years of adaptive evolution that gave that to human males, even the ones with absolutely no use for it at all. Or, if you don’t believe in evolution, fine. Then God did it. But there it is. If you’re going to go on a pulpit thumping rant about God’s design, the fucking take some notice of God’s design willya? Open your goddamn eyes every now and then and fucking take a look at what God hath wrought…okay? Just a suggestion.
By coincidence I came across this article in the Economist just prior to reading that Pam’s House Blend post, which seems to do nothing more then idly wonder why homosexuality exists in nature. It starts off with a pretty good observation though…
WHAT is taught in a country’s schools reveals much about the national psyche. The Norwegian curriculum requires that all 14-year-olds learn about homosexuality. Assisting with this education, the National History Museum at the University of Oslo has just opened an exhibition of gay animals.
“Against Nature?” does not tell zoologists anything new. Homosexuality has been recorded in some 1,500 species so far, and been well documented in about a third of these cases; it has been known since the time of Aristotle, who thought he witnessed two male hyenas having sex with one another. But the exhibition’s purpose is not to educate zoologists. It is to persuade the public that, as there are gay whales and worms, gay humans do not disturb the natural order.
And ends with another…
Taking lessons on sexuality from the birds and the bees itself requires first accepting something not taught ubiquitously outside Norway—that evolution occurs by natural selection.
Ya think? Well that leaves a large swath of the United States out. We have crackpots here who can’t even divine God’s will from the evidence of our own bodies, let alone the workings of nature.
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