Re-reading that post about what a luxury car is, I am kinda…stunned…to realize that my life went from this…

…to this.

That is not the trajectory anyone would have predicted for me back when I first entered grade school.   It’s not what I would have predicted for me.   If I hadn’t been walking through my life in the past decade or so on autopilot I’d be more amazed.   But I don’t pay attention to my present day life all that much the way probably other people do.   Away from work, back in my house, down in my art room, my head stays in the clouds, because I’m not so lonely there.   It’s only occasionally when I’m at home, that I come back down to earth and it’s like…oh…I have a house of my own…and a Mercedes-Benz.

At night I dream of other worlds, other lives I might have had, where I’m not alone anymore and I’m happy.   Oddly, in those dreams I still don’t own a house, or a Mercedes-Benz.

The Chairman said quietly, “Loki, you weary Me” – and suddenly, Loki was missing. Even his chair was gone. “Odin, will you spare her for part of that cycle?”

“For how long? She has earned the right to Valhalla.”

“An indeterminate time. This creature had stated its willingness to wash dishes “forever” in order to take care of her. One may doubt that it realizes just how long a period, “forever” is… yet its story does show earnestness of purpose…”

-Robert Heinlein, Job – A Comedy of Justice

Via friend and fellow Truth Wins Out Blogger Michael Airhart I get this link to John Aravosis going on a righteous tear as to why the Family Research Council isn’t merely a pious group of conservative christians who just happen to disagree with same-sex marriage but is, in fact, an organization of calculating hate mongers who will shrink from no lie they think they can get away with. And thanks to useful tools like The Washington Post and Dana Milbank they can get away with a lot of them.

Why the Family Research Council is a hate group

At one point, I had the Congressional Research Service send me a copy of every single document the Family Research Council had written about gays, and then I had CRS get me every single document listed in the FRC doc’s footnotes. I.e., all the “original sources” for the Family Research Council’s anti-gay claims.

And there were a lot of them.  At the time, FRC’s list of footnotes could be nearly as long as the written part of the document itself.

What did I find when I went through the original sources cited in the footnotes?  I found that nearly every single footnote was a lie.  Not a lie in the conventional sense – meaning, they didn’t make up a source that didn’t exist.  Rather, they did things like quoting a damning opinion from a judge in a court case without mention that the judge was in the minority, that the gays had actually won the case they were citing.

Or they’d quote a study with a hideous conclusion about gays and lesbians, only for you to realize later that the actual quote in the study was rather benign – instead, FRC “forgot” to put and end-quotation mark on the quote, added an ellipse, and then put their own damning conclusion.  Let me give you a made-up example of a quote about gays to who you how the family research council did this.

“This study looked at 45 gay men, and 35 lesbians.  It was clear from the subjects that gay men and lesbians face greater societal pressures in their day to day lives… which makes gays and lesbians much more likely to rip the heads off small bunnies.

Wow, rip the heads off small bunnies – that’s pretty bad.  But hey, it’s a real study in a real journal, so it has to be true.  Except of course that the real quote from the actual study ends at the ellipse, while the FRC added its own opinion after the ellipse, while “forgetting” to put the end quote, so it looks like the FRC’s opinion is part of the official quote from the reputable study.

Gosh, I wonder how that happened?

It went on and on like this, through hundreds of footnotes.  I went through the original research of the various studies they cited and found that the study reached no such conclusion like the FRC claimed it did.  And on and on and on.

These are not honest people simply expressing a contrarian view of politics, like Democrats and Republicans do every day in Washington.

Tony Perkins, FRC’s head, got on TV a few months ago to debate whether gay parents were as good as straight parents.  Perkins said “no,” and he had the study to prove it.  Perkins explained how studies have proven that kids need a mom and a dad.  What Perkins didn’t bother telling you was that those studies compared kids with a mom and a dad to kids with a single parent.  The studies never looked at the relative merits of gay parents.  Gay parents might have been just as good, or heck, even better than straight parents.  The study didn’t even look at it.  But Perkins cited the study as proof that straight parents were better than gay parents, when the study had nothing to do with it.

And again, Dana, if you actually go through the FRC’s “research,” you will find this kind of “mistake” happening again and again.  It happens so often, it’s happened for twenty years now that I’ve been tracking them, that you come to realize that lying for the Family Research Council isn’t a flaw, it’s a feature.

There’s more…you should read it.   That the beltway media has a habit of looking the other way at conservative hate groups so long as their talking heads dress nicely and refrain from wearing hoods, never gets any less repulsive no matter how often you see it.   But it stopped long ago being just a problem for the gay community.   This endemic disdain for what used to be journalism’s basic function, to get the facts, get them right and get them out to the public, is a big reason why one of our two major parties has walked off the crazy cliff, and now threatens to take the United States of America with it.

As your gay neighbors have watched the fanatics in the course of waging their scorched earth culture war shove any pretense of honor, reason and morality from their way, so we have watched one news organization after another, one journalist after another, tuck their tails between their legs and run, run away from democracy’s front lines.   Speaking truth to fanaticism, let alone to power, will never get you the big bucks.   When calling a fact a fact and a lie a lie means raising the ire of the rich and powerful, or perhaps one or more of their batshit crazy friends, it’s safer on the paycheck to just stick to stenography.   There are two sides to every story, but never a factual side to any story.   Print the controversy, pass along the press releases and hit the bar at days end.   It’s only a job.   Remember how, in the aftermath of the Proposition 8 trial, so many mainstream journalmalists were shocked, shocked, to discover there was so little substance to the opposition to same-sex marriage? What did we know…it’s not like our job is digging up and reporting the facts or anything…

I’ve been meaning to write this one for years actually. Ever since I bought my first Mercedes-Benz.   And…trust me…just typing out that phrase “my first Mercedes-Benz” makes me want to do a double-take.   Time was I lived in a friend’s basement and mowed lawns and did Manpower temp jobs to make ends meet, and I figured that was pretty much going to be my life. But even a low income kid can dream, and when mine turned to automobiles I always had pretty definite ideas about what a top rank, best of the best, car was.

I grew up in a household without a car.   Mom divorced dad when I was 2 and we never had a lot of money.   So for the first decade and a half of my life we were carless, and the edges of my childhood world were tied firmly to wherever public transportation and my own two feet could take me.   Cars were fascinating, but distant things, like home ownership.   I grew up in a series of garden apartments, always near some bus line that could take mom to work and near enough to walk to a small shopping center with a grocery store, a drugstore and a five and dime.   It was still a time when most American households had only one car, if they had a car at all.   So to be carless wasn’t necessarily considered a sign of poverty and we were not poor…I never went to bed hungry…just very low budget. We would get rides occasionally from neighbors and other church members when necessary, but mostly the weekly shopping trip involved a foldable two wheel grocery cart, something like this…

…which I would pilot, being the man and thereby the muscle in the household.   Trips downtown, or to a deluxe shopping center some distance away (there were no malls back then), possibly involving a bus transfer ticket even, were very special occasions, and usually all day affairs the end of which left my little legs very tired. Vacations involved either Trailways, Greyhound or the train. I still vividly remember the magical two vacations we took to Lauderdale By The Sea, Florida, by way of the train.   There was a dining car, and a car at the end of the train you could sit in and watch the landscape go by, and the lovely sound of the tracks clicking off the miles to sing me to sleep.   It would never have occurred to me that a car was a necessity.   A car was a luxury.   We got by just fine without one.   But oh…how nice to have one!   Possibly even as nice as having a house of our very own.

I recall vividly the 1960 Ford Falcon one of the church lady’s had that took us back and forth to Sunday services…

…which would get so hot inside sitting in the sun during church services that even with the windows rolled all the way down by the time it got me back home I felt like a baked cookie. Or the 1959 Rambler Rebel owned by Mr. Rogers, one of the deacons…

…the car that taught me the value of seat belts well before they became mandatory equipment, when my little seven year old face got slammed into its all metal dashboard when Mr. Rogers had to stop suddenly to avoid a drunk driver. I never doubted after that that cars could be dangerous things. But they were magical things, whispering promises to little me of travel to distant places, in a time when my world pretty much ended at reach of mom’s voice.

I think my first glimpse of the 1958 Ford Thunderbird is what really ignited my love affair with the automobile.

I remember I was walking with mom to the local grocery store and one of those things went gliding by on the street and my little jaw dropped.   From then on I was all about cars. I used to embarrass mom walking beside her as she shopped, pretending to be driving a car, holding my hands out on an imaginary steering wheel and making all the sound effects.   But embarrassing mom is part of a small boy’s job description.   Frightening to her, and in retrospect to me later in life, was my habit of peering into the windows of parked cars to admire the dashboards and steering wheels. This was a more Baroque age in American automobilia, and the dashboards and steering wheels of that time are amazing to me even today.   They just don’t make them like this anymore…

I would get smacked every so often when mom caught me peering into a parked car, entranced by what I saw, and warned darkly that someday I’d find myself getting snatched away by a stranger. In retrospect it scares me now to think of too. Eventually one Christmas I got a toy that was probably intended to divert my attention away from parked cars…

When you turned the little pot metal ignition key it made a rumbling motor sound.   There was a horn, wipers that flicked back and forth, turn signals that blinked, a light switch that illuminated the dials and gauges, and lots of finger candy just like the grownups had on their dashboards.   It would be the only car I ever owned whose gas tank I could fill back up just by turning a knob.

I had an uncle who back in those days drove big Oldsmobiles.   Probably more then anything else those cars set my childhood notions of what a luxury car was.

A luxury car was a car that was big and magnificent and had all the options, and even a few options you couldn’t get on the other models.   Uncle Wayne’s Oldsmobile had Power Windows! No hand cranking in a luxury car…you just pressed a button one way and the window went up…pressed it the opposite way and it went down.   What won’t they think of next?   It had Power Seats! Oooooh!!!   You just pressed a button and the seats moved forward or backward.   It was a push button future all right.   It had an antenna that automagically extended when you turned on the AM/FM Radio!!! It had two-tone bench seats.   It had a light in the glove compartment.   It had Air Conditioning!!!! Cool air, really cool air, flowed out of these chrome plated vent balls at either end of the dashboard, and from some chrome plated vents in the middle…

Oh.   My.   God!!!   Our apartment didn’t have Air Conditioning, and here it was in a car no less!   No more rolling down the windows in the summertime and waiting outside the car before getting in, until the seats were something less then frying temperature.

Its speedometer had the first progress bar I ever laid eyes on.   Instead of a needle that swept across the numbers, it had a green bar that extended from left to right in a horizontal box…

When it got up to highway speeds…40 and over…the green bar was replaced by an orange one.   Above 60 it became red.

But the thing that just floored me was the magic button in the middle of the windshield wiper knob. Uncle Wayne showed me one day what it did. He pulled the knob and the wipers started wiping…so much so obvious.   Then he pressed the magic button and two little jets of soapy water squirted out onto the window!!!

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

It was perfectly clear to me what a luxury car was.   A luxury car was a car that had all the options, and maybe even a few options you couldn’t get on the other cars.   You certainly weren’t going to get power windows, let alone power seats, on a plain old ordinary everyday Chevy.   No.   It had to be an Oldsmobile.   And if you wanted leather instead of cloth seats, then obviously you would have to step up to a Cadillac.

One day, when I was 16, he came for a visit driving his brand new Mercedes-Benz 220D…

I was…nonplussed.   I knew by then that Mercedes-Benz was a German luxury car of some sort, but I had a general disdain for European cars.   They were expensive compared to U.S. cars, plain and generally unexciting. And here before my very eyes, was the proof.   And…it was a diesel!   You didn’t have to know the ‘D’ meant diesel, you knew it the moment he started it up. They’d put a truck engine in a luxury car.

Mind you, by this stage of my life I’d already decided I was a four-door sedan kinda guy.   Sports cars didn’t really do much for me, though I admired the engineering that went into them and loved to watch them race. But they weren’t practical for what I wanted to do with a car by that age, which was see the country…just take my maps and my luggage, find some roads I’d never been down before and go.  I wanted a car I could drive comfortably in for hours at a time, which you really couldn’t in a low slung, stiff suspensioned sports car, could carry lots of luggage and cargo here and there, could drive my friends anywhere we wanted to go. It had to be a sedan…preferably one with four doors because two doors meant folding down the front seat and squirming your way into the back.   I had no money for a car of my own, and not much hope I’d ever have one either. But I had specifications.

This is a luxury car??? I wandered around the Mercedes while my aunt and uncle took their luggage in and chatted with mom.   It was small compared to the last Oldsmobile he’d had, and boxy. There wasn’t nearly as much chrome.   It had no fins.   The front row were two unappealing looking bucket seats.   From outside the dashboard looked a bit sparse, the steering wheel somewhat old fashioned.   Then my uncle invited me to sit down in it.   I opened the passenger side front door and noted the locking mechanism looked very simplistic and odd.   I sat down in the bucket seat, closed the door…

…and that was when I realized I was in a whole different world.

This thing is built like a bank vault… I’d never experienced the like of it.   Just sitting there I could feel the solidness of it.   The seats, made I later learned of the legendary MB-Tex, weren’t soft and cushy like the Olds, but very firm and somehow lots more comfortable in spite of that.   And there was absolutely no wiggle in them.   They weren’t power seats like the Olds.   There was a lever directly in the front and bottom of the seat that you lifted up and then you could move the seat backward or forward.   It slide smoothly, and when you snapped it into place the seat locked firmly and would not budge, even a little.

You got used to a slight degree of slop in a car back then.   It was normal.   A little give, a little wiggle here and there wasn’t a big deal unless it got excessive. A little play in the steering wheel, a little give in the shift lever and turn signals.   You knew a car was a mass produced thing and you didn’t expect anything mass produced in those days to be as tight as a watch.   Just so it wasn’t so loose it felt like it was about to come apart.   Thing was, a little initial looseness usually ended up being a lot of looseness.   Things broke down.   Lots.   And so you took them in for repair.   Cars especially in those days, needed lots of repair.   But you expected that, just as you expected that a car would not last much further then 50k miles.   Odometers back then only had five digits on them.   You pushed a car all the way back to the point all the zeros rolled back over…100k…only if you didn’t have the money for a new one, or you were stubborn.

A good car was one that didn’t break down in the first few months of ownership.   A great car got you maybe all the way to 50k on just the routine maintenance, and maybe a few minor repairs for things like a knob that fell off or got stuck.   By 50k you’d have replaced the brakes several times, and the exhaust pipes and muffler, and the shocks maybe half that.   You’d have gone through several sets of tires and multiple tune-ups.   That was routine and you bought a car knowing all that was coming.   But you also expected at least one or two break downs somewhere along the way.   Cars just did that.   A lemon was a car that did it every week.   A good car maybe only once or twice in 50k miles.   Beyond 50k you knew it would give you more trouble then it was worth.   So most people traded in at that point for a new one.   And so it went.   By the time he’d bought that 220D, my uncle had gone through several Oldsmobiles.

And there I was, sitting in a car that Just Felt like uncle Wayne could have driven it clean around the world and it would only just be broken in. I looked over the dashboard, every instrument and knob exactly centered in it’s holder, noticed the odometer had Six Digits on it…and I think I sat there for a few moments with my jaw hanging open nearly catatonic…like Bowman in 2001 sitting in his space pod at the end of his trip down the stargate.   Then I was a barrage of questions.   How much did it cost?   Why a diesel?   Is it hard to find diesel fuel?   How do you start a diesel?   What kind of mileage do you get on Diesel?   What’s the maintenance like?   Do you need metric tools to work on it?

He explained to me how Mercedes didn’t come out with a new model every year, but instead made little incremental improvements over maybe an eight or ten year run.   He told me how if a part showed more wear or breakage then expected it would be redesigned and improved and once the improvement was approved it went right into the production line and no waiting for the next model year.   And when you needed a new part you always got the latest most improved one, not an identical to the one that just broke on you part.   That was the Mercedes way.   He told me that the diesels got way better mileage because diesel fuel had more energy in it by volume, and since a diesel had to be built strong if you took care of one it would last not just 50k but easily hundreds of thousands of miles.   He told me about its safety features and how they were building Mercedes-Benz cars with crumple zones back when Detroit was fighting Washington over seat belts.   He told me about the cornering and handling capabilities of the car and that they were engineered primarily as safety measures: the best way to handle an accident is to prevent one from happening in the first place.   A car that can get its driver out of danger is a safer car.   He told me that all the engineering in a Mercedes-Benz was judged against that purpose.   Speed and handling weren’t just about speed and handling…they were about safety.   German practicality.   I felt myself falling in love.

We went for a short ride in the country. I thought I knew how good a sports car was in the curves.   I was naive.   American sports cars were no damn good in the curve back then.   They were big muscle bound V-8 things that would blast you off the road in the straight and get lost in the curve.   For an afternoon I sat in a little boxy four door sedan that didn’t accelerate very fast at all, the Oldsmobiles would have laughed at it on the on ramp, but it took the twisty little country back roads we traveled down like it was foreign to no road on earth and just hunkered down and glued itself to the asphalt.   It felt like it could have taken the corners at twice the speed my uncle took them.   You felt the road under the tires, and the car’s response to it, but not in a scary or discomfortable way.   The ride was smooth and serene but not to the point you lost your feel for the road…and that was the thing that stunned me most.   I’d never really known before what it was to experience a car that gave you such absolute control before then.   A luxury car was supposed to insulate you from the road…make you feel like you were gliding along on a cushion of air! No.   I saw it then.   A car that takes the feel of the road away from its driver takes their control away too.   A great car gives its driver absolute control, moment by moment and that means you have to be able to feel the road under you, and the response of the car to it.   The car I was riding in did that…I could feel it even though I was in the passenger seat. It was the first time in my life I’d really experienced that…and it was no sports car.   It was a boxy little four door sedan.

Yes, yes…most American luxury car models can take a curve at high speed now and keep you in control.   But try to imagine going down a twisty country road in a 1971 Cadillac DeVille and trying to make it take the curves like it was a sports car.   No.   More like a whale.

That whole day I never once asked my uncle why he bought that boxy little four door sedan.   The moment I sat down in it I knew damn well why he bought it.   For the next several decades of my life I wanted one too.   Some decades later, to my amazement still, I was able to afford one…

…and then…a few years after that…finally…a diesel….

…like the one my uncle drove to visit in, but with forty years of incremental improvements.

In my thirties, broke, doing Manpower temp jobs and mowing lawns to make ends meet, living in a friend’s basement, I never thought I’d own another car again, let alone a new one, let alone a Mercedes-Benz. Luxury. It is not about money. Luxury is better then good enough. At one time in my life a car was something our family considered a luxury. We got by without. And though that was a long time ago, practically in a different America, some folks even now consider cars a luxury item. If you live in the urban zones you can probably get by without one most of the time. But even the new carless urbanites still make use of new ways to rent when they need a car. ZipCar and Car2Go being examples. Owning a car in today’s America might still be considered a luxury in some places. But a car is still more necessity now then it was back when I was a toddler and Washington D.C. still had trolly lines and transcontinental train lines still boasted of their speed and comfort.

Gottlieb Daimler’s motto was “Das Beste oder nichts”, The best or nothing. But what is “best”? If basic transportation will do there is much you can buy nowadays, thanks to the ass kicking Japan gave the rest of the auto making world, that will get you from point A to point B and give you your money’s worth for years and years and then some.   My first new car after decades of bare bones living and no prospects was a little Geo Prism and that car was a champion.   Under the skin it was a Toyota Corolla and I’d own one again in a heartbeat if I didn’t have the money for the car I do now and I’d be proud of it.   It was well made and if you took care of it it would outlast a lot of other makes.   I got just over 200k miles out of mine. But if you are lucky and you have it to spend you can reach for something better then basic transportation. That’s luxury. But what is better? What is best?

There’s a scene in Mary Renault’s novel, The Last of the Wine, where the philosopher and teacher Socrates and Alexis, one of his young followers, are walking down a street where the armorers are busy working. They’d been discussing Alexis’ troubles in love and hearing the sound of the armorer’s hammers, Socrates, slyly testing the boy, supposes aloud that now that he is of age he will soon be wanting to buy his first set of armor. Where will you go, he asks. To Pistias, if I can afford his price, says Alexis. “He’s very dear; nine or ten minas for a horseman’s suit.” “So much?”, wonders Socrates aloud. Well surely you’ll get a nice gold device on the breastplate for that kind of money. Not from Pistias, says Alexis, he wouldn’t touch that if you gave him twelve. Kephalos, says Socrates, will give you something to catch the eye. Well but Socrates, says Alexis, I might need to fight in it.

That. A Cadillac or a Lincoln is expensive because it has all the options…all the nice gold devices you can’t get on a Chevy or a Ford…and because the job of a Cadillac or a Lincoln is to tell the world you have a lot of money to spend.   Under the skin, a Cadillac is a Chevy and there is no reason other then the marque to not give a Chevy all the options a Cadillac has.  That’s how they do it in Japan, where what we call a Lexus here in the U.S. is still a Toyota over there.   But here in the U.S., driving a high end Toyota does not say “money”.   A Cadillac is expensive, because it is a Cadillac and not a Chevy.   A Rolls Royce is expensive because it is practically hand made, by the best artisans working in the finest rarest woods, the finest rarest leathers, the finest wool carpeting, meticulously hand producing only a few cars every year.   Ostentatious spending, yes, but at least its ostentatious spending in the service of excellence in craftsmanship.   But the engineering and the technology in a Rolls or a Bentley is subordinate to the purpose of luxury for its own sake…everything about the car is about pampering and calling attention to its owner, it’s all about the nice gold device and something to catch the eye. But I might need to drive in it. All day and through the night, down uncertain roads, through whatever weather, in whatever conditions the journey throws at me.

And I have driven my Mercedes-Benz cars, mostly the little ‘C’ class because I’d owned it several years, but now also my ‘E’ class diesel, through some pretty hazardous weather, and down long twisty gravelly roads, winding up and down hazardous no guardrails here sorry you’re on your own terrain, and over scorching desert landscapes and I have never felt safer inside an automobile, or more in control when the going got seriously ugly.   Luxury.   I could always walk to the grocery store and take the bus or the train come vacation time.   But I love cars and I love to drive and I want to see whatever there is down all the roads I’ve never been down. I want a car that will take me to all those places. Not an SUV because I drive long distances and also short ones over many kinds of roads and my car needs to be agile and fuel efficient not large, clunky and hungry all the time. But not a sports car either because I need to carry cargo and passengers. Comfortable on the inside, because I will be driving long hours. And built to keep its passengers safe, because you never know. And yes, beautiful too, because I love the automobile. But not empty beauty. Beauty that comes from within. I have specifications.

These days I admire car interiors from a safe distance via Google Images, and at the dealer’s whenever I take a car in for routine servicing and I can sit down inside one in the showroom and wonder. When I first laid eyes on the new ‘E’ class it took my breath away so beautiful did I find them to be inside and outside. Thank you Dr. Z for making them solid again, like they used to be. When I sat down in my very own new ‘E’ class diesel last December, and started its engine for the first time, it made a sound like I could have driven it clean around the world and it would only just be broken in. Das Beste oder nichts!

[Edited and edited again…and again…and again…sorry…]

Steve Benen writing at the Rachel Maddow blog today:

[Perkins] said the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups gave “license” to a shooter who injured a security guard at the conservative religious policy and lobbying organization’s headquarters on Wednesday.

In a news conference addressing the incident and the arrest of the alleged shooter, Floyd Corkins II, Perkins said: “Let me be clear that Floyd Corkins was responsible for firing the shots yesterday that wounded one of our colleagues … but Corkins was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center that have been reckless in labeling organizations ‘hate groups’ because they disagree with them on public policy.”

Perkins noted that plenty of LGBT organizations issued statements condemning Corkins’ violence, and he “appreciates” the sentiments, adding that he hopes they will “join us in calling for an end to the reckless rhetoric that I believe led to yesterday’s incident.”

This from a group of hate mongers, led by a hate monger, that routinely denies their vitriolic rhetoric has ever caused anyone to attack or kill gay people, or contributed to the climate of hate that gets gay people killed.

I have a wee suggestion Tony.   If you want to be taken of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate group list, you might consider stopping the behavior that got you listed in the first place.

A movement dedicated to the right to love and be loved does not employ violence toward its end.  With what arms will we embrace the lover, after we have killed in the name of love?  With what what hands will we touch their flesh, that have wielded the weapon?  With what eyes will we behold the lover, that have gazed upon the dead?

Daimler Quietly Puts Maybach Brand to Rest

Daimler AG purchased the Maybach luxury car brand in 1960 and eventually groomed it to become a rival to ultra-luxury vehicle manufacturers Bentley and Rolls-Royce. Now, Daimler has quietly ended the Maybach saga.

Everybody knew the fate of the brand after Dr. Dieter Zetche in November last year confirmed its discontinuation. The final nail on the coffin was the new pricelist released by Mercedes-Benz USA featuring its 2013 model range. All the five Maybach models offered in the US—the 57, 57 S, 62, 62 S, and Landaulet—were listed as “Discontinued.”

In the end its major claim to fame was its price…high even by Rolls Royce and Bentley standards.   You have to figure they thought that alone would attract the Rolls Royce customer.   Which means they didn’t really understand that customer.   But even worse, Daimler forgot who they are.

I think I understand a little better why they did it now.   Daimler produced a Maybach concept car in the late 90s while it looked like troubled Rolls Royce Motors would be sold off and Audi and BMW were looking on hungrily (the name Maybach comes from Wilhelm Maybach, the engineering and design genius who worked with Gottlieb Daimler back in the early days, and who designed the first the Mercedes model, built to the specifications of auto enthusiast and racer Emil Jellinek (whose daughter was named Mercedes…Jellinek named that first Maybach designed race car after his daughter.)).   Eventually Audi was successful in getting the Rolls Royce car and its factories, but BMW got the rights to the Rolls Royce name, the distinctive grille, and the Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament, and in the early 2000s started a new Rolls Royce bloodline literally from scratch.   Which by the way also explains why the new Rolls is so damn ugly.   You can say a lot of good things about BMWs from an engineering standpoint I suppose, but beautiful cars they really just aren’t (except for the two seater).

I guess Daimler felt under the circumstances they had to compete with BMW, their arch rival, for the Rolls Royce customer.   So out came the Maybach around the same time as BMW started making its BMW Rolls and Audi was producing what were Rolls Royces but now under the Bentley marque.   But the Mercedes marque was never about luxury merely for its own sake and ironically by trying to out Rolls BMW they weren’t rising their sights but lowering them.

That is why they failed.   The Maybach was built on a prior ‘S’ class frame and had none of the cutting edge engineering and technology the current model ‘S’ class had. It was merely an older ‘S’ with lots of ostentatious luxury touches…rare leathers, woods, a champagne cooler in the armrest, and so on.   By dropping the Maybach and instead producing an “ultimate” ‘S’ class variant they’re back to their place of artistry and strength and where their traditional customers, who are not about luxury for its own sake, are.

When Gottlieb Daimler said “The best or nothing” he wasn’t talking about the rarest and most expensive leather for the upholstery.

The man who stood behind a pulpit in Miami and said of his gay neighbors that they are “vile”, and compared same-sex love to drug addiction and witchcraft, had this to say about all of that at a recent meeting with gay activists…

“Because [the far left] calls us bigots and hatemongers, what does that mean? They hate us? No, they just disagreed with our views and practices…”

You know, Al Capone disagreed with Eliot Ness.   But there was a little more to it then simply a difference of opinion.

I strenuously disagree!

Just because I disagree with you does not make me a bigot… To say that gay people are merely disagreeing with one filthy lie after another thrown in our faces, let alone thundered from pulpits all over the nation to incite ever more violent passions toward us, is a way of sweeping the hate mongering that gets gay people beaten and murdered under the rug.   But it isn’t mostly about face saving.   Even more then that, what Hakimian is doing there is cheerfully spitting in the faces of the very people he attacks, trivializing the claims of injury his gay neighbors have placed at his feet, and others like him who keep thumping their pulpits at the homosexual menace.   What, you vile creatures object to my calling you vile?   Well we’ll just have to agree to disagree about that…

“They kept saying that because you don’t agree with us you don’t love us, you hate us. We tried to explain to them that love doesn’t mean Christians can’t disagree…”

Let us agree to disagree about your vileness, your sex addiction, your witchcraft…because I love you. Right, and love is the swinging baseball bat of a gay basher.   He’s spitting in the faces of the people he has attacked, and it’s as deliberate as the attack itself.   But with that placid, meticulously transparent I’ll pray for you smile on his face.

The thing that began nudging me away from Rand was seeing how people who embraced her values system actually behaved. Years later and well after she had passed away, some biographies began to appear and I got a glimpse into the behavior of the person herself.   Unsurprisingly these random sickening glimpses of the person within are to be found everywhere she went.   In her novel The Charioteer, Mary Renault wrote that “some events are crucial from their very slightness; because circumstances have used no force on them, they are unequivocally what they are, test-tube reactions of personality.”   We leave our mark sometimes where we are least aware of it.   But these light little footsteps on our world are the most authentically us.

For an eyewitness portrait of Ayn Rand in the flesh, in the prime of her celebrity, you can’t improve on the “Ubermensch” chapter in Tobias Wolff’s autobiographical novel Old School.

Invited to meet with the faculty and student writers at the narrator’s boarding school, Rand arrives with an entourage of chain-smoking idolaters in black and behaves so repellently that her audience of innocents gets a life lesson in what kind of adult to avoid, and to avoid becoming. Rude, dismissive, vain and self-infatuated to the point of obtuseness — she names Atlas Shrugged as the only great American novel — Rand and her hissing chorus in black manage to alienate the entire school, even the rich board member who had admired and invited her.

What strikes Wolff’s narrator most forcefully is her utter lack of charity or empathy, her transparent disgust with everything she views as disfiguring or disabling: a huge wen on the headmaster’s forehead, the narrator’s running head cold, the war injury that emasculated Hemingway’s Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.

To the boy, she appears to be exactly the sort of merciless egotist who might have designed a fascist philosophy that exalts power and disparages altruism. Rand is wearing a gold pin in the shape of a dollar sign. After meeting her, he can no longer read a word of The Fountainhead, which as an adolescent romantic he had enjoyed.

The thing that still distresses me most to this day is how she treated her husband, Frank O’Connor, who became a painter after his acting career declined. He did the dust jacket illustration for the first hardbound editions of Atlas Shrugged…the one with the train tracks leading into the tunnel with the huge red stop light above the entrance (if you’ve read the novel you know what it refers to).   Rand’s affair with the younger Nathanial Brandon destroyed both their marriages (never of course, causing her to check her premises about the nature of human emotions), and O’Connor became a recluse in his own little apartment studio.   After he died some friends of Rand entered his studio and found it littered with empty bottles of booze scattered everywhere, and a lot of unfinished paintings.

Radley Balco tweets: “Surprised the Cato crowd is so big on Ryan. Votes don’t match rhetoric on fiscal policy, and he’s awful on social, civil liberties issues.”

Uh-huh.   I see you’re still taking their libertarianism seriously.   Something I discovered back in my libertarian days was you scratched the surface of a lot of them and you found a John Bircher who figured pot decriminalization would appeal to younger voters.

Charles Mudede writes:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has done yeoman’s work on tracking violent groups, notes that “Currently, there are 1,018 known hate groups operating across the country, including neo-Nazis, Klansmen, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, black separatists, border vigilantes and others. And their numbers are growing.” The Center’s data show that hate groups have increased by 69 percent in the last decade. And the so-called “Patriot” groups have increased nearly 800 percent since Obama became president.

If the news media and political leaders were told there were a thousand violence-prone Muslim groups operating in the United States, can you imagine the reaction? Yet, apart from the glancing attention given incidents like the Sikh temple massacre, the national discourse about terrorism focuses almost exclusively on Muslims.

The same goes if they were white and on the radical left.

I remember immediately after the Oklahoma City bombing, nearly everyone figured Arab terrorists were responsible. Then it turned out a right wing lunatic did it.   Right wing lunatics have continued to kill people in this country ever since and yet when the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI issued a report on anti-government right wing violence it was denounced by the republicans as a political attack.   As if the republican strategy of tearing the country apart for political advantage hasn’t itself been a political attack on the country they keep claiming to patriotically love.

The United States of America is fantastically more violent then any other industrialized nation and the tragedy is every time a domestic terrorist attack happens any hope of talking about why that is so quickly devolves into an argument about guns.   Guns don’t matter.   What matters is how much hatred there is now between Americans.   What matters is one of the two major American political parties has for decades actively sought to incite that hatred for political gain.   They have courted the racist vote.   They have courted the misogynist vote.   They have courted the votes of religious bigots, xenophobes and homophobes.   And that has had consequences.

But we can’t talk about them.   We can talk about how our enemies hate us, but we can’t talk about how we hate each other.   Because that would be a politically motivated attack on the people who have made tearing the country apart in order to get the bigger half their election strategy for decades.   For some reason that is a wrong thing.

“The reason I got into public service, by and large, if I had to credit on thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” -Paul Ryan

“Our rights come from nature and God, not government.” – Paul Ryan.

Let others bust on Romney’s VB choice for his let the rich eat the middle class and have the poor for dessert politics. I want to point out something that’s irritated me about him and all the Who Is John Galt tea-ed off jackasses that want government out of their Medicare.   Seriously…Rand would chew all of you to shreds and spit you out in disgust.

I will admit to being a Randoid back in my twenties. In my defense it was something Ronald Reagan cured me of, which means I can look back on it with some relief and a little pride that, whatever ideology I would have become hooked on at that age I was never the sort to let a belief stop me from seeing what is right in front of my eyes. But before Reagan managed to convincingly show me how people who equate money with morality actually behave in real life, and what a government comprised of such people really looked like, I delved into Rand’s books and her writings hungrily.   Some say Randism is a kind of petulant ego trip, but for me it was my inner teenage geek thinking she had the simple elegant answer to all the problems of society and government.   Simple is better…right?   H.L. Mencken once said that for every complex problem there is an answer that is simple, neat and wrong.

I still have all those books of her’s I bought way back when, and even some of the newsletters. Give me a sentence or two of dialogue from Atlas Shrugged and well worn hardbound copy in hand I’ll put my fingers on the pages it came from in under a minute. I’m not exactly proud of this…but it’s come in handy from time to time whenever I get into an argument with someone who is still eating at Hugh Akston’s rancid diner.

So let me take this opportunity to say, as someone who has been there and can claim some experience with the territory, its culture, and its charming little village church…Ryan is shitting you. Twice. He’s shitting you when he says he admires Ayn Rand, and shitting you when he says he believes rights come from God, both. The magnitude of the mendacity here is you can’t even believe he’s at least being honest about one of those statements. To say both of these things is to basically say you believe neither one.

Anyone who so much as skims the John Galt speech knows what Rand thought of Christianity and God worship. Her take is so absolutely venomous it is just not possible to reconcile any form of Christianity, even the ersatz republican christianity of war, wealth, power and contempt for the poor and outcast, with Rand. Rand and Christianity do not fit together in any possible way.   Not even in The Twilight Zone do they fit together. Here…just take a wee taste…

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge – he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil – he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor – he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire – he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy – all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was – that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love – he was not man.

Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

And so on… But take note: Ryan’s mendacity is eminently typical of modern republicans. They pick ideas from Rand and from her hated bastard offspring, libertarianism, the way they pick from the bible, like they’re populating the window display of an antique shop with any pretty junk that might get the passers-by to stop and look. Their admiration of Rand is intellectual the way a bank robber admires a well made shotgun and getaway car is intellectual, and to the same exact kind and degree that their religiosity is deeply spiritual.   It isn’t just about waging culture war.   When you’re busy plundering one of history’s great democracies, it’s good to be able to look in a mirror and convince yourself it isn’t a thief looking back.   The bible merely gives them a few handy clobber verses.   They have to skim over all the parts about loving your neighbor and getting camels through the eyes of needles.   Rand told them outright that theirs is the power and the glory and that even a little mustard seed of compassion toward your neighbors is anti-life.   She set them free, free at last from the loathsome work of forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty to anyone but themselves.

Paul Constant over at SLOG reminds us…

Paul Ryan has a highly consistent legislative record. He has voted against regulations of all kinds—environmental protections, work safety laws, controls on the banking, credit card, and health care industries—and against spending on things like food stamps, arts funding, Medicare, and infrastructure. He wants to decimate Pell Grants and he votes against education funding almost every time. He’s strongly anti-abortion. He votes against protecting minorities and women—against The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, for example—but he votes for religion, arguing against the separation of church and state whenever possible. He claims to be for small government, but he votes for military spending a whole lot. He was against drawing down in Afghanistan, and he’s for government wiretapping and the PATRIOT Act. The only real divergence from that record comes from his votes to bail out GM and his support for TARP, when the entire country was teetering on the edge of a Bush-inspired collapse.

Something that worries me, though, is Ryan has a disconcerting habit of completely denying the reality of his record, in a very convincing way. If a senior citizen asks Ryan about privatizing Medicare, he will toss a word salad that leaves the senior disoriented and convinced that he’s actually for a stronger Medicare. He will force his interns to read Ayn Rand novels, tell everyone we’re “living in an Ayn Rand novel,” and even credit his entire life of public service to Ayn Rand, and then he will tell a crowded room with a straight face that his love for Ayn Rand is an “urban legend.” Both of these contradictory truths are on the record.

I think Rand would have understood at some level, even as she would have despised his bows to right wing fundamentalists.   She yapped a lot about the rights of the individual but for her it was all about the will to power. Her beef with religion, Christianity specifically, was almost certainly in all that stuff about being a neighbor and doing unto others.   I think she saw religion as a cousin to communism, and so even a religion that exalted the rich and powerful would have drawn her contempt, because to some degree all religion involves fellowship of some kind and Rand acknowledged no interhuman connections of any sort beyond transactions that are engaged in purely for self benefit.   She despised the idea that love could be unconditional and selfless.

It’s a view of human society citizens of the nation of Wall Street can see the rapture in.   A morality in which all that matters is acquiring and holding onto power makes the concept of neighbor pointless. Everyone is responsible only to themselves and harm is something you do only to yourself. There is no neighbor.   And without neighbor there is no shame. The people you meet are nothing more than potential sources of profit or loss. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are not contradicting themselves and they don’t view what they are doing as lying per se, let alone immoral.   Business after all, is business. They are selling you a product under the rules of a marketplace where the only thing that matters is did they get your money.   And that is exactly how they will govern.   Because theirs is the power and the glory, and Atlas don’t feel shame.

So it’s Really Swell how Chick Fil A has brought people together to discuss what rights, if any, they’re willing to grant their gay neighbors. Behold the Wonder of Food. In Ancient times we would break bread together and discuss matters close to the heart. Now we eat junk food and get our arteries hardened. Some gay friends of mine on Facebook tell me lately that I’m not the only gay American in my friends list having this conversation with their heterosexual friends. But this is good. If nothing else there is value here, great value, in remembering that most folks outside the gay community are in the dark about the details of our struggle and its history.

That isn’t because they’re ignorant (at least My friends aren’t!), it’s because their news streams generally don’t give much focus to our lives and our issues. This fact really hits home day after day lately, as I engage other friends, heterosexuals, and see them getting genuinely surprised to hear details about Chick Fil A’s corporate giving to hate groups…even more surprised at the magnitude of venom those hate groups have been injecting into the political discourse for years. On the one hand, it can get frustrating to be constantly reminded in these conversations that we are mostly a side show to the other pressing issues most heterosexuals face. Like oh…the crappy economy…their job situations…their health care. On the other hand, the “teachable moment” here runs both ways.

Just because you can recite off the top of your head what states have same-sex marriage and what states have it on the ballot this year and who the major players are in the fight against it and where they get their money from, that doesn’t mean everyone else can, and just because they can’t that doesn’t mean they don’t care. Harder, but just as important to learn is this: just because you hear some boilerplate crap about same-sex marriage and gay rights in general coming out of their mouths that doesn’t mean anything, other then the hate mongers are much better at getting these little poisonous memes out there then our crappy corporate news media is at informing people.

So…keep calm, and carry on a discussion with whoever is willing to listen. Remember…they don’t always know the subject the way we do.

Below is something I just posted elsewhere, in the hope that clues are digested here and there. It began with an old high school classmate, also an atheist but let it be said with a much Much bigger chip on his shoulder toward religion then I’ve got, who surprised me by dispensing some standard antigay boilerplate crap to the effect that:

• Heterosexual relationships are of a different kind because they have the potential to procreate. (He actually said he was surprised the “religionists” didn’t make more of an issue about biology! (foolish religionists…always waving your bibles when there is Biology to discuss!))
• Government needs to put same-sex couples into a different category to distinguish between families that procreate for the purposes of education, housing, transportation, etc…

And oh by the way he’s fine with a Constitutional Amendment granting all the same rights heterosexual couples have to same-sex couples.   Just not apparently, the term “marriage”

Here’s my reply…

So you’re fine with government denying the status of marriage to opposite sex couples who are infertile for one reason or another (old age or medical condition) but allowing them some sort of separate but equal status? Even if they’ve adopted children anyway? Somehow I am doubting that.

I can see you don’t follow the struggle between gay Americans and the religionists much (and as I said before I don’t expect everyone to) because the fact is that’s actually something they bellyache about a Lot. Along with something they keep calling the “complementary nature of man and woman.”

I can appreciate how, being sexually drawn to the opposite sex, and finding a wholeness of body and soul, a perfect romantic complement in a person of the opposite sex, heterosexuals can mistake that complementary nature of their relationships for gender. Listen to your gay neighbors: it isn’t gender. The complement is the person. If you look at human relationships you see it all the time; lovers filling in each other’s blank spaces. The religionists are always claiming that homosexual relationships don’t really involve love as deeply or as meaningfully as heterosexual relationships, but all that is telling is that they can’t see the people for the homosexuals. But also that they aren’t looking too carefully at themselves. If making babies makes a marriage then why do so many children live apart from one or both parents? How often do you hear the story of a guy getting his girlfriend pregnant and then leaving her. Some relationship that, eh?

Children do not make a marriage work. They will not turn a sexual relationship into a whole hearted romantic one capable of sustaining a marriage. That I even have to say this given the barrage of evidence all around us is just…amazing. But that is what the national conversation about the rights of gay people reliably devolves into. If having sex does not make a marriage, as the religionists keep yapping at gay people, then sex that results in children clearly does not either. The evidence is all around us. That takes something more. And if you would bother to look you might see that your gay neighbors are as capable of that something more as anyone else is.

I would put it to you that this something more is something that any civilized society should want to nurture in its people. Or at minimum, not try to suffocate.

Our relationships are not of a different kind. They are just a small variation on a theme. And that holds true for same sex marrieds, same sex dating but not sure want to marry and one night stands. Try your local straight singles bar sometime to see a lot of that. Or here in Baltimore, where we have a charming little neighborhood called The Block. Browse around it sometime and then tell me that heterosexual relationships are so much more innately noble. Cheap? Empty? Oh boy! It isn’t just chicken that’s on the junk food menu. There’s a lot of sex on that menu too it would seem.

And don’t gay people make really swell scapegoats for all the problems heterosexuals are having with their lives these days? Oh gosh…if we can only reserve the word “marriage” for ourselves, keep it out of the hands of Teh Gay, then we won’t have such high rates of divorce, or so many lost children wondering where mom or dad or both went. No…I don’t think kicking your gay neighbors into a separate but equal status is going to help with any of that.

Our relationships are not in any substantive way any different from that of heterosexuals. And the reason government needs to stop denying same sex couples access to marriage is that equal justice thing. Government does not need to keep tabs on whether a couple is gay or straight for education, housing healthcare or any of that, just do they have kids. I believe the census already asks about that. No. The only reason to place a different label on our relationships would be to enforce some sort of cultural norm that has no bearing at all on anything real, other then a deeply rooted need to see our relationships as somehow different. Separate. Apart.

Why would anyone want to do that?

So you know…I use the term “religionist” in the above because that was how my classmate from way back when referred to them. That is not how I would normally put it, nor do I believe that religion is necessarily a problem for gay people. Or anyone for that matter. You hear a lot of bible waving from homophobes, but that doesn’t mean they’re very religious…only that they’ve discovered their bibles have another handy use besides door stop and beer coaster.

When it comes to matters of religion and faith I keep coming back to something the author Mary Renault once said, that politics, like sex, is a reflection of the person within, and that if a person is mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in their politics and it will come out in their sex lives when what really matters is they aren’t the sort of person who behaves like that. I would only add religion to that statement. If they are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in their spiritual lives when what really matters is they aren’t the sort of person who behaves like that.

I know a lot of religious people will profoundly disagree with that because what I’m saying there basically is religion does not matter, what matters is the person within, but it’s been my experience in life. If you are an angry person, you probably worship an angry god (or I suppose, just angry at existence if a non-believer). I have never seen a religious epiphany make a cold heart warm, but I have seen it bring to life a tiny little spark of humanity that was always there, but buried under a lot of hurt. There are people who hurt and who lash out in pain. And there are cold hearts out there that will never know a touch of human warmth. That is not the fault of their religion.

Bryan Fischer does a pivot from supporting a christian (in his opinion) parent who defies a judgment giving her lesbian co-parent custody, to supporting the wholesale kidnapping of children from gay parents…

This tweet followed one about Mennonite minister Kenneth Miller, charged with aiding and abetting the kidnapping of the child Isabella Miller-Jenkins in a custody battle between a lesbian and her now ex-gay partner who fled to Nicaragua with the girl rather then obey a court order giving custody of the girl to her former partner.   But the link below the tweet, to a story posted on the blog of The Witherspoon Institute…one of Mark Regnerus’ big money teats, by a man who blames his difficulties growing up on the fact that he was raised by a lesbian couple. (Naturally he ends his story with a big round of applause for Regnerus’ work and you can be sure that has no bearing at all on why the people who dropped a giant wad of cash on Regnerus saw fit to publish his story…)   So Fischer here isn’t tweeting that an underground railroad is needed to support good christian parents when they decide to flee their homosexual past and take the kids with them.   He’s saying that any kid being raised by homosexuals is in danger, and needs a few good christian child snatchers to get them out of it.

This is where the culture war can take a turn for the very worst, and if you think these people are not capable of wholesale child snatching you need to refresh your memory as to what they’ve been capable of in the fight over abortion.

[Update…] As expected, Fischer is slyly sticking to his guns on the Miller case as though that was what he meant all along….

No kidnapping involved in Lisa Miller case. She left the US to keep her natural, biological daughter FROM BEING KIDNAPPPED. In Lisa Miller case, I’m advocating AGAINST JUDICIAL KIDNAPPING, in favor of keeping daughter with her own mother. In Lisa Miller case, lesbian who wanted sole custody of the daughter had NO legal or biological relationship to the girl. If any kidnapping involved in Lisa Miller case, it’s judges stealing a child from her mother and giving her to a stranger.

This is a standard technique of the kook pews, when cornered to pick a distraction and try to drag the conversation down and away from whatever was getting them mainstream static. But Fischer’s tweet about “Why we need an Underground Railroad to deliver innocent children from same-sex households” didn’t link to a story about the Miller case, but to the story of a man raised in a same-sex household which he blames for his life problems, published by The Witherspoon Institute which funded the Regnerus “study”. Never mind for a moment that even in the Miller case Fischer is claiming a right to ignore the rule of law wherever it gets in the way of his holy war on Teh Gay, there was no custody battle issue in the story he linked to, no issue of gay verses christian parent. Fischer was saying that Every household headed by same-sex parents is a danger to the children in them.

At minimum, it was a dog whistle endorsement of snatching these kids from their homes and Fischer isn’t walking back any of that, he’s merely waving the Miller case around as if that was all he was talking about. It wasn’t. Be assured that the right ears will have heard Fischer’s dog whistle, and nodded their heads approvingly.

And…If you thought the work of Mark Regnerus would only be used by the culture warriors to deny gay people the right to marry, you have been painfully naive.

This is making the rounds on Facebook and over at Truth Wins Out…

My own Dad ended his life badly, by way of robbing banks.   I’ve said before that if I had to choose between being raised by him and being raised by any of these self styled godly men, I would unhesitatingly choose to be raised by the honest crook.

Strangers can gay bash you, they can take your life from you, but only family can chew your heart up and spit it out. But consider not only the man who wrote this. Take a moment to wonder about the person, most likely but not necessarily someone who gets up behind a pulpit every Sunday, who taught this man to hate his own son so terribly much.

Put aside for a moment if you can, your feelings toward this man. Think about the kind of person who teaches parents to hate their children and considers it righteous. Think about the kind of person who does it as a campaign strategy and considers it patriotic. What do you say to someone like that when they tell you about their deeply held moral values?

[Update…] Via Towleroad, the son who got this letter says…

It’s important to know just what this zealotry from Bryan Fisher, Maggie Gallagher, Dan Cathy, et al., does to everyday people. I’ve never done drugs, was an excellent student, an obedient child (far less trouble than many of my classmates), didn’t drink until I was 22 because it terrified me, and have had just 1 speeding ticket in my life. Yet I am still seemingly deserving of this terrible act of hate and cowardice that one person can place on another. 5 years on and I am still doing fine, though this letter saunters into my mind every once in a while. When it does, I say without hesitation: F**k you, Dad.

There was a poem I read many years ago…I just tried to Google it and couldn’t…I think it was about a PFLAG mother attending a gay pride march with her son, seeing all the other lost children standing on the sidelines, watching the march go past, and upon seeing her their faces light up with a painful joy at the sight of a parent proud enough of their gay child to walk with them publicly. But behind that joy she saw also a hopeless longing. Would you be my mother…? So many lost children she sees as she walks with her own son, and she could not take them all in. It isn’t just the children who have to be carefully taught to hate, it’s the parents too. When the likes of Bryan Fischer, Maggie Gallaher, Dan Cathy, et al., speak of family values, laugh in their face.

[Update…] Fixed the Towleroad link.

[Update…] In the comments, Alsafi found the poem I was referring to, Here. Amazing how it stuck with me so long, even after I’d forgotten nearly all of its words. Which I guess just goes to show that words are just the stepping stones a poem takes you somewhere on. It’s the somewhere that’s the thing, the imagery it conjures up, not the words.

[Update…] The link the reader sent me is broken now. Luckily the Wayback Machine is there to help. Whoever it was that wrote this…thank you…it is pure gold

San Diego Pride Parade – July 18, 1992 – author unknown

There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them
and only a handful of us.
The screamed and they shrieked and they cheered as we passed
yelling, “Thank you. It’s great that you care!”

Loudest of all and clearest of all
were the screams that emerged from the eyes
of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them
who watched as we marched down the street.

I carried a sign that stated most clear
my love for my son who is gay.

She stared at my sign
piercing my heart
with her pain.
I left the parade and moved to her side.
I held her in both of my arms.
Her sobs were intense and I tightened my grip
as she whispered her secret to me.

“My mom has disowned me since she found out.
She says I’m not right in the head.
She says that I’m weird
that I’m one to be feared
that I’ve caused her to suffer such pain.
Do you think that you could
Do you think that you might
Just be my mom for today?”

There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them
looking for parents they’d lost.

There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them.
But only a handful of us.

Every election cycle the republicans run on deregulation, lower taxes and more jobs. And when they get power then it’s all about the culture war and everything they do seems to cost people jobs and depress the economy more and more. You wonder if they even care about the economy.

Get a clue: a productive economy, technological progress, and general prosperity, are the most destabilizing things for authoritarian cultural norms and religious fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism and right wing authoritarianism flourish in stagnant or declining economies.

I’m not saying it’s a plan, I’m saying it’s a reflex. They act like they don’t want Americans to prosper because they have an allergic reaction to prosperity anywhere below the top 1 percent. Prosperous happy people don’t obey orders and generally don’t take a lot of crap from authoritarian louts.