Via Pam’s House Blend. Warning, this video is disturbing and violent. It is also the reality of life for gay people in Jamaica, a place that bills itself as “A premier caribbean travel destination”…a place of “Sweet fragrances, shimmering sunsets, spicy flavors…No wonder hearts beat faster in Jamaica.”
Public Defender Earl Witter resorted to the vernacular yesterday as he advised members of the gay community to “hold your corners”, and avoid flaunting their sexual preferences in the face of those who are repulsed by their behaviour.
Condemning violence in all forms, particularly against homosexuals, the public defender, however, warned members of the gay community that if they continued to shove their tendencies on others who found it repugnant, it might incite violence.
“It may provoke a violent breach of the peace,” Mr. Witter told The Gleaner yesterday evening.
… During the luncheon, Mr. Witter said that, as with most things, “tolerance has its limits” and gays and lesbians should be sensitive to the “repulsion that others feel” and should not be so “brazen”.
“What takes place behind closed doors between consenting males is ordinarily beyond the reach of the law so they (gays) should confine their activities to their bed chambers and not, by their conduct, provoke disapproving reactions. In other words ‘hold yu corner,'” Mr. Witter said.
…not, by their conduct, provoke disapproving reactions. Now…where have I heard that before…?
A 15-year-old gay Centennial High School student was taunted and attacked by six classmates last week because of his sexual orientation.
The victim was undergoing surgery for a broken nose and facial injuries today, according to the Gay, Lesbian and Gay Alliance.
The incident happened last Thursday afternoon, when Anthony Hergesheimer was walking home from Centennial High School along Denver Boulevard, the organization said. Six male students, ages 15 and 16, in a vehicle apparently passed by Hergesheimer several times before they stopped and hurled anti-gay insults at him.
One of the students also got out of the vehicle and threw a can of Lysol at Hergesheimer, who suffered a broken nose and severe facial injuries.
Lysol. Like they were cleansing the street of some kind of human garbage…
The six male Centennial students, who were not identified, were suspended Monday until a decision is made about possible expulsion. The district usually has 25 days to make a recommendation on whether to expel a student.
Pueblo police is also investigating the attack and possible criminal charges may be filed against the youths.
But it’s not the teenagers who attacked the gay kid who need to be ashamed of themselves, according to The Alliance Defense Fund…
God has condemned them. They should live in shame. What was I saying the other day? You can’t paint a bulls-eye on a group of kids, tell their peers that those kids are condemned by god, and not expect that every now and then one of them will get the shit beaten out of them. But…that’s the intent isn’t it? A fearful homosexual is a good homosexual. You have to beat the pride out of them young. Christianity has come to this in the Land Of The Free And The Home Of The Brave: Accepting Jesus Christ as your lord and savior means you can set kids loose on other kids, and still look at yourself in a mirror. Who would Jesus throw the first can of Lysol at?
Daniel Gonzales, formerly of ExGay Watch has created a little video about the anti-gay counter attack on the Day of Silence. Cynically named “Day Of Truth”, it seeks to legitimize harassment of GLBT kids in school by their classmates, in the name of freedom of religion. The problem is, as always, that the religious right isn’t on speaking terms with Truth, or anything even remotely resembling it. Their website, as the video shows, helpfully provides kids with cards printed up with informational resources on homosexuality that all link back to Ex Gay ministries and their usual myths, lies and superstitions. The party line is that this is all supposed to give gay kids “the other side” of the story. But as always this “other side” is actually a message directed not at gay youth, but to their heterosexual peers. The resources handed out to school kids are nothing less then a collection of handy excuses for them to treat their GLBT peers with disrespect, if not outright contempt.
We see in the video the t-shirt their poster child got tossed out of class for wearing on a previous Day of Silence, which tells gay kids to “Be Ashamed” and that God condemns them. On its face then, this is not a message of love directed toward gay youth, but an exhortation to their peers to treat them like human garbage. It is incitement that at some point is certain to result in outright physical assaults. And when that happens you can bet that like Pilot the grown adults who are instigating this will wash, wash their hands of the consequences. But you don’t paint a bulls-eye on children, tell everyone that those children are condemned by God, and not expect violence to result.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, has said that the churches of the Anglican Communion must be safe places for gay and lesbian people. His comments come in a welcome to an interim report on the Anglican Communion’s Listening Process, a commitment to listen to the experience of homosexual people.
Williams warns that the challenge to create the safe space for the voices of gay and lesbian people to be heard and for their dignity to be respected is based on a fundamental commitment of the Communion.
"The commitments of the Communion are not only to certain theological positions on the question of sexual ethics but also to a manifest and credible respect for the proper liberties of homosexual people, a commitment again set out in successive Lambeth Conference Resolutions over many decades," he said. "I share the concerns expressed about situations where the Church is seen to be underwriting social or legal attitudes which threaten these proper liberties.
The problem of course, is that even the local homophobes really don’t give a rat’s ass anymore what Williams thinks, never mind the ones in Africa…
Bishop blocks gay youth worker’s job
A leading bishop has fuelled the controversy over the Church of England and equality after being accused of refusing to employ a youth worker because he is gay.
The Bishop of Hereford, the Right Reverend Anthony Priddis, blocked the appointment of John Reaney, 41, Reaney’s lawyers say, despite the unanimous decision of an interview panel, including two vicars, to give him the job.
Reaney, from north Wales, claims he had been told after the interview that confirmation that he had got the job from Priddis was just a formality. Instead he was subjected to embarrassing and intimate questions about his private life before being informed by letter that he could not be offered the job because he was a practising homosexual.
On Wednesday the bishop will appear before an employment tribunal in Cardiff to defend his decision. In the first case of its kind, his lawyers are expected to argue that lay appointments by the Church of England should be exempt, as are clerical posts, from anti-discrimination laws.
Anni Holden, a spokeswoman for the Diocese of Hereford, said: ‘We expect the same sexual standards of behaviour from our support ministers or lay ministers as we do of clergy.’ The standard they expect is based on a statement from the House of Bishops in the Nineties which said it was acceptable for staff to be gay but that they must remain celibate.
Reaney’s lawyers will argue that his rejection was based purely on his sexuality, and heterosexual staff were never asked similar questions about their private lives.
The case will highlight the controversy in the Church of England facing Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, below, and could exacerbate the conflict between Christian beliefs and equality laws that are aimed at protecting the rights of gay and lesbian people.
Ironically enough, the problem facing his church, and Christianity itself these days, is pretty neatly summed up by Williams himself…
No-one reading this report can be complacent about such a situation, and the Church is challenged to show that it is truly a safe place for people to be honest and where they may be confident that they will have their human dignity respected, whatever serious disagreements about ethics may remain.
But it is precisely the human dignity of homosexuals that people in his church are having "serious disagreements" about, not ethics. How you answer the ethical questions depends on how you answer the fundamental question of the humanity and dignity of homosexual people. If you think homosexuals are some kind of human vermin, a cancer on the church, then you’re sure as hell not going to make your church a safe place for them. And you’re not going to want anyplace outside the church be a safe place for them either. Your calculation is simple: wherever homosexuals are safe, nobody else is. Therefore, homosexuals cannot be safe anywhere. You are going to do everything in your power to sweep them into the gutter where you think they belong, for the sake of your church, and your community. Well…really…for the sake of your cheapshit prejudices. But this is what Anglican archbishop Peter Akinola, is encouraging the government of his country to do. It is what the Americans who have now aligned with him would wish their government could. A safe place for homosexuals is the last thing these people want. They want a purge, and not just in the church pews either.
The really sad thing is that even in this new document, Williams cannot bear to actually take a stand For the human dignity of gay people. At a glance it seems that he is, but by glossing over the nature of the serious disagreement he’s undercutting the very stand he would like everyone to think he’s making. You can’t simultaneously insist that the human dignity of gay people must be respected, and at the same time agree that it is debatable.
On the March 20 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage discussed a San Francisco Chroniclereport detailing the murder of a transgender woman whose body was found naked near a freeway outside San Francisco. Savage read a sentence from the article stating that "it appeared the victim had been in the process of becoming a woman," to which Savage replied: "Yeah, process of becoming a woman — psychopath. [She] should have been in a back ward in a straitjacket for years, howling on major medication." He went on to say, "And what’s this sympathy, constant sympathy for sexually confused people? Why should we have constant sympathy for people who are freaks in every society?" adding, "But you know what? You’re never gonna make me respect the freak. I don’t want to respect the freak." Savage concluded: "The freak ought to be glad that they’re allowed to walk around without begging for something. You know, I’m sick and tired of the whole country begging, bending over backwards for the junkie, the freak, the pervert, the illegal immigrant. All of them are better than everybody else. Sick. Everything is upside down."
There’s a link to the audio on the Media Matters page there, and to other gems of wit and wisdom from Michael Savage. And he is far from the only one out there inciting pure, unadulterated hate on the radio. Take a nice long cross country drive someday, through the heart of red state territory and listen. It’s why I got the satellite radio installed in my car; so I would have something to listen to besides hate, hate, and more hate. But you need to listen. This is the republican base. These are the people the republican party knows it cannot win elections without.
While the vast majority of Hillcrest’s gay population rejects the Bible, it may prove useful to them to at least consider what the Bible has to say about the self-destructive choices they are making. The Book of Deuteronomy reveals the high cost to a community or group of people who reject God’s commandments and laws:
"But if you refuse to listen to the Lord your God and do not obey all the commands and laws I am giving you today, all of these curses will come and overwhelm you: You will be cursed with confusion and disillusionment in everything you do, until at last you are completely destroyed for doing evil and forsaking me. The Lord will send diseases among you until none of you are left in the land you are about to enter and occupy. The Lord will strike you with wasting disease, fever, and inflammation. These devastations will pursue you until you die. The Lord will cause you to be defeated by your enemies. You will be oppressed and robbed continually, and no one will come to save you."
…and so on. Ever get the feeling when you hear people reciting those verses that they’re not so much warning their neighbors about God’s wrath, as cheering it on…? Anyway, Hartline’s post is pretty long and rant-rambling as you might expect from a babbling bible thumper, but here’s a couple passages from it that I think get to the meat of it. First, Hartline recounts his crusade against the annual San Diego (his hometown) Pride Day festival, and how the defiant San Diego gays just kept listening to Satan rather then the prophet Hartline…
During the San Diego City Council hearing on July 25, 2006, over 90 gay activists and their supporters showed up to influence the council’s decision to issue a proclamation to honor the San Diego Gay Pride organization and its annual events. Rather than acknowledge the terrible decisions that the group had made the previous year when San Diego Gay Pride had hired the network of sex offenders, the multitude of gay activists used the city council hearing to lambast Christians opposed to the pornographic gay pride events. In speech after speech, gay and lesbian gay pride promoters attacked Christians and their beliefs. It had now become perfectly clear that there would be no repentence on the part of those gay leaders who have been so determined to continue their rabid quest to indoctrinate San Diego’s youth into their crusade of sexual anarchy.
Well of course they only have themselves to blame for what happened next…
Several days later, the San Diego Gay Pride Festival turned from a celebration of homosexuality and pornography into a tragic blood bath as several gay males were severely beaten outside of the gay pride festival grounds (www.gaylesbiantimes.com/?id=8193&issue=979). The assaults were so severe that one of the victims, Oscar Foster, remained in intensive care for two weeks due to a fractured skull and mutilple facial injuries. Baseball bats and a knife were used in the horrific attacks. James Allen Carroll received eleven years in prison for attempted murder on the victims after accepting a plea bargain with prosecutors. Two other adult attackers also received lengthy prison terms for their roles in the heinous attacks.
Yes…he’s saying their that God sent those thugs to beat the living crap out of the homosexuals to punish them. A little further down Hartline makes it specifically and abundantly clear:
While there may not be any apparent moral conviction for embracing such anti-christian discrimination, is it possible that these same gay leaders will ever consider that their actions are reaping a judgment from God on their community? Is it actually possible that God is angry with their mockery of the Bible that has become a cornerstone of the gay community in San Diego? If so, will there be any reconsideration by San Diego’s gay community for their anti-god, anti-christian behaviors? Is Hillcrest being warned by God? What will happen if they don’t heed such warnings?
Although leaders of the San Diego homosexual movement have rejected any Biblical references to homosexuality and lesbianism as being a sin, perhaps it is time for them to rethink their conclusions. The Bible teaches a premise that the wages for sin include death. While most in the gay community reject that premise, is it possible, that in doing so, they could be wrong? Is it possible that God does judge those that harm children? Is it possible that God is now judging San Diego’s homosexual community for its continued promotion of rebellion against the Bible?
The wages of sin are death… But it wasn’t God striking down peaceful festival goers that day, it was a gang of gay hating thugs acting out in an atmosphere that had been charged for months with Hartline’s venomous accusations that San Diego Pride was facilitating pedophilia, and indoctrinating children into homosexuality. Hartline stoked a climate of hate in San Diego in which violence toward homosexuals attending Pride Day became practically inevitable. And now that it’s happened, he’s telling gay bashers yet waiting in the wings that they’re not responsible. Even if the blood of gay people is literally on their hands, Hartline says as far as God is concerned, that blood is upon the gays themselves. That club isn’t in your hands…it’s in God’s hands…so swing away because you’re only doing God’s will…God smites them through you… Black market arms dealers selling explosives to terrorists for money probably give more thought to the human lives they’re putting at risk then Hartline does.
This is how the game is played below the radar of the mainstream news media, that accepts at face value the protestations of the main religious right celebrities, that they love the sinner, and only hate the sin. It isn’t true. To a man, they all believe what Hartline so blatantly shouts there in that blog post: that violent attacks on homosexuals represents God’s judgment upon them…that violent attacks on homosexuals fulfill the will of God.
For those of you who have been following it (which is likely only those of you who read the gay news sites), the 72 year old gay man who was beaten with a pipe the other day, by a man on his bus who asked him if he was gay, has died…
Andrew Anthos died Friday of injuries sustained during an attack last week outside his downtown Detroit apartment building. Family members said he was a victim of an anti-gay hate crime.
Anthos was on a city bus Feb. 13 when a man asked him if he was gay. The man followed Anthos off the bus at the stop in front of his building and beat him with a metal pipe.
Anthos, whose family said he was gay, was taken to a hospital and later fell into a coma.
Local and national gay rights groups condemned the attack. Police told The Detroit News in story published Friday that the department was investigating whether the attack was a hate crime.
This is what Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin, looks like in practice, or as one of Bill Donohue’s nemesis, Shakespear’s Sister, points out…
This shit doesn’t happen in a void. Like the sexualization and objectification of women in the media being psychologically damaging to girls, the constant drumbeat of negative stereotypes and exploitative hatred issued by the GOP and social/religious conservative leaders is dangerous for members of the LGBT community. And the hatemongers’ faux-naïveté at the reality that you can’t continually put a target on someone’s back but expect no one to shoot at it is growing really goddamned old. The hate-the-gays schtick isn’t just infuriating and spiteful and wrong; it’s irresponsible.
But it’s effective. It keeps winning them elections. It keeps the cash flowing in. And it keeps the gays fearful. A fearful homosexual is a good homosexual. Not perhaps, as good as a dead one, but it will do.
The reference to "Dome Man" comes from Anthos’ campaign to light the Michigan Statehouse dome in red, white and blue colors one night a year…
Photo by Lansing State Journal file photo
So he loved his country, and he loved his state. Too bad they couldn’t have loved him back.
A gay Baltimore man who’s fighting to keep his late partner buried in rural Tennessee may have to sell his car and home to fund the legal battle.
Kevin-Douglas Olive said the parents of his late partner, Russell Groff, have appealed a court ruling that granted Olive an early win in the case. The appeal effectively restarts the case, making progress a costly proposition.
Olive said he’s committed to continuing a case in which he’s already invested $8,000 — but fears his legal bills may demand another $20,000.
"I’ll do what I gotta do," he said, "but they’re telling me to expect to spend a lot more than I spent before."
Read more at the Washington Blade’s site Here. The article references the comments from the Groffs to this post on my blog that I’m pretty certain are genuine, and which if they are they show just how far into the gutter hate has led them. They’ve lied through their teeth pretty consistently throughout about the condition of Russell’s gravesite and the events that led to their lawsuit, claiming that it was neglect when it was the removal of their cheapshit insults to the man Russell loved that provoked them into going to court.
Olive said Groff became so weak that he couldn’t leave his bed to urinate. To best help the man he loved, Olive would hold the bedpan for him.
“This is my soul mate, so I just did it,” he said. “You don’t even think about it. You just do it.”
Eventually, a staph infection that originated in Groff’s gall bladder spread throughout his body, and on Nov. 23, 2004, he died.
"I just collapsed on the floor of the hospital, face down and shrieking," Olive said. "Part of me knew that was entirely inappropriate, but part of me didn’t care.”
And how does an all-American God fearing family treat the man who cared for their son in his last hours. Well…like dogshit of course…
In keeping with the burial instructions signed Nov. 18, Groff was interred in the West Knoxville Friends Cemetery outside Knoxville, Tenn.
Olive said the grave, located about 30 minutes from Groff’s childhood home, was to remain simple and clean. But Groff’s mother, Carolyn, made changes.
"She made it into this shrine that really offended the sensibilities of the Quakers," he said, "because we’re all about simplicity."
Olive said Carolyn routinely decorated the grave. At one point, she posted a picture of Groff with his female prom date, plus a poem Carolyn wrote wherein her son essentially apologized for being gay.
"I was so insulted by seeing this,” Olive said. "She was trying to paint him as this repentive person who was heterosexual, really."
After seeing that picture and poem, Olive said he could tolerate no more and cleaned his husband’s gravesite.
"When I cleared the grave, that was the final straw for her,” he said. “She filed the caveat and challenged the will."
Without a doubt Russell knew what was coming after he died, and that was why he had that will drawn up. He loved Kevin, and he didn’t want him to go through the kind of hell he knew his parents were going to bring down on him. And without a doubt, the reason why the homophobes want to deny same sex couples not just the right to marry, but Any legal rights whatsoever, is Precisely so they can twist the knife in our guts, just like the Groffs are twisting the knife in Kevin’s. There is no other plausible reason for the all-out assault on any and every possible legal status for a same sex couple, other then to facilitate this kind of grotesque scorched earth warfare where even our lover’s graves aren’t safe. None. When they talk about fighting to preserve the sacred institution of marriage, what they mean is they’re fighting to preserve the right to dig up your spouse’s grave.
A Maryland judge upheld the will, on the staringly obvious grounds that Russell knew what he was doing when he made it. Russell saw it coming. He did the only thing the law in Maryland allows a gay man do, to to protect the man he loved from it. But the Groffs are bound and determined to bleed Kevin as much as they can because now all they have in their lives is how much they hate him. He’s having to sell off possessions now, and perhaps even his house in order to pay the legal bills over this continuing fight.
I want to ask everyone reading this blog to help him out in any way they can, however much. Do you believe in love? Did it make a difference in your life? Do you remember the first time someone you loved took you into their arms? Do you remember that first kiss? Does it make you angry that some people feel as though they have a god-given right to spit in your face whenever moments like those bring you joy and peace and contentment? Kevin-Douglas Olive watched the man he loved and was loved by die, and now he’s having to fight over the ground he laid his body to rest, and I think even more then money to pay the legal bills, it would help him now to know that there are people out here who Care.
Donations can be sent via mail to the Kevin Olive Defense Fund, c/o C.W. Hardy, 715 Park Ave., Apt. B, Baltimore, MD, 21201.
As a point of interest, it looks like Kevin’s lawyer is Mark Scurti. In fact some years ago I had his law firm, Scurti and Gulling do my own will, and Medical Directives document. They’re good people, known and respected in Baltimore’s gay community for their work fighting for our legal rights.
There are those who do not believe that the institution of marriage is under assault. There are those who do not believe that same-sex marriage is a knowing attempt to undermine the nature of marriage. There are those who do not believe that many homosexuals bear a particular animus for heterosexual marriage, and have designs beyond mere tolerance.
Then there are those of us who live in the real world.
You need to pay attention to what Shapiro is saying because it’s all there, plain as day. Gay people in his reckoning want the right to marry Specifically in order to destroy marriage. And because we hate it so much we’re willing to throw our very selves at it to destroy it. Dig it. According to Shapiro, our ultimate weapon of choice for destroying marriage is…us. Shapiro isn’t merely saying in his Human Events article that we want to destroy marriage, not merely that we hate the institution of marriage because we know that it represents a spiritual state that only heterosexuals can enter into, he’s saying that we know just how depraved and unfit our relationships are, so we want to have our relationships embraced by it, in order that our depravity will destroy it. If you still have trouble believing how thoroughly the gutter has demonized homosexual people in their own minds, read that article. It says it all. When Ben Shapiro looks at gay people, he simply does not see human beings. He can’t. He sees only monsters. This is how bigots think.
What provokes him is the initiative filed in Washington State recently, in the wake of the supreme court ruling last year that the state had a legitimate interest in restricting marriage to opposite sex couples for the welfare of children. Activists in the state have simply called the heterosexual majority on it, by filing a referendum of their own to make having children mandatory in order to be married. No children, no marriage. Of course no one expects it to pass, but that’s not to say there won’t be a lot of fun to be had watching the religious right argue that the ability to bear children is only a barrier to marriage for same sex couples.
Shapiro sees the weakness here. Basing the arguments against same-sex marriage on children makes no sense if you’re going to let opposite sex couples who will not or can not have children marry anyway. The exception disproves the rule, and makes it clear that the issue isn’t children at all, but homosexuality. The problem for Ben and his kind, is that in defending the exclusion of same sex couples from marriage simply because they are same sex couples, the argument then becomes chillingly honest in its core bigotry.
Shapiro’s article rises to almost Orson Scott Card levels of contempt for the inner lives of homosexual people in its matter-of-fact exaltation of heterosexual coupling as something sacred and divine. But as usual with the right, the rhetoric of the sacred is merely excusing not devotional. A squirt or two of Righteous Men Of God perfume sprayed over the stench of that open sewer they call their conscience, in the hope that it will be a tad less obvious to anyone with a nose…
Advocates of same-sex marriage argue that gender is literally meaningless. It is for that reason that they compare gender to race in legal contexts…
Well I don’t know anyone supporting same-sex marriage who thinks gender is literally meaningless, only that in this particular context, a legal, secular covenant of marriage, it’s irrelevant. There is just no factual basis for asserting otherwise.
It isn’t children…
If gender is meaningless, children do not need both mother and father; a father and a father, two mothers, six fathers and a mother — any or all may suffice. To homosexual marriage proponents, the fact that only the sexual union between men and women produces children is an unfortunate accident of nature.
But, this is exactly what Washington State referendum throws back in the faces of crackpots like Shapiro. In fact, children have no bearing whatsoever on the ability of a couple to marry or not. You are not required to have children, you are not required to be fit to raise children, you are not even required to be Capable of having your own biological children. All you have to be, is an opposite sex couple. And here Ben illustrates perfectly the reason why that’s purely an animus based form of discrimination…
Gender is not meaningless, of course. The radical individualism that denies all distinction between men and women is deeply pernicious. It denies the spiritual in mankind. It denies the obvious physical and spiritual bounty springing from traditional marriage…In one sense, Washington’s same-sex advocates do us a favor: They make clear that in order to deny homosexual marriage, we must uphold the beautiful and natural distinctions between men and women. They also make clear that we must uphold the value of heterosexuality over homosexuality. We must take up the gauntlet and, in doing so, vindicate the possibility of a higher spiritual elevation through the deepest possible human relationship.
(emphasis mine)
And there it is: Homosexuals don’t love…they just have sex…
Shapiro’s position is that marriage is a sacred institution that same sex couples are simply incapable of entering into, not merely because they don’t have the right combination of genitals, but because they do not, Can Not, love one another as deeply, as wholeheartedly, as devotedly as heterosexuals do. Heterosexual love is spiritual. What homosexuals do is merely carnal.
This isn’t exactly the first time I’ve heard this argument. I’ve had people tell me to my face as far back as my teen years that they flat-out didn’t believe that a same sex couple could possibly be capable of loving each other as deeply or as wholeheartedly as a heterosexual couple. And this is the unspoken (sometimes spoken outright) premise behind ever dolled up statistic you’ve ever read about how promiscuous homosexuals are. Homosexuals don’t love…they just have sex… Now…re-read that first part I quoted you…
There are those who do not believe that the institution of marriage is under assault. There are those who do not believe that same-sex marriage is a knowing attempt to undermine the nature of marriage. There are those who do not believe that many homosexuals bear a particular animus for heterosexual marriage, and have designs beyond mere tolerance.
Then there are those of us who live in the real world.
A particular animus for heterosexual marriage… So…follow the thinking here: Homosexuals are depraved. So depraved they cannot possibly enter into the kinds of loving and devoted intimate relationships that heterosexuals do. To even consider putting their dirty, brief, barren sexual assignations on the same plain as heterosexual love amounts to a despicable attack on the very human capacity to love and cherish, body and soul, ’till death do you part. Heterosexual love is spiritual. Homosexuality is just empty lustful rutting, utterly devoid of any deep spiritual meaning for the people involved.
But here’s the problem with all this: if homosexuals are incapable of feeling that kind of tender, cherishing human love, then why are they so damn insistent about having the right to marry? What is all this crap about securing their relationships, providing for one another, hospital visitation and all that? Why would homosexuals even care about all that? Why aren’t they all just laughing it off that they can’t get married? Oh…look at all those silly heterosexuals, going on about that love thing again…how boring and pointless… Why do they fight for their sterile relationships so fiercely? What could their cheap tricks, their empty, barren assignations, possibly mean to them?
It must be envy. It must be envy turned to hate. Homosexuals must be so utterly depraved that they want to drag everyone else down into their gutter too. Because they can’t bear to witness the sight of that higher spiritual elevation, that deepest possible human relationship that they can never enter into themselves.
Next time someone hears this little gutter crawling maggot use the phrase "Love the sinner, hate the sin", or something like it, please laugh in his face. If any side in this fight is incapable of experiencing the emotion of love, it’s the one that keeps insisting that love is something you feel for a gender, not a person. No Ben…lust is what you feel for a gender. It’s how we’re wired as sexual beings. And yes…most people mate to the opposite sex. But some of us mate to the same sex. Love is what transcends all that, and takes it to that higher plain that you know absolutely nothing whatsoever about, because you can’t see the person, for the gender.
Advocates of same-sex marriage argue that gender is literally meaningless.
That’s simply ignorant. What the right asserts is that gender is everything. What anyone with half a brain knows is that there is more to a person then their gender. But this kind of thinking past surface appearances has always been hard for right wingers to get their minds wrapped around. Consider the difficulty they’ve always had comprehending that there is more to a person then the color of their skin. Get one of these drooling morons started on The Bell Curve sometime. Go ahead. It’ll be fun.
It’s probably somewhat easier for a gay person to see the confusion here then a straight person. Because heterosexuals mate to the opposite sex, it’s all too easy for them to mistake the intimate and spiritual complementary nature of two lovers for their gender. But the complement isn’t the gender, it’s the person. Otherwise, any two random opposite sex pairs must be equally capable of experiencing that same spiritual intimacy and clearly that just simply isn’t true. Some people are not only incompatible, but explosively so. And most of us know all this from our day to day experience in that real world right wingers can’t bear to look at because their cheapshit conceits wouldn’t survive it. Some people just plain don’t get along. And some people…just can’t live without each other.
If homosexual sex wasn’t rewarding and satisfying to homosexuals then we wouldn’t do that. So much so goddamned obvious…right? Yes you babbling idiot, the parts fit. And I’m here to tell you they work very well in that configuration thank you. The first time I put my hands on a guy I desired, felt the muscle and bone under his skin, something deep down inside of me Just Lit Up. I had no idea what the word ‘passion’ meant before that. I sure as hell knew what it meant afterward. If homosexual sex wasn’t rewarding and satisfying to homosexuals then we wouldn’t do that.
But it takes more then sex to make a marriage. It takes more then a sexually compatible gender. Any couple, gay or straight, whose only common ground between them is sex, isn’t likely to last long. Sex can seal an intimate soul-to-soul bond between two people. It can join a couple together where there is love, and lift them both to that higher spiritual plain. But it cannot put love someplace where it isn’t. You cannot make sex the basis of a marriage, it simply won’t work. What makes it work, is the way two people complement each other deep down inside. It is the people, not their gender, that make a marriage.
It doesn’t take a radical individualist to see how this works, just someone with even a meager regard for the essential beauty and dignity of the human race. We are not ants in an anthill, or bees in a beehive, each of us predestined to live out the measure of our lives according to our biological caste. We are human beings, each of us endowed with our own unique personality and consciousness. That diversity among individuals is what has made us so successful as a species. But it also means that we have somewhat complicated love lives. It’s easy to jump in the sack for a one night stand with a willing date…that’s just an instinct that’s older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates. It’s much, Much harder to find a soulmate and make a life together with them. If gender was all there was to it, that wouldn’t be true. The country music singers would have to find something else besides broken hearts and lonely nights to sing about.
But human cultures for generations and even today some cultures still, have tried to behave as if it Were true. Arranged marriages. Strict rules on marrying outside your faith, or your class, or your race. As if the human heart knows these things more then it knows the beloved person within. If anything destroyed marriage the way the Ben Shapiros of the world knew it, it was the Enlightenment, and Democracy. But then religious fanatics and secular totalitarians have long despise both of these human events.
The ironies here are monumental. You have a political movement that ostentatiously stands for individual freedom against big government and the so-called nanny state, that categorically rejects the fact that the most spiritual and intimate of all human relationships is between two individual people, and not a couple of faceless gender stereotypes. You have them arguing in all seriousness that this most intimate and spiritual of human relationships only exists to benefit society, rather then the two people whose lives are at the center of it. You have a political movement that stands squarely against Darwin, and puts on a really swell show of moral outrage at the very idea that human beings are part of the animal kingdom too, arguing that a biological fact we share with nearly every other vertebrate species on this good earth counts for more then the unique humanity of the individuals who make up a couple. And, most amazingly of all, here is a political movement that avails itself of every excuse it can grab to bellyache about the sexualization of America, telling us that it’s the sex a couple has that makes a marriage, not the love they feel for, and give to, each other. How much more of this do people have to see before they finally get it, that the religious right and their American conservative enablers are to marriage, as brothels are to chastity?
They don’t give a good goddamn about marriage. They care about power. They care a Lot about power. Here’s their spirituality: They want to tell us how to worship, what churches we can go to, and when and what God to believe in and how to pray to it. They want to tell us who we can marry, and why, and when we can have sex with them, and when we can’t and why. They want us to understand that how much we may love someone it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether or not we get their permission. Their permission to worship. Their permission of have sex. Their permission to love. And above all else they want us to understand that our fulfillment in life isn’t to be found in the arms of the one we love, but in how well we serve them.
Think I’m being overwrought here? Two Words: Radical. Individualism.
That’s not just how Ben is putting it these days, that’s a catch phrase now all throughout the kook pews. Radical Individualism. And a radical individualist is someone who holds…
…these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
It is not merely the human rights of gay people that are at stake here. It is not merely the intimate lives of gay people that are on the chopping block if these people get their final way.
Take one last look again, at how completely certain in his own mind Ben is, that same sex couples are incapable of loving as completely, as wholeheartedly, as opposite sex couples are. There is the unmovable prejudice. But you have to understand, it’s not just about homosexuals. We are not human beings in their regard. But most people who walk this earth aren’t either. Ben and his tribe are the True Humans. The rest of us are the mud people. Only True Humans feel. Only True Humans have needs. The rest of us have our place. That is what they believe. That is the world they inhabit. That is why appeals to basic human decency do not reach them.
Via The Daily Gotham… Are you a republican candidate facing a tight race? Well then play the gay bogyman card for a few quick last minute votes…
Note in particular, this comment from a poster in Wisconsin…
Be aware that above brochure is the exact same template used against several Democrats in campaigns around the country over the last several election cycles, including here in Wisconsin. I believe the "source" for the brochure template ("just add your name and you opponent’s one the respective dotted lines and print") is Donald Widemon’s AFA.
They probably have a print shop dedicated to turning out those, and other anti-gay pamphlets. When I refer to the anti-gay religious right as a hate machine I am not being melodramatic. I’m serious. It’s a big business with them, and they treat it exactly like a business would, complete with dedicated subsidiary operations that exist only to support the parent’s business operations. They have "think tanks" and publishing houses and consumer research operations that do nothing but work on demonizing gay people in order to bring money into their bank accounts, and votes to their chosen political candidates. And its all funded by the same handful of right wing billionaires. I often wonder if the Holocaust came to Germany and Europe via similar means.
MFI and VoteOnMarriage.org – the ballot question committee seeking to advance the Massachusetts marriage amendment – has endeavored to advance a campaign that refrains from name calling and does not denigrate individuals. However, as many political pundits predict, the same sex marriage debate, much like the abortion debate, will be with us for decades and MFI sees a need and an opportunity to work with leaders on all sides to promote justice in the way we discuss our differences.
"The tone and rhetoric around this public policy issue has escalated to a frenzied level, too often with shouting that does nothing promote understanding. Denouncing individuals as bigots does not bring people with honest differences together. We would like to work with our opponents to raise the quality of the dialogue," said Kris Mineau, president, Massachusetts Family Institute and spokesman, VoteOnMarriage.org
…Even as this initiative beings to take shape, MFI and VoteOnMarriage.org will continue to urge supporters of the marriage amendment to be respectful of human differences and always maintain a dialogue that affirms the dignity of every person.
You know how this works…right? We stop calling them bigots, and they get to keep calling us AIDS spreading child molesting family destroying abominations in the eyes of God.
Honest differences? There is nothing honest about these people. Nothing. And especially nothing honest about their calls for mutual respect and civility. Every time you hear something like this coming out of an anti-gay hate machine, you know they’re talking to the heterosexual majority, not the gay people they’re busy bashing. They didn’t place that press release in the local gay papers. This call for mutual respect wasn’t addressed to the gay people they’re trying to take the right to marry away from. This is window dressing for the big vote in a couple years. They need to convince just enough voters that voting to take away their neighbor’s right to marry doesn’t mean they’re jumping in bed with bigots. That’s what this is about. Nothing else.
Picture a bunch of white racists pleading with black Americans for mutual respect while arguing for segregated schools and neighborhoods. Picture a bunch of antisemites insisting they want a dialog about the Nuremberg laws that affirms the dignity of every person. It’s to laugh.
Via The Christian Science Monitor…this from Peter Akinola, who it’s a safe bet fancies himself the Archbishop of the new church he’s busy carving out of the Anglican one. It’s really entertaining when they don’t know enough to keep their goddamned mouths shut…
Best known for his vocal opposition to homosexuality, Akinola has found support among US Anglicans, or Episcopalians, who opposed the 2003 consecration of a gay bishop and the church’s move to allow dioceses to bless same-sex unions.
Last month, two of America’s oldest Episcopalian churches – both in Virginia – voted to break with the US branch of Anglicanism over the issue and concerns about church leaders’ adherence to biblical authority. These churches, and several other smaller churches, joined the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, which is connected to Akinola.
"Homosexuality seeks to destroy marriage as we know it, unity as we know it, family life as we know it, so how can we endorse that?" asks Akinola. "That is completely outside what God planned for humanity. When God created man, he saw man was alone and added a female mate for him. Why didn’t he pick one of the baboons, one of the lions to make his partner? He could have done so. He didn’t,"
[Emphasis mine] Say…weren’t they saying the same thing about mixed race marriages not all that long ago in Virginia…?
Via Steve Gilliard…via Firedoglake… How do you sell advertising space on a radio station that openly calls for liberals to be killed? Why…you sell it to them as Disney programming, of course…
Evenin’, fellow firedogs! Tonight I’m going to attempt to get us all up to speed about a situation that I suspect we’re going to be hearing a lot about in the near future. This story was brought to my attention by ¡El Gato Negro!.
Where to begin? First we’ll go to A. J. Kandy, who blogs at King Marketing:
ABC/Disney operates a US-wide network of radio stations and affiliates. One of these affiliates, San Francisco’s KSFO, is a die-hard right-wing talk shop whose rabidly eliminationist hosts have publicly endorsed (if not outright revelled in) torture and engaged in hate speech of all stripes. However, the station is sold to its advertisers as a “Disney” station, with all the connotations of family-friendliness that entails. [Bruce here – the emphasis is mine…]
Self-described “fifth-tier blogger” Spocko decided to “out” KSFO to its national advertisers with a polite letter-writing campaign, and by exposing their hate speech on his blog with short audio clips and transcripts (which falls under the Fair Use statutes.)
This, of course, is what we call citizen action, and most of us know the drill by now. We write to advertisers and once in a blue moon, they write us back, pat us on the head and tell us that they’ll take our suggestion under advisement, then go on their merry way without changing a thing. This was not the case, however, with Spocko. From a guest post at BlogIntegrity, Spocko himself can tell us what happened next:
In mid-December I got confirmation that a major national advertiser, VISA, pulled their ads from the Melanie Morgan and Lee Rogers show, based on listening to audio clips I provided them. I also think that FedEx, AT&T and Kaiser are considering pulling their ads. Visa isn’t the first advertiser who has left KSFO, multiple advertisers have left the station, especially from the Brian Sussman show. In July of this year when KSFO lost MasterCard as an advertiser someone from KSFO “outed” me on a counter-blog (which I won’t link to). This same person has also threatened me with local and federal criminal action for using the audio (which I clearly used under the fair use portion of copyright law). And because they have suggested violence toward me (in addition to talking about suing me "for everything I have”) I have chosen to remain anonymous.
As Thers has said,
Hooray, for Thers!! Oh, uh, ahem. Sorry. You were saying, Spocko?
95 percent of blog fights don’t mean anything, but I think this one does since KSFO is using the full weight and force of an ABC/Disney lawyer and copyright law against a private citizen blogger. I dared to use the audio content in question for nonprofit educational purposes (I don’t even have ads on my blog!), and thus under the protection of the Fair Use Doctrine set forth in Section 107 of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C.§107.
IN THE LATEST SKIRMISH BETWEEN big media and a blogger, The Walt Disney Company has succeeded in shutting down the Web site "Spocko’s Brain."
On the site, blogger and media critic "Spocko" took issue with on-air comments made by right-wing talk show hosts at Bay Area ABC affiliate radio station KSFO. He posted audio files of hosts’ comments on his Web site, and also began a letter-writing campaign that, he says, resulted in advertisers fleeing the station.
But Tuesday, Spocko’s Internet service provider, 1&1 Internet, pulled the plug on the blog–a move prompted by a Dec. 22 cease-and-desist letter from ABC Radio claiming that material on Spocko’s Brain violated Disney’s copyright.
And that’s where things stand right now. Many of us are now familiar with ABC/Disney’s strong-arm fascism-in-mouse-ears tactics from the "Path to 9/11" debacle earlier this year. Here’s what you can do to help our fellow blogger, Spocko:
1. The KSFO hate clips are all up at Online BlogIntegrity. Collect ’em all. Share with your friends. Spread them around. It’s a veritable cornucopia of Right Wing Hate Speech. (Listen at your own risk.)
2. Go here and scroll down to "What Can You Do?" and follow the instructions. Spocko has provided us with a step-by-step plan to alert the blogging world, the MSM (if they’ll listen), and KSFO’s advertisers to the current situation.
I urge you all to get involved. This is an example of how we can effectively fight the tide of hateful bile that pollutes our airwaves and rots the brains of millions of overly credulous talk-radio listeners. We, of course, support the wingnuts’ right to say whatever they want to say, but they must be prepared to face the real-world consequences of stoking the fires of ethnic, political, and religious hatred. If that means losing the support of their advertisers and cutting into their six-figure salaries, well, then, hurrah! We win.
Thank you and good night.
If those clips get taken down email me and I’ll pass them along to you. Here’s some excerpts from the menu at Online Blogintegrity…
Somebody at Disney needs to get their head screwed on straight. This isn’t anything Disney should want its brand associated with. Yet they’re apparently marketing that station to advertisers as a Disney station. It’s like putting the Disney logo on a burning cross at a Klan rally. Why are they doing this? Is someone in marketing there just completely brain dead or what?
I can appreciate wanting to attract an audience. But some audiences you should probably just walk away from, regardless of whether or not it adversely impacts the shareholder bottom line. The kind that think ridiculing a congressman’s racial make-up is funny, for example. If Disney owns this station, then they either need to make it reflect their corporate values, or they need to sell it.
In the meantime, the least the rest of us can do is inform the advertisers of what it is they’re buying into, when they buy into the Disney brand. Read this from the blogger Disney is going after, for more info on how. If that post gets taken down email me and I’ll send you a copy of it.
Simply put, I can get news and information of concern to the gay community that I could not before. It isn’t merely that a lot of hate crime news never makes it beyond the local media. It isn’t merely that the mainstream news media often chooses not to even report hate crimes against us. It’s that more often then not you catch them actively downplaying it. In effect, hiding it from view.
Chicago police are investigating the shooting of six men at a party in a house on Chicago’s South Side in what may have been a homophobic hate crime.
Police say two masked men burst into an apartment in the house early Sunday morning, spraying semi-automatic gunfire throughout the living room hitting six men.
Residents in the area say the apartment was rented by two gay men and was the scene of frequent loud parties. One neighbor told the Chicago Sun-Times that the building was known as the "Gay House".
"We always be seeing them, and they always be looking at people," Kevin Carter, 18, told the paper.
"They give you that gay look, like you’re a female or something. That ain’t cute. People be ready to fight. … I knew something was going to happen to that house."
…
A man who said his brother lives in the apartment told the paper that his brother had complained for several months about being harassed by people in the neighborhood for being gay.
That’s from the story at 365Gay.Com. The gunmen didn’t use homophobic slurs, apparently didn’t say anything at all, just opened fire. They wore masks, and there have been as I write this, no arrests.
But 365Gay.Com does not field their own reporters. They mostly get their stories off the wire and serve as a news aggregate. That story was based on the reporting from the Chicago Sun-Times. So I went around looking for the story via Google News to see if there were any other takes on it. This is typical of what I found:
Six people were wounded, two of them critically, when masked gunmen opened fire early Sunday on a South Side party, authorities said.
About 100 people were at the party in the first-floor apartment of a two-story building in the 7900 block of South Woodlawn Avenue in the Grand Crossing neighborhood about 5:30 a.m. when two men–armed with semiautomatic handguns–kicked down the front door and starting shooting, said Chicago police spokeswoman Monique Bond.
"Because the gunmen who kicked in the door and opened fire were masked, we don’t have a good description," she said.
The men fled into a nearby gangway, Bond said. Detectives were still questioning witnesses and neighbors.
The victims were all men between the ages of 19 and 35, she said. None lived there.
…
Neighbors said residents of the apartment often held loud parties that lasted into the morning and that police had been called there several times recently. Bond confirmed that officers had been called to the apartment several times since October, including some calls for complaints of aggravated battery.
Outside the apartment Sunday, blood still stained the front steps, porch and door. .
"All I want is for my friends to be OK and healthy," said a man in his 20s who spoke from a window but declined to give his name.
A neighbor who lives in the unit above the apartment, who also declined to give her name because the gunmen were still at large, said the party was going full force when she fell asleep about 2:30 a.m. Then, about 5:30 a.m., she heard shots from directly below her and tumbled out of bed.
…
She said the men who live there held raucous parties almost every weekend and many times on other nights of the week. Officers also had gone there several times responding to shouting and physical confrontations, she said.
"It’s not just on Friday or Saturday; the police have been here Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, when normal people have to work," the woman said.
Not a word, not a breath, about the fact that the victims were gay, and that the renters had been complaining about harassment from the neighbors. The only neighbor quoted complained about the parties and the noise they made (the landlord, also quoted in that article, said he’d only had one complaint and that was when they held a party after they moved in and the upstairs neighbor complained). This was from the Chicago Tribune. Yet another reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times had no trouble getting neighbors of the men to state that they thought the attack was motivated by the men’s sexual orientation. But that reporter, Mark Konkol, was apparently the only one at the scene who thought it was noteworthy.
And it was the Tribune’s take on the matter, that it was merely an attack on a loud party (and whoever heard of loud parties happening on New Year’s Eve), that made the wires. The story came up on google news and I went through one after the other, from papers in California to the Jerusalem Post, and none of them breathed a word to me that the victims were gay men, that they’d previously complained of harassment by their neighbors, and that there was the slightest bit of hostility toward them in the neighborhood where they lived. You saw none of that in the media reporting.
I constructed a google search string using that quote from the kid who said that the men were giving people "that gay look, like you’re a female or something". The only stories that popped up were from the online gay news organizations, and that one Chicago Sun-Times article. That was it.
Now…maybe this shooting wasn’t motivated by anti-gay hate. But there is at least a reasonable suspicion that it was. In the days before the Internet, all I’d have seen of this, perhaps, would have been the sanitized version set out by the Tribune, and accepted by most of the rest of the heterosexual news editors around the country, and in my local neck of the woods, who all decided that the gay angle on it wasn’t worth printing. Nobody outside of Chicago would ever have any inkling that there might be a hate crime here. And so the gay community wouldn’t have had any reason to pay attention to it, to how well it was being investigated, to question what was going on in that neighborhood, and whether hate had once again turned into bloodshed.
I can well remember a time when violence toward homosexuals just didn’t matter to the police, let alone the press. And we are not out of those woods as much as some would like to believe. Between covering that aspect of it up because you believe they had it coming, and not reporting on it because you just don’t give a good goddamn about the faggots anyway and can’t imagine why any normal person would, anti-gay violence would still be swept under the rug, even today. And even the most committed gay rights activists won’t make their voices heard, if they don’t even know what is happening. Silence equals death. What has made a difference now is the Internet. We are not many small and isolated ghettos anymore. The heterosexual majority can avert their eyes all they want, but now we can see what is happening to us as a people in this country. We can’t make the rest of the world pay attention too, if we ourselves don’t even know what is going on. That is why for so many decades, we believed it when they told us we had it coming. We endured the violence in silence and shame. Those days are over.
Now that the new spiritual leader of the schisming Episcopalians is getting a little mainstream news media attention, the conservatives are having…concerns…
Nigeria’s conservative Anglican archbishop has contacted for the first time the nine Episcopal churches in the state of Virginia whose members voted this month to leave and align with him.
The churchs’ new leader, Archbishop Peter Akinola, addressed in a letter some concerns about his support for a proposed law in Nigeria that would make same-sex union ceremonies illegal. The law also would ban public affection between same-sex couples and private meetings of gay advocacy groups.
Parse this…go ahead…
"We recognize that there are genuine concerns about individual human rights" in the law "that must be addressed both in the framing … and its implementation," wrote Akinola, who has called the growing acceptance of gay relationships a "satanic attack" on the church.
When news reports about dead gay people in ditches start coming out of Abuja like they are coming out of Baghdad, Akinola will recognize the genuine concerns about that too.
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