I think if partners want to have the opportunity to live together, I don’t have a problem with that…
Trois…
And I think that’s where most of America is.
Quatre…
So I think that you know, you have to speak from the heart about these issues.
Cinq…
They are very personal.
Six…
They have a significant impact on an awful lot of people…
Sept…
…and the less the government is telling people what to do, the better off we’re all going to be.
Huit…
….partners living together, I don’t have a problem with.
Neuf…
Question: Now that you’re trying to occupy the political center, are you still in favor of a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage? Governor Crist: I feel the same way, yes, because I feel that marriage is a sacred institution, if you will.
Ken Mehlman, former republican party chair, is out and proud. Well…out anyway…
Ex-GOP national chairman Ken Mehlman says he’s gay
Mehlman, manager of the 2004 Bush/Cheney re-election campaign, came out to Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic. “It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” Mehlman said in the interview. “Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey and for me over the past few months, I’ve told my family, friends, former colleagues and current colleagues and they’ve been wonderful and supportive.”
The article goes on to say Mehlman wants to work for same-sex marriage. That would be helpful. Mehlman worked for years to get anti-gay bigots elected. He ran the reelection campaign of Bush The Junior, waving the gay scarecrow at voters despite the fact that he himself was one…
But he was, and probably still is, a party loyalist, and as Garrison Keillor said after Norm Coleman won in the almost-as-ugly 2002 election (which also saw Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam veteran loose to slimeball Saxby Chambliss), they are Republicans first and Americans second. If the party tells you it wants to put a knife in your back, you offer to do it yourself as a show of loyalty.
“Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,” Mehlman said at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”
This was happening back when some pundits were thinking republicans could peel some of the black vote away from the democratic party on social (read: anti-gay) issues, which makes Mehlman’s offering this apology more then a little grotesque. But if all you’re noticing about this is its tang of political opportunism, you’re missing that he’s offering this apology for deliberately polarizing the nation to win elections, just a year after they’d waged the most homophobic campaign in American history. Here’s a cartoon I did at the time…
That was the summer I stood in a protest line outside an ex-gay ministry in Memphis Tennessee, where a gay teen had been committed against his will by his own parents. There I heard the stories of other gay kids and young adults either forced into ex-gay therapy or on their own because they were terrified of being homosexual, in a climate of anti-gay fear, loathing and hate ginned up over the years by among others, Ken Mehlman. He had an election to win you see, and never mind the damage done to this country in the process. Neighbor had to hate neighbor. Parents had to loath their own flesh and blood, children had to see that loathing in the faces of their own fathers and mothers, and remember having seen it for the rest of their lives, so George Bush could be president. To the party loyalist the ends justify the means. You must be willing to destroy some families, to win an election on Family Values.
I’m glad Mehlman is finally at some sort of inner peace with the person he is. For one thing, people who are disgusted with their sexual nature, gay or straight, tend to take that disgust out on others. But no one, not even Republican’s first and Americans second, should feel forced to live their lives in the closet. But it isn’t unreasonable to expect those republicans to work a little harder now to make this an America where nobody else has to either. There’s a lot of damage out there, with their names on it.
The preacher stopped at least, and there arose out the darkness a woman with her hair pulled back into a little tight knot. She began so quickly we couldn’t hear what she said, but soon her voice rose resonantly and we could follow her. She was denouncing the reading of books. Some wandering book agent, it appeared, had come to her cabin and tried to sell her a specimen of his wares. She refused to touch it. Why, indeed, read a book? If what was in it was true, then everything in it was already in the Bible. If it was false, then reading it would imperil the soul.
–H.L. Mencken, The Hills of Zion
Some days I marvel at how lucky I was, to enter grade school when I did, just when the Soviet Union was scaring the hell out of the United States. Looking back, it’s astonishing to me now, how utterly taken for granted it was, that all American kids needed, and by god were going to get if the feds had anything to do with it, a good education in the sciences. The Soviets had launched Sputnik, which meant their missiles could hit any city in the U.S. They were going to own a good chunk of planet Earth and outer space too if we didn’t get up to speed. Suddenly having science in the classroom Mattered. Things are a tad different now.
As soon as I saw it in my morning Google news page, I knew it would be spreading through the kook pews like wildfire by days end…
In March of 2000, Pat Buchanan came to speak at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. Harvard being Harvard, the audience hissed and sneered and made wisecracks. Buchanan being Buchanan, he gave as good as he got. While the assembled Ivy Leaguers accused him of homophobia and racism and anti-Semitism, he accused Harvard — and by extension, the entire American elite — of discriminating against white Christians.
A decade later, the note of white grievance that Buchanan struck that night is part of the conservative melody. You can hear it when Glenn Beck accuses Barack Obama of racism, or when Rush Limbaugh casts liberal policies as an exercise in “reparations.” It was sounded last year during the backlash against Sonia Sotomayor’s suggestion that a “wise Latina” jurist might have advantages over a white male judge, and again last week when conservatives attacked the Justice Department for supposedly going easy on members of the New Black Panther Party accused of voter intimidation.
To liberals, these grievances seem at once noxious and ridiculous. (Is there any group with less to complain about, they often wonder, than white Christian Americans?) But to understand the country’s present polarization, it’s worth recognizing what Pat Buchanan got right…
Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.
[Emphasis mine…] Never mind that we’re actually not talking about White Anxiety here but Rural White Anxiety. Never mind that not all American Christians are white, let alone rural. Never mind that this…analysis…comes from Minding the Campus, which is a Manhattan Institute front group (Especially never mind that one of their published authors is Bell Curve author Charles Murray, who explains that black people have lower IQs not because poverty and racism limit their educational opportunities, but because they’re just…well…genetically inferior. Please do never mind that!)
Here’s the problem:
…and this…
And this…
And…this…
…and…this…
And. This.
If all you’re seeing there is a religious verses science struggle you are missing it. This isn’t about religion verses science, this is about two utterly different and incomparable views of what constitutes knowledge. In the Christianist, fundamentalist view, knowledge is something that is received. In science, knowledge is something that is discovered.
The difference is profound. One group of kids gets taught how to think, how to ask questions, how to evaluate, how to make independent judgments…and the other gets taught to be afraid of questioning authority and to always defend the tribe against outsiders. And the worst kind of outsider is the one who stops blindly accepting everything they’ve been told by their tribe. Edjucatin’ will do that to a kid. What you aren’t getting, is the entire grade school life of rural white kids these days is now being carefully, meticulously geared toward preventing a higher education from ever taking root.
But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”
It is not the “gatekeepers of elite education” keeping rural white kids from getting into their schools Douthat you drooling moron, it’s their fear and loathing of anything that doesn’t righteously affirm their fundamentalist, tribal culture. It’s the knee jerk reflexive hostility to that very education that their world view is drilling, drilling, drilling into them, that’s keeping them out of America’s big universities.
And it’s nothing new. It has been going on, and getting worse and worse, since Scopes. I was lucky…so incredibly lucky…that I entered grade school for one brief shining moment when nobody was paying any attention to the howls from the kook pews. (Thank you Khrushchev!) A kid today from the rural bible belt part of America who wants, really wants, that higher education has had the cards stacked against them by their grade school experience. They haven’t been taught how to think critically, because that might lead them to question the story of Noah’s Ark. They haven’t been taught how to sift through a set of facts to find an answer, because the culture they grow up in not only instills in them a knee jerk hostility to any fact that contradicts eternal tribal truths, it also teaches them to hold onto ideas that are palpably, laughingly false against even the most staringly obvious facts, in defense of those truths.
And it’s getting worse. Now their schools are on a roll to dumb down their curriculums even more.
The Texas Board of Education has been meeting this week to revise its social studies curriculum. During the past three days, “the board’s far-right faction wielded their power to shape lessons on the civil rights movement, the U.S. free enterprise system and hundreds of other topics”:
– To avoid exposing students to “transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else,” the Board struck the curriculum’s reference to “sex and gender as social constructs.”
– The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum, “replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.”
– The Board refused to require that “students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others.”
– The Board struck the word “democratic” from the description of the U.S. government, instead terming it a “constitutional republic.”
Tell me how a university is supposed to try and teach those kids…anything. Those school boards are grimly determined to keep their kids from crossing over to the other side in the culture war…the side where the pursuit of knowledge isn’t just a good thing, but a great adventure…and in the process they’re locking them behind their own down home version of the iron curtain. A university admissions officer is going to look at their school system and know right away that kid will never make it past their first year, possibly not even their first semester, and they simply won’t bother with them. That’s not the university’s fault. It’s one thing to make room for an urban minority kid whose disadvantage is money, and another to give that seat to a rural kid whose disadvantage is money and Intelligent Design.
And yes, it is very, very bad for this country to have it divided into well educated urban citizens verses people who have had any genuine desire to Learn pummeled out of them by a culture scared to death of anything resembling independence of thought. I would argue that the “gatekeepers of elite education” really do need to do some serious educational outreach to the white rural population. But do you understand the explosion of bitter hate and resentment that reaching out to those communities, trying, really trying hard, and with energy, to bring them science, world literature, logic and semantics, and all the humanities that they’ve been mocking for generations as “effete”…do you understand the nuclear explosion that would follow? The howls of “elitist cultural aggression” would be defining. And their republican enablers would take to the talk radio airwaves and cable TV junkyards with proof…proof mind you, that the elites were trying to brain wash their children…possibly to make them gay…ban the bible, impose a socialist new world order and sell their white women to the negros as reparations.
Try…just try…to bring the rural white population into higher education in greater numbers and they’ll just dig themselves even deeper, deeper into the gutter, to prevent their children from ever learning anything that might make them question that bedrock of bigotry, paranoia and resentment their culture sits and sulks on. I can appreciate that urban minorities have their own host of problems preventing them from getting into the better Universities… poverty… crime… violence… a general breakdown of family and community. But the problem isn’t that “the gatekeepers of elite education” are prejudiced against low income white people. The problem is that a kid in a drug gang infested urban slum whose school is falling apart because their city has no money actually has a better chance of leaving grade school being able to think for themselves then a kid from bible belt America does.
He argued that the gift of tongues was real and that education was a snare. Once his children could read the Bible, he said, they had enough. Beyond lay only infidelity and damnation. Sin stalked the cities. Dayton itself was a Sodom. Even Morgantown had begun to forget God…
I think part of the reason Glenn Beck’s 912 Project opts for the term “values” rather than “virtues” is because virtues take work. They require practice to acquire as habits.
This is not what the 912 Project is for. It is not a group or “movement” of people who have chosen to practice these 12 virtues in order to acquire them as habits. It is not a group that seeks to learn or to embody those virtues at all.
Look at that list again: Honesty, reverence, hope, thrift, humility, charity, sincerity, moderation, hard work, courage, personal responsibility, gratitude.
Does any of that characterize the agenda or the practice or the visible habit of Beck’s tea partying mobs? Were any of these virtues on display in the town-hall disruptions, in the angry marches or the signs carried under Beck’s “912” banner? Was there even a hint that these gatherings were composed of people even slightly interested in such virtues?
This is why Beck’s list of “12 values” can’t withstand comparison to the first similar-seeming list that comes to mind, the Boy Scout Law. The Boy Scouts of America isn’t my favorite organization as I’m not a fan of either homophobia nor vacuous civil religion, but I am a big fan of that Scout Law:
A Scout is: Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.
Against such there is no law.
The 12 virtues listed there are at first glance quite similar to Beck’s, but the differences are telling. The Scout Law begins “A Scout is“…
Is verses waving them around like a damn flag. This is the single most telling thing about the culture warriors. They yap, yap, yap about Values…but they don’t ever act like they have any. And there’s a reason for that. Values are to them as weapons to wield against the Faceless Other…not things that actually sustain and guide. Values aren’t a part of your bedrock, they’re rhetorical tools to use as needed and discard like a Kleenex afterward.
I have these arguments online from time to time with nutcases who feel this world would be just peachy keen if everyone were made to live according to the dictates of their particular religion. You get to a point where the argument becomes why do I want to trample all over their religious freedom. Because for instance, I’d like to marry someday and their religion says homosexuality is an abomination, and if I can marry a same-sex partner then…somehow…that means I’m trampling on their religion and I need to respect their deeply held religious beliefs. My argument is they need to respect American Cultural Values of liberty and justice for all because that is what is making it possible for them to practice their religion in the first place.
But a lot of people who have absolutely no respect for the cultural values that make American religious freedom possible, just love appropriating little bits and pieces of it when it suits them, without any regard for the culture that made that which they find worthwhile possible.
I’m working on a blog post about a column by Rod Dreher in the Dallas News, which has prompted me to scan his blog on BeliefNet, and I came across this…
What’s needed is a full-fledged effort to cultivate "Whole Foods Republicans"–independent-minded voters who embrace a progressive lifestyle but not progressive politics. These highly-educated individuals appreciate diversity and would never tell racist or homophobic jokes; they like living in walkable urban environments; they believe in environmental stewardship, community service and a spirit of inclusion. And yes, many shop at Whole Foods, which has become a symbol of progressive affluence but is also a good example of the free enterprise system at work. (Not to mention that its founder is a well-known libertarian who took to these pages to excoriate ObamaCare as inimical to market principles.)
What makes these voters potential Republicans is that, lifestyle choices aside, they view big government with great suspicion. There’s no law that someone who enjoys organic food, rides his bike to work, or wants a diverse school for his kids must also believe that the federal government should take over the health-care system or waste money on thousands of social programs with no evidence of effectiveness. Nor do highly educated people have to agree that a strong national defense is harmful to the cause of peace and international cooperation.
…rides his bike to work… Oh yes…let’s hear it for libertarian road rules, where everyone gets to decide for themselves what safe speeds are and what safety equipment needs to be on their cars and whether the bicycle has the right of way or they do because they’re in a bigger more powerful vehicle and placing limits on how automobiles behave in mixed traffic is just a way of Big Brother penalizing bigness and success. Let the marketplace of traffic decide who the winners and losers are. That’ll make all those Whole Foods Republican cyclists happy I’m sure.
Yes…buying food made by companies who think selling people crap just because they can is immoral is so very nice isn’t it? How wonderful it would be, if corporate America had to behave like that, if the law held them accountable for selling food that damaged people’s health…
Two years ago, Orville Redenbacher soared from the graveyard and announced in weeks of TV ads that his popcorn was now free of diacetyl. That’s the chemical in artificial butter flavoring that has been blamed for sickening hundreds of workers, killing a handful and destroying the lungs of at least three microwave popcorn addicts.
Almost every other popcorn maker followed suit.
But now, government health investigators are reporting that the "new, safer, butter substitutes" used in popcorn and others foods are, in some cases, at least as toxic as what they replaced.
Even the top lawyer for the flavoring industry said his organization has told anyone who would listen that diacetyl substitutes are actually just another form of diacetyl.
So what is the Obama administration going to do about it? Nothing meaningful, at least for a year, it said this week, stunning unions, members of Congress, public health activists and physicians who have pleaded for government action to protect workers and consumers from the butter flavoring…
…When diacetyl trimmer is in the presence of heat and water, it will release diacetyl. And butter starter distillate is not a substitute for diacetyl because it contains high concentrations of diacetyl. However, it is considered a natural material, which is a boon to companies that wish market their food items with the "natural" label, Hallagan said in an interview from Colorado.
Hallagan said that his trade association discouraged using these materials and calling their products "diacetyl-free."
But he added that his group "is not a regulator and has no legal authority to prohibit their use. That’s up to the food manufacturers."
Let’s hear it for the invisible hand of the marketplace. How the hell did we ever expect to get meaningful healthcare reform done when we can’t even make the food companies sell food that doesn’t kill people? The alternative food marketplace evolved from an eminently liberal-progressive disgust with how big business treats its customers and is allowed to get away with it again and again by government that allows itself to be influenced by big business money. If people who shop in that marketplace "view big government with great suspicion" it’s more likely because they can see how corrupted it’s become by corporate interests every day the current health care debate goes on, then that they’re all just waiting for someone to tell them they’re republicans.
In fact, a lot of them probably aren’t shopping at Whole Foods anymore. I know I’m not…
Since no one at Whole Foods Market Inc., can tell CEO and co-founder John Mackey just how bad he screwed up, I will. Mr. Mackey, your extremist views on employee benefits and unionization have, lucky for you, mostly flown under the progressive radar to date. Which is why pushing that luck with this screed on healthcare suggests you are either out of your flippin mind or have suffered a lapse in business acumen not seen since New Coke. And in the WSJ no less:
While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment.
Mr. Mackey, I’m not sure if you understand who it is that shops at your organic grocery chain: a lot of progressives, vegetarians, professional and amateur athletes, and others who care so much about the environment and what they eat that they’re still willing to shell out three bucks for an organic orange, even in the midst of the worst recession in sixty years. I was proud WFMI was based in my hometown of Austin, and defended it against most of the conservatives I knew growing up there, many of whom still hold your entire business in utter contempt. Some of them ridiculed me for shopping at Whole Foods, with all the "tree huggers and granola eaters and hippies" who, incidentally, made you a millionaire.
Mr. Mackey, you just shat all over your best customers. Given the years of pseudonymous postings on Yahoo finance slamming a competitor you were quietly trying to acquire at the time, double talk and unethical behavior arguably seems to be becoming a habit for you. So I will never, ever, shop at your stores again, unless you retract that op-ed, apologize for stabbing us in the back, or resign. In this day and age, it’s just too easy to locate competitors. Until then, well, judging by the Whole Foods community forum, not to mention the discussion in Hopeful Skeptic’s and Aptoklas’ diaries, you’ve finally managed to universally piss off everyone. I predict the next few weeks of your life are going to suck, immensely.
Dreher here, and his pal at the Wall Street Journal, are trying to drum up support on the right for their union busting Randian friend, since he had the regrettable stupidity of telling his customer base that his store’s progressive facade is just that. Not quite as deceptive as a box of microwave popcorn claiming to be diacetyl-free, but more like that doughnut shop in Pittsburgh with the name Peace, Love and Little Doughnuts with a hippy love peace theme that’s owned by a religious right nutcase who hates gays and liberals and democrats and writes on his blog that…
This crowd will not rest until Homosexuality is mainstream; until the Second Amendment is done away with; until abortion on demand is as common and accepted as going to the dentist; until sexual images and strip clubs line our streets and suburbs; until government education is started in the womb; until disagreement with their political party is “hate speech” and becomes a crime; until they pass the Fairness Doctrine and rid the county of Conservative talk radio; until they transfer our sovriegnty to the UN, etc. etc. etc…
Right. Whatever. There is money to be made by marketing to urban progressives obviously, or the con artists wouldn’t bother with branding scams like Peace, Love and Little Doughnuts. But at least they’re honest liars. Mackey’s Whole Foods is to grocery stores, what a lot of high end native American trading posts are in the southwest. He sells the best items he can find, without the slightest regard for the culture that brought them forth. He is it for the money, not to cultivate the culture that made what he sells possible, knowing full well that enough of his customers won’t care as long as the goods keep coming.
But what do you make of a bunch of free market republicans who would rather buy their food in the alternative food markets progressives created so they could have something fit to eat and feed their children, then buy from the big food factories they’ve set free, free at last from the chains of government oversight? You call them practical. A Whole Foods Republican is someone who doesn’t want to eat from the table they set for everyone else. Ezra Klein writing in The Washington Post about Mackey’s Wall Street Journal said…
Food is more like health care than it is like cable television. We worry if people don’t have enough food to eat. We worry quite a lot, in fact. So we have a variety of programs meant to ensure that people have sufficient food. If you don’t have much money, you rely on these programs. As of September 2008, about 11 percent of the population was on food stamps. It’s probably somewhat higher now. Millions more rely on the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program, and reduced-price school lunches.
The insight that people need food has not led us to simply deregulate the agricultural sector (though that might be a good idea for other reasons) or change the tax treatment of food purchases or make it easier for rich people to donate to food banks, which is what Mackey recommends for health care. It’s led us to solve, or try and solve, the problem directly by giving people money to buy food. And that works. These programs, as every Whole Foods shopper knows, haven’t grown to encompass the whole population or set prices in grocery stores. If you have more money, you shop for food on your own. And if you have a lot of money, you shop at Mackey’s stores. That’s pretty much the model we’re looking at in this iteration of health care reform. We’re also laying down some rules so grocery stores — excuse me, health insurers — can’t simply refuse to sell you their product, or take it away after it’s already been purchased.
Mackey, playing to type, has offered a Whole Foods solution for health care: It makes the system even better for the rich and the young and the educated — the sort of people who shop at Whole Foods, in other words — and doesn’t do a lot for those who really need help. But the existence of a vibrant institution like Whole Foods within a broader system that considers it unacceptable — at least in theory — for the poor to go hungry, and so subsidizes their purchase of food, does have lessons for heath-care reform.
Emphasis mine. If you think Mackey is simply suffering myopia you are not paying attention. He’s a Randoid. Me…I buy from Trader Joe’s these days. It’s smaller then the Whole Foods down the street from me, but that Whole Foods used to be a Fresh Fields until Mackey gobbled our local natural food chain up. A lot of folks here in Maryland had bad feelings about that when it happened, but Mackey put on a good show for us right up until the Wall Street Journal editorial. Now we know what we’re dealing with. Now I have another reason not to shop there. I don’t want to be rubbing elbows with rich republican homophobes who support Proposition 8 but absolutely love the work their gay landscaper does around their house.
In 1989, Juan Navarete came home to find his beloved Leroy Tranton lying bloody on the concrete driveway to their house. He’d fallen off a ladder while doing work. What happened to Juan next is the stuff of nightmares. Or…righteous devotion to Godliness depending on your point of view…
Juan and Leroy lived together in Long Beach for eight years. One day, Juan came home from the grocery store and found Leroy, who had fallen off a ladder, lying on the concrete patio. Leroy was rushed to the hospital where he stayed in a coma for several days. Although Leroy regained consciousness, he remained hospitalized for nine months. Juan visited Leroy once or twice each day, feeding him and encouraging him to recuperate.
Leroy’s estranged brother, who lived in Maine, filed a lawsuit seeking to have himself appointed as Leroy’s conservator.
When Juan accidentally found out, he showed up at court in Long Beach. Although Juan, who was not represented by counsel, stood up and protested, the judge refused to consider Juan’s plea because he was a stranger to Leroy in the eyes of the law.
The brother subsequently had Leroy transferred from the hospital to an undisclosed location. When Juan finally discovered that Leroy was being housed in a nursing home about 50 miles from Long Beach, he attempted to visit Leroy there. The staff stopped Juan in the lobby, advising him that the brother had given them a photo of Juan with strict orders not to allow him to visit Leroy. Unfortunately, no one else ever visited Leroy there.
It took Juan about two weeks to find an attorney who would take the case without charge. The attorney filed a lawsuit seeking visitation rights.
A few hours before the hearing was scheduled to occur, the brother’s attorney called Juan’s attorney, informing him that Leroy had died three days before.
Since the body had already been flown back to Maine where it was cremated, Juan never had an opportunity to pay his last respects.
Juan had no, absolutely no legal standing to do anything other then grieve, and there are those (I’m coming to you in a minute Jeff…) who would likely say that he was lucky to have that, and not be tossed into a jail cell for admitting he had engaged in homosexual conduct. In the eyes of the law, he and Leroy were strangers. Some people to this day think that’s more then we deserve, considering that in the eyes of the law we used to be criminals.
Same sex marriage is allowed in a few states now, and you can call that progress if you wish. But the chilling truth is that in most of the land of the free and the home of the brave, a same sex couple can be legally ground under foot by the local justice system, to the sound of loud hosanna’s from the righteous. It’s not enough that our wedding rings mean nothing. It’s not enough that our love isn’t seen as meaningful to us, let alone to anyone else. Even our grief must be unreal…a cheap imitation of the real grief heterosexual couples feel when one becomes gravely ill, or dies.
Because to permit us even our grief is to erode the sacred institution of heterosexual only marriage…
In his veto message, Republican Carcieri said: "This bill represents a disturbing trend over the past few years of the incremental erosion of the principles surrounding traditional marriage, which is not the preferred way to approach this issue.
"If the General Assembly believes it would like to address the issue of domestic partnerships, it should place the issue on the ballot and let the people of the state of Rhode Island decide.”
At a hearing this year on one of the stalled bills to allow same-sex marriage, Mark S. Goldberg told a Senate committee about his months-long battle last fall to persuade state authorities to release to him the body of his partner of 17 years, Ron Hanby, so he could grant Hanby’s wish for cremation — only to have that request rejected because "we were not legally married or blood relatives."
Goldberg said he tried to show the police and the state medical examiner’s office "our wills, living wills, power of attorney and marriage certificate" from Connecticut, but "no one was willing to see these documents."
Homosexuals don’t love…they just have sex…
He said he was told the medical examiner’s office was required to conduct a two-week search for next of kin, but the medical examiner’s office waited a full week before placing the required ad in a newspaper. And then when no one responded, he said, they "waited another week" to notify another state agency of an unclaimed body.
Homosexuals don’t love…they just have sex…
After four weeks, he said, a Department of Human Services employee "took pity on me and my plight … reviewed our documentation and was able to get all parties concerned to release Ron’s body to me," but then the cremation society refused to cremate Ron’s body.
"On the same day, I contacted the Massachusetts Cremation Society and they were more than willing to work with me and cremate Ron’s body," and so, "on November 6, 2008, I was able to finally pick up Ron’s remains and put this tragedy to rest."
When will it occur to supporters of same-sex marriage that they do their cause no good by characterizing those who disagree with them as haters, bigots, and ignorant homophobes? It may be emotionally satisfying to despise as moral cripples the majorities who oppose gay marriage. But after going 0 for 31 – after failing to make the case for same-sex marriage even in such liberal and largely gay-friendly states as California, Wisconsin, Oregon, and now Maine – isn’t it time to stop caricaturing their opponents as the equivalent of Jim Crow-era segregationists? Wouldn’t it make more sense to concede that thoughtful voters can have reasonable concerns about gay marriage, concerns that will not be allayed by describing those voters as contemptible troglodytes?
Why of course you’re not a contemptible troglodyte Jeff…you’re perfectly capable of looking at your gay and lesbian neighbors and seeing human beings…aren’t you…
I can sympathize with committed gay and lesbian couples who feel demeaned by the law’s rejection of same-sex marriage or who crave the proof of societal acceptance, the cloak of normalcy, that a marriage license would provide.
Because of course, all Juan Navarete wanted when he saw Leroy lying in a pool of blood on their driveway was societal acceptance…a cloak of normalcy.
If you knew what it was your gay and lesbian neighbors wanted, you wouldn’t be a bigot Jeff. But you can’t see the people for the homosexuals, so you don’t. You can’t. You never will. Even a troglodyte knows his neighbor is capable of grief.
Michael Duvall is a conservative Republican state representative from Orange County, California. While waiting for the start of a legislative hearing in July, the 54-year-old married father of two and family values champion began describing, for the benefit of a colleague seated next to him, his ongoing affairs with two different women. In very graphic detail.
For instance:
She wears little eye-patch underwear. So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And
 so, we had made love Wednesday–a lot! And so she’ll, she’s all, ‘I am going 
up and down the stairs, and you’re dripping out of me!’ So messy!
Oh how lovely. Haven’t I already seen this movie?
As the OC Weekly reports, 
Duvall has "blasted" efforts to promote gay marriage, and got a 100 percent score from the Capitol Resource Institute, which describes its mission as to "educate, advocate, protect, and defend family-friendly policies in the California state legislature". In March, a spokeswoman for the group called Duvall "a consistent trooper for the conservative causes," adding that "for the last two years, he has voted time and time again to protect and preserve family values in California."
See…this kind of thing is funny for a while (oh look at what just popped out of another conservative’s closet…!), but then it gets so soul wearying. I really need to remember that morality and values and honor and decency really do represent more in our lives then convenient hooks to drive the rubes to the polls with…that there is more to the human status then this runt represents.
People need to look…really look…at what’s motivating all those moral crusaders of the right, waving scarecrows bearing their neighbor’s faces. They’re just pushing your buttons because they know it works. And why is that?
Gay Americans…Republican’s Cynical Weapon Against Democrats Since Truman
You hear some folks bellyache about those "Gay Studies" curriculums in various colleges and universities. If they’re not complaining that they’re utterly worthless exercises in pointless "diversity", they’re insinuating that the courses couldn’t be about anything but how to have gay sex.
I’ve never gone through one of these curriculums myself, but if the vast treasure trove of gay history that’s out there is any measure, a Gay Studies course isn’t just a nice idea for promoting diversity, it’s an important part of the human story. Particularly here in America, where gay citizens have been a punching bag, a handy scarecrow, for every hysteria that’s ever swept through the country. Case in point, the red scare of the 1950s.
I’m only part way into David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare, and already its challenging some of my bedrock views of what happened to my country during the so-called McCarthy era. Far from being merely a sideshow to the communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the purges of gay Americans were central to it. And…surprise, surprise, the engine for it all was republican hunger for political power.
Right at the beginning of the book, Johnson describes, using newspaper accounts of the time, interviews, and newly declassified documents, how the republicans in the late 1940s, out of power since Hoover brought on the great depression, saw the issue of homosexuals in government as a useful weapon against the party in power.
They orchestrated a hearing in which they pressed the secretary of state for information about communists in the state department. But it was a game of tag. In the process of defending themselves against the republican charge that they had allowed communists to get and hold jobs in the state department, the democrats described how they were diligently ferreting out "security risks". Far from being lax said the democrats, they’d uncovered and removed 91 "security risks" from the state department.
Which gave the republicans an opening to press them for details. How many of those were communists? It was a question the republicans already knew the answer to, because they’d had all the details in a closed door hearing previously. What they wanted was to get it out in the open. And the democrats, backed into a corner and not wanting to leave it hanging out there that they’d let so many communists into the state department when they hadn’t actually, said, that in fact none of them were communists, nobody had been let go from the state department for disloyalty. The 91 people fired were not accused of being traitors. Just…you know…security risks. Pressed further they admitted that these people had all been fired because they were homosexuals.
That was what the republicans wanted to hear, and get into the papers. Not a communist threat, but a lavender one. Why? Because it was felt that the moral issue played even better against the democrat’s base…working class and poor Americans, then the communist threat did. In other words, it made a great wedge issue against the democrats. And right from the beginning, when Joe McCarthy began waving around his baseless claims of a vast communist conspiracy lurking in the federal government, some republicans…even in his own state…were counseling him to downplay the communist thing and play up the morals charges more, because for one thing they actually were finding homosexuals working in government agencies, but mostly because it made the voters in the democrat’s base even angrier.
McCarthy of course, didn’t take that advise. He pressed on with his communist bogyman and the question echoed in the committee chambers of capital hill, are you now, or have you ever been a communist? But while McCarthy was busy stirring up the Communist Menace and getting headlines, the republican party was busy stirring up the Homosexual Menace and a great purge began which…ironically…led to the formation of the first gay rights groups as gay people began to get tired of being kicked around and started pushing back.
Later, during the black civil rights movement, the republicans would go on to exploit white working class racial fears against the democrats in exactly the same way. But here, even as far back as the late 1940s, you can see them using the Homosexual Menace as a tool to divide and weaken the democrats. Because accusing the democrats of tolerating homosexuality worked even better then nearly anything else the republicans could throw at them…even communism. And it wouldn’t stop working, until we gay Americans, having had enough of it, took to the streets in defense of our lives.
You want to know why it’s so damn important that we make a big deal out of our sexual orientation? Why we don’t just quietly "leave it in the bedroom where it belongs"…? This is why. Because our lives were turned into cannon fodder for the power dreams of politicians and that needs to stop. This country needs to look…really look…at the character of those loud voices bearing moral crusades, waving around scarecrows that have their neighbor’s faces on them.
The moral rot that is on plain view every night on Fox News and in the many health care "town halls" going on all across the country…in the "birthers" and the "deathers"…it isn’t new. Not at all. What’s different now is the gutter that all those country club republicans began playing to back in the Truman years has taken over, and they have their own voice now in the national news media. And you need to understand this: those country club republicans would be fine, even with that, if it could keep them in power.
Perhaps you could see this just as clearly from looking at the history of race relations in America, and republican party race baiting. But the history of the struggle of gay Americans for equality and justice is American history too, and you really see what the republican crusade for "morality" and "family values" is made of when you study it.
Via Sullivan…a handy little snapshot of the state of the Union…
As the GOP declines in popularity, Fox News gains audience. Or in other words, as reality presses closer in, that subset of the American population who never saw a fact they couldn’t look right in the face and deny, is cocooning. Surprise, surprise.
What was once a cultural divide has become a chasm, bigger, and vastly more dangerous then anything the "generation gap" of the 1960s could have produced. Again, from Sullivan…
A reader writes:
I just want to share a sad story with you. Tonight I was at my regular Friday night AA meeting in LA that I have been attending for 18 years – I am a 48 year old woman. One of my oldest friends, a male with 30 years sobriety, is a Republican. I am a Democrat. Every week he talks politics with another like-minded friend. Tonight he arrived a bit later than usual, so as I gave him a hug, I said, "Thank goodness you arrived because I am sure Betty* (name changed) did not want to discuss politics with me!"
He then turned around and started screaming at me. I was so taken aback, I didn’t even know what he was screaming about at first. When I finally tuned in, he was yelling that Obama "sent the SEIU thugs to beat up the senior citizens" protesting at the health-care town hall meetings and that Obama had instructed the SEIU "if they come at you, you go at them twice as hard."
When I tried to reasonably protest this statement, he just spewed forth a tirade of vile invectives.
We were outside and there were about 30 people milling about. I was shocked, embarrassed and literally frozen in place. I managed to turn and walk away. This is a man I have known and respected for the entire length of my sobriety. I am fairly certain this friendship is over. Reasonable discourse is over. The lies and hate spread by the right-wing have won. As a side note, his wife, who is one of my best friends would not talk to me for over a month after the election in November. I am just heartbroken. Sorry, I know this is not the most well-written account, but I am so shaken, I can barely wrap my head around it.
I have an acquaintance…someone I used to call "friend" but simply cannot anymore…who nonetheless calls periodically. I wrote of my frustrations about that Here. Last time he called I ended the conversation when he started going on about how the new supreme court justice Sotomayor was a racist. Next time he calls I’ll have a simple question ready for him…
Do you think President Obama was born here in the United States?
End of story. Life is short. The American Dream is still beautiful and I believe in it and you don’t anymore. There is are lot of things Americans need to discuss with one another and hash out together and the politics of life in a democracy is you have to have those discussions and maybe even a few major arguments and in the end you compromise and you hold a vote and you get on with it. But you’re not there anymore. You’re somewhere on the dark side of the moon where not even light can penetrate. We can’t talk anymore, and to have an America Americans need to be able to talk with each other and you want to shut down the talking so everyone can listen to you scream about nothing for as long as you have the breath to scream about it. Fine. The conversation is shut down…with you. I’ll talk it out with anyone who has a gripe about what I think or what I believe, no matter how angry they are…but not with a Fox News crack addict. You drag yourself out of that gutter and maybe I will. But not before.
Via Sullivan…this little nugget from the front lines from Daily KOS…
It is, in short, a movement made up of the enfranchised and enabled; people who have gained every benefit from the politics of America and yet who feel in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones, the ones who have nothing left to lose, so rapidly is America falling away from them. It is rare to run across any movement so deeply angry — or more to the point, a movement which explicitly celebrates anger as the primary mission of their activism. They are not willing to listen to any factual evidence that contradicts their own beliefs in whatever dark conspiracies have been peddled to them; they have in fact made it their publicly proclaimed mission to block any such explanations from even being attempted.
This could be a description of the anti-gay movement in America ever since Anita Bryant. Enfranchised and enabled? Check. They have every right that their gay neighbors are fighting for. Every. Right. Feeling in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones? Check. It’s a constant refrain. Militant homosexuals are oppressing them. Somehow. But don’t ask how exactly because all you’ll get are either vague claims that their "deeply held religious beliefs" are being trampled on every time they’re told to leave gay people alone, or if not that, then outright lies. Remember this?
Another "Yes on 8" canard is that the continuation of same-sex marriage will force churches and other religious groups to perform such marriages or face losing their tax-exempt status. Proponents point to a case in New Jersey, where a Methodist-based nonprofit owned seaside land that included a boardwalk pavilion. It obtained an exemption from state property tax for the land on the grounds that it was open for public use and access. Events such as weddings — of any religion — could be held in the pavilion by reservation. But when a lesbian couple sought to book the pavilion for a commitment ceremony, the nonprofit balked, saying this went against its religious beliefs.
The court ruled against the nonprofit, not because gay rights trump religious rights but because public land has to be open to everyone or it’s not public. The ruling does not affect churches’ religious tax exemptions or their freedom to marry whom they please on their private property, just as Catholic priests do not have to perform marriages for divorced people and Orthodox synagogues can refuse to provide space for the weddings of interfaith couples. And Proposition 8 has no bearing on the issue; note that the New Jersey case wasn’t about a wedding ceremony.
We’re being oppressed…by having to live by the same rules everyone else does…
Not willing to listen to any factual evidence that contradicts their own beliefs? Check. Not only are they not willing to listen to the facts, they’ve built a multi-million dollar industry with dozens of front groups whose only job is to churn out one lie after another about gay people which they insist everyone else accept as holy writ, whereas any actual science is regarded as pro-homo propaganda. Publicly proclaimed their mission to block any actual facts from coming to light? Check. From keeping honest, factual information about sexual orientation out of schools, to keeping it out of public libraries, to keeping it off of television, there is no public space that the facts about homosexuality and sexual orientation can appear that they have not vigorously…and I mean vigorously…worked to shut it down.
This Daily KOS post could have been written years ago, decades even, about about the anti-gay culture warriors. But it isn’t about the fight over gay rights. It’s about the struggle for America…
There seems little question that something odd is going on with the healthcare debate. Foremost is the ridiculous extent to which the debate has been entirely commandeered by flagrant, outright lies — things about euthanasia, and death panels, and the like, abject propaganda peddled directly from House and Senate offices. We have had lying in our discourse since the beginning of that discourse, but it has been a long while since the fabrications have been so blatant, so absolutely without even the smallest grain of truth. To take a Republican-sponsored healthcare provision that rather innocently and uncontroversially extends insurance coverage to those that want to create their own living wills and turn it into a declaration that the government will decide every five years whether or not you should be euthanized is something out of the Protocols, or out of Saddam’s Iraq, or a mimicry of the worst and most stupid and most absurd of North Korean propaganda towards their own citizens.
Likewise, the explicit instruction to protestors not to debate, but to aggressively attempt to shut down the meetings entirely — not normal. It is perhaps the best possible approach for insurance lobbyists to take, if their goal is to protect the profits of their industry — but it is still not normal. We have always had the fringes of such speech, but I cannot recall a time it has been so celebrated as the formal solution to political debate. Certainly not by a major political party, coupled with the majority of their most popular pundits and talking heads, coupled again to lobbyist groups with long histories of corporate astroturfing. And the proud shuffling just-up-to-the-line-of-violence, right in the very faces of their own representatives of Congress, requiring police protection in order to escort those elected representatives safely from the meetings — that part is new. That part is not normal.
It’s been normal in the battle for gay rights for decades now…you’re only just now noticing it, because they’ve moved beyond us. But you have to understand this: you’ve always been the target too. A free, just, and proud America has always been their target. The America of liberty and justice for all has always been their target. Because in that America, they’re then just a bunch of ignorant runts, resentful that the universe doesn’t revolve around them, resentful of everything fine and noble human beings can be, they they never will because it’s too much work.
You haven’t seen the hate like your gay neighbors have seen it. Now you are. Surprised? Shocked? Just wait until you realize, really realize, that there is no bottom there.
One thing to keep in mind is that race, and racism, have rarely ever acted alone. One of the best points that Phillip Dray makes in his classic history of lynching is that epidemics of lynching often coincided, not just with an expansion of black rights, but with increased labor mobility among white women. So fear of white women, and their independence, as well as fear of sexual competition, all worked in concert. It wasn’t simply "I hate niggers" — it never is. It was "I don’t much like black people, and prices are going up, and I have to let my wife work, so I can survive, and I’m scared she won’t stay with me if she’s not dependent on me and I’d die if she left me for a black guy." Or some such.
Ditto for the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t just racism — it was class also. In the South you had this black middle class that always had to be deferential to the most poorest white person in the world. The prospect of losing that deference, of already being lower than the white aristocracy and now also being lower than a class of blacks too, wreaked havoc.
…
We’ve got governors yelling about secession, and major politicians peddling stories of imminent threats to your family and your children by the very government they are supposedly a part of, and every day the town hall footage just seems to look more and more like a modernized version of the mob attacks against citizens and legislators during old anti-desegregation rallies, and we don’t need to say "sooner or later someone will be shot" because it has already happened, and multiple times, and in truth it never really left us, these last fifty years.
It wasn’t about desegregation. It wasn’t about feminism. It wasn’t about gay rights. Those were just the flashpoints…the excuses. It wasn’t about any of those things. Not ever. Think about the other major event of the last half of the 20th century…the cold war. Think about the Iron Curtain. Think about the Berlin Wall. Think about all those people who were shot, trying to get over it to freedom. Think about what was going through the minds of the people who gave the order to shoot and kill those wall climbers. What this has always been about: The Gutter…resentful, hating everyone who ever managed to rise above them, fearful of being left alone in the gutter, afraid of the day when the walls all fall down and everyone who can leaves them behind and all they’ll have is each other to look at, and to blame.
TRANSCRIPT: Never underestimate the ability of a tiny fringe group of losers to ruin everything. For the past couple of weeks we’ve been laughing heartily at the wacky antics of the "birthers", the far-right goofballs who claim Obama wasn’t really born in Hawaii and therefore the job goes to the runner-up, Miss California Carrie Prejean.
And you know there is nothing you can do to convince these people, you can hand them in person the original birth certificate with the placenta, and have a video of Obama emerging from the womb with Don Ho singing in the background, and they still would not believe it.
"Hey birthers, wanna hear my theory? My theory was that Obama was born in America and you were born with the umbilical cord around your neck. I don’t know what his mother was doing when she was pregnant, but I’m pretty sure your mom was drinking."
Oh, I kid the birthers, there’s one thing that makes me think they could be right. We’re Americans, of course we’re gonna hire an illegal alien to clean-up.
I’m joking, of course. And laughing it off has also been the reaction from Democratic leaders so far. Proving that Democrats never learn. But if you don’t immediately kill errant bulls**t, no matter how ridiculous it can’t grow and thrive like crabgrass or Cirque du Soleil. This birther stuff might be a deluded right-wing obsession, but so was Whitewater and look where that ended up: "What are they gonna do, keep expanding the case until they impeach the President over a blowjob?"
Yes.
I’m telling you that in America there is no idea so patently absurd that it can’t catch on. Have you ever met a Mormon?
Or, more recently, we had the Swift Boat allegations against John Kerry, making him, a genuine war hero, a coward in a race against the guy who never left Texas. It was so stupid Kerry refused to even discuss it and we all know how well that worked out.
Well, you may ask, how something as inane as Whitewater or Swift Boats or the birther-thing gains traction? Well I’ll tell you how, the same way that the story of Elton John almost dying from ingesting too much of Rod Stewart’s sperm gained traction in my high school, dummies talking to other dummies.
It’s just easier now because of the internet. And because our mainstream media does such a lousy job of talking truth to stupid.
Lou Dobbs said recently, "People are asking a lot of questions about the birth certificate." Yes, the same people who want to know where the Sun goes at night and where to put the stamp on their e-mail. And Lou, you’re their new king.
Which is why it is so important that we, the few, the proud, the reality based, attack this stuff before it has a chance to fester and spread. This is not a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It’s sentient beings versus the lizard people.
And it is to the lizard people that I offer this deal, I will show you President Obama’s birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin’s high school diploma.
…because our mainstream media does such a lousy job of talking truth to stupid. Yes. Because they’re not allowed to by their corporate masters. See what happened to Keith Olbermann.
Heroes Of The Culture War #721…Collect The Entire Series!
As Jim Burroway remarked last night on Facebook, I had no idea "Hiking the Appalachian Trail" meant that…
Mark Sanford. Republican. Conservative. Sexual moralist. Fierce defender of Traditional Marriage. Protecting innocent children from the homosexual agenda. Upholding his state’s reputation as a place decent normal families can come visit…
When South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford learned that his state was being advertised as a gay tourism destination, he ordered a Cabinet-level department head “to do the right thing personnel-wise or process-wise to ensure this does not happen again,” Sanford’s spokesman Joel Sawyer told Q-Notes.
Sanford was reacting to U.S. media reports that a subway poster mounted in London, England, during Gay Pride week was announcing, “South Carolina is so gay.”
A state employee who approved the ads was called to a meeting with management and resigned, according to Marion Edmonds, spokesman for the state’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism (PRT).
If the employee broke any rule in the conduct of her job, it was apparently an unwritten one.
…
Governor Sanford mandated that PRT director Chad Prosser will from now on have to personally sign off on all advertising campaigns, Sawyer said.
S.C. Governor Mark Sanford has admitted to being unfaithful to his wife, and stated in his press conference at 2:30 p.m. that this was the reason he was in Argentina for Father’s Day instead of at home with his family.
I don’t want to hear one more word about how horrible it is that teh gays hold their parades every year on Father’s Day. Oh…and his mistress is also married…
Seemingly fighting tears at times, he said the situation holds a certain irony. He said his mistress is also married and has two children.
Good thing we have people like you keeping children safe from all those same-sex households, so they won’t grow up with a twisted set of values.
Another day…another anti-gay culture warrior pops out of the philanderer closet. So…"I believe in traditional marriage" is a euphemism for "I’m cheating on my spouse" is it?
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