The Third Reich collapsed 61 years ago but you wouldn’t know it if you walk into the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin. The stark entrance hall is lit by a black chandelier in the shape of an iron cross. The pulpit has a wooden carving of a muscular Jesus leading a helmeted Wehrmacht soldier and surrounded by an Aryan family. The baptismal font is guarded by a wooden statue of a stormtrooper from Adolf Hitler’s paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) unit clutching his cap.
Friezes depicting the eagle of the Reich and helmeted soldiers’ heads have been carved into a giant stone arch framing the chancel. The organ was used at the 1935 Nuremberg rally of the Nazi party and egend has it that the church was originally meant to be named after Adolf Hitler. Indeed, the only thing that might irk the Führer were he to inspect the building now is the absence of swastikas — there used to be plenty, but they have been scratched out from the walls because the Nazi symbol is illegal in Germany.
The church bells — which were also embossed in swastikas — are likewise missing. They were removed and melted down in 1942 to forge much-needed guns and ammunition.
…
In the early 1930s the Protestant church came under the influence of a racist and fascist movement called the "German Christians" — called "stormtroopers of Jesus," by the group’s leader and founder Rev. Joachim Hossenfelder.
"The people who designed this interior wanted to show that religion and the Nazi philosophy could merge into one. But it can’t," said Böhm.
No…but that won’t mean people won’t try. Particularly when it comes to choosing between a faith that says, someday, the last shall be the first, and their own comfortable conceits. Emphatically it won’t mean that everyday people won’t come and worship the muscular Jesus regardless of anything the actual Jesus said, about loving your neighbor as yourself, about doing unto others, about how blessed are the merciful, and pray their devotions to Christ and to the Aryan race, and return to their homes thinking themselves good Christians, good soldiers for righteousness. How popular is Muscular Jesus now in America? How popular the Jesus of vengeance, the Jesus of war? Change the uniforms on the soldiers a tad, and that church could fit easily into any bible belt community in America, and quite a few outside as well.
That, I’m glad to say, is not the Christianity I grew up with. But I’ve been close enough to it to have a certain familiarity with the mindset. And as a gay man my very existence is pummeled daily by the disciples of the muscular Jesus. Had I not the religious upbringing I had, I might be as hostile towards Christianity now, as are others I know.
Why the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell became the media embodiment of Christianity, and not people like Fred Clark, and Peterson Toscano, I have absolutely no idea. But it’s one of the great tragedies of our age. Böhm is right…the religion of Jesus cannot be merged with the philosophy of Nazis. The mistake is that the muscular Jesus isn’t a merging of the two philosophies, but a superseding of the one by the other. So the Jesus that said love your neighbor vanishes in the shadow of the one who says might makes right.
On the train back from Montreal (I love taking the train) two college age male hockey players sat in the seats across the aisle next to me. As they settled into their close seats, one turned to the other and announced, “No Homo”. To which his seatmate replied, “Yeah man, I know”.
They then stripped down to their tee-shirts, leaned into each other to watch a movie on the tiny screen of a laptop, shared one set of ear buds to listen and then ate a meal together picking at each others food.
When I saw the title on Peterson’s post I mistook it for the gay version of Negro Please… But no…it’s a couple of straight guys telling each other that they’re not gay. So they can…sit together?
I have the flirt instincts of a brick, so even when someone is coming on to me I seldom notice when I should. And my gaydar is no better. It took my straight brother to tell me that the two of us were being sized up by a gay guy in a coffee house in Arroyo Grande once. I just didn’t notice, and my eyes were everywhere inside that place. When he told me I was floored. Who? What?? So I suppose it’s hard for me to sympathize with nervous young heterosexuals these days. But…Get Over It! You’re not God’s gift to everyone who lays eyes on you.
It’s true…I hate to break it to you. I’m fifty-two and young and hard-bodied as you might be, I’m probably not interested. In fact, you’re probably not even on my radar. I’ll almost certainly forget I even saw you five minutes after we pass each other on the street. I don’t think my sex drive, even at my age (or especially at my age) is particularly low…I could spend days on end contentedly in the sack with the right guy…and when a certain kinda guy throws a smile in my direction, swear to God I’ll have that smile in my thoughts for weeks afterward. But I don’t even notice most guys I encounter throughout the day and, trust me, I’m really not that different in that regard from most other gay guys. I spend all day long with various male co-workers and I couldn’t even tell you what most of them were wearing at work yesterday, and even after years of working alongside them I still get some of their names wrong from time to time. No…it takes a certain special something to grab my leash and give it a yank and chances are, you’re not it.
And there’s something else you have to face up to: you’re not perfectly safe from most heterosexuals either. The guy in the seat next to you may not be a Kinsey 6 like me, or even a five, but that means there’s still a 20 percent or less chance that they’ll get a stray thought about you while you’re sharing earbuds (and presumably ear wax…). So what you really need to do, instead of saying "No Homo" is exchange Kinsey ratings. Then the conversation could go something like this…
"I’m a zero."
"Yeah man, I know. Me too."
Isn’t that much better? And it would be a bit less offensive to the gay folk sitting nearby, most of whom already know that while beauty is only skin deep, stupid goes right to the bone.
In the interest of fairness and balance, and to make sure all viewpoints are carefully aired, the Washington Post has added a republican blogger to its web site. And if you think that means they’ll be adding a liberal democrat to the roster too, I’ve got a Florida election to sell you…
You recently wrote of reader comments deleted from the Post blog: "If I had let them, they would have obliterated any semblance of civil, genuine discussion." Domenech’s inaugural post on his "Red America" blog for the Post referred to "the shrieking denizens of their [the Democrats’] increasingly extreme base" and "the unhinged elements of their base, motivated by partisan rage." Is that the sort of "civil, genuine discussion" you had in mind? Or do you have one set of rules for your staff and another for your readers, one set for liberals and another for conservatives?
As Greg Sargent writes…
Either way, the problem is this: Those critics can’t be placated. The right wouldn’t stop shrieking their "media is liberal" war cry if every single major liberal columnist in America were hauled off in tumbrels and beheaded on the Mall. Right-wing media criticism isn’t about achieving the "balance" they supposedly seek; it’s about bullying and intimidating mainstream reporters and pundits to fear being labeled as "liberals" if they don’t reproduce GOP spin, even when they know it to be false. It’s also about enabling right-wing voices that are far out of the mainstream to infiltrate the media.
The Post on the other hand, thinks that the likes of Domenech are balanced out by the likes of Richard Cohen. Sorta like Bozo The Clown balances out Pol Pot…
The first computer I ever programmed was like this one:
InfoDog, MB-F Newsletter, October 1992: a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP 1170. It came complete with 128K of memory, 100 megabytes of disk, [15 MHz]…. All this great hardware cost a mere $200,000.
Due to the fact that my laptop hard disk started screaming like a Bain Sidhe last week, I now have a $2,000 MacBookPro:
2G of memory, 92GB of hard disk, running at 2 GHz.
My first computer was a Commodore C64. I bought it as a step up from the ColecoVision game station I had, and because computers had started to tweek the curiosity of my inner techno geek. At first I used it to decipher shortwave teletype traffic. Later, as my business building architectural models grew, I bought a word processor for it, Paperclip, and CalKit, a spreadsheet made by the same company, Batteries Included. But even then my eyes were set on the ultimate personal computer: the IBM PC…a monster of a machine, with a whole 640k of ram and huge 340k capacity floppy disk drives. It was well out of my reach, until parts to build one yourself started appearing at the local HAM fests.
Building my first computer turned out to be much easier then building the Heathkits I so loved back then. It was mostly just a matter of buying the right circuit boards and plugging everything together inside a standard sized case. I decided on a clamshell case for the ease of getting at the computer’s innards (the FCC later banned them due to the amount of radio noise they leaked). I bought two of the best quality disk drives of the time, Teac 360k double sided-double density drives, and the best monochrome monitor made, a Princeton Graphics amber screen. The monitor plugged into a Hercules Graphics card. I bought a copy of IBM-PC DOS 3.2 for it, rather then MS-DOS, on the grounds that if the computer I was building could boot it, then its hardware was absolutely IBM compatible. I remember the thrill of turning it on for the first time, and the heart rending shock when I got a series of error beeps during the POST test and nothing happened. It turned out I had a jumper pin on the motherboard set wrong (I had it set for a CGA color graphics card instead of a monochrome video card…there was no plug and play back then…). On the second try the computer booted, and I beheld my first A:\> prompt.
I remember later that night, sitting on the edge of my bed, staring in a kind of awe at the thing I’d just built. This was no toy computer, for playing games. This was the real thing! How little did I know, even then, how much that computer was going to change my life. By today’s standards that 8088 PC-XT compatible is as much a toy as the Commodore it replaced. But that computer was literally my doorway to the edge of the universe.
There is a power in sharing our stories and I hope we can learn more of J’s experience and others like J who have submitted to ex-gay treatment.
Peterson, himself a former Love In Action participant (like J, he voluntarily entered the program), knows whereof he speaks. Their stories are wrenchingly powerful. This passage from J’s blog struck me at a place too deep for words:
I just started a new job, and the first day was very interesting. I found out that my manager, who happens to be a pastor of some small Apostolic church, also "Hates Fags." Well, we are all familiar with Fred Phelps and "God hates fags." When I came out to my parents the first time at the age of 16, my father conveniently left pieces of paper around and the website(godhatesfags.com or something) as the homepage on my computer.
Some days I find myself trying to fathom the cruelty of some parents toward their children and I just can’t. Nor could I imagine what it must be like to walk through life with that memory.
One interesting tidbit I learned from J’s blog, and in the comments on Peterson’s, is that LIA is apparently not telling prospective entrants (the voluntary ones) that their program does not promise a cure for their homosexuality, until after they’ve signed on the dotted line and coughed up their dough. In comments on Peterson’s blog, one poster puts it this way:
I too went into LIA expecting to be cured–expecting to come out completely heterosexual. Imagine my disappointment when I learned during orientation that there was no promise of a cure. The disappointment that I felt learning that I would never be anything more than ex-gay was bitter. While some of us in that orientation class were disappointed, others were angry–even livid.
If you take someone’s money under false pretenses, isn’t that stealing? Isn’t there a commandment or something about that…?
On the surface, "Hate Crime" may seem like a movie about violence rooted in religious bigotry, but underneath it’s a poorly disguised argument for vigilantism. The writer and director, Tommy Stovall, uses the same extremism and rigid stereotyping his film purports to rebel against.
When half of a young gay couple is viciously beaten and eventually dies, suspicion falls on the new neighbor, a fundamentalist preacher’s son with a brush cut, a permanently clenched jaw and a nice line in homophobic curses. Stacking the deck unnecessarily, Mr. Stovall dresses him in tight, white T-shirts accessorized with beer cans, gives him a Southern accent and a criminal record, then lights him like Robert Mitchum in "The Night of the Hunter." And just in case we’re still not clear where our sympathies lie, the gay couple is seen purchasing wedding rings and discussing adoption.
I can’t tell from this review whether this movie is any good or not…only that this reviewer thinks that violence against a gay couple by a religious nutcase is a ridiculous concept for a movie. Oh…and that showing a gay couple buying wedding rings and talking about adopting is a over the top. Oh come on…I’m supposed to believe this…?
With a little more subtlety — and a lot less predictability — the movie might have played more like a thoughtful drama and less like an outrageous exercise in wish fulfillment.
A jailhouse visit between accused murderer Benjamin Matthew Williams and his parents in which Williams compares himself to Jesus Christ and jokes, ”Oh, the devil made me do it,” came into more vivid focus Wednesday when a transcript of the tape was released.
The tape itself was entered into evidence Tuesday at a preliminary hearing for Williams, 31, and his brother, James Tyler Williams, 29, who are accused in the slayings of a Happy Valley gay couple found July 1.
…
Sally Williams also asks her son if, as reported, he was heavily armed when arrested.
”Yeah,” he replies, also acknowledging that he wore a bulletproof vest.
Then Sally Williams, apparently worried that her son might be suicidal, urges him to ”stick it out, however hard it is. Don’t take the easy way out. Don’t.”
”We put five dollars in the commissary for each of you,” interjects Matthew Williams’ father in one of only two remarks on the transcript attributed to him.
The elder Williams also asked what time the brothers would be arraigned.
”They, they’re not doing the death penalty a whole lot here anymore, are they?” Matthew Williams asks. ”Are we looking at 20, 40 years or something? Then I don’t expect to serve that, though.”
His mother assures him ”the Lord can do miracles, he has.”
But then she tells him that after the detectives’ searches ”they had a tablet you took to the church and they had some of the notes you, that you said, was going to get blamed on you.
”Well, someone ratted, um, I, I don’t know, were there other people involved?” she asks. ”I don’t want to, don’t ans–, this is monitored … Um. I don’t, I don’t think you did what they say you did.”
”What do they say I did?” asks Matthew Williams.
”They say you took out two homos,” she responds.
”Huh. Why wouldn’t you think I’d do that?” Matthew Williams returns.
”Not under those circumstances,” his mother says. ”And Tyler, also?”
”I think they have pretty good evidence,” her son says. ”So I, I don’t know what an attorney could do for you other than take your money.”
His mother suggests an attorney might help with a plea bargain.
”Plea bargaining for what?” Matthew Williams says laughing, adding, ”Oh, the devil made me do it. Yeah.”
A little later in the visit Sally Williams worries about Tyler Williams, his sore knee, diet problems and hypoglycemia.
And she seems to chastise her older son.
”I knew the Lord was going to humble you and I’ve been praying for you for a long time,” she said. ”Some of the things you believe are wrong. … I’m sorry that I have failed you.”
But Matthew Williams suggests that God may have put him where he is because he can use the witness chair as a kind of pulpit and ”a lot of people will hear.”
”Basically, basically, um, society now calls what’s bad good and they call what I’ve done as bad and I want just, just to tell them, you know, if you love me, keep my commandments,” Matthew Williams tells his parents, adding that he has ”followed a higher law …
”I have to obey God’s law rather than man’s law.”
His mother warns that ”a lot of people will hear it with their ears, but not with your understanding.”
Matthew Williams then suggests that ”they” might think he’s insane and ”that might be to our advantage.”
”That will be a good thing,” his mother agrees.
Matthew Williams also says, though he ”didn’t want to do this,” he thought ”that I was supposed to.”
Then he explains that there are ”a lot of parallels between this and a lot of other incidents in the Old Testament.” But he went on to refer to the New Testament.
”I mean, they threw, they threw our Lord and Savior in jail. They, they accused him of things that, that he did that were not wrong, but they said they were wrong, you know, and he was punished for things,” the transcript reads.
Not To Say We Told You So…But…Yeah…We Told You So…
Comes the first tentative stirrings from the kook pews, those first little squeaks of dismay at the wreckage that is the Smirking Chimp’s excellent adventure in Iraq. Then the gulps of dawning appall at the wreckage that is President Junior’s economic policy. What’s this you say…President Strutting Jackass isn’t the tall in the saddle great American whose smirking face every patriotic American should bow down to and venerate every morning? No shit Sherlock.
And so begins the scramble to cover ass. We were all taken in. Bamboozled. He was a fraud all along. A faker. He’s no conservative.
Oh yes he is. He is the living breathing image of conservative values. Never mind the rhetoric…here’s the practice. Here’s the reality. Here’s what you get, when you practice conservative values. You get corruption. You get war and death. You get economic ruin. Smells like…victory. George W. Bush didn’t fail your values, he embodies them. Can’t stand the sight of him now can you? My heart bleeds.
Tom Tomorrow has a post up of quotes from those breathless Mission Accomplished Days, starting with this wee bit of good advice from Cal Thomas:
All of the printed and voiced prophecies should be saved in an archive. When these false prophets again appear, they can be reminded of the error of their previous ways and at least be offered an opportunity to recant and repent. Otherwise, they will return to us in another situation where their expertise will be acknowledged, or taken for granted, but their credibility will be lacking.
Here’s the source of the quotes. Its good reading, if only as a reminder of how seductive and degrading the mob mentality that the Republicans have deliberately cultivated in America is:
“Now that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over, what begins is a debate throughout the entire U.S. government over America’s unrivaled power and how best to use it.”
(CBS reporter Joie Chen, 5/4/03)
"Oh, it was breathtaking. I mean I was almost starting to think that we had become inured to everything that we’d seen of this war over the past three weeks; all this sort of saturation. And finally, when we saw that it was such a just true, genuine expression. It was reminiscent, I think, of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And just sort of that pure emotional expression, not choreographed, not stage-managed, the way so many things these days seem to be. Really breathtaking."
(Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly, appearing on Fox News Channel on 4/9/03, discussing the pulling down of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, an event later revealed to have been a U.S. military PSYOPS operation–Los Angeles Times, 7/3/04)
“The only people who think this wasn’t a victory are Upper Westside liberals, and a few people here in Washington.”
(Charles Krauthammer, Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)
“We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back.”
(Newsweek’s Howard Fineman–MSNBC, 5/7/03)
"He looked like an alternatively commander in chief, rock star, movie star, and one of the guys."
(CNN‘s Lou Dobbs, on Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech, 5/1/03)
“The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war.”
(Fox News Channel’s Fred Barnes, 4/10/03)
“What’s he going to talk about a year from now, the fact that the war went too well and it’s over? I mean, don’t these things sort of lose their–Isn’t there a fresh date on some of these debate points?”
(MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, speaking about Howard Dean–4/9/03)
“I doubt that the journalists at the New York Times and NPR or at ABC or at CNN are going to ever admit just how wrong their negative pronouncements were over the past four weeks.”
(MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, 4/9/03)
"This will be no war — there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention…. The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling…. It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on."
(Christopher Hitchens, in a 1/28/03 debate– cited in the Observer, 3/30/03)
"It won’t take weeks. You know that, professor. Our military machine will crush Iraq in a matter of days and there’s no question that it will."
(Fox News Channel‘s Bill O’Reilly, 2/10/03)
“I’m waiting to hear the words ‘I was wrong’ from some of the world’s most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types…. I just wonder, who’s going to be the first elitist to show the character to say: ‘Hey, America, guess what? I was wrong’? Maybe the White House will get an apology, first, from the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. Now, Ms. Dowd mocked the morality of this war….
“Do you all remember Scott Ritter, you know, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector who played chief stooge for Saddam Hussein? Well, Mr. Ritter actually told a French radio network that — quote, “The United States is going to leave Baghdad with its tail between its legs, defeated.” Sorry, Scott. I think you’ve been chasing the wrong tail, again.
“Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don’t call them ‘elitists’ for nothing.”
(MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, 4/10/03)
“Over the next couple of weeks when we find the chemical weapons this guy was amassing, the fact that this war was attacked by the left and so the right was so vindicated, I think, really means that the left is going to have to hang its head for three or four more years.”
(Fox News Channel’s Dick Morris, 4/9/03)
“I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week. Are you willing to take that wager?”
(Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, 1/29/03)
“We’re all neo-cons now.”
(MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)
No Chris…the word that describes what you are now is tool. What the rest of us have to live the rest of our lives with is knowing that anyone with a brain and even a meager capacity for independent thought could see this catastrophe coming back in 2003, and yet it still happened. Right here. Right in America. I was in Washington in the days just before the war started. I was attending a software developer’s conference at Washington University, a short walking distance from the Mall…a short (for me) walking distance from that black granite memorial to our Viet Nam war dead. I’d protested that war too, and after Nixon resigned I was certain we’d never let ourselves get dragged back into that gutter ever again. I remember walking the streets of Washington between conference sessions. I remember how the shock of it all had simply made me numb. And now…here we are again…
Flashback…Washington D.C…March 18, 2003
Tuesday afternoon. I am attending a conference on open source software in government being held at George Washington University. I am here because my project manager is investigating the possibility of moving the system I’ve been working on for the past several years to open source software. Work on the Hubble Space Telescope will go into maintenance mode shortly, and the thinking is that the Institute doesn’t want to spend a lot of money it won’t have on software upgrades, simply because a certain vendor has a business cycle that requires you to do that. At least with open source we would have the option of making any small fixes we absolutely needed to have before the end of the mission ourselves, without breaking our systems that depend on it. The alternative is to stick to the vendor’s upgrade cycle, and pray the new versions don’t break anything in our software, or introduce new bugs and security holes.
Between conference sessions, I wander around the Foggy Bottom area, and back and forth to my hotel, which I paid for out of my own pocket, rather then hassle with Washington traffic, which is a nightmare. The hotel has a nice little kitchenette, which allows me to eat reasonably well without further damaging my budget for the month. Around noon I begin the walk back to my hotel for lunch, stopping to examine a decrepit building right next to the conference hall, that I assume is one of the student dorms. It is, and I see by the bronze plaque by the door that this one is named Lafayette Hall. I read the inscription, which briefly describes the history of Marquis de Lafayette, who fought beside George Washington, taking a bullet in the process, for the freedom of a nation that was not his own, and who later attended the first commencement ceremonies of the university that bore his friend’s name, shaking the hand of each of those first graduates. While I am reading, a snarky voice in the back of my mind is saying Freedom Fries…Freedom Toast… An old friend of mine I’d had breakfast with that morning, told me a joke he’d heard about a man who, while visiting France recently, asked a random Frenchman, "Sir, can you speak German?" When the Frenchman replied that he couldn’t, the American said, "You’re welcome." I told my friend the Frenchman could just as easily have asked the American, "Sir, do you have a king?"
My hotel is somewhat oldish. My room is on the sixth floor and the elevators are small and slow. I press the button and when one finally appears, I see that there are already two businessmen inside. It’s a tight fit for three. As we go up I feel the hair on the back of my neck rise. There are some who you would never know from the look of them, to be of the right wing thuggish persuasion, and there are others who hit you with it in waves, in the cut of the clothes, the bullying posture that is as second nature as breathing, and the coldness of the face, particularly when smiling at nothing in particular. I tune them both out, pulling out from a space within me I’d almost forgotten about, a "Yes I’m a longhair, yes I know you hate my guts, and no mister establishment person sir, I really don’t give a flying fuck" attitude, close my eyes, and listen to the elevator floor counter click off the floors to mine. I toy briefly about writing a book, "Everything I know about living under Bush II, I learned from Nixon". The old elevator rises slowly. I hear one of my companions say, "I hope they don’t cancel our flight out Thursday." The other chuckles and says, "The war will be over by then."
What you have to understand about that Mission Accomplished banner, is that the mission wasn’t winning the war in Iraq. The mission was starting it in the first place.
Via Alicublog, Ms Instapundit herself comes out swinging for the ex-gay movement…but in the Instapundit way, which is to make gutter crawling bigotry seem downright liberal and progressive, all the while denying that you even agree with…well…anything.
Her beef seems to be that the APA is calling NARTH a worthless bunch of pseudo scientific quacks.
Not only did the APA deny CE (Continuing Education) credit to professionals attending the annual NARTH conference in November, stating that "The program content is not consistent with APA policy" but the APA is attempting to declare therapy to modify sexual orientation unethical
Well…duh. When the fucking science says that ex-gay therapy not only doesn’t work, it is likely to result in long term damage to a patient’s mental health, and can even lead to suicide, then…yeah…it’s unethical to keep doing it lady. What part of "first do no harm" are you having trouble parsing?
And where you really see the agenda here, is that same pusillanimous equivocation that her husband resorts to, whenever he wants to promote the politics of hate without looking like he’s a hatemonger himself…
Personally, I’m skeptical about turning gay people straight…
Like fuck you are lady. A motherfucking cinder block can tell what’s wrong with this, let alone a goddamned doctor of psychology:
But shouldn’t the client be the one to choose, not the APA? The APA has decided that the answer is no.
Are you really a doctor lady, or do you just play one on the Internet? I suppose if someone wants to go on a diet of canned beans and ice cream as a way to cure their left handedness that’s their business…but…yeah…for a doctor to tell them being left handed is a sickness they can cure with canned beans and ice cream would be unethical you drooling fuckwad. That’s the point, and…yes…you fucking know that’s the point!
Dig the way she’s calling it "therapy to modify sexual orientation" as opposed to ex-gay therapy or reparative therapy, as its usually called. This is how we make the essential ugliness of anti-gay hate seem innocuous. It’s not ex-gay therapy, it’s therapy to modify sexual orientation. And a lobotomy is therapy to modify the functioning of the brain.
Christ almighty…who do these jackasses think they’re fooling with this Oh I have nothing against the gays I just think that the people who hate their guts have a valid point claptrap…?
Stand Up For The Pariahs And You’ll Be Treated Like One Too Boy…
A straight seventeen year old high school senior has been expelled from his school for showing his video project to his class. It was about a gay high school romance …
Brandon Flyte, a student at West Linn High School in West Linn, Oregon, was recently expelled for airing a video project he had been assigned in class which includes a same-sex "snuggle" scene. The film, Brokeback High, is a "gay love story" based on themes from Brokeback Mountain, but set in a modern day high school. The shot above was the one that got him expelled.
Flyte writes on his website: "One has to wonder if any of this would’ve happened had the two characters snuggling in my film been male and female. We’re led to believe that diversity is encouraged in schools, but when a 17 year-old straight kid makes a serious gay love story and is expelled for it, it just begs the question of exactly what kind of policy was the administration following?"
Well…let’s see…a quick lookup of the high school web site leads you to a main page with this text very prominently displayed for all to see:
It is the policy of the West Linn/Wilsonville Board of Education and School District that there will be no discrimination or harassment on the grounds of race, color, sex, marital status, religion, national origin, age or disability in any educational programs, activities or employment.
Notice what’s missing…? The school administration wasn’t just sending a message to the gay students, but to the straight ones too. Stand up for the pariahs and you’ll be treated like one… Now that this kid’s plight is getting some internet attention, wait for the school to ban him from his graduation too, in retaliation. I sincerely hope it doesn’t happen, but adults who kick kids around like this for supporting for their gay peers have no conscience.
[Update…] According to Pam’s House Blend, after much local media attention the school has relented and are letting the kid attend classes again. Good.
There’s some discussion in the Pam’s House Blend post about how conservative that particular part of Oregon is. That’s not especially surprising. What is, is this little detail they dug up, from the School District (as opposed to the school’s) policies:
The district shall promote non-discrimination and an environment free of harassment based on an individual’s race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, parental or marital status or age or because of the race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, parental or marital status or age of any other persons with whom the individual associates.
Which is, in one obvious case, more embracing then the one displayed prominently on the schools’ own web site. I assume the district policies outrank the school’s, but you have to wonder if that one omission was deliberate nonetheless.
After a complaint to the Human Rights Commission, New Zealand’s biggest fertility service, Fertility Associates, has decided to accept sperm from gay men – previously barred because of a supposed higher HIV risk. Responding to the move, Canterbury University associate professor of genetics Frank Sin called for potential recipients of sperm from gay donors to be told that "the gay gene(s)" could be passed on to the child.
Dr Sin told The Dominion Post that it was "not daydreaming" to suggest that sexual orientation could be inherited. Animal models had clearly shown the existence of a gene that controlled sexual behaviour, he said. Though there was nothing so conclusive in human studies, there was strong evidence – particularly from twin studies – of a significant genetic component.
Environment also played a role, Dr Sin said. Though he had nothing against homosexuality, Dr Sin said people had the right to know the trait could be passed on.
Notice however, that he’s not saying that anyone with gay relatives in their bloodline should also have their sperm so labeled. My parents were both straight, as are the parents of most gay children…and yet they produced a gay son. So who does this guy think he’s fooling? Perhaps he’s got nothing against homosexuality, but he’s clearly got a problem with homosexuals.
In his discussions with students Mr. Panse mentioned several options for advancing their figure drawing skills; the local community college, a nearby frame shop that sponsors art classes, and the prestigious New York Academy of Art. He also described pre-college figure drawing programs at several other New York City art schools, and a highly successful art college prep program called the Mill Street Loft.
…
Specifically, Mr. Panse was charged with making “comments that students could construe as being of a sexual or personal nature…or using [his] position as a teacher to put students into any situation reasonably likely to make them feel uncomfortable because of the injection of sexuality into…the substance of [his] comments”.
One parent complained and the shit hit the fan. Oh for chrissakes…it’s a goddamned art class! What’s it going to be next…they demand art museums put fig leaves on all the nude sculptures and paintings before anyone under 18 years old will be allowed to enter?
Nudity. Flesh. Skin. You know what this is all about? It isn’t sex. Over in the Netherlands, they’re talking about showing images of gay couples kissing to new immigrants as a way of testing whether they’ll adapt to the open and tolerant culture over there. But they don’t even have to do that. Just show them Michalangelo’s David (or better still, Donatello’s David and his Narcissus), Rodin’s "The Kiss", Picasso’s "Blue Nude", Lord Leighton’s "The Fisherman", Anne Swynnerton’s "Cupid and Psyche", Chavannes "The Little Fisherman" and just to make things fun, Broc’s "The Death of Hyacinth" and if they get red faced just tell them to take the next boat back home. It’s not that they hate gays, it’s not even, that they hate sex. The fundamentalist radicals hate the human species, and nothing makes that plainer then the way they react to the sight of the human body itself. It’s not that nudity is obscene, it’s that taking an awed appreciation for and pride in our physical selves is horrifying to them. It’s not sex they think is dirty, it’s the human race they think is dirty.
You may have noticed a slight change in the way things look around here. That’s because I’m migrating the blog, finally, to a blog maintainance system… WordPress. When I moved the site to Winters Web Works (webmaster/host for Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World), Jonah, the admin here, coaxed me into it. For the past several months he’s been letting me experiment with a mirror WordPress blog and I’ve grown to like it, and in particular, the convenience of not having to manually do every little thing, like update the archive file and keep the permalinks and the comment links correct. It’s a very nice system, and one that should allow me to post from any computer with an Internet connection and a browser, so now I won’t have to carry my entire web site with me everywhere I go on a flash stick.
I’ve got a nice rich text editor I can compose my posts in (provided the browser I’m using follows the standard document model) and a spell checker (very necessary) and I can cut and paste links and text and format everything much more easily then editing the HTML by hand. I can also work on a post and save it without publishing, to work on it later, even from another location if need be.
There’s a new comment engine built right in to WordPress, which I’ll be using from now on. But Jonah has migrated the old comments over (which is why some of the old posts have duplicate comment links in them now). If you have any trouble with the new comment engine let me know. My blog should be RSS Feed enabled now, and better integrated with Technorati’s blog update notification system. Hopefully that will make things easier on the readers here who’ve asked me about it.
There may still be some dust to setting after the change over. If you notice anything amiss let me know. But I think the blog looks really nice now. Jonah made some suggestions about the banner image and the overall layout that I think work really well, and I’m very happy with how things look now. And since it’s a lot easier for me to just sit down and drop in a post I’ll probably be posting a tad more often now. I’m pretty sure this will end up being one of those "Why didn’t I do this before" kinda things…
Last week in Annapolis at a hearing on the proposed Constitutional Amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at American University, was requested to testify.
He did so. At the end of his testimony, a right-wing senator said: “Mr. Raskin, my Bible says marriage is only between a man & a woman. What do you have to say about that?”
Raskin: “Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.”
The room erupted into applause.
According to 365Gay.Com, the right wing state senator was Nancy Jacobs, republican (surprise, surprise) from Cecil and Harford Counties. So Dwyer isn’t the only nutcase in Annapolis.
Merrill Keiser, Jr., is a trucker by trade, and he’s hoping his next journey takes him all the way to Washington. His goal is a seat in the US Senate, but first he has to make it through the primary that will determine which Ohio Democrat will be the November ballot.
The Fremont man is causing some controversy with one of his beliefs. He tells News 11 homosexuality should be a felony, punishable by death. “Just like we have laws against murder, we have laws against stealing, we have laws against taking drugs — we should have laws against immoral conduct,” Keiser says.
1-40 lashes for crime of maliciousness, like graffiti, porn, strip clubs.
Execution for crime of adultery. (Leviticus 20:10)
Execution for crime of homosexual acts. (Leviticus 20:13)
We have met the Taliban, and they are us. A decade ago I might have said these nutcases stand absolutely no chance of being elected. Now I’d have to say that they both have excellent chances of being elected. And that’s not because a majority, or even a significant number of Americans want to live in an old testament theocracy. It’s because there is no vigorous political defense of individual liberty in America anymore, and in particular, in defense of religious liberty. Religious liberty in America has come to mean that the most extreme fundamentalists can agitate for stoning to death people for old testiment sex crimes, and burning heretics at the stake, and anyone who speaks out against them is anti-Christian.
Believers in the American Dream, defenders of liberty and justice for all, had better start getting as angry, and as loud, and as in your face as the theocrats, or we’re headed for Shira law here in America.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
