It’s a stereotype of homophobes that they’re closet homosexuals, acting out of fear of discovery and/or self loathing. And we’ve all certainly seen evidence in recent years that it’s often true. But it isn’t always.
The Council for Marriage Policy (CMP), a Christian anti-LGBT group that is a division of the right-wing Renew America PAC, issued a frantic warning on Friday that if same sex marriage becomes legal in all 50 states, lesbians will trick gay and straight men into fathering their children and turn them into economic slaves. According to Right Wing Watch, the 37-pragraph column was written by CMP president David R. Usher and was entitled “Our last chance to save traditional marriage.”
On the face of it this is a rant about same-sex marriage, taken to extreme right wing dystopian fantasies. But look closer.
Usher’s dystopian screed warned that the Supreme Court will create multiple classes of marriage. In a section called “Class 1: Mother-Mother marriages,” he predicted that “[w]hen two women marry, it is a three-way contract among two women and the government. Most women will bear children by men outside the marriage – often by pretending they are using birth control when they are not.”
…
Gay men, he said, will have the worst time of it under legalized same sex marriage because “[i]n most cases, these men will become un-consenting ‘fathers’ by reproductive entrapment,” although how the devious Class-1 lesbians will accomplish this is left to the reader’s imagination.
I find his concern touching. But I don’t think what he’s suggesting there is that lesbians will offer to be surrogate mothers for gay male couples and then back out of the deal once they become pregnant. He’s saying there that they’ll lure gay men into having sex with them.
Now, we gay males are not all perfect Kinsey 6’s, and a lot of us have tried desperately over the course of our lives to be straight, often with hostile clergymen and/or family members pressuring us into it. It isn’t that a homosexual man can’t have sex with women, it’s that he’d much rather have it with men. But the decent humane society is one that encourages self honesty, trustworthiness, and a habit of truth seeking and truth telling in its own. The decent society also treats its women as the equal of its men, and this is what I think Usher has a problem with. It isn’t homosexuality or even lesbianism specifically.
Usher writes…
Men will be forced to labor for the economic benefit of marriages between women – marriages men have been “redlined” out of – by the choice of two women who married with intention to have children by men outside the marriage. This approaches the definition of slavery – and perhaps sexual trafficking or bondage
It’s a crude stereotype that gay men are gay because they’re afraid of women. I am not afraid of women nor do I hate them, they were just never on my radar the way they are for a straight guy. For most of us, gay and straight, sexual desire is what makes life sweet and we love and cherish the ones that do that to us. But as some never forgive their libidos for making them gay, and go on a never ending warpath against The Homosexual as a proxy for beating up on themselves, some straight guys never forgive their libidos for giving women power over them.
Usher might well be a closet case but I suspect he’s a straight male supremacist who really hates how a pretty girl can make him all hot and bothered. The homophobia of men like that is really misogyny; gay males draw his contempt for making themselves into woman. That his libido recoils at the thought of having sex with another man makes him feel justified in that contempt. But really, that contempt, or fear, or loathing, or all of it mixed together, is directed at women.
Usher writes;
“Progressive terminology morphed from “gay marriage” to “same-sex marriage” over the past five years because the feminist power-agenda is not attached to orientation. The feminist goal has always been to create an institution where any two women can marry each other, have children out of wedlock, and force individuals who cannot be part of the marriage to support it economically, with government as a statutory guarantor.”
Look at that…really look at it. This isn’t about lesbians…it’s not about homosexuality…it’s about women.
In friendship you want your reflection, but in love you want your complement. This came across my Facebook stream the other day…
When arguing for the legitimacy of homosexual relationships and same-sex marriage you hear a lot of talk from the other side about the complementary nature of the sexes. But there’s the gender you’re attracted to sexually and the one you are emotionally comfortable with and in the best of all possible worlds those two are the same, because that is where the soulmate and wholeness are.
It isn’t always precise, lots of people are completely comfortable in the company of both men and women, and some people fit more in the middle of the Kinsey scale than at its extremes. But sometimes there is a disjointedness. You see the heterosexual male who is sexually attracted to women but dislikes them emotionally, prefers the company of his buds and treats women as nothing more than sex objects. And I’ve encountered gay males who are more emotionally secure in the company of women and do the same thing to other gay men.
I feel sorry for those. Life is so much sweeter when your emotional needs can be met by your attractive sex too. There is wholeness. And because heterosexuals mate to their opposite sex, it’s very easy for them to mistake the complementary nature of their relationships for gender. But the complement isn’t gender. The complement is the person.
So sometimes you see a same-sex couple and one seems very masculine and the other very feminine and you think ‘a-ha…this one’s the man and that one’s the woman..’ But then you see a pair and you can’t rightly tell and it’s confusing.
Forget about gender. See how they, as individual people, complement each other. That is how it always works.
So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange a walk on part in the war
for a leading role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
I live on a dead end street. There is an access road that goes to the alley behind my block of rowhouses, but on the maps and as far as the city is concerned Redfern Avenue ends a few feet from my front door. But in my dreams it goes on forever. I walk down it often, though sometimes I also drive. Every car I have ever owned is parked on the gravel shoulders, and every place I have ever lived, and every school I ever went to is somewhere further on. Some nights I walk past them and keep going, just to see what’s there. If you go far enough it is always different then the last time you walked there. Time is like that the further away you get from the world we live in while awake. Just before you reach the beginning of time (or the end, I can never tell), you pass the house of the oldest handyman in the world.
He lives in a little stucco house on the side of a hill. Inside against all the walls are all the tools that ever were, going back to the age of flint, and in the basement and the attic are every spare part that ever had a catalog number. He greets you at the door with a friendly smile and you can’t help but smile back. His face is aged and full of lines and his hair is white as snow. He wears overalls that were once green but now faded and gray. His cap is wrinkled and worn because he often uses it as a handle, and the visor casts a shadow over his eyes, making them hard to look back into; but you never should because if you do you’ll wake up and forget your dream. There is a name patch sown on his shirt, but in my sleep I can never read it.
He can rewire a 1948 GE toaster, make a 1953 Muntz TV work again by passing a small fork made of pure silver over its vacuum tubes until he finds the bad one. He can straighten a crooked door frame by shaking a carpenter square at it. He can fix a Kaiser Manhattan’s seized inline six by tapping its spark plugs lightly with his fingers and humming a tune I can never recall when awake. Once he fixed a broken electrical transformer by calling down the lightning, and directing it through the winds with a magnet he keeps in his pocket.
In this dream I see my first car, a 1973 Ford Pinto, beside the road and decide I want to take a drive in it. But as I get in I notice the paint on it is fading. So I go back home and look online, only to discover that nobody sells that color anymore. A boy always has a fondness for his first car, even if it was mean to him and refused to start sometimes because it was being cranky that day, so I take a walk to see the Handyman. He is there at the door waiting for me when I arrive, and he invites me inside. I tell him about my car and scratches his chin and then pulls a straight edge razor with a white handle out of his pocket. He tells me to scrape the old sunlight off the hood of my car with it and bring it to him. Paint he tells me, only shows color by trapping other colors out of the sunlight. The reason paint fades he says, is because of all that trapped sunlight wanting to get back out. If I could bring him all the color the paint had trapped, he could make me an exact match of the original factory color. So I walk back to the Pinto and began to scrap the old sunlight off it. It takes weeks.
Eventually I have a small bar of trapped sunlight, dirty orange in color and the consistency of wet clay. I bring it to the Handyman and he puts it into a can of white paint. The paint he tells me, will free the sunlight, taking its color with it out of the white, leaving behind only the color my car was when it left the factory. He pokes a finger into the paint and begins to stir it and it turns a bright blue, exactly like my car was before.
I stare into the blue and it gets brighter and brighter…and I wake up.
Depression is when I decide to go for a short pleasure drive and don’t bother taking a camera along. Depression is when I go downstairs to do a laundry, look at my drafting table, and then look away. Depression is when I just want to sleep all day long over the weekend, until its time to go to work again Monday morning.
I took his Christmas cards down off the fridge this afternoon while cleaning the kitchen, and put them in the box with all the other cards and letters I’ve received over the years. All but the first one, which was just a post card it seemed he’d tossed in the mail to me on the spur of the moment.
“The attorney general fails to understand that self-defense is not a concept, it’s a fundamental human right of white people.” -NRA Executive Director Chris Cox
Something that needs to be understood about this notion that his wearing a hoodie meant Trayvon Martin’s was a thug or a thug wannabe, is if young black men started wearing bow ties they’d be calling bow ties thugware. And all the nice people living in those gated communities would be telling each other that it’s the bow ties, not the color of their skin, that makes them thugs.
Now that Zimmerman has a legitimate reason to fear for his life, the threshold for what constitutes a personal threat has got to feel awfully low. What about an unarmed person wearing a t-shirt with George Zimmerman’s face in crosshairs who sees him on the street and swears at him? Could Zimmerman shoot him? Trayvon Martin was unarmed and was wearing a plain sweatshirt. What about a group of protesters shouting hostile messages about him as Zimmerman happens to walk by? Based on the jury’s handling of the Trayvon Martin case, it seems Florida law would allow Zimmerman to pull out his gun and, if he continued to feel threatened by these people for whatever reason, shoot them all in good standing under the law.
You thought the gun made you somebody and it didn’t after all, did it George. You had to chose, as everyone who puts a gun, or any other sort of weapon in their hand, has to choose, between the rule of law and the law of the gun…and you chose the gun…because you thought that made you somebody…and now the gun owns you George…it owns you…
“If I was doing you a favor I’d let them hang you now and get it all over with. But I don’t want you to get off that light. I want you to go on being a big tough gunny. I want you to see what it means to have to live like a big tough gunny. So don’t thank me yet partner. You’ll see what it means.”
Zimmerman walks, which is the outcome we should all have expected from Florida, but still…
I was born in the early 50’s and spent most of my grade school years in the 1960s. During that time, probably largely due to the homosexual panics of the 1950s, I got tons of warnings in and out of school about being followed by strange men and how I shouldn’t let them get too close and needed to fight like hell if one of them tried to grab me off the street because I might never be seen again. Maybe they teach kids differently these days, but one of the most striking things to me in this whole episode is Zimmerman could stalk a teenage boy and get away with shooting him dead by claiming that he was mortally afraid of him and people keep saying with pious straight faces that Martin shouldn’t have fought back and because he did Zimmerman was justified in killing him and his race has nothing to do with that.
Seriously. Who tells teenage boys to just do whatever the strange man with a gun tells them to do and everything will be all right? I’m not trying to be snarky here. If you subtract Martin’s race from this, then all the people saying that Martin caused his own death by fighting back are not making sense. That Martin, if (If) he took a swing at Zimmerman, did because he was afraid is obvious. Unless you think that young black men don’t need any reason to try and kill someone with their bare hands because they’re all just animals really.
The facts show that George Zimmerman armed himself with a gun loaded with hollow point bullets and ended up killing an unarmed teenager who was just out buying some snacks. How that happened is disputed but to me it’s obvious that when you strap on a gun, go looking for trouble and end up stalking and killing an unarmed 17 year old, you’ve done something wrong.
Digby goes on to say “To me, the carrying of that gun morally requires that he be held liable in some way for the unarmed Trayvon’s death”, but there is where I often part company with my fellow liberals on the issue of guns: I am fine with the concept that you have a right to own a gun and defend yourself with it. In fact, I consider that right to be a fundamentally democratic thing.
What isn’t are things like vigilantism and racism. These are poison. They are poison to the person, they are poison to the nation. This case is positively dripping with racism that nobody in the corporate news media wants to look closely at, because we’re all supposed to be beyond all that now. Except we’re not. Zimmerman’s suspicion and fear of Martin only makes sense in the context of Martin’s race, his sex, and his age. There is literally nothing else there but those three things. Zimmerman stalked that kid because of those three things, and his rational for killing an unarmed teenage boy who was out buying snacks can only seem plausible due to those three things. Fear the black male, and especially, fear the young black male. Look, for as long as you can stomach it, at the breathless agreement that Martin posed a threat to Zimmerman’s life, solely on the basis of Zimmerman’s say-so, and the ephemeral signs of a fight on his face and head. That was no beating. You want to see what a beating looks like, look at the photos of recent victims of gay bashers. But it’s simply an accepted fact in certain quarters of the country that Zimmerman’s life was threatened. Were Martin white it would not matter what the race of his stalker would be, other than if his stalker was a black man he’d already have been convicted and on Florida’s death row. Picture it: a white teenaged boy stalked by a strange man, fights back and is found shot to death. Would anyone doubt the adult male had done something horribly wrong? Why is it never considered, that Martin was standing His ground when Zimmerman confronted him? Well, of course a young black male has no such right. Racism was always at the rotten core of this.
But if Zimmerman was a racist, he was also a vigilante and if you approve of vigilantism anywhere outside the pages of a comic book you are no friend of civilization let alone democracy. All those people waving around the second amendment as a defense against tyranny are no defenders of democracy…if anything they are the useful tools of anarchy. The gun is what you need when the the peace is broken, so the first thing, the basic responsibility of the believers in civilization and democracy is to preserve the peace. That means the rule of law and the ballot box as the agent of change. Peaceful disobedience, where the conscience requires disobedience, and responsibility for ones own conduct toward your neighbors. Responsibility. What a concept, that. Zimmerman acted like the gun came with a badge and they don’t. But more than that, he acted as if he had character enough to bear the wearing of a badge and it’s sickeningly obvious he is no such person.
However this trial turns out, if nothing else this case really raises a lot of questions about the kind of nation we are, or should want to be. So many virtuous moral all-American values types cheering on what Zimmerman did. It’s been a while since I’ve been this completely disgusted. Digby’s right, what would be a just punishment for what Zimmerman did isn’t obvious, but what is staringly obvious is that he did something terribly, horribly wrong. A teenage boy went out for snacks and never came back home, because Zimmerman saw a young black man somewhere he thought a young black man didn’t belong, and took that matter into his own hands.
The evening of my abrupt trip back home from Walt Disney World I had a dream. I’d made the trip back from Orlando in a haze of deep depression; the kind I usually endure over the winter, around February, around Valentine’s Day.
Before sleep, as I lay in my motel bed and read my Facebook stream, I saw Wil Wheaton fretting about not wanting to go to sleep for fear of having night terrors. He has very bravely and publicly talked about his struggles with depression and I assume that the night terrors are a part of that. The deep depression I feel now as I turn in for the night isn’t of the clinical sort, or at any rate I don’t think it is. The evening before I had given a small gift of gourmet chocolates to a certain someone for his birthday, and he handed them back to me. The lonely ache I am feeling this night is almost like a second home to me now, and it is not night terrors I am worried about. Some dreams scare the steaming shit out of you but then you wake up and it’s just a dream. But some dreams, not terrifying, play with your emotions like a dog plays with a stuffed rabbit.
I’m in a coffee house somewhere I don’t recognize, chatting with a handsome guy who I’ve never seen before but I somehow recognize in this particular dream as an old boyfriend from many years. We chat casually about this and that and then out of the blue it seems, he asks me to marry him. Overjoyed, I tell him yes, yes I will.
Then we are in in our tuxedos standing together at the altar. The church is old, but more of a simple meeting house kind of church than the Baptist churches I grew up in. Its old wooden pews seem relaxed and comfortable, not stiff and unyielding. There are tall windows of unstained glass through which pure golden sunlight shines through, free and clear. Oddly, I see rows of old wooden bookshelves tucked between the windows, full of books. In my dream the thought of a church chapel doubling as its library delights me. It speaks to me that my boyfriend, now my spouse-to-be, brought me to this place to be married. I am overwhelmed with joy.
We make our vows and the minister pronounces us married. Oddly, he holds up the marriage license for us and everyone there to see and says that “Now it’s official”. I can’t read what the document says but that’s not unusual. I’ve written before about how for some reason I can almost never read anything in my dreams.
Everyone adjourns to a room next to the chapel where a reception is taking place. I suddenly realize there was no marriage kiss at the altar, so I walk over to my spouse and embrace him happily, give him a delighted kiss on the mouth, and tell him how much I love him and how happy I am to be married to him. As I do this I am thinking how sure I was this day would never happen for me, and it did after all. I am overwhelmed with joy.
He pulls gently away, smiling, but I can see he is very embarrassed about something. So are the people standing nearby. I step back and my spouse and our guests begin talking among themselves, as if to ignore what just happened. Something seems very wrong all of a sudden, but I don’t know what.
I step outside, confused. Didn’t I just get married? Didn’t he ask me to marry him? Then I realize there was no exchange of rings either. I am walking though an old part of town where the church is situated; a smallish main street with shops, all closed I am assuming because it is Sunday and here they still don’t open things on Sunday. As I walk I can see my reflection in the little shop windows, in my tux, walking alone down an empty main street. I begin to realize that this wasn’t a wedding after all, it was a rehearsal, and I was not the one getting married to my old boyfriend, he had merely asked me to stand in for someone else, who could not be there for that rehearsal.
But this theory is confusing too. Didn’t he ask me to marry him? Didn’t we have a marriage license? But I could not read the names on it. I glance at myself in the shop windows again, and oddly, for some reason, start practicing skipping down the sidewalk, like I used to do when I was a kid.
Still not sure that was what happened, I go back to the reception trying to think of a way of asking my boyfriend if he was satisfied with how things went without admitting that I don’t actually know what is going on and getting an answer from him that will tell me. The ersatz reception has moved outside now and everyone is enjoying themselves. I walk up to my boyfriend but before I can say anything his spouse-to-be drives up in their car, towing a small hardware trailer full of gardening things. Now I know. The Spouse-To-Be was out buying things for their house and could not be there, so I was asked to stand in for him for the rehearsal.
They embrace and he asks my boyfriend how the rehearsal went and I wake up.
A dim morning light filters through the motel curtains. I check the clock. It’s a little after 6am. I get up to pack the car and finish the drive home, alone.
“At the heart of the gay marriage argument is an untruth: unions of two men or women are not the same as unions of husband and wife. The law cannot make it so, it can only require us to paint pretty pictures to cover up deep truths embedded in human nature.”
-Maggie Gallagher, still trying to paint a pretty picture over the untruth at the heart of the anti-gay agenda, that Homosexuals Don’t Love, They Just Have Sex…
Joshua’s mother, Beatrice Padilla, said, “I always knew in my heart he was going to grow up to be gay.” That didn’t mean, however, she was prepared to learn that day had arrived when her son was in just the fifth grade.
When the boy timidly asked, “Is there something wrong with me?” though, she rallied:
“You eat like everyone else, you sleep like everyone else, you go to school like everyone else. You’re no different,” she said.
He’s now 15 and says that while he never doubted his mother would be supportive, “I don’t think telling a parent at any age gets any easier.”
This is such an old story and I have heard it told and retold among gay people ever since I can remember: I knew I was different in some fundamental way even then, I just didn’t have the words to express it… I don’t think there is a single one of us who hasn’t heard it over and over and over. It’s my truth too. In first grade I knew I liked guys in some distinct way that set me apart from the others and that if I talked about it too much I would get in trouble.
But blabber mouth little young me couldn’t always keep it in. I remember being teased once by my other classmates about a girl and getting pissed off about it I blurted out that I didn’t like girls, and one of the girls said, “Oh, then you like boys I guess.” and everyone laughed.
I blushed. Fiercely. Which only made them laugh more. Everyone has these school days memories they would rather forget.
In a speech last week titled “Mullahs of the West: Judges as Moral Arbiters,” Justice Antonin Scalia told the North Carolina Bar Association that the court has no place acting as a “judge moralist” in issues better left to the people. Since judges aren’t qualified—or constitutionally authorized—to set moral standards, he argued, the people should decide what’s morally acceptable.
…and so on. Nathanial Frank pegs it at the end of this piece, thusly:
Morality is not just whatever views a majority has long held, and it’s not simply what you learned on your mother’s knee or whatever it says in your faith’s scripture. Moral belief is a grounded judgment about what harms or helps living things.
(emphasis mine) That. Which leads to this: Scalia, like a lot of homophobes, does not have a misunderstanding about morality; he has an assortment of smokescreens he hides his prejudices behind, that he calls morality.
They do that in the kook pews and that is why their moral judgements seem so haphazard and contradictory: They’re not making moral judgements, they’re jerking their knees, dancing from one thing to another to whatever tune their prejudices call.
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