But We Must Consider The Feelings Of The Bullies Too…
The problem with directly confronting and dealing with anti-gay bullying is apparently we have to do it in a way that doesn’t make the bullies feel like they’re doing anything wrong…
A spate of teen suicides linked to anti-gay harassment is prompting school officials nationwide to rethink their efforts against bullying – and in the process, risk entanglement in a bitter ideological debate.The conflict: Gay-rights supporters insist that any effective anti-bullying program must include specific components addressing harassment of gay youth. But religious conservatives condemn that approach as an unnecessary and manipulative tactic to sway young people’s views of homosexuality.
It’s a highly emotional topic. Witness the hate mail – from the left and right – directed at Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District while it reviews its anti-bullying strategies in the aftermath of a gay student’s suicide…
What leaps out at you first here is the rote equivocation on the part of this mainstream reporter. Instead of stating what is simply a fact here that religious conservatives insist young people’s views of homosexuals must remain negative, its religious conservatives condemn that approach as an unnecessary and manipulative tactic to sway young people’s views of homosexuality. Never mind that. Note that its hate mail when it comes both from the homophobes and people outraged at what homophobes are doing to helpless children.
Reporters can’t be taking sides after all. Just imagine the national outrage and loathing if the news media was as carefully neutral toward Al Qaeda. We can’t call them terrorists after all, that would be taking sides…
This in a nutshell, is why gay kids are dying. The religious right has successfully convinced everyone that brutalizing gays is an essential part of their religious freedom. Hating Jews might raise a few eyebrows. Hating people of color might get them some frowns of disapproval. But to even question that they are and have been for decades now engaged in a systematic campaign of hate mongering, let alone question their need to hate their gay neighbor is apparently a step too far. And the consequence is that gay kids feel as though they have no friends in the adult world. Their need for love and acceptance in this world is of no more importance then the need of bigots to spit in their faces and look the other way while their kids kick them in the stomach. They are alone.
But if we act aggressively to protect gay kids from bullying we’re taking sides and that just wouldn’t be fair…
But at least four younger teens have killed themselves since July after being targeted by anti-gay bullying, including Justin Aaberg, 15, of Andover, Minn., who hanged himself in his room in July. His friends told his mother he’d been a frequent target of bullies mocking his sexual orientation.Five other students in his Anoka-Hennepin school district have killed themselves in the past year, and gay-rights advocates say bullying may have played a role in two of these cases as well.
Carlson, the district superintendent, lost a teenage daughter of his own in a car crash, and says he shares the anguish of the parents bereaved by suicide. He acknowledges that a controversial district policy calling for “neutrality” in classroom discussions of sexual orientation may have created an impression among some teachers, students and outsiders that school staff wouldn’t intervene aggressively to combat anti-gay bullying.
As we software engineers say, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature…
It was posted at Suicide.org, and it’s from a gay teen, aged 16, named Steven, who attempted suicide. He survived.
It’s brutal, and I would rather no gay kid reads it. Seriously, if you’re a gay teen go look at some of the videos over at Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project. Because it Does get better. You don’t need to be dealing with what I’m about to post here. You have resources. The Trevor Hotline is a 24-hour toll-free suicide prevention line for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning youth. Call them at 1-866-4-U-Trevor (866-488-7386). But seriously…go see It Gets Better. And…I love you. Hang in there. There are adventures waiting for you live them. There are people waiting in your future for you to come into their lives and make them smile and feel like they will always be loved and never be lonely again. Your dreams are waiting for you. Walk proudly into them.
After decades of demonizing gay people and blasting devotion of same-sex couples as fraudulent, Maggie Gallagher suddenly surprises everyone by announcing she thinks she has a heart…
“The suicide of that teen was not only a tragedy it was a crime. The young people who violated laws out of mindless desire to bully or embarrass or whatever the heck kids do this stuff will be prosecuted and probably jailed, I hope. Nothing in the press accounts suggest the kids who did this were motivated by homophobia, and the cruelty of cyberbullying is causing teen suicides among those who are not gay, as well. I do not think the absence of gay marriage is the cause of these tragedies or its presence will resolve them. We can make this a symbol of all our other fights, or we can try to save all our kids, gay and straight, from this kind of ugly and mindless cruelty. My heart goes out to the family of the young man. God bless him and them.” – Maggie Gallagher, commenting on NOM’s blog.
“A group of San Francisco first-graders took an unusual field trip to City Hall on Friday to toss rose petals on their just-married lesbian teacher – putting the public school children at the center of a fierce election battle over the fate of same-sex marriage,” the front page story by Jill Tucker begins.
In fact, the parents who decided to surprise the beloved schoolteacher didn’t put the children “at the center of a fierce election battle” – the Chronicle did for sensationalism.
According to blogger Paul Hogarth in his Oct. 24 dissection of the piece for Beyond Chron and Daily Kos (“SF Chronicle Jeopardizes Marriage Equality”), Tucker said that “the parents who organized the trip actively sought media coverage—and the paper decided on its own that it was ‘news’ enough to deserve front-page treatment.”
Since lesbian weddings were legal then, one can image that the parents might have expected any coverage to go in the back with the other wedding announcements. On Oct. 26 two aggrieved parents sent a letter to the Yes on 8 campaign and the Chronicle complaining about their children “being exploited and used as pawns” by the Yes campaign which downloaded the front page picture from the Chronicle’s website to use in their ads.
Sapphocrat, who blogs at LavenderLiberal, complained vociferously about the Chronicle’s failure to put the field trip into the larger context of the Creative Arts Charter School’s philosophy.
But the damage was done. In an in-depth interview with me after Prop 8 passed, campaign consultant Steve Smith said they were winning back the critical undecided women’s vote until the Yes ad featuring the Chronicle story on the lesbian teacher.
That post by Karen Ocamb centers on the roll of the San Francisco Chronicle in instigating the successful Yes On 8 attack ads which used that teacher’s wedding as a hook for their The Homos Are Invading Your Schools To Turn Your Kids Gay message. But lurking in the background of her story is this simple, brutal fact: Maggie Gallagher and her fellow travelers in the Proposition 8 battle used the love those kids had for their teacher as a knife to cut their teacher’s ring finger off.
But she wants to save kids from mindless cruelty. Right. And Osama Bin Laden wants to save them from terrorist attacks.
More cartoons on The Cartoon Page…and many more in the archives I’ve been neglecting to update for so long…
It is perfectly fine for Mr. McCarthy to forcefully disagree with the rhetoric President Obama uses when discussing national security. Unfortunately, this first excerpt of Mr. McCarthy’s book isn’t an argument against President Obama’s rhetoric, it is a wildly, serially misleading, factually inaccurate account of the rhetoric he uses that better resembles an alternative universe.
It is so easily shown to be false that it ought to exist only in the author’s mind. Unfortunately, this misinformation is being touted by Rush Limbaugh as piercing, Michelle Malkin is recommending it to her readers, and Mark Levin is calling it “thorough” and “cutting edge, and few of their listeners will question the facts the book presents because they foolishly if understandably underestimate the capacity for intellectual negligence perpetrated by these hosts everyday.
They’re fools, but not fooled. At some level, nearly every one of McCarthy’s fanbase know full well he’s not to be trusted with the facts. As we software developers will sometimes ironically say, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”
Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
-Eric Hoffer
How About A Day Of Keeping Your Hands Off The Altar Boys?
As usual, the upcoming Day Of Silence isn’t getting a warm reception everywhere. Like the California Catholic Daily for instance…
Keep your children home Pro-family groups urge parents to keep kids out of school on ‘Day of Silence’ (Editor’s Note: Some schools observe the “Day of Silence” on dates earlier or later than April 16. Parents should check with a particular school to determine if and when the observance is held there.)
TINLEY PARK, Ill. /Christian Newswire/ — On Friday, April 16, thousands of public schools around the country will permit students and teachers to refuse to speak during class during a political event sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) called the Day of Silence, which is intended to increase society’s affirmation of homosexuality and Gender Identity Disorder. A national coalition of pro-family organizations is asking parents to call their children out of school on the Day of Silence if their school permits students and/or teachers to remain silent during class.
Under the guise of anti-bullying, GLSEN’s goal is to have all children come to believe that moral disapproval of homosexual acts constitutes bullying and hatred and to make it socially unacceptable to express their beliefs that homosexual acts are immoral and dangerous.
GLSEN is using publicly funded schools to promote its agenda.
Worried about the children are you?
Bullying gay kids, whether it’s done by other kids or by adults, is a form of child sexual abuse, and I can understand completely why that isn’t regarded as such a big deal in Ratzinger’s house. Every day is a day of silence for children who’ve been sexually abused in Ratzinger’s house…
Willa Sibert Cather said “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” So I’m reading a story in Today’s Deutsche Welle which, after another round of Vatican pronouncements on how defending marriage from same-sex couples is the moral equivalent of protecting the environment, and weeks of reading about American fundamentalism’s disturbing, sickening willingness to incite anti-gay violence in Africa, that reminds me how the more time change the more they stay the same…
For years, a tight lid has been kept on the activities of Germany’s Catholic and Protestant churches during the Holocaust. But now, historians have shown that many clergy actively contributed to the persecution of Jews.
The article gives me a piece of the puzzle I hadn’t fully understood before: that at the beginning Nazi rule, Churches in Germany performed a service for the fascists that nobody else could: identify who had Jewish blood in them.
Pastor Joe Fuiten, who at first seems to be among Washington’s more sane Christian fanatics, concedes that the campaign to reject Referendum 71 has "fallen short of the glory of God." In a statement posted over at the Tacoma News Tribune in response to an editorial (posted in full after the jump), Fuiten blames his former brothers-in-bigotry—Gary Randall and Larry Stickney—for disappointing the Lord and for failing to oppress the gays.
Fuiten dives into a tirade against his former cohort Randall for being exactly what The Stranger exposed Randall to be long ago: a greedy bigot who takes money from naive evangelicals and puts little of their contributions into the campaign. Today, Fuiten writes, "On August 28th, Mr. Randall promised ‘All income is spent directly on printing, mailing, Internet promotion and going forward, media ads and expenses, rather than salaries or consulting fees.’ We were promised ‘Radio ads are running and more are on the way.’ As it turned out, according to the PDC reports, virtually nothing was spent on media ads and precious little on anything else."
What caught my attention reading the right reverend’s rant was he asked something in it I’ve just about Never heard any of these gutter crawling bigots for Jesus ask themselves in the aftermath of any of these anti-gay electoral battles:
Randall claimed the referendum was a miracle from God, but I have to wonder at that. In the Bible, the miracles of the loaves and fishes fed 5,000 with 12 baskets left over. In this "miracle" we didn’t have enough money to fund television ads but the gays had millions.
In the Bible, a miracle raised one who was sick. In this "miracle" our strategy was sick and then died in the election. I suppose such miraculous claims are made to hype up the faithful to work harder and give more. It just seems like the "miracle" that Randall claimed fell a bit short of its biblical counterparts.
Was the referendum an effort blessed by God? Did the Kingdom of God advance because of the effort? I have not heard of people giving their lives to Jesus.
[Emphasis mine…] This is a question I used to hear so often asked by the Baptists I grew up with that seeing it there in that bigot’s rant startled me. I don’t think I’ve ever heard any anti-gay crusader ask that question after gay bashing a few hundred thousand or so of their neighbors at the ballot box. Did people come to Jesus? Were souls saved?
It’s been decades since I’ve heard preachers talk like that. Not just that taking their measure by the goal of winning souls to Christ, but to even question one’s actions in that light in the aftermath of battle…it’s startling in its utter abnormality. I don’t think I’ve ever heard one of these knuckle-draggers question whether or not they did anyone or anything any damn good beyond putting the homos back in their place and seldom even that since The Homosexual Menace usually just dusts itself off and gets right back to attacking the sanctity of marriage and family and morality.
Did we do anyone any damn good? Who’s asking? Yes, it’s true, for the moment same-sex couples aren’t entirely strangers before the law in Washington state. But gay folk and their families…their parents, their sons and daughters, their brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts, and all their friends, and all their loved ones, know that nearly half of the people who bothered to cast a ballot wanted their ring fingers cut off and I have a hunch that making homosexuals into scapegoats for every one of their straight neighbor’s cheap failures of moral character hasn’t done a whole fuck of a lot to bring anyone to Christ.
But it sure has made the sorry lot of you feel so fucking righteous though, hasn’t it? Until all the dust settles and the Homosexual Menace lays quietly on the floor nursing its wounds and you catch a glimpse of something that looks like a human being in it and everything gets quiet for a little while until you can work yourselves back up into a righteous frenzy again, so you don’t have to see that glimpse of something human in the Homosexual Menace again. Did anyone give their life to Jesus? Hahahahaha! Since when did that matter?
I did hear from a non-Christian friend commenting about one of his friends. He wrote, "I noticed the anger building in him, and tried to soften his approach, but he’s fed up. Referendum 71 has turned him against Christians." Neither is a Christian.
Well then I guess they’re not your neighbors then either, are they reverend?
Hello…Alan…? So Laws Banning Same-Sex Marriage Saved Your Life Did They…?
I saw this little news tidbit over at Box Turtle Bulletin. But first, let’s review some testimony about marriage from Alan Chambers, president of the ex-gay therapy group Exodus International. Alan likes to tell people that homosexuals can change. Here he is, giving testimony at a 2004 U.C. Berkeley Debate on Same-Sex Marriage…
My name is Alan Chambers; I am a Christian…
Hello Alan…
…a husband to my wife, Leslie and I also used to be a homosexual. To be clear, I did not choose my same-sex attractions nor did I willfully adopt a homosexual orientation, but my response to both, my behaviors, were a choice.
I remember being a lonely 18 year-old searching for Mr. Right. I remember the ache to have a man hold me, protect me, love me and devote his life to me. I remember thinking I would do anything to fill that insatiable need. I did everything short of praying for my knight in shining armor to show up on my doorstep. I was certain that beyond the shadow of a doubt that the missing piece to my life’s puzzle was going to be found in the man of my dreams.
Nearly 14 years later, I am happy, content and satisfied emotionally, physically, spiritually, relationally and sexually. My process was one of self-determination and willful choice to move beyond the box that enslaves so many wonderful same-sex attracted people. Change is possible and I am living proof. I used to be homosexual and today I am not.
Had same-sex marriage been legal in 1990, I am certain that I would have tested that option. I met men who I wanted to marry. Yet today, as a mature adult with a sober perspective, I realize that I wasn’t searching for a man as much as I was searching for an answer, a drug even, to numb the pain and to make me feel better about who I thought I was. The law kept me from making one, if not many, life-altering mistakes.
Recently, Dennis Teti wrote in "The Weekly Standard", "Governments’ purpose is not to dispense rights but the secure rights created by nature and nature’s God." The current laws saved my life and continue to save the lives of other young people like me who need life saving boundaries.
As a former homosexual, I know that this battle has little, if nothing, to do with marriage, but rather with an absolute need for social approval and acceptance. This experiment with marriage, being promoted by a few, is about silencing inward guilt, pain and the gut-wrenching reality resident within homosexual and lesbian people that their desires will never be completely satisfied in the ways they seek homosexually. Legal endorsement and approval of same-sex marriage will simply guarantee that more lives those of today’s and future children, will be ruined. We already live in a truly tolerant society where the law views us all equally. Race, religion, gender, age or disability affects our personal freedoms. The laws in place that protect marriage do so to protect an institution that has been the bedrock of societies for thousands of years and most importantly to protect children. A two parent, one man-one woman, family is the best environment in which to raise the next generation. We must do all we can to protect this family unit.
Again, I am one of tens of thousands of people whom have successfully changed their sexual orientation. I am grateful for the message of change and for the current laws that saved my life.
BOULDER – A woman accused of stabbing her husband less than two months after their wedding day is now facing second-degree murder charges.
[Traci] Housman told police they were drinking a lot the night of Aug. 2 and started arguing after "John began telling everyone, ‘I’m a gay guy.’"
According to the wife the fight got physical when they got home and she stabbed him in self defense. She’s facing 32 years in jail now. Good thing this guy wasn’t allowed to marry another man, eh Alan?
You’re right Alan…absolutely right. This battle has little, if nothing, to do with marriage, but rather with an absolute need for social approval and acceptance. Right on. It is being promoted by a few, is about silencing inward guilt, pain and the gut-wrenching reality resident within homosexuals. Some homosexuals. The ones that hate themselves and want more then anything else to be heterosexual. Homosexuals like you Alan. As long as there exist some gay people, anywhere, who could accept themselves just as they are, and live happy, contented, decent lives just as they are, and find someone of their own sex to love and cherish and settle down with…then what does that make you?
Silencing inward guilt? Can a man really buy self respect by driving a dagger into the hopes and dreams of his neighbors? Really?
Town hall disruptions around the country have led to some outbreaks of violence. Unions participating in town halls have received death threats. At an event held by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) last week, the threat of violence led her aides to call the police after one attendee dropped a gun.
MSNBC just aired footage of the crowd gathering at the Obama town hall meeting on health care that’s supposed to start later today in New Hampshire and pointed out one man in a group holding protest signs with a gun in a holster on his hip. Apparently not a law officer, but a civilian.
If some nutcase shoots the president this nation will know full well that it was Fox News and all the other tentacles of the republican party noise machine, who incited it. They’ve been screaming for months now that President Obama wasn’t born in America, isn’t legally president of the United States, is secretly a Muslim, is a socialist-fascist tyrant who wants to shovel senior citizens into death camps. This is hatemongering rhetoric that has been winked and nodded at by the party leadership, when they haven’t been excusing it outright. It isn’t just that the extremist fringe has taken over. The party leadership aren’t nutcases, just consumed with bringing down a democratic president. If they have to bring down America in the process too, they’re fine with it. They Know What They’re Doing. They are republicans first and Americans second. If this president is killed by the hysteria they have been cynically whipping up, the nation will hold them responsible. There will Never be another republican president, let alone a republican congress, if the worst happens now.
They need to step back from the edge. Now. Or face the judgement of the nation, and the world, and history.
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.
Those Lovely Little Songs That Cut You To Ribbons Inside
I was flipping channels before bedtime the other day and came across one of those Time/Life CD collection ads. This one was for classic love songs from the 60s and 70s. I saw a few titles and heard a few tunes that struck my interest and so I jotted them down and began looking for them on iTunes and Amazon. Joe Cocker’s You Are So Beautiful… I Just Fall In Love Again by The Carpenters… That kind of thing. What the Germans would call schlager if it was played over there. Schmaltzy, sentimental, florid, some would say maudlin tunes. Perhaps it’s a sign of aging that I get into that more. On the other hand, I got into it a lot actually when I was a kid, though I wasn’t really big on the romance thing at the time. But sentimental, evocative melodies always got to me and I had to buy them, even if I wasn’t really paying attention to the lyrics…
…which was probably because none of that spoke to gay kids back then. Gay was a horrible, dirty, vile perversion and gay men were dangerous sexual psychopaths and I knew I wasn’t any of that. Just that this whole dating thing was nothing I wanted to have anything to do with. Except…except…there was this beautiful guy in my high school I just couldn’t take my eyes off…
The joke is that even in a more accepting time, I would have probably had the same empty love life I had then. And…now. It wasn’t all just that I was gay. I was…well…one of those ugly duckling types. And from the other side of the tracks at that. Low income kid…living with his divorced mom… Clothes don’t quite fit right…and the styles are ten years old. Awkward. Shy. Thin and geeky. Book-wormish. That was me. Some small creative talent you could tell was just waiting to blossom…if only someone would pay attention to him. But that never happened.
One of the songs I caught a hint of on that Time/Life ad was a song I’d heard fragments of all though my adolescence but somehow never bothered with…probably because the singer was a woman singing about her girlhood and I was decidedly not interested in girls back then. But on a lark I went and downloaded it along with the others I’d noted from the ad. It was sung by a lady named Janis Ian, who has a beautiful voice. The song was At 17…
To those of us who know the pain
Of Valentines that never came,
And those whose names were never called
When choosing sides for basketball.
It was long ago and far away
The world was younger than today
And dreams were all they gave for free
To ugly duckling girls like me.
We all play the game and when we dare
To cheat ourselves at solitaire
Inventing lovers on the phone
Repenting other lives unknown
That call and say, come dance with me
And murmur vague obscenities
At ugly girls like me
At seventeen.
I’m sitting here typing this…and I can’t stop crying…
Just So We Don’t Have To Talk About What Louts We Allowed Ourselves To Become
Once upon a time, it may surprise you to learn, the American Puritan set wasn’t so afraid of the natural world. In fact, they embraced it with a passion very much akin to the environmentalists of today. My favorite American landscape painter, Fredric Church, embodied the thinking in those days. His absolutely stunning landscapes were representations not merely of nature’s awesome beauty, but also of the eternal spiritual truths one may behold within. They were revelations on canvas for "…those who have eyes to see and a mind to understand".
In his essay, Church and Luminism: Light for America’s Elect, David C. Huntington says of Church’s painting, The Andes of Ecuador, that it is…
…a joyous paean to a divine universe. The very composition appears to soar in exaltation. All, as it were, becomes a resurrection. The light of the sun expands without effort to touch and bless the whole earth. The atmosphere itself bears the higher message of the painting. In Cotopaxi, however, the sun must suffer for the evils of this world.
Church painted Cotopaxi in 1863 and many understood it to be a parable for the nation in the midst of a bloody civil war. Understand, these were not your trite modern bible story paintings. They were realistic, almost hyper realistic, awesomely beautiful landscapes. Church twice visited South America, drew many sketches in oil on paper of the natural wonders there. As well as any modern day naturalist, Church took pains to make sure that every detail of his landscapes were true to nature. And yet they were created by an artist for a viewing public that took for granted that the natural world and the revelations of the Bible not only did not contradict one another, but did in fact emphasize one another.
Cotopaxi is a geological parable, a proverb drawn from the sacred "volume in stone". The canvas is as charged with the spirit of prophesy as is Bushnell’s discourse. "The word, the meaning and the expression" of the great Andean volcano becomes a "revelation" to "those who have eyes to see and a mind to understand". Cotopaxi is nature’s type for the regeneration of America.
Once upon a time in America, religion was not at war with the natural world. In fact it was the pride of many biblical literalists that Americans held a special regard for the natural sciences. Some even believed that it was here in North America (some said it was Yosemite Valley) that the Garden of Eden had once been located. Much of the 19th century efforts to protect and preserve the natural wonders of America were based in no small measure on these deeply religious people’s intent to venerate that "sacred volume in stone"…
For those who will have remarked the visible absence of an explicitly Christian context in The Personal Narratives and Cosmos of Alexander von Humboldt, works which twice inspired Church to visit South America, McCosh’s treaties would seem to provide a missing link between Church’s religious and Humboldt’s secular approach to natural history. Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation is a dedicated Calvinist’s guide to the "Science of Design". Geology is viewed as a Bible in stone, infallibly inscribed with the story of creation. Like the verbal Bible, known to the generations who lived without the benefit of the new dispensation of science, the physical world is as much, so McCosh tells us, the word of God as is the word recorded by the prophets and the apostles.
And then Darwin came along and scared the steaming shit out of all of them, and they never forgave science for it. It takes courage, and a little humility, to look God in the face and ask a question, because you might just get an answer. Why yes Pope Urban, Gallilao and Copurnicus were right…the earth isn’t at the center of the universe after all. And oh…by the way…neither are you…
After Darwin, America’s religious purists retreated back into a padded room prison of Bible idolatry which has corrupted them ever since. It is not a matter simply, of science verses the Bible. Religion that teaches its faithful to deny any fact that contradicts its dogmas makes liars out of them. First to themselves, then to their neighbors. When lying to yourself becomes a daily necessity, to lie to your neighbors becomes simply a fact of life.
Witness the routine, almost offhanded lying by the modern religious right in their war against their gay and lesbian neighbors. A good recent example is provided by Timothy Kincaid over at Box Turtle Bulletin…
Reports are coming in that some people collecting signatures in opposition to the new marriage law in Maine are doing so under false pretenses (Sun Journal):
Gerard Caron walked into the Auburn Post Office and was met by a woman with a pair of clipboards.
“This petition is against gay marriage and this other petition is to support gay marriage,” she said, according to Caron.
The Poland man said he asked her why there would be a petition to support something that already happened, referring to the petition “in support of” gay marriage.
“She just kinda gave me a little grin and didn’t say anything,” he said.
Then he looked at the two petitions and discovered they were identical, both were supporting the repeal of the same-sex marriage law, Caron said.
There is no way this person honestly made that mistake. It was a lie. A simple, easy, toss-off lie for Jesus. We are doing God’s work and that means we have to lie. Eventually the lying becomes so ingrained in one’s day to day life that it goes unnoticed. What was a pious duty becomes a habit of two-facedness. Thus, during the Dover Pennsylvania Intelligent Design trial, Alan Bonsell, then on the Dover Pennsylvainia school board, may have actually believed it when he told Judge John Jones that he didn’t know who the money came from to purchase copies of Of Pandas and People, a creationist textbook, even though he himself had handed his father the check for $850 to buy them…a check that a former board member had given him, from the proceedings of his church’s fund raiser for the books…
The judge also wanted to know why the money needed to be forwarded to his father, why Buckingham couldn’t have purchased the books himself.
Bonsell stammered.
"I still haven’t heard an answer from you," Jones said.
"He said he’d take it off the table," Bonsell said.
"You knew you were under oath?" Jones asked at one point.
Yeah he knew he was under oath. This is what fundamentalism brings people to. More specifically, it’s what idolatry brings people to. They are not worshiping God the creator. They are worshiping a book. After Ben Stein’s film Expelled came out, National Review columnist John Derbyshire smacked out into the open what his fellow movement conservatives are loath to speak of publicly…
When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise. Individual creationists can be very nice people, though they get nicer the further away they are from the full-time core enterprise of modern creationism at the Discovery Institute. The enterprise as a whole, however, really doesn’t smell good. You notice this when you’re around it a lot. I shall give some more examples in a minute; but what accounts for all this dishonesty and misrepresentation?
My own theory is that the creationists have been morally corrupted by the constant effort of pretending not to be what they are. What they are, as is amply documented, is a pressure group for religious teaching in public schools.
The shifty… That’s it exactly. It’s the shifty. But Derbyshire doesn’t dig deeply enough into the cause. It isn’t simply creationists are pretending not to be a religious pressure group. Morality in the fundamentalist world is a constant struggle to have it both ways.
All this was churning in my thoughts the other day when I came across this post by Marv Knox, Editor of the Baptist Standard. Marv thinks it’s time for Baptists to talk about homosexuality. Here’s what talking looks like to Marv…
I’m not a geneticist or a biologist, so I don’t know if someone is “born homosexual.” I do know many homosexuals who swear they did not choose their orientation and never would choose to feel this way. Still, a direct reading of Scripture says sexual relations are designed by God to be enjoyed between one woman and one man exclusively within the bonds of marriage. While I empathize with the pain and grief of homosexual friends, I believe the Bible says their option is to remain celibate. I do not belittle their suffering, because the sex drive is one of the most powerful forces on Earth, but I also cannot ignore what seems to me the plain teaching of Scripture. Likewise, I do not feel their same-sex yearnings alone comprise sin. Humans are responsible for actions, not feelings. So, we must differentiate between homosexuality and homosexual activity.
There’s lots here to unpack, but if the first thing that strikes you is how shallow this man’s empathy is for his gay "friends" you don’t grasp what it means to talk about…well…anything, in fundamentalist circles. It all comes back to the bible, and ultimately there is no talk because there are no questions. Questions aren’t permitted. Only answers. Does your job bite? Well, Ephesians 6:5-8! Are credit card companies ripping off the public? Well, Psalm 37:21! Origin of the species? Well, Genesis 1:20! Homosexuality? Well, Leviticus 20:13!
Talk about homosexuality? Sure…as long as we already know what the answers will be. Talk to homosexuals? By all means…to save them. You can talk all you want as long as you don’t listen.
Marv empathizes with the pain and grief of his homosexual friends. Some of my best friends are… But he is also perfectly willing to join in the pummeling of them because that’s what the bible tells him he must do. This he regards as friendship. Look at that, if you have the nerve. His "friends" are in pain and grief. Marv is not looking the other way while they suffer. He’s looking right at it, adding his own righteous measure to it, and calling that empathy. He must. The bible calls us to love our neighbor, and to kill the homosexual…
Mark 12:31 And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.
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.
"A direct reading of scripture" says both these things. We must love. We must kill. Therefore, to love the homosexual, is to kill them. Or at least, to make sure they understand that God condemns them.
And let it be said that gay people are killed every year in this country by murderers who claim some measure of justification in the bible’s condemnation of homosexuality. But while actually killing his homosexual neighbor may be more then Marv’s conscience will endure, twisting the knife in their hearts can be seen as a kind of tough love, the moral qualms at seeing yourself doing it washed, washed, washed away in the knowledge that you are simply obeying God’s will. That isn’t you bringing pain and grief into the lives of your homosexual neighbors, it’s the fallen state of humanity…it’s Satan…it’s God’s will…not mine… I am twisting this knife into your heart because God wants me to love you…
Once upon a time the righteous believed that God’s will could be seen in nature’s design. Then one day nature informed them they weren’t the center of the universe and they turned away in anger. But as Jacob Bronowski once said, when you discard the test of fact in what a star is, you discard in it what a human is. The commandments were not written on the stone, but in the stone, and in the light of the sun and stars, and in the songs of birds, and the color of the tiger’s eyes and the fish’s scales, and in our flesh and blood and bones, and in our hearts. To turn away from the natural world is to turn away from your human identity, and everything fine and noble a human being can become. Then you enter the wasteland, where inflicting pain and grief upon your neighbor is regarded as loving them…where the death of love is embraced as the purest essence of it. No Marv, let’s not talk about homosexuality. Let’s talk about how you became so callow. You need to understand why that happened.
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committe held the first-ever hearing on the Uniting American Families Act, which would equalize the status of foreign-born same-sex partners of American citizens. Heterosexual Americans can earn citizenship for their foreign partners by marrying them. Gays, obviously, cannot do that, effectively making a gay American and his or her foreign spouse legal strangers.
Testifying was Shirley Tan, a Fillipino woman who has been with her American partner for 23 years. Together, they are raising twelve-year-old twin boys…
…one of Tan’s children started crying within seconds of the start of her testimony. At the sight of this, Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy stopped the hearing and asked Tan if her son might want to sit in another room, where presumably a Senate staffer would console him for the duration of what was clearly an emotionally fraught experience. For most people, the sight of a 12-year-old boy in tears at the prospect of his mother being deported halfway around the world would invoke some sympathy. Unmoved, however, was Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, ranking minority member of the Committee and the only Republican to bother to attend the hearing. At the sight of the weeping boy, according to a Senate staffer who was at the hearing, Sessions leaned towards one of his aides and sighed, "Enough with the histrionics."
Take Note:
Sessions opposes the bill, stating that it would amount to a federal recognition of same-sex marriage.
I keep drumming on this but it’s a simple fact: Everything we have ever asked for in this fight, from hospital visitation to the repeal of the sodomy laws amounts to recognition of same-sex marriage if you listen to our enemies. This has always been their trump card in Every Fucking battle over any and everything: turn it into a fight over same sex marriage.
So it makes no sense to say that we are wasting energy fighting over same-sex marriage when we could be putting our resources into fighting for anti-discrimination and hate crime laws. Everything is a fight over same-sex marriage. Which is to say, everything is a fight over the legitimacy of our emotional lives. The pieces make up a whole at the center of which is a simple question: do gay people experience life the same way heterosexuals do, or do we, as Orson Scott Card would say, merely play house in hollow mimicry of genuine emotions that heterosexuals feel?
Look at Sessions’ gut level knee jerk response to that kid’s tears again. Histronics. He doesn’t believe they are real. They can’t possibly be. Because that family is only playing house. It isn’t a real family. They don’t have real feelings. It’s just an act they have convinced themselves of. Even the kids. This is the enemy your gay and lesbian neighbors have been facing for decades now.
WICHITA, Kan. – Dr. George Tiller, who remained one of the nation’s few providers of late-term abortions through decades of protests and attacks, was shot and killed Sunday in a church where he was serving as an usher and his wife was in the choir.
The gunman fled, but a 51-year-old suspect was arrested some 170 miles away in suburban Kansas City three hours after the shooting, Wichita Deputy Police Chief Tom Stolz said.
Andrew Sullivan writes that Bill O’Reilly painted a bull’s eye on the doctor during one of his shows. John Aravosis reminds us that President Obama caved recently to right wing demands to bottle up or tone down a report on domestic terrorism. At some point, this naton is going to have to confront its right wing hate mongers and their willing tools. Either that, or let them cow us all into the facist theocracy of their dreams. In the meantime, I am on vacation and I have a new mantra…
…I will not become a misanthrope…I will not become a misanthrope…I will not become a misanthrope…
"[President Barack Obama] says he wants to appoint judges who show empathy, but what does that mean?" said Wendy Long, chief counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network. "Who do you have empathy for?"
…
"Empathy," says Wendy Long, scornfully spitting out the word like an epithet. "What does that mean?" I wonder if it’s possible to answer that question in a way she could ever understand.
No.
This has been another edition of Simple Answers To Simple Questions…
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