A House committee rejected Rep. Jennifer Seelig’s HB160, which would have offered two, unmarried cohabiting adults — including same-sex couples — rights of inheritance and medical decision making for one another.
Nope. We can’t even allow same-sex couples to have inheritance rights, or make medical decisions if one is incapacitated. Let alone protect gays from job discrimination, let alone allow them to adopt. No common ground there. Same sex couples need to consider this carefully when planning trips that might take either or both of them into or through Utah. Getting sick or injured could be just the beginning of your nightmare in Mormonland.
I’m going to have a heart attack from this surprise.
Strong comments against the gay community were made recently by Utah senator Chris Buttars during work on the documentary "8: The Mormon Proposition" just a year since he called a black baby a "dark, ugly thing" on the Utah State Senate floor.
He compared gays to radical Muslims and suggested they may be America’s greatest threat, likening gay rights to "the beginning of the end." Although the footage has only been seen by Salt Lake City’s ABC affiliate, some audio has been released.
Buttars describes gays as having "anything goes" morals, and "the meanest buggers" he’d ever seen; some comments were too graphic to include. He also takes credit for "killing" every bill related to gay rights in the Utah State Senate since 2001.
"What is the morals of a gay person? You can’t answer that because anything goes."
"They’re probably the greatest threat to America going down I know of."
Common ground. You folks out there just keep right on searching for that common ground. And when some gay basher splits your head open because he’s been told that gays, with their anything goes morality, are the greatest threat to America, you’ll have found it. Common ground.
Jim Burroway makes a good catch I’d missed when looking at the new anti-gay ad campaign created by Campaign Secrets…the one that shows an unseen gay sniper putting a family and more specifically their little children in the crosshairs. This one is good…it really says it all…
By the way, we also learn that public schools no longer celebrate Father’s Day. Wait a minute. That couldn’t be because it’s celebrated on the third Sunday in June while school’s out, could it? Naah, it’s a much better story when it’s all the gays’ fault.
Dig it. Never mind that Father’s Day happens after the school year ends…just remember that the homosexuals have forced schools to stop celebrating Father’s Day.
Now…this kind of crap may actually fool a lot of people, not all of whom necessarily want someone to feed them pre-fabricated lies about gays they can pass around without taking responsibility for it. Some people will actually hear this and think…Wow…the gays took Father’s Day out of the schools… But you know goddamned well the people who made that ad knew that it was horseshit, and almost certainly so did the folks who bought it. And it’s a safe bet that its target audience doesn’t care if it’s truthful or not.
There’s your moral crusade right there. There’s your righteousness.
The Fine Art Of Inflaming Violent Passions Toward Homosexuals
Via Pam’s House Blend…and as of now racing across the net like a fire. West Virginia Christianists are gearing up for a push to enact an anti same-sex marriage amendment in their state. As always, it isn’t enough to simply make a case for heterosexual supremacy. They have to demonize gay people too. Their latest ad starts out with the image of a gay sniper putting a heterosexual family, and more specifically their little children, in the cross hairs. They are being targeted, to be gunned down, by some the homosexuals. Here’s a screen shot:
Bear in mind that this ad is running in a state that’s maybe only a tad less armed to the teeth then Texas. And the message of this particular sequence is crystal clear: The homosexuals are going to kill your family, starting with your children. Of course they’ll insist its only a metaphor. They don’t mean that homosexuals are Literally going to kill your family. Naturally all the West Virginians who see this ad will understand that.
This is what gets gay people killed in this country every year. And make no mistake, the people creating and the people running these ads are well aware of that fact. But we are not so much human beings as cockroaches to them. They want us gone. They want us eliminated. If the state won’t do what Leviticus commands, then maybe Bubba will…
The video is below. The sniper shot comes in at about .53 seconds. Then it’s another four minutes plus warning everyone about the threat the homosexuals pose to families and children. In 1977 Jerry Falwell stood beside Anita Bryant, who was then fighting to have Dade County’s anti-discrimination ordinance repealed by popular vote, and told a room full of reporters that “A homosexual will kill you as soon as look at you.” Now they are, almost literally, telling people in West Virginia that we do in fact intend to kill them, and kill their children. Gay people are going to die because of this ad.
Pam over at the Blend notes this same group who made the ad…Campaign Secrets…also created an attack ad against the AARP back in 2005. AARP’s crime back then was opposing Bush’s plan to let the stock market play with your social security pension money. To discredit AARP, Campaign Secrets cooked up this little gem:
Dig it. The AARP is wrong about social security, because it hates our men in uniform and loves faggots. That, literally, was the message.
Some time ago the Bay Shore Gay and Lesbian Center for Youths was vandalized. Its front door was broken and its van had its tires slashed, its windows busted out, and its sideview mirrors mangled.
Today I read that arrests in the case have been made and…surprise, surprise, the police have in their impartial wisdom determined that the vandals had not a prejudiced bone in their bodies after all…
Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy called the vandalism at a Bay Shore gay and lesbian center for youths an "attack against the gay community."
Gov. David A. Paterson dispatched the state’s commissioner of human rights to visit the site and deliver a message calling for acceptance.
And the Suffolk County Police Hate Crimes Unit investigated last week’s incident as a hate crime.
It turns out the vandalism at the Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth Center was not a hate crime after all, police said Tuesday.
What a relief to know that! Because…er…because… Well because the police just say so…
Police declined to say what led them to determine the crime was not bias-related.
I see. Three men and a woman, two of them 21 years old, one 20 and one 19, decided to slash a van’s tires completely at random. And then they broke out all its windows. And then they mangled the sideview mirrors. And then…again completely at random, they decided to break out a door that only happened to belong to the same group that owned the van. Just…on a lark… It had nothing to do with the fact that the van had the Long Island LGBT Youth center logo on it. And that door…it was just a coincidence that it also happened to be the door to the Long Island LGBT Youth center. There was no anti-gay animus involved here. Take our word for it. Because we insist you take our word for it.
Police arrested three men and a woman, all from Bay Shore, Monday in connection with the vandalism and charged each of them with second-degree criminal mischief. None of the four was charged with a hate crime.
Mischief…
Mischief…
But seriously…what more could attacking homosexuals amount to anyway, other then mischief? You say "hate crime" like its a bad thing…
[Update…] Reports are coming out now that two of the suspects were former clients of the center, who had been asked to leave for an as yet unspecified disruptive behavior…more then three years ago.
Via Pam’s House Blend… The next time you hear someone in the Catholic Church complaining that proposition 8 supporters are being targeted, laugh in their face…
Father Geoffrey Farrow, the Fresno priest who came out against Prop 8 during Mass and was suspended for following his conscience by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles is still being hounded by the church.
Since he was out of a job, you’d think the church would be satisfied that Farrow would seek employment elsewhere and fade from its PR radar. Think again. Father Geoff applied for a position with the Los Angeles branch of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE) and look at the thuggery of the Church in action. Father Tony at The Bilerico Project and at his pad:
CLUE derives a significant part of its funding from the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles.
Today I spoke with a member of CLUE’s board of directors, Rev. James Conn, a Methodist minister and Director of New Ministries for the California-Pacific Conference of the United Methodist Church. Reverend Conn had been directly involved in the recruitment and interview process involving Father Geoff.
I asked him if CLUE had denied Father Geoff a second interview specifically because the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles threatened to cut off all its significant funding for CLUE should Father Geoff ever be offered the position in question.
As incredible as it may seem, Reverend Conn confirmed the truth of this and expressed his heartfelt disappointment over the fact that CLUE had to choose between continuing the interview process with an extremely promising and qualified candidate or risk losing the financial support of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles that is critical to CLUE’s work.
…I am writing this because I’ve learned over the years that the Roman Catholic Church gets away with this kind of despicable and inhumane treatment of men who choose to follow their conscience only when its bad deeds are not held up to a strong light. Father Geoff does not wish CLUE to lose its funding and therefore has remained silent about this, but his friends have brought this situation to my attention, and I want Catholics in California and beyond to understand clearly the level of unchristian behavior and deliberate malice of which their bishops and cardinals are capable.
More from the Bilerico Project blog…
It is important to note that at the age of 51, after having devoted 23 years of his life to the Roman Catholic Church plus an earlier 7 years in the seminary, Father Geoff has had his medical benefits discontinued and is without income and assistance from his bishop. While it is disgusting that his bishop has turned his back on Father Geoff, it is infuriating to think that his bishop would conspire with the Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles to block gainful and appropriate employment.
I am well familiar with the jargon of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. They will say that they feel compassion for Father Geoff and that they pray for him, but their actions speak too strongly and demonstrate deliberate malice. They do not wish him well. And, God forbid that they should have ever proactively attempted some sort of out-placement effort on his behalf. Some bishops privately do that on behalf of priests who leave, but not the hard-hearted bishop who cut off Father Geoffrey Farrow nor the malicious Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles.
I am writing this because I’ve learned over the years that the Roman Catholic Church gets away with this kind of despicable and inhumane treatment of men who choose to follow their conscience only when its bad deeds are not held up to a strong light. Father Geoff does not wish CLUE to lose its funding and therefore has remained silent about this, but his friends have brought this situation to my attention, and I want Catholics in California and beyond to understand clearly the level of unchristian behavior and deliberate malice of which their bishops and cardinals are capable.
I hope you will consider going to CLUE’s website and leaving them a message about your feelings (please keep in mind that CLUE wanted to continue its interview with Father Geoff so don’t paint them as the "bad guy". If you want to leave a message for the real "bad guy", you may contact the office of Cardinal Roger Mahony.
Archdiocese of Los Angeles
3424 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90010-2202
213 637 7000
info@la-archdiocese.org
Ask them why they hate Father Geoff. When they assure you that they do not hate him, ask them to prove it and soon. Right now, more than their insincere prayers, he needs a job.
I hope nobody is surprised. When you hear the Proposition 8 supporters talk of civility and mutual respect, laugh in their face.
There Can Be No Morality Without Religion…(continued)
Via Sullivan… Pope Ratzinger welcomes into his fold, a bishop who claims the Holocaust never happened…
Pope lifts excommunications of 4 bishops
Pope Benedict XVI has lifted the excommunications of four bishops consecrated without papal consent 20 years ago by the late French ultraconservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the Vatican announced Saturday.
One of the four bishops was shown this week in an interview saying that the Nazi gas chambers probably didn’t exist. The report prompted Rome’s chief rabbi to ask the Vatican to halt plans to rehabilitate him.
Lefebvre rebelled against the Vatican’s modernizing reforms of the 1960s, including replacing Latin with local languages at Mass.
Benedict has already reached out to the rebels in the hopes of bringing them back into the Church by making it the old Mass more readily available.
"The Holy Father in this decision was inspired by the wish that full reconciliation and full communion can be achieved soon," the Vatican said.
Richard Williamson said in a Swedish state TV interview that historical evidence "is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed." The Vatican had no comment on the report.
Traditionalist bishop: ‘There were no gas chambers’
Bishop Richard Williamson is a hardline ultra-conservative bishop of the Society of St Pius X. He is excommunicated from the RC church, along with his three brother SSPX bishops but as we report, and also according to reports coming out of Rome, the excommunications could be lifted soon by the Pope. It could even be lifted by Sunday, according to the usually reliable Rorate Caeli. And that while he faces possible prosecution for Holocaust denial in Germany after an interview with a reporter from Swedish TV in which he claimed that six million Jews did not die in the Holocaust, merely a few thousand, and that the gas chambers did not exist. CathCon has the translation of the Der Spiegel report and more on the likely lifting of those excommunications. Could the clock really be turned back this far on Nostra Aetate and the teachings of Vatican II?
In an earlier story in the Catholic Herald, Bishop Williamson was exposed as endorsing the forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion…
…
If he brings them back in with Williamson on board, then truly it will be a disaster. Vatican II might as well never have happened and it won’t just be the Jewish community that would be justifiably disgusted. For many thousands of lay Catholics the world over, this could be the final proof that what the atheist bus campaign suggested was true: ‘There probably is no God.’ At least not the God that Williamson and his like believe in. Who could blame them, then, if they put traditionalist Catholic guilt aside, and get on and enjoy their lives.
I hope people don’t get it into their heads that this is merely Ratzinger’s German heritage coming to the fore because this sort of thing horrifies a lot of Germans. It’s his fascist soul that’s peeking out now. They say men don’t change, they just reveal themselves. Well…this is Ratzinger.
…and he’s eminently representative of that vein of fascism in the Catholic church that was not only on Hitler’s side once upon a time, and the Spanish dictator Franco, but actively helped many of his henchmen escape justice after the war. The reason strongly Catholic Spain can have same-sex marriage regardless of what the church thinks of it is because so many Spaniards remember how cozy the Catholic church was with Franco while Spain suffered under his thumb, and they care more about the church keeping its fingers the hell out of their government then what the Pope thinks about anything.
American protestants shouldn’t be feeling too smug about all this either because while there are folks in the Henry Ford heartland who think the Catholic church is the whore of Babylon, they also think Protocols is as literally true as the King James bible. The only reason the kook pews give a good goddamn about Israel is their nutty end times theology. They could care less about the fate of the Jews…they need Israel to exist so the world can end. Then American right wing Jesus will come back to earth and cast them all into the lake of fire along with the other non-believers. And…presumably Catholics. And Mormons for sure. And Unitarians. And Quakers. And the heathens in the church across the street. Especially them.
Hell’s a big place all right. As big as the human capacity to hate each other. As big as our ability to excuse ourselves for killing each other. And heaven is so very small. So very, very small. Just big enough for me…but probably not big enough for you too. And remember…there can be no morality without religion…
43 years ago today, this is what the nation was being told about its gay citizens, by one of the big national news magazines…
It used to be "the abominable crime not to be mentioned." Today it is not only mentioned; it is freely discussed and widely analyzed. Yet the general attitude toward homosexuality is, if anything, more uncertain than before. Beset by inner conflicts, the homosexual is unsure of his position in society, ambivalent about his attitudes and identity—but he gains a certain amount of security through the fact that society is equally ambivalent about him.
A vast majority of people retain a deep loathing toward him, but there is a growing mixture of tolerance, empathy or apathy. Society is torn between condemnation and compassion, fear and curiosity, between attempts to turn the problem into a joke and the knowledge that it is anything but funny, between the deviate’s plea to be treated just like everybody else and the knowledge that he simply is not like everybody else.
…In 1948, Sexologist Alfred Kinsey published figures that homosexuals found cheering. He estimated that 4% of American white males are exclusively homosexual and that about two in five had "at least some" homosexual experience after puberty. Given Kinsey’s naive sampling methods, the figures were almost certainly wrong. But chances are that growing permissiveness about homosexuality and a hedonistic attitude toward all sex have helped "convert" many people who might have repressed their inclinations in another time or place.
Homosexuals are present in every walk of life, on any social level, often anxiously camouflaged; the camouflage will sometimes even include a wife and children, and psychoanalysts are busy treating wives who have suddenly discovered a husband’s homosexuality. But increasingly, deviates are out in the open, particularly in fashion and the arts. Women and homosexual men work together designing, marketing, retailing, and wrapping it all up in the fashion magazines. The interior decorator and the stockbroker’s wife conspire over curtains. And the symbiosis is not limited to working hours. For many a woman with a busy or absent husband, the presentable homosexual is in demand as an escort —witty, pretty, catty, and no problem to keep at arm’s length. Rich dowagers often have a permanent traveling court of charming international types who exert influence over what pictures and houses their patronesses buy, what decorators they use, and where they spend which season.
…
There is no denying the considerable talent of a great many homosexuals, and ideally, talent alone is what should count. But the great artists so often cited as evidence of the homosexual’s creativity—the Leonardos and Michelangelos —are probably the exceptions of genius. For the most part, thinks Los Angeles Psychiatrist Edward Stainbrook, homosexuals are failed artists, and their special creative gift a myth. No less an authority than Somerset Maugham felt that the homosexual, "however subtly he sees life, cannot see it whole," and lacks "the deep seriousness over certain things that normal men take seriously … He has small power of invention, but a wonderful gift for delightful embroidery.
Homosexual ethics and esthetics are staging a vengeful, derisive counterattack on what deviates call the "straight" world. This is evident in "pop," which insists on reducing art to the trivial, and in the "camp" movement, which pretends that the ugly and banal are fun. It is evident among writers, who used to disguise homosexual stories in heterosexual dress but now delight in explicit descriptions of male intercourse and orgiastic nightmares. It is evident in the theater, with many a play dedicated to the degradation of women and the derision of normal sex. The most sophisticated theatrical joke is now built around a homosexual situation; shock comes not from sex but from perversion. Attacks on women or society in general are neither new in U.S. writing nor necessarily homosexual, but they do offer a special opportunity for a consciously or unconsciously homosexual outlook.
They represent a kind of inverted romance, since homosexual situations as such can never be made romantic for normal audiences.
…
Even in ordinary conversation, most homosexuals will sooner or later attack the "things that normal men take seriously." This does not mean that homosexuals do not and cannot talk seriously; but there is often a subtle sea change in the conversation: sex (unspoken) pervades the atmosphere. Among other matters, this raises the question of whether there is such a thing as a discernible homosexual type. Some authorities, notably Research Psychologist Evelyn Hooker of U.C.L.A., deny it—against what seems to be the opinion of most psychiatrists. The late Dr. Edmund Bergler found certain traits present in all homosexuals, including inner depression and guilt, irrational jealousy and a megalomaniac conviction that homosexual trends are universal. Though Bergler conceded that homosexuals are not responsible for their inner conflicts, he found that these conflicts "sap so much of their inner energy that the shell is a mixture of superciliousness, fake aggression and whimpering. Like all psychic masochists, they are subservient when confronted by a stronger person, merciless when in power, unscrupulous about trampling on a weaker person."
Another homosexual trait noted by Bergler and others is chronic dissatisfaction, a constant tendency to prowl or "cruise" in search of new partners. This is one reason why the "gay" bars flourishing all over the U.S. attract even the more respectable deviates.
…
The once widespread view that homosexuality is caused by heredity, or by some derangement of hormones, has been generally discarded. The consensus is that it is caused psychically, through a disabling fear of the opposite sex. The origins of this fear lie in the homosexual’s parents. The mother—either domineering and contemptuous of the father, or feeling rejected by him—makes her son a substitute for her husband, with a close-binding, overprotective relationship. Thus, she unconsciously demasculinizes him. If at the same time the father is weakly submissive to his wife or aloof and unconsciously competitive with his son, he reinforces the process. To attain normal sexual development, according to current psychoanalytic theory, a boy should be able to identify with his father’s masculine role.
Fear of the opposite sex is also believed to be the cause of Lesbianism, which is far less visible but, according to many experts, no less widespread than male homosexuality—and far more readily tolerated. Both forms are essentially a case of arrested development, a failure of learning, a refusal to accept the full responsibilities of life. This is nowhere more apparent than in the pathetic pseudo marriages in which many homosexuals act out conventional roles—wearing wedding rings, calling themselves "he" and "she."
Is homosexuality curable? Freud thought not. In the main, he felt that analysis could only bring the deviant patient relief from his neurotic conflicts by giving him "harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency, whether he remains a homosexual or gets changed." Many of Freud’s successors are more optimistic. Philadelphia’s Dr. Samuel Hadden reported last year that he had achieved twelve conversions out of 32 male homosexuals in group therapy. Paris Psychiatrist Sacha Nacht reports that about a third of his patients turn heterosexual, a third adjust to what they are, and a third get no help at all. But he feels that only about one in ten is moved to seek help in the first place.
That is the crux: most homosexuals apparently do not desire a cure…
Focus on the Family? The Mormon Times? No…Time Magazine, issue of January 21, 1966 – The Homosexual In America
I was 12 years old. By the end of the year I would turn 13, and enter my teen years in an America where the common view of gay people were that we were sick tortured twisted sexual deviants who ought to be locked up for the safety of the community. When I was 14 I would sit with my grade school peers in a sex ed class, taught by our gym teachers, who told us that homosexuals typically killed the people they had sex with, and preferred to kidnap and rape children and seduce young heterosexuals, rather then seek out other homosexuals for sexual trysts, precisely because we knew how dangerous we were. They taught us that homosexuals would become so excited during sex that we often mutilated the genitals of the people we were having sex with. They taught us that we were confused about which gender we were, and hated ourselves, and would take out that hate on other people by killing them horribly. Most unsolved murders we were told, were committed by homosexuals. That was the world I came to know myself in.
How I managed to come out of my teen years into adulthood not completely loathing myself as others of my generation did is a story I’m (very slowly I’m afraid…) telling in cartoon form in A Coming Out Story. I was so lucky…especially in that my first high school crush was so completely decent to me. Those of us who made it out of there in one piece emotionally and mentally, pretty much swore to make sure other gay kids didn’t have to go through what we did, and to fight for the honor and the dignity of our lives, and our loves, so that future generations wouldn’t have to know what it was like to have your teachers look you in the face and try to make you and all your friends believe that you were a sexual monster…a deviant…a pervert…
On SlashDot recently there was a post concerning Google’s announced support for repealing or overturning Proposition 8. Google placed its opposition to discriminating against same-sex couples in marriage in the context of being able to entice the best workers to its California workplace, but immediately the commenters on SlashDot began to bellyache at the hypocrisy of being concerned about recruiting good workers at the same time they’re laying people off. As if the two things are mutually exclusive. I guess most SlashDot visitors are very young and haven’t been through many recessions.
But reliably came the calls from ersatz libertarians to get government out of the business of marriage. Civil Unions they say, are a workable compromise. People are just getting hung up over a word they say. Never mind that making all civil marriages civil unions just isn’t going to happen politically. Our enemies don’t want us to have even civil unions. This isn’t a fight over a word or none of these anti same-sex marriage amendments would forbid civil unions too and nearly all of them do. That wasn’t accidental. The word people are getting hung up over in this fight isn’t ‘marriage’, it’s ‘homosexuals’.
From the Salt Lake Tribune comes this little article, ostensibly to show that Utahns (read: Mormons) aren’t so bigoted after all…
While Utahns aren’t ready to let gay and lesbian couples exchange wedding vows or enter civil unions, most are willing to give them broader legal rights to inherit property, visit a partner in the hospital and ward off employment discrimination…However, the poll shows overwhelming opposition (70 percent) to any changes to the Utah Constitution that would allow same-sex partners to enter civil unions…
Well isn’t that lovely. You want hypocrisy? It’s not in Google taking a stand for human decency, even as it has to lay off workers. It’s here, right here, in all those righteous people who think that respecting the love and devotion of same-sex couples in sickness makes it okay to rip their lives apart in health. If you believe that homosexuality is a sickness, a perversion, an abomination to God that will lead to the destruction of the family and western civilization, then what sense does it make to give same sex couple’s any rights? All that says, is they know goddamned well that same sex couples love each other every bit as much as opposite sex couples do. All this says, is that they don’t want to be thought of as the gutter crawling butchers of other people’s hopes and dreams that they are.
This is their way of saving face, nothing more, nothing less. It’s the equivocation of bigots trying to look at themselves in a mirror and deny the blood on their hands was something they did willingly, deliberately, knowingly. We don’t hate them…look…we’re willing to let them visit their sex partners in the hospital… How does that make sense when homosexuals are destroying the family and western civilization? It doesn’t. It’s an admission of guilt. It exposes the bedrock of animus toward gay people that motivates them more then simply denying gay people all legal status does. Ignorance sees only monsters when it looks at gay people. It takes shame to know that kicking them in the face isn’t something you want to be seen doing.
And even those moral runts only constitute a bare majority of the whole in Utah. After the critical roll the Mormon church played in passing Proposition 8 became known, Mormon church leaders averred they had no objection to granting same sex couples some small rights, and the democratic opposition in the state promptly took them at their word, proposing legislation to grant them just that. They call their work, without any apparent sense of irony, the "common ground" bills.
While Senate President Michael Waddoups, R-Taylorsville, doubts Utahns would change the state constitution to permit civil unions, he said he would entertain bills on more-expansive legal rights for gays.
"The fact that anybody wants [wider rights] isgrounds to pursue it and investigate it," said Waddoups, adding that he would ensure the Common Ground bills get a fair debate if they make it to committee or the Senate floor.
But opposition certainly will follow from Utahns such as poll respondent Maureen Johnson.
"I don’t believe they should have any rights at all," said the South Jordan resident. "The Lord says the man is made for the woman and the woman is made for the man."
Well thank you Senator Waddoups, R-Taylorsville for entertaining the idea that gay people ought to have rights. The compromise between right and wrong is indifference to either right or wrong. The compromise between living in freedom and living in a police state is I agree to put the handcuffs on myself and pretend I had a choice in the matter. The compromise between love and hate is to put the knife into your own heart and spare hate the trouble. The word that describes the "common ground" between free people and tyrants is Battleground, not Peace. Just ask the shades that walk at Shiloh.
Common ground is that we are all equal in the eyes of the law. Once upon a time that was the American compromise. We all had different faiths, came from different lands, were raised in different cultures. But as far as the law was concerned, we were all Americans. The religious and fascist right have waged a decades long scorched earth war to shred the American ideal of equality, so that they might rise above the rest of us and rule over all. Because they are the favored of God. Because to rule over the heathens is their God-given right. No…duty.
Take up the Godly Man’s burden…
Ye dare not stoop to less…
And now we, who believe in the American dream, are in a pitched fight to retake what was once our sacred common ground: liberty and justice for all. Equality is the common ground. What’s equal to marriage, is marriage.
There’s been some conversation over on SLOG today that the author of those threatening letters to gay bars in Seattle might actually be a gay man himself. I wasn’t convinced, until I saw this…
Remix in comments flagged an important clue about the author of the Ricin Letters. The line…
…is from a poem, "A Display of Mackerel", from a collection by poet Mark Doty. The poem appeared in Atlantis, a 1996 collection of poems that Doty wrote after the HIV-related death of his partner in 1994.
They don’t care they’re dead
and nearly frozen,
just as, presumably,
they didn’t care that they were living:
So whoever wrote the letter knows—and plagiarizes—his gay poets.
That’s…pretty telling. It’s not conclusive, but I’m not making any more assumptions about this guy until he’s caught. Let’s hope that happens before he actually kills someone…
From SLOG… Here is the letter one gay bar in Seattle received…
Read between the lines of every love the sinner hate the sin sermon you have ever heard, and you will see these words. There must be no homosexuals… The ex-gay movement gets back to basics…
A reader sends along this link, which he says is not a parody but is actually a serious statement by a guy named Matthew Stucky. He says that Santa Claus (which he spells Clause, for some reason) is satanic and is "corrupting people all over the world." Oh, and the reindeer are all gay. Seriously.
So I go take a look…
Santa Clause
1. He knows if a person has been naughty or nice. He is omniscient.
2. If a person has been nice then he will give them gifts.
3. If they have been naughty then they get a lump of coal.
4. Most people are good enough to receive gifts & few get a lump of coal.
5. Santa somehow has the ability to give gifts to the entire world in one time although that would be scientifically impossible. He is basically omnipresent and omniscient.
6. The word for Holy in Spanish is Santa. This gives the world the perception that a man can be a really good person & this makes Santa Clause a mock of God.
Okay…
Santa’s queer reindeer:
Take a look at the names of the 8 reindeer.
Blitzen, Comet, Cupid, Dancer, Dasher, Donder, Prancer and Vixen.
The person who originally came up with these names probably did not have this intent. They probably originally had some of the reindeer as male & some as female. However, the animated movie that was made in 1964 had a different idea. In the movie all 8 of these reindeer were male reindeer. Take a look at those names again. Male reindeer named Dancer, Prancer, Vixen & Cupid?!?!?!
Let’s start with Vixen in the dictionary:
1 : a shrewish ill-tempered woman 2 : a female fox 3 : a sexually attractive woman
So Vixen is a queer. It’s nice to know the creators of this sweet innocent cartoon were so concerned with young kids who would be watching.
Cupid
1: the Roman god of erotic love — compare eros 2 not capitalized : a figure that represents Cupid as a naked usually winged boy often holding a bow and arrow
Dancer & Prancer certainly sound like feminine terms as well.
I think from these names we know Vixen, Dancer, Prancer & Cupid are queer reindeer.
Let’s go back to the story from the animated movie with Rudolph. Rudolph gets shy around girls & his nose turns red. As a result, the other reindeer won’t let him play any reindeer games. That sounds sick, perverted & homosexual. Basically Rudolph like girls because he is straight & as a result they don’t let him participate in their homosexual games.
People are going to read this & say I’m crazy but hasn’t Hollywood always been trying to pump in homosexual themes into kids movies & cartoons. One of the teletubbies is gay. Bert & Ernie are gay. In Scooby Doo Greg is gay. Hollywood has always had agendas they are trying to push and one of those major agendas is homosexuality is ok. It’s no big deal. Another one they are trying to push is "It’s ok for women to work."
The truth is Santa Clause is being used by Satan to corrupt kids at a very young age. This is much like in the Disney movies which are littered with sexual content, homosexuality, etc… A woman falling in love with an animal(Beauty & the Beast). A grown man who wants to hang around little boys all day(Peter Pan). Peter Pan is also always played by women in plays because he is a long haired looking faggot in the movie.
We as Christians need to separate ourselves from this kind of garbage. You can say I’m crazy but Satan Clause is corrupting kids & we ought to have nothing to do with it. We ought to keep our kids away from these fun little animated shows that came from Hollywood. It came from the world so it’s not of God. 1 John 2:15-16 "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world."
Leviticus 20:13 "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them."
According to the Bible homosexuality should be punishable by death. I would be overjoyed if every single queer in the entire world died today. The Bible makes it clear they are reprobates who are past the point of salvation. The Bible also makes it clear they are rapists & very wicked people. They have no chance to get saved and no saved person could ever become a queer. Therefore, I would be overjoyed if they all died tonight & our government would actually follow what the Bible states. The death penalty should be enacted for the queers.
Matthew Stucky
Just one screwy little blogger boy you say? Yes. Of course. But there’s your grass roots. Right there. The fertile soil decades of pulpit thumping against the Homosexual Threat was meant to take root in. Check out his goals for the new year…
Personal Physical Goals
1. Get my mile time under 5 minutes & keep it there for the entire year.
2. Run a marathon.
3. Bench 250 lbs.
4. Leg Press 900 lbs.
5. Get my 6 pack abs back before the end of January & keep it for the entire year.
6. Dunk a basketball.
7. Maintain my side to side split but be able to do one front to back both with left leg forward & right leg forward.
8. Learn how to do a front flip.
9. Learn how to do a back flip.
10. Be able to flat jump on the pulpit by the end of the year.
Nice. He also wants to "Personally lead 1000 people to the Lord" this year. No word on how many homosexuals he intends to kill. I suppose we’ll find that out eventually.
Good thing I’m not a Mormon though. Then I’d have to endure angry threats and rhetoric.
If you are a Proposition 8 supporter and you don’t like my attitude…I strongly suggest you don’t try to tell me about it here in the comments. This is my web site and I will endure a lot of things here but bile from gutter crawling bigots isn’t one of them.
I’m angry. At you. At all your pathetic self righteous excuses. At your absolute moral squalor. At your total inner depravity. At you. I’m angry. Want to see how angry? Once upon a time a writer named Harlen Ellison wrote a passage about what it is to hate that captures it…exactly:
Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live.
There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my
complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds
of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this
micro-instant for you. Hate. Hate.
Maybe It’s Just As Well Obama Didn’t Invite A Rabbi Too
What you have to understand about the fundamentalist mindset is that it isn’t just gay people they hate. It’s everyone.
For those who believe that Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry–and its portrayal of evangelical preachers as hypocritical frauds–offers the last word on conservative Christianity, Rick Warren cannot possibly be a force for good. I have yet to let Jesus enter my life, but I admire Warren. We once appeared on a panel together along with Harvard’s Peter Gomes at the Aspen Ideas Festival. When it came time for questions, a woman stood up, proclaimed her Judaism, and asked Warren if she was going to burn in hell. He paused before responding–and then answered her question the only way it could be answered. Yes, he said to audible gasps. My reaction was that either you believe that Jesus is the savior or you do not, and I found myself impressed that Warren remained true to his convictions, knowing full well that the audience would not like what he said.
Emphasis mine. You can suppose Wolfe would be equally impressed that Al Capone remained true to his conviction that crime pays. Anyone who thinks that all Sinclair Lewis did in Elmer Gantry was paint a shallow two-dimensional picture of the fundamentalist herd as a bunch of cynical hucksters never read the book. Lewis is hard to read sometimes for the brutally clear eye he lays on American life in the early twentieth century, and his relevance to the America we live in today becomes crystal clear the moment you start reading him. The picture he painted of American populist fundamentalism was so spot-on accurate to the practice of it I knew as a kid in the late 20th, not so much in the particulars as in the culture and mindset, that reading it made me squirm uncomfortably.
The church provided his only oratory, except for campaign speeches by politicians ardent about Jefferson and the price of binding-twine; it provided all his paintings and sculpture, except for the portraits of Lincoln, Longfellow, and Emerson in the school-building, and the two china statuettes of pink ladies with gilt flower-baskets which stood on his mother’s bureau. From the church came all his profounder philosophy, except the teachers’ admonitions that little boys who let garter-snakes loose in school were certain to be licked now and hanged later, and his mother’s stream of opinions on hanging up his overcoat, wiping his feet, eating fried potatoes with his fingers. and taking the name of the Lord in vain.
If he had sources of literary inspiration outside the church–in McGuffey’s Reader he encountered the boy who stood on the burning deck, and he had a very pretty knowledge of the Nick Carter Series and the exploits of Cole Younger and the James Boys–yet here too the church had guided him. In Bible stories, the the words of the great hymns, in the anecdotes which the various preachers quoted, he had his only knowledge of literature–
The story of Little Lame Tom who shamed the wicked rich man that owned the handsome team of grays and the pot hat that led him to Jesus. The ship’s captain who in the storm took counsel with the orphaned but righteous child of missionaries in Zomballa. The Faithful Dog who saved his master during a terrific conflagration (only sometimes it was a snowstorm, or an attack by Indians) and roused him to give up horse-racing, rum, and playing the harmonica.
How familiar they were, how thrilling, how explainatory to Elmer of the purposes of life, how preparatory for his future usefulness and charm.
…
He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.
Hypocrisy isn’t in knowing you are a fraud. That’s Hollywood’s fundamentalist and it exists to reassure actual ticket-buying fundamentalists that Hollywood still loves them and will keep selling them all the blue-eyed white anglo-saxon Jesuses they want. Yes, it’s a safe bet that many in the upper ranks dispise the flock. But not all of them do. The mindset both in the pews and behind the pulpit is that they are a better class of miserable sinner then you are and that makes them the right hand of God Almighty.
This particular strain of Americana is the fountainhead of American anti-intellectualism and know-nothingness and the reason for that isn’t because they understand that intellect without conscience is a very dangerous thing. Conscience is the first thing you have to kill within yourself to join the tribe. They hate any and all human achivement because it shows that humans Can achieve. The sight of human kindness and compassion, the kind that comes straight from the heart, without strings attached, simply out of love, terrifies them, because that kind of selfless whole hearted love is utterly unfathomable to them. How can anyone possibly love their gay son for the person they are? Ney…’tis a greater love to stick a knife in their heart… The common complaints about "elitism" from the kook pews isn’t a complaint about vanity and arrogance…it springs reflexively from that deep hatred within for anyone with a bigger brain and a bigger heart then their own. H.L. Menkean pegged the type perfectly in his obiturary of William Jennings Bryant. He might as well have been talking about Warren when he wrote the following…
This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without any shame or dignity. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition–the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine.
Warren has none of the vitriolic bombast of a Bryant or Falwell or Dobson, but so what? When you can look a jewish person in the face and tell them they’re going to burn in hell for all eternity, does it really matter that you do it with a smile verses a snarl? Does calling down God’s wrath on Jews really command respect when it’s done out of conviction? Then I guess the millions who went to the ovens in the Holocaust died for nothing after all, and all the millions who died in anti-Jewish pogroms before them too. We know how many Jews were alive in the days of Christ, because their Roman overlords kept good population records. By the standards of natural population growth, or so I’m told, there ought to be around 280 million Jews walking this good earth right now, right this moment. In fact there are about 19 million. And Hitler didn’t do all that…
We shall see how defenders of the Church take pains to distinguish between "anti-Judaism" and "antisemitism"; between Christian Jew-hatred as a "necessary but insufficient" cause of the Holocaust; between the "sins of the children" and the sinlessness of the Church as such. These distinctions become meaningless before the core truth of this history: Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal.
-James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword
Rick Warren is a hate monger, and the fact that he is willing to stick to his religious conceits over the humanity of one Jewish woman standing right in front of him isn’t proof of integrity, it is proof that he’s taken his own humanity around behind the barn and killed it. Is sincerity really being able to look a person in the face and deny the common human heart you both share? Doesn’t blind obedience to dogma of any sort involve a necessary amount of self-deception? What you have to keep in mind, is that just because you are a charlatan that doesn’t mean you don’t see yourself as being sincere. The first person you have to fool after all, is yourself.
Dan Savage takes note of the case of the California teenager who escaped his captors with the chain still dangling from his ankle, and complains, thusly…
Paul linked this in Morning News, but more details are emerging…
A husband and wife have been charged with torture and other counts after a bruised, terrified 17-year-old showed up at a gym with a chain locked to his ankle, claiming he had just fled his captors, authorities said Tuesday.
Kelly Lau Schumacher, 30, and Michael Schumacher, 34, were arrested late Monday, said Matt Robinson, a spokesman for police in Tracy.
They had been taken into custody for questioning earlier in the day at their home in Tracy, where the emaciated boy was allegedly held against his will. A search of the home turned up evidence implicating the couple, Robinson said…. Robinson said the boy was confused when approached by detectives Monday, unsure where he had come from and how long had been held against his will. He was taken to a hospital.
"The wounds he had and his physical condition as well as having a chain around his leg corroborated his basic statement that he was being held against his will," Robinson said.
Kelly and Michael Schumacher are legally married—and they can stay legally married, even if they’re found to be guilty of this horrendous crime. They can stay legally married even if the decomposing remains of twenty other teenagers are found buried in their backyard. Their marriage license cannot be revoked. If Michael dies in prison, Kelly can remarry—even if she’s serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. If Kelly decides to divorce Michael, he can remarry—even if he’s sitting on death row. He can remarry and divorce and remarry and divorce and remarry and divorce until he runs out of prison pen pals. Because the courts have declared that marriage is so fundamental a right that it cannot be denied to convicted rapists or to serial killers.
But it’s a right that’s denied to me and my boyfriend. Because we’re both men and that ain’t right.
What you have to understand, and I’m sure Dan Savage understands this perfectly well, is that killing twenty teenagers isn’t nearly as big a sin as loving someone of your own sex. You can sit on death row for torturing, killing, and eating an entire classroom full of children and still get sympathy from the kook pews. They forgave Susan Smith the moment, the instant, it was discovered that she, and not the black man she’d claimed, killed her own two boys by locking them in the family car and pushing it into a lake and letting them drown. Her stepfather, Beverly Russell, who had abused her since she was 15, was a figure in the South Carolina republican party, and the Christian Coalition, and after all Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven. But if someone splits your head open because they saw you walking down the street with your boyfriend’s hand in yours, you had it coming.
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