On April 11, Kentucky governor Ernie Fletcher removed protections against job discrimination from gay and lesbian state employees. To add insult to injury, he did it on the same day he declared “Diversity Day”.

More on the cartoon page…

Shallow understanding from people of good will, is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
-Martin Luther King Jr.

Jason Johnson, the gay college student expelled from The University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky, has been allowed to return to class and finish the school year, under an agreement hammered out by his, and the school’s lawyers.  I’m actually surprised.  I’d thought the school would dig in its theological heels and insist on its absolute right to remove filthy sodomites from its sacred grounds.  In exchange Jason agrees not to sue the school, but I’m puzzled as to how much leverage the threat of a lawsuit against a Southern Baptist school in the Bible Belt could have been.  In any case, they’re not going to lie on his transcripts that he failed the semester anymore.  Whether or not they treat him fairly in the classroom remains to be seen.

From the Lexington Herald-Leader comes this column from Paul Prather.  I wish I could like it…he says a few things I completely agree with…

• I believe private religious schools should have the right to make whatever rules they want (short of mandates to torture or behead heathens), in keeping with the tenets of their faith…

• If you can’t obey a school’s code of conduct, common sense dictates that you might not want to enroll there.

• On the other hand, the same principle holds true for the school itself. If the University of the Cumberlands hopes to earn accreditation from a secular agency, it must be prepared to abide by that group’s secular standards. You can’t have it both ways.

That’s pretty much where I am generally, and I’d go on to add that if you want to discriminate against a portion of the citizenry at minimum you can’t expect them to support you with their tax dollars.  Prather goes on to comment on the hypocrisy of singling out gay students for violations of sexual conduct rules, saying that in his own experience on Christian campuses, the straight kids could be just as sexually active as the kids on the secular campuses, if at least a tad more reserved about expressing it openly.  But then he goes on to assert that Johnson’s problem was that he called attention to himself, and from there his column goes down a familiar path…

Thus, Johnson’s main mistake wasn’t simply being gay. It was calling undue attention to his orientation. Christian colleges might have been the originators of the don’t-ask-don’t-tell philosophy.

It is a fact that Johnson posted pictures of himself and his boyfriend on his MySpace profile, but nowhere have I seen it said that he was being open about his sexual orientation at school.  What I’ve always heard to date is that someone informed on him to the school administration, and they went looking for his MySpace profile and then confronted him with it.  In other words, Johnson didn’t tell the school, the school Asked.  That’s not Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell…that’s stay in the closet if you know what’s good for you.  If heterosexuals understand nothing else about their homosexual neighbors, they need to understand this: Those days are over. 

There are a lot of us, far too many in my opinion, who are still perfectly willing to be closeted on a situational basis, but none of us but the desperate self loathing are willing to live our entire lives inside the closet anymore.  There’s a reason for that, and it’s not turning your back on God or having a lack of moral values or defiant homosexual militancy.  It’s something else, something that the Prather’s of the world just don’t seem to get.  And yet it’s so simple, or would be, if only you can see the people for the homosexuals.  Prather, in trying his best, and I don’t doubt for a minute that he’s actually trying, misses it completely.

If a straight student had, say, posted photos of himself and his girlfriend in flagrante delicto on the Internet, he also would have been expelled.

In flagrante delicto.  It means "Caught in the act."  Johnson didn’t post pictures of him and his boyfriend having sex on his MySpace profile.  But you could tell at a glance those photos were of two teenagers in love.  Look at that for a second.  Prather is using a phrase that generally is taken to mean getting caught having sex (the act) to describe photos of two gay teenagers in love.  And he goes on in that manner for the rest of the column, trying his best to be sensible and compassionate, and failing miserably because he cannot see the people for the homosexuals…

Homosexual activities and extramarital heterosexual sex indeed are contrary to biblical and historical Christian standards. Yet, they’re about equally as errant as pride, gluttony, stinginess, temper tantrums, disrespect for parents and lying.

Homosexual activities.   Homosexual activities.  Homosexual activities.

One question raised by the Johnson case is this: How should Christian groups react to sexual misconduct? All religious organizations are made up of human beings who, in my observation, tend to fail miserably a fair amount of the time.

Sexual misconduct.  Sexual misconduct.  Sexual misconduct. 

Maybe Christian administrators should consider reacting the way Jesus did. I never can think about an incident such as Johnson’s without remembering the time Jesus was confronted with a woman who had been caught "in the very act" of adultery and was about to be stoned for it…

Adultery.   The Very Act.

Jesus said, "Let the one who is himself without sin throw the first rock." That ended the stoning. Then he addressed the woman. "Neither do I condemn you," he said. "Go your way. From now on, sin no more."

What a beautiful response…

Beautiful perhaps, when made to someone who had cheated on their spouse.  But it is unmitigated ugliness to say this to a gay teenager about his first love.  Johnson is not married (never mind for now, that homosexuals can only Be married in one state of the union).  He is not having an affair with another married person.  And considering Johnson’s religiosity, it would not surprise me in the least to hear they aren’t even having sex yet.  We don’t all jump right into the sack on the first date.  So at worst you can only call Johnson’s "sin" fornication, not adultery, and there is no evidence even for that.  But notice the mental leap here, from images of two young men in love, to adultery, and even more grotesquely, to forgiveness for adultery.  No.  From Johnson’s MySpace profile, his sin can only be one thing: being a homosexual in love.  And there’s what’s missing from all of Paul Prather’s compassion and understanding: any sense whatsoever that homosexuals love, and that they are punished simply for being in love.

Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…  This is the bedrock of anti-gay prejudice, the one irreducible premise through which everything else about homosexuals is understood.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Never mind the raving haters of the world like Fred Phelps…if you want to understand how otherwise decent people can casually rip the lives of their gay and lesbian neighbors apart with no thought or care for the human misery and wreckage they leave behind, there’s why.  They can do it, confidant in the knowledge that our feelings for our mates are shallow imitations of the real feelings heterosexuals feel for theirs.  Heterosexuals feel love and contentment and fulfillment in their spouses, but homosexuals can only feel a pale imitation of that.  "Playing house" as the homophobic science fiction writer Orson Scott Card once put it.  Heterosexuals feel deep and profound grief at the loss of a spouse,  but homosexuals can only try to mimic grief at best.  So we cannot rip apart everything in their lives they ever held dear, because they don’t really hold those things dear…not the way we do.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.

It’s how anti gay prejudice becomes it’s own unstoppable machine, grinding up the lives of innocent people while others who fancy themselves decent and compassionate and thoughtful citizens look sadly on, as though watching the fate of dogs that have to be put down because they’re so sick.  Oh how…unfortunate…for them…  If you think that the only wrong done to Jason Johnson was being expelled from his school, you’re missing the graver injury done to his person, and right at the very core of his being.  To see it, all you have to do is be able to see the person for the homosexual.  Let me try to explain to the Prathers of the world how horrible that "beautiful response" actually is. 

Picture the first time you fell in love.  Picture that amazed, wonderful feeling.  One day, life just seemed more wonderful, more intense, more amazing then you’d ever dreamed it could be.  The sun shone a little brighter on everything around you then it did before.  The stars seemed to shine more intensely.  Everything old seemed new again.  Life was beautiful.  It was worth living no matter how hard or desperate it got.  Everything that ever happened to you was worth it, because it brought you to that moment, and that person.  Everything that ever Could happen to you from then on was worth it, so long as a certain person was there, so long as you could see them smile.  Because whenever they smiled, you smiled.

I remember it well.  When I was a teenager I used to listen to all the pop culture love songs of the sixties and early seventies on my radio, and never really understood what they were about, until I fell in love myself, with a male classmate.  I remember hearing this song on my radio one day, I’d heard it countless times before and I didn’t like it at all because it was it was slow, it had no beat, it was just some gooey sugary love song and whenever one of those came on I would reach for the tuning knob and try to find something else I could rock to, and this time when it came on I sat and listened, and began to cry…because I knew exactly how the person who wrote it felt…because it said it all about what I was feeling then…

Today I feel like pleasing you more than before
Today I know what I want to do but I don’t know what for
To be living for you is all I want to do
To be loving you it’ll all be there when my dreams come true
Today you’ll make me say that I somehow have changed
Today you’ll look into my eyes, I’m just not the same
To be anymore than all I am would be a lie
I’m so full of love I could burst apart and start to cry
Today everything you want, I swear it all will come true
Today I realize how much I’m in love with you
-Jefferson Airplane, Today

Homosexuals mate to their own sex.  That we do doesn’t take from us any of the higher emotions heterosexuals are capable of expressing to their mates, or of their unions.  We love.  We honor.  We cherish.  Til death do us part.  We are capable of great sacrifice for the honor of our love.  We are capable of great joy in that love.  Our unions are as life affirming to us as yours are to you.  The only difference between us is that we mate to our own sex.  You can’t take the homosexuality out of a homosexual, otherwise the snake oil salesmen of the ex-gay ministries would have thousands of happy heterosexuals to show as proof, instead of one paid staff member after another who proudly proclaims their heterosexuality only to get caught in a gay bar months or years later.  We are what we are. 

You can make us ashamed of ourselves.  You can make us hate ourselves.  You can make us terrified of the slightest shred of sexual arousal.  But you can’t make us heterosexuals because we aren’t.  What you Can do, is take all the higher aspects of love and devotion away from us.  All the romance.  All the poetry.  All the honor and devotion.  All the awe and all the joy and all the wonder.  You can take that from us.  You can drain our lives of every last drop of it.  But when you do we are still homosexuals, and all you have done is leave us empty human shells with sexual needs that won’t go away. 

And that’s exactly what you do, every time you tell a gay kid that his feelings for his first love are sin.  You convince him of it, and you literally leave him with nothing left in his life but mindless loveless lust.  That’s what you’re calling beautiful.

I’m not going to argue theology with anyone.  If you’ve got yourself locked into a relentless fundamentalist religiosity that insists that every last comma and period in the King James bible Must be literally true or you’re not a faithful Christian, then I guess the universe really was created in six days and is about six thousand years old and women suffer the pains of childbirth for the sin of Eve.  And if that’s what you believe then all I have to say to you is: Get the fuck off my back! 

I’m not going to argue about whether or not we have a choice.  That argument is over and done with for everyone except bigots and religious fanatics for whom no science could ever be enough to change their minds.

Here’s what I have to say about the case of Jason Johnson and forgiveness of sin: it doesn’t matter if you don’t mean to hurt anyone, if you won’t stop hurting them!  And one other thing, which was said more eloquently by another man, dealing in his own blunt way with another mindless human prejudice that was, and still is, tearing away at innocent people’s lives…

If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches,
that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress.
Progress is healing the wound…
-El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X)

Forgiveness.  The biggest problem I have with Christianity, the reason I could never go back to it, is forgiveness.  Christ would tell me I have to forgive.  I know that.  I just can’t.  But maybe if I saw a serious start in this country at healing the wound I could try. 

Via a friend on MySpace, comes this appeal for letters.  First, from the Wikipedia, a little background…

The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), formed in 1987, is a rebel paramilitary group operating mainly in northern Uganda. The group is engaged in an armed rebellion against the Ugandan government in what is now one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts. It is led by Joseph Kony, who proclaims himself a spirit medium, and apparently wishes to establish a state based on his unique interpretation of Biblical millenarianism. The LRA have been accused of widespread human rights violations, including the abduction of civilians, the use of child soldiers and a number of massacres.

It is estimated that around 20,000 children have been kidnapped by the group since 1987 for use as soldiers and sex slaves. The group performs abductions primarily from the Acholi people, who have borne the brunt of the 18 year LRA campaign. The insurgency has been mainly contained to the region known as Acholiland, consisting of the districts of Kitgum, Gulu, and Pader, though since 2002 violence has overflowed into other districts. The LRA has also operated across the porous border region with Southern Sudan, subjecting Sudanese civilians to its horrific tactics.

God save this poor world from your prophets…  My friend passes along this request that you send a letter to the U.S. State department, urging them to keep this horrific conflict high on the agenda.  In includes the story of one boy who was kidnapped and forced into The Lord’s Resistance Army…

Ms. Condoleezza Rice
Secretary of State
U.S. State Department
Washington DC 20520

Dear Secretary Rice,

I am deeply concerned about the conflict in northern Uganda, and particularly its devastating impact on children. I am writing to urge you to place this forgotten crisis higher on the United States’ agenda, and to use the U. S. influence to end the human rights abuses by both sides that lie at the heart of the conflict.

Since the war began in 1986, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has abducted more than 30,000 children to serve as soldiers, laborers and sex slaves. These boys and girls are forced to fight against the government Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF), carry out raids, beat and kill civilians, and abduct other children. Girls are additionally forced into sexual slavery as "wives" of LRA commanders. Children who refuse to follow orders or try to run away are often captured and killed.

I want to tell you about a boy who I will call Peter. Peter lives in Gulu, Uganda, on of the most targeted areas in the country. One horrific day, while attending his primary school in Gulu, Peter was abducted by the LRA along with 6 other schoolboys. The same day the LRA went to Peter’s house and murdered his two uncles and his father, and later took Peter home to see their dead bodies, and watch his mother get beaten unconscious. Additional members of his family were also tortured and murdered before his eyes.

Peter was dragged into the bush where he endured severe unspeakable brainwashing meant to turn the abducted children into brutal soldiers. If the children dropped their guns they were beaten, if they tried to escape they were tortured in front of the other children as an example of what would happen in the case of disobedience. Peter lived among this nightmare for 10 long years, quickly rising to the rank of Joseph Kony’s (the leader of the LRA) personal bodyguard. Peter managed to escape the LRA when he was 19 years old and has now lived the last 5 years of his life doing everything he can to spread awareness and end this treacherous war.

Peter is only one story out of the approximate 30,000 children that have been abducted into the LRA.

The threat of LRA abduction is so great that every night as many as 40,000 children leave their homes in the countryside to sleep in the relative safety of towns. They seek refuge overnight at churches, hospitals, bus stations and temporary shelters before returning home again each morning. These children are known as "night commuters" because of the long distances they travel nightly on foot.

Top UN officials have called the war in northern Uganda the world’s biggest forgotten crisis. Child abductions and other human rights have now continued for nearly twenty years,

I urge the United States government to take stronger action to address this crisis. The United States should use its leverage with the government of Uganda to push for increased protection for children and other civilians in the north of Uganda. It should press the new government of Sudan (the government of National Unity, formed with the former rebel forces in 2005) o cut off all support, formal or informal, for the Lord’s Resistance Army which operated in southern Sudan. The U.S. should also support efforts through the United Nations to strengthen human rights and child protection operations in the North.

Under President Bush, the United States played a significant role in achieving peace between long-warring parties in Sudan, Uganda’s northern neighbor. I urge our government to place a similar priority on addressing the crisis in northern Uganda.

Respectfully,
 

In addition, the request is that you also send a copy to John Bolton.  Now…I strongly doubt that Rice or Bolton give a good goddamn about the fate of impoverished children anywhere, let alone in Africa.  But it can’t hurt to try and prick somebody’s conscience in the State Department.  And while you’re at it, send a copy to your congress critters too.  War is hell enough on children but this is beyond evil.  It might not seem like much, but sometimes just knowing that people are aware of and watching what’s going on is the difference, that makes a difference.

Just a little something to add the My World post…

A thought struck me the other day as I was re-reading it: I’m the only one I know from my high school/college days, who’s ever actually been to a street protest.  At least…that I know.  It flabbergasted me for a moment to think that, because my circle of friends back then was very politically aware.  Remember, those were the Nixon/Viet Nam years.  My friends and I were angry, livid even, about what was happening.  Everyone could cite you chapter and verse the Nixon gang’s various crimes against America and democracy.  We talked about it a lot.  We ranted and raved and bitched royal.  But I was the only one I could recall, who ever marched or became politically active, even just a little.

Never mind the national gay rights marches.  Never mind all the Pride day marches I’ve been too, let alone the ones I’ve actually marched in and not watched from the sidelines.  In the 70s I went to an assortment of anti-war protests too, and various women’s rights and civil rights marches, merrily taking photos along the way.  I lived in the suburbs of Washington D.C., and it was easy to get downtown to the Mall whenever something was happening.  Sometimes I went purely as a photographer.  But more often I went as I often do, as both participant and observer, camera in hand, marching along with the others, chanting the chants, helping out here and there when I could, and with my camera documenting the times I lived in.

And I’ve never, never considered myself all that much of a radical or an activist.  Never.  I’m not an organizer.  Shy as I am, it took every shred of nerve I could muster to go out when I had to and get petitions signed, because I just hate walking up to total strangers and starting up a conversation.  It’s nerve wracking.  And I’m not preoccupied with politics all day long, not even gay politics.  I’ve always considered it to be a part of my life, a part of the times we all live in, but not all there is to life.  And sometimes I feel guilty that I’m not doing more politically, especially now.

And yet…I marched.  Nobody else did.  Not even on their issues.  That…really surprises me to recall.  I have no idea why I never noticed it before.

I always tried to get a button from the marches I went to, for some small token that says that, yes, I was there.  I suppose you can pick them up at flea markets and hip retro ’70s boutique shops now too, along with lava lamps, peace necklaces and tie-dyed t-shirts.  Alas my hair there is covering one of my favorite march buttons, the one from the first gay rights march on Washington in 1979.  The others are from the rest of the national gay rights marches to date.  The little Capital dome with the rainbow below it is from the HRC Millennium March in 2000, which got the biggest crowds ever, but was dismissed as being more of a big block party then a political protest march.  The little green square next to it is my GLIB button…the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS which I did volunteer work for many years on, and which gave me my first real access to the larger gay community beyond the confines of the D.C. suburbs.

Via Some Guys Are Normal, Ben at Scattered Words, who is questioning homosexuality (but probably not in the same sense as physicists are questioning dark matter), finds that someone at Christianity Today didn’t think Brokeback Mountain was such a bad flick after all…

Homosexuality has been like a ghost, hiding in the shadows of my shame, telling me I can never reach my full potential as a Christian. As strange and contradictory as it may sound, seeing Brokeback Mountain helped me bury that ghost and begin moving forward.

What I saw in Brokeback Mountain tore my heart apart. I cried with Alma when she discovered the truth about Ennis and Jack. I also cried for the countless wives in real life who know that their husbands are leading a secret existence. I cried even harder for the men, more in number than we realize, who are trapped in sexual sin and don’t know how to escape it. And as I wept, I wondered if God could use me to help reach some of them with his grace and delivering power.

No scene touched me more than the one in which Ennis’s daughter pays him a visit after Jack dies, and tells him he needs to buy some furniture to liven up his cold and barren trailer. Ennis responds, "If you ain’t got nothin, you don’t need nothin." I made up my mind then and there that I would not let homosexuality rob me like it had robbed Ennis.

No you drooling moron…homosexuality didn’t rob Ennis, a goddamn tire iron swung by all the force hate could give it robbed him.  Twice…

"You won’t catch me again," said Jack. "Listen. I’m thinkin, tell you what, if you and me had a little ranch together, little cow and calf operation, your horses, it’d be some sweet life. Like I said, I’m gettin out a rodeo. I ain’t no broke-dick rider but I don’t got the bucks a ride out this slump I’m in and I don’t got the bones a keep gettin wrecked. I got it figured, got this plan, Ennis, how we can do it, you and me. Lureen’s old man, you bet he’d give me a bunch if I’d get lost. Already more or less said it — "

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. It ain’t goin a be that way. We can’t. I’m stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can’t get out of it. Jack, I don’t want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don’t want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich — Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They’d took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel."

"You seen that?"

"Dad made sure I seen it. Took me to see it…"

Annie Proulx,  "Brokeback Mountain"

That’s what robbed Ennis.  That’s what stole from him his capacity to love and accept love from another man.  Nearly every review of the film I’ve seen has commented on how perfectly the actor who played him, Heath Ledger, captured the sense of a man completely uncomfortable inside his own skin, so completely inhibited he can barely talk.  Shame.  Guilt.  Self loathing.  It’s not enough for the hatemongers to make other people hate us.  We have to hate ourselves too.  We have to hate ourselves even more then they hate us.  Because only by hating ourselves that much, will we keep punishing ourselves for simply existing, for just being alive and walking this good earth along with them and breathing their air, when they’re not able to punish us for it with their own two hands.  And those of us who never fell into or who manage to escape that bottomless pit of shame and self loathing, still have to deal with the hate and all the myriad ways, large and small, that it cheats us out of one of this life’s most perfect joys. 

That’s what robbed Ennis.  And it robs all of us.  Some of us more then others…horribly more.  I’ve never hated myself and never tried to obliterate myself in reckless squalor, or an all controlling self-annihilating religious cult.  I’ve never lost a lover to the tire iron.  I’ve never been forced against my will into ex-gay therapy.  But I can count in months the time in my life I’ve had someone to love, and that’s partly because I’ve fallen in love so many times with other guys, who could not love and desire whole heartedly, because they were so ashamed to love and desire at all.

Hate, and the tire iron.  One way or another it robs us all.  It robbed me…and it robbed you too. Mr. Belkofer.

This post isn’t for everyone.  This one’s for…uhm…to whom it may concern…

News Item: Congress Moves To Except Religious Schools From Gay Rights Laws

(Washington) Private Christian colleges would be excepted from local and state non-discrimination laws under a proposed amendment to the Higher Education Act – a move that would allow the schools to legally reject LGBT students.

The amendment, proposed by Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah), would prevent accrediting boards from making adherence to non-discrimination laws a requirement.

Now…you’d think nullifying local discrimination laws for private christian schools would mean congress was givng them the green light to discriminate on the basis of race, religion and a host of other things too.  But…well…not.  This isn’t about opposition to anti discrimination laws.  This bill’s target is a tad more specific then that.  It’s a bullet aimed at one particular group of students…

The committee also inserted language in the bill stating that it is not meant to allow an institution to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age or disability. The provision does not include sexuality.

News Item: GOP Bid To Shore Up Conservative Support With New  Effort To Pass Anti-Gay Amendment 

Between now and the November elections, Republicans are penciling in plans to take action on social issues important to religious conservatives, the foundation of the GOP base, as they defend their congressional majority.

In a year where an unpopular war in Iraq has helped drive President Bush’s approval ratings below 40%, core conservatives whose turnout in November is vital to the party want assurances that they are not being taken for granted.

So what’s a good way to get votes in this country?  Well…crap like this for instance:

News Item: Police Investigate Gay Beatings In Fort Lauderdale

News Item: Montana Prof Threatened After Speaking Out Against Homophobia

News Item:  Hate on a Michigan campus

What the gay students of Michigan Tech are seeing on campus these days…

News Item: Pope Uses Easter To Attack Gay Families

(Vatican City) In marking the Stations of the Cross during Good Friday observances in Rome Pope Benedict XVI called for the "filth" that surrounds society to be cleansed and said the world is in the grip of "a diabolical pride aimed at eliminating the family".

Diabolical pride.  Diabolical pride.  Diabolical pride.  Aimed at eliminating the family.  Next week is kill a fag week…bring your own gun!!!

News Item: Students Sue Georgia Tech Over Gay Tolerant Policy

(Atlanta, Georgia) A conservative law practice has filed a federal lawsuit accusing Georgia Tech of violating the constitutional rights of religious students over the school’s non-discrimination policy that protects gays and lesbians on campus.

The suit, filed by the Alliance Defense Fund on behalf of two students, names President Wayne Clough and other administrators. ADF is involved in fighting LGBT issues across the country.

The lawsuit alleges that the school policy discriminates against Christian and Jewish students by barring them from speaking out against homosexuality and other issues.

Next week is kill a fag week…bring your own gun!!!

News Item: Anger Over Gay Bullying Speech At Vermont School

(Burlington, Vermont) Several parents are blasting the Burlington, Vermont school board for inviting a state-wide LGBT advocacy group to make a presentation on gay bullying at a local middle school this week.

A teenage member of Outright Vermont told the sixth graders about the bullying he faced and the difficulty he had in coping.  The presentation at Lyman Hunt Middle School was part of Wellness Week".  Other presentations covered topics such as tobacco, alcohol and drugs abuse, eating disorders, suicide prevention and violence against women and girls.

Parent Kristy DeGuise said parents should have been notified in advance that a gay person would be speaking.

"School is a place to learn. I don’t personally believe that learning about not bashing gays is going to get them a better job in life," she told the Burlington Free Press.

Mary Rouille, a parent who said she is Catholic but enrolls her children in the public system said the speech should never have been allowed.

"If we can’t bring our religion into the school, they shouldn’t bring their beliefs in," she said.

Next week is kill a fag week…bring your own gun!!!

Welcome to my world.  Maybe you can understand why gay politics preoccupies my time and my throughts a lot these days.  Maybe you can understand why I seem so goddamn angry and pissed off sometimes.  Maybe you can understand why I take a little…erm…Pride…in my activism, artistic and otherwise…pissing in the wind though it all sometimes seems to me. It takes a certain amount of courage to stand up to this kind of vitriolic hate, look it in the face and tell it ‘No’.  Do you understand that?  I’m Proud of what I’ve done to fight this cancer on our lives, this profound insult to the human identity, this all out war on that deepest most intmate part of ourSelves where we can love and trust and hope and dream.  Maybe you can understand why I think it’s so important to be out, and to push back against prejudice and hate.  Or…not.  Maybe I’m just irritating you more by waving all this in your face again.

Here…let me show you what gets waved in mine, on a regular basis:

It’s not just that I’m single…it’s not just that at 52 I see one of life’s great dreams receding into the distance…vanishing over the horizon…it’s not the triumphalism of all the gutter crawling bigots of this poor world whenever they get another chance to twist that knife in our hearts, and murder that dream in yet another gay soul, and then dance in its ashes.  Oh it’s all that…but I could endure it all, and maybe be a little less angry, and a little more balanced and secure, but for the indifference, the motherfucking indifference, of a few people in my life, a few people I once held dear. 

You should have cared.  You should have given a good goddamn.  Never mind my desolate love life, you should have cared about my physical safety, about my status as a free and equal citizen, it should have bothered you, just a tad, how bad the threat to your friend was getting.  But it never did.  Here…look at it again…

See a connection there yet?  And you’re pissed off at me because I’m fighting back…because I’m standing up to it, because I’m proud of what I’ve done in the fight?  So where the hell were you during the great great American Kultar Kampf?  One of this life’s most magical, most wonderful moments, that time when you discover love, and sex, and falling in love for the first time, and being loved in return, is systematically turned into a desolate nightmare for some of us and I’ve asked myself why so many nights until my head is going in circles that I can’t count them anymore.  But I’ll tell you what: I’ve stopped asking why some of the people in my life never really seemed to care. After the last election, when the republican national committee proudly took credit for that Bible Ban ad, I reckoned there was just no fucking point in it any more.  Someone who has gay friends and isn’t completely pissed off at how their friend’s lives are under constant, relentless attack these days, is simply faking it. 

I am not the some in some of my best friends are.  In a better time, I could treat my sexual orientation like it’s just another part of me…like my blue eyes and brown hair, and the fact that I’m right handed and like to paint and draw and take pictures and go on long road trips.  In a better time we all could. You have no fucking idea how much I’ve wanted to just live my goddamned life as if my sexual orientation was no big deal.  

But when I have to read about one attack on my person after another nearly every fucking day in the newspapers, when they’re calling for an amendment to our constitution declaring me in essence a second class citizen, and religious passions toward people like me are being thumped on pulpits from one end of the country to the other,  then I can’t afford to ignore it any more then I could afford to sit on my porch and sip ice tea while a tornado is bearing down on me.  As William Lloyd Garrison once said, Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm. 

I stood on a protest line last summer while a sixteen year old gay kid was involuntarily put through an ex-gay therapy program.  I have to tell you it crossed my mind more then once during that protest, to wonder what my own friends would have done for me had I been placed into that kind of nightmare when I was that age.  Picture me standing in a protest line, staring at this run down church they’d converted into an ex-gay ministry, not knowing the answer to that.  

Hate cannot take our lives away from us, it cannot devastate our hopes and dreams, without the help of indifference.

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.

–Elie Wiesel

Yeah.  I’m angry.  So fucking what?  Where the hell were you while I was in Memphis?  I know…I know…the same place you were while I was marching in Washington for equal rights…in 1979…in 1987…in 1993…in 2000.   You were somewhere else.  You were always somewhere else.

[Edited a tad…] 

This week’s cartoon. 

More about PFOX’s war on gay youth in our schools later, when I’ve caught up a bit… 

On the way home yesterday I saw my first barn swallow darting around the Institute parking deck.  So never mind the spring equinox…spring arrived in Baltimore sometime yesterday afternoon, while I was busy in my ground floor office trying to figure out why my XML parser was validating a document that it should have failed.

When the swallows leave for the winter, their nesting spots are taken over by the local sparrows and house finches.  The house finches aren’t much of a problem, but sparrows are mean and aggressive as all hell.  They only seem like small birds.  Side by side you notice that they’re actually bigger then most of the the native songbirds.  My worry has been that if we get enough sparrows in the parking deck they’ll drive out the swallows.  But not to fear…it seems the first order of swallow business upon returning to their nesting grounds from South America is clearing out the sparrows.  When I saw my first swallow of the year it was chasing a sparrow for its dear life away from their nests. 

Swallows are tiny little things, but they’re fast and can turn on a dime in mid air and what I saw the other day is that sparrows are just no match for them in air combat.  I watched while that swallow fairly terrorized that sparrow in a high speed wheeling and hair pin turning chase up and down half the parking deck.  They zipped and turned and darted between parked cars and around the concrete columns like a couple bats out of hell, with the swallow loudly cussing and the sparrow completely terrorized until it finally, I’m not kidding, ducked under a parked car.  Then the swallow perched on one of the overhead fire sprinkler lines nearby and sassed it for a few minutes before flying off.  So I guess the swallows aren’t afraid of the sparrows.  If this year is anything like all the others, what will happen is the sparrows will move to a few isolated locations around the deck, perch on the deck railings during the day and sass the swallows as they fly in and out of their nests, and the swallows will just ignore them as long as they keep their distance.

Everything is green again.  The neighborhood trees are almost fully leafed now, and my bird feeders are suddenly getting a lot less traffic then they did in the winter.  My Spanish moss offering was picked over a little, but not much, so I guess the city birds aren’t really impressed with it as nest material, but I’ll leave it out for a couple months more.  I can walk to work in shirtsleeves most days now.  The swallows are back.  It’s spring now.

Sorry…  This one’s taken a little longer then I thought.  And I’m still too tired during the day for some reason.  I’m still napping a lot when I really need to be working around the house and in my art room.  I’d hoped to be getting more past all that now then I am.

I’ll have this week’s cartoon up by the end of the day Monday.  Sorry for the delay.

Via Peterson Toscano, a powerful reminder that James Dobson’s greatest crimes against humanity aren’t the ones he’s committed against gay and lesbian people, but his methodical and systematic breaking of the bond of love between parent and child.  Ex-ex-gay blogger Christine writes about what it was like growing up in a fundamentalist household, where Dobson’s pathological hatred of children had found its soil, and taken root…

I was disciplined and guilted and shamed into submission for many years. It somehow seems appropriate to me that Focus on the Family is such a partner with Exodus. My parent’s treatment of me as a child (using Dobson as their guide) no doubt made me all the more vulnerable to the ex-gay message. I was ready and willing to believe myself a damaged and broken person that needed to be fixed, with my sin nature needing to be beaten down and submerged, subdued, and dominated. I was willing to believe that my homosexuality was a part of my own strong-willed defiance gone horribly wrong and satanically out of control.

I can’t even look at Dr. Dobson’s book Dare to Discipline without wanting to weep…

Well somebody needs to look at it.  Because this man has single handedly shattered the lives of countless thousands of helpless children.  And he did it by manipulating their parent’s fundamentalist religiosity, their fear of Satan, and that secret empty place inside of them, where other people have a conscience and a capacity for basic human sympathy…

For parents like mine, who got almost all of their parenting advice from Dr. Dobson, is it any wonder that everything turned into a battle of wills and they saw their child as a "strong-willed tyrant" that needed to be battled into submission? Dr. Dobson is a man who says that "If discipline begins on the second day of life, you’re one day too late." What kind of discipline could a one-day old infant possibly need?!?

I have heard of Dobson-style parents commenting on how "manipulative" a four-month old baby is, because the baby will smile when an adult is playing with them, but cry when it is left alone.

This is sickening.  Of course an infant will cry when its left alone.  Look at that, because the temptation is to think that Dobson desensitizes parents and he doesn’t.  Infants are helpless and vulnerable and need to be cared for.  For Christ sake they’ll cry when they’re hungry too, when they’re sick, when they’re in some kind of pain.  The first reaction of any normal human being to the sound of an infant crying is that anxious sensation  that something’s wrong.  But the problem Dobson’s parents face isn’t that they don’t know what to do with a crying infant, it’s that they don’t know what they’re supposed to feel. 

And Dobson supplies them with an explanation of child parent interaction that fits their sensibilities perfectly: there are no genuine human emotions…everything is manipulation.  Love… affection… tenderness… anxiety… grief… sorrow…  Dobson tells them that all of that is really just different ways humans manipulate one another.  Ask yourself what kind of person this makes sense to, and the horrors inflicted on so many children in this world by their own parents stop being so surprising.

There’s also the story of how Dobson treated his own dog, Siggie (yes, after Freud) in a battle of wills between man and beast. Dobson relates this story in The Strong-Willed Child:

"I had seen this defiant mood before [defiant mood being indicated by Siggie not wanting to leave a warm spot in the house and go to his kennel, and subsequently growling at Daddy Dobson], and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me ‘reason’ with Mr. Freud."

You can read the chilling conclusion here.

If you decide to click on that link, brace yourself.  They say that the abuse of animals is a prime indicator of deeper sociopathologies.  Its something they watch for in young children as a warning sign of potential for serious pathological violence later in life.  Dobson however, is in the enviable position of being able to exercise his pathologies by proxy.  Why abuse children yourself, and risk a very long prison term, when you can get their parents to do it for you? But not just any parents mind you.  You need the ones who are missing that extra something most humans have…a capacity to feel sympathy.  A heart, capable of whole hearted love for another.  You find yourself enough of these, and then the rest is just a matter of invoking the name of Jesus, and telling those parents that their children are Satan incarnate. 

No…I’m not exaggerating…

This brings me to another thing I’ve wondered of late. In talking with other ex-ex-gays or those who have survived fundamentalist upbringings, many of us have in common parents who are absolutely unable to love unconditionally. These parents do things and say things that most parents would not utter to their children no matter how upset they were with them. Is it the idea of sin or satan somehow controlling our lives that gives them license to think of us this way, or talk to us this way? Is it a lifetime of thinking of us as "defiant tyrants" that gives parents the idea that their child is in league with the devil himself?

My own mother once looked at a 5-year old boy and said out-loud to him "get thee behind me, Satan!" because she was convinced that he’d looked at her in a defiant manner that gave her chills and that she could only attribute to Satan. She told our family about this later, with an air of pride that she’d had the guts to speak out against Satan in this manner (nevermind the poor child who probably still remembers that church lady calling him "satan"). For those of us whose parents see us in this light…could this be an explanation for why they are so willing to throw us away, to denounce us and reject us? Do they truly still see brazen and defiant tyrants controlled by satan when they look at us?

(emphasis mine)  I’ve seen that with my own two eyes.  Guy I dated once had a father like that.  Couldn’t love unconditionally if Jesus Christ gave him his heart to do it with.  And there’s the problem, in all its horrible stomach churning glory.  There’s the Pit you don’t want to stare into for too long, because it also stares back into you.  The fundamentalist demands structure, tight all controlling structure to their world, because the world of intimate human interaction is utterly incomprehensible to them.  If they have to manage their way in the human community the way the rest of us do, by building bonds of trust and Empathy and love, they’re completely lost at sea and cannot cope.  Without that all controlling structure to tell them how to conduct their lives at the interpersonal level, they simply can not fathom right from wrong. They just can’t figure it out.  Telling a five year old boy that he’s the devil no more disturbs their conscience then telling him the time of day would.  The boy does not exist in their conscience as a boy, but as an incomprehensible…thing.  It might be human…it might be a child…on the other hand it might be the devil himself.  They’ve just no way of knowing, apart from some structure, some tradition, some religious dogma, telling them what the boy is.

And into this soil fertile for every human horror you can imagine, because none of them have any brakes beyond the traditions and social structures they live inside of, comes Dobson – telling these parents that their children are, in fact, the very images of satan himself.  The growing child who expresses the slightest shred of their own human individuality is, in fact, channeling the serpent in the Garden of Eden…

Perhaps this tendency toward self-will is the essence of ‘original sin’ which has infiltrated the human family. It certainly explains why I place such stress on the proper response to willful defiance during childhood, for that rebellion can plant the seeds of personal disaster.

To suck the human identity out of a child, leaving their soul an empty blackboard that any authority figure can scribble their will upon, is Exactly Dobson’s purpose here.  But I don’t think Dobson means to be that authority.  I think he just takes pleasure in the emptying of a human soul, and leaving it with nothing left to Be. A vampire gains some nourishment from the people whose blood they take.  Dobson is one of those toxic human voids that just suck the life out of everything they touch, for the pleasure of watching something they could never themselves become die. Oscar Wilde once said that we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.  Dobson is the man handing out hot pokers to parents, determined that every child will grow up blind, so they will never know that the stars above his gutter and beyond his reach, even exist.

…many of us have in common parents who are absolutely unable to love unconditionally… My own mother once looked at a 5-year old boy and said out-loud to him "get thee behind me, Satan!"…  Never mind the stacking of the Federal Courts…here’s the legacy of the ascendancy of the religious right that America will be suffering under for generations to come.  Tens of thousands of soul wounded children, walking into adulthood with their only understanding of what it is to trust and love coming from parents who were taught to regard them as satanic beings.

[Edited a tad…] 

You may have already heard the story of Jason Johnson, a gay student who was expelled from the fundamentalist University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky.  You may have heard this university claims the right to treat any of its students like less then dog shit because…hey…they’re a private institution and they don’t have to answer to any of those damn secular civil rights and equal opportunity laws.  You may have heard further that the University of the Cumberlands is slated to get a sweetheart 11 million dollars of Kentucky tax payer money from the state assembly this year…it’s status as a private institution willing to discriminate against any citizen of Kentucky it damn well pleases to notwithstanding.  God says it’s okay to steal money from the heathens.

What you may not have also heard, and which attracted my attention just a few moments ago while reading this article about the incident, is that the University of the Cumberlands is apparently also quite willing to lie through their teeth about Jason’s school record…

The summer after his freshman year, he came out to his parents and returned to campus as an openly gay man.

"I just knew that I couldn’t go back to hiding again. I wanted to be out," said Johnson, adding that he never experienced harassment or conflict because of his sexual orientation. "Being gay is part of who I am, but not the totality of who I am."

Johnson posted messages about his boyfriend and being gay on his profile at MySpace. com, and school administrators eventually saw the Web site; Johnson doesn’t know how they found it. They confronted him last week with a printout of the site, an order to leave the school and failing grades for a semester that probably would have ended with honors.

The university did not return calls seeking comment yesterday.

(Emphasis mine) Okay…it’s one thing to say that an openly gay student doesn’t conform to your school’s religious teachings.  It’s one thing to expel that student.  But it’s quite another to claim in his transcripts to any other school he might want to attend, that he failed classes which in fact he was doing quite well in, but which in fact you did not permit him to finish.  No…you mark the semester as incomplete, and if you’re ashamed to go into detail about why this particular student didn’t complete the semester you let it go at that.  But you don’t say he failed, because he didn’t.  He wasn’t allowed to finish.

The word for what University of the Cumberlands is doing here….is lie.  The word for people who do that sort of thing…is liars.  But the word from the pulpits in America now, is that it’s okay to lie through your teeth about homosexuals, and god won’t mind.

Morals.  Values.  Who would Jesus slander?

Now, this is funny.  From aTypical Joe:

Just borrowed Brokeback from Video Warehouse. They’ve put a big sticker on every copy which reads, in red letters, "Explicit Homosexual content."

Seems to me if someone doesn’t know what Brokeback is about, they won’t know what the word homosexual means either.

Stupidity is a force of nature…

Via Pam’s House Blend…  The Stranger is reporting that a pharmacy in Seatle refused to fill a woman’s perscription on moral grounds.  The morning after Pill?  Contraceptives?  Oh mes non:  Antibiotics…

The complaint includes one incident at the Swedish Medical Center outpatient pharmacy in Seattle. According to the complaint, someone at the Swedish pharmacy said she was "morally unable" to fill a Cedar River patient’s prescription for abortion-related antibiotics. Cedar River’s complaint quotes its Renton clinic manager’s May 17, 2005, e-mail account: "Today, one of our clients asked us to call in her prescription… to Swedish outpatient pharmacy. [We] called the prescription in… and spoke with an efficient staff person who took down the prescription. A few minutes later, this pharmacy person called us back and told us she had found out who we were and she morally was unable to fill the prescription." (Cedar River thinks their client eventually got her prescription filled.)

Cedar River Clinics, is a women’s health and abortion provider.  What you need to pay attention to here is that the pharmacy in question has at this point, no idea whether or not the woman who needed the antibiotics has even had an abortion.  They only know the doctors calling the prescription in work for a clinic that provides abortions.  But…never mind.  The moral position now seems to be to let woman who do have abortions die from post surgery infections.  And it gets better…

The complaint also includes an incident from November 2005 in Yakima, in which a pharmacist at a Safeway reportedly refused to fill a Cedar River patient’s prescription for pregnancy-related vitamins. The pharmacist reportedly asked the customer why she had gone to Cedar River Clinics and then told the patient she "didn’t need them if she wasn’t pregnant."

Perhaps the day is coming in which grocery store owners can legally deny food to certain people on moral grounds too.  Who would Jesus starve to death?

"I’m a uniter, not a divider."  Remember that?  Anyone remember that?

I noticed a difference the very first morning after using the CPAP machine.  I noticed it the moment I opened my eyes with my head on the pillow.  My head was clearer.  Visually, everything in my bedroom seemed suddenly sharper and clearer to my eyes.  The morning light coming in my windows streamed over walls and bookcases and bedroom furniture and dozens of little objects scattered throughout the room that looked richer in detail then before.  The wood grain in my beach dresser stood out in the morning light in a way I hadn’t noticed in years.  There was a world out there.

It’s hard to explain the sensation.  It isn’t like my eyes became suddenly sharper.  It’s that the visual detail in my environment was suddenly more there then before.  I was still tired.  My body was still not nearly as energetic as it used to be.  But my head was noticeably clearer, and it was taking everything around me in. 

I’d known at some rational level that my sleep problem had been dragging me down, not only physically but mentally as well.  I had to work to keep things in focus.  For years now I’ve been having to force myself to concentrate in a way I’d never had to before (unless I was seriously high).  I’d known at some rational level the state I was in was bad.  But I hadn’t realized how down, how out of it I’d been for years, until that instant of waking up, and looking around my bedroom. 

You know how it is with cars…they get worn and cranky and you have to work to get the engine up to speed, and before long you have a dozen little work-arounds you just do automatically to compensate while you’re driving. Imagine one day you get into that car and turn the key and the engine just starts purring and when you get it out onto the road the car just leaps forward.  Yeah…it was like that.  But only mentally.

My body is still tired.  I have years of living a sedentary life I have to work now to overcome.  And I expect that at 52 that’s not going to be a piece of cake.  But if I don’t want my body to spiral down into complete helplessness when I’m aged then I need to get it back into some kind of shape now.  If I inherited the trend of males on mom’s side of the family to die of stroke in their 60s or before I’m fucked anyway.  But if my circulatory system has more of dad’s side in it I might live a reasonably healthy old age.  I need to start getting myself back in shape now though…

But…the difference in how I feel mentally now is just…amazing…

For example…

Dream…

I’m walking through the halls of my old High School.  Usually in these dreams I’m a teenager again, but this time I’m the grown adult I am now, and I’m walking alone in empty halls, while paradoxically all the kids I grew up with are outside, still teenagers, talking noisily to each other as they begin their walk home from school. 

Instead of following them I walk into the big central gym and in my dream it morphs into the arcade of some big shopping mall, the same one I’ve visited hundreds of times in my dreams.  I think this dream Mall is some mental aggregate of all the Malls I’ve ever lived near.  I don’t know how other people’s dreams are, but in mine things can just change instantly from one setting to something else entirely and it never seems to faze me.  One minute I’m walking into the school gym, but I go through the doors and then I’m strolling around in a Mall, and I never seem to notice the oddness of that while I’m dreaming it.

In my dream I recall that there is a subway station down one level, down at the end of this particular arcade, and wanting now to go home, I walk toward it.  For some reason though, instead of going down the escalators to the subway I stop and sit on a stone bench nearby, and just relax for a while watching the people in the Mall walking by. 

Then I notice a beautiful guy sitting on a similar bench on the other side of the arcade.  He’s just breathtakingly beautiful.  He notices me looking at him…and he smiles back at me.

I work up some sort of nerve I don’t normally have and smile, quickly, back at him and then look away.  I’m such a damn wuss.  You want to know why I’m still single?  That’s why.  I can never, never work up the nerve to make the first move.  Been like that my entire life.  And I’m not nearly good looking enough to be waiting around for a beautiful someone to make a move on me. 

So I sit there, like I always do, stealing glances at this beautiful guy sitting across the arcade from me.  From time to time he smiles at me.  Then he reaches over to his backpack, pulls out a notebook and starts writing.  He strolls over to my bench, sits down, and passes me a note…

Hi…what’s your name?

Like a couple of damn teenage school kids we pass this note back and forth for a while.  Swear to god it was even ruled loose leaf notebook paper we were writing on…

I’m Bruce.  What’s your name?  Do you live around here?

Eventually we dispense with the note passing and start chatting.  I forget now what we chat about, but I’m enjoying the conversation immensely.  

The foot traffic in the arcade suddenly starts to get heavy.  We’re suddenly surrounded by crowds.  I check the time.  Of course, it’s rush hour, and people are starting to head to the subway.  The beautiful guy I’m sitting next to looks annoyed at the crowd around us, and for an instant I think he’s just going to get up and leave.  That’s almost always how these sorts of dreams end for me.  But no…instead he gives me a serious look and asks me if I know of someplace where we can have a little more privacy.

And…amazingly…I do.  I’ve walked this particular dream Mall many times.  There’s a spot just down the arcade full of tiny little boutique shops that seldom get any foot traffic.  And there are little nooks here and there along it, where you can sit and not be seen. 

We start walking that way, still chatting easily.  We leave the crowds behind, and enter this very odd little corner of the Mall I’ve never figured out.  It’s full of these tiny little stores that never seem to get any customers, but they’re always open all the same.  There are no boarded up shops here, no look of economic despair, but just the opposite.  Brightly lit stores everywhere, that just never seem to do any business.

I point out a nice quiet spot along the arcade where we can be alone for a while… 

…and I wake up.  Crap.  The damn CPAP mask is crowding my face again.  About four or five times a night now it does that and I wake up having to get it all adjusted again.  I need a better mask.

But…damn!  In my dreams the beautiful stranger never approaches me.  Never.