As many as eight conservative Episcopal churches in Virginia are expected to announce today that their parishioners have voted to cut their ties with the Episcopal Church. Two are large, historic congregations that minister to the Washington elite and occupy real estate worth a combined $27 million, which could result in a legal battle over who keeps the property.
In a twist, these wealthy American congregations are essentially putting themselves up for adoption by Anglican archbishops in poorer dioceses in Africa, Asia and Latin America who share conservative theological views about homosexuality and the interpretation of Scripture with the breakaway Americans.
“The Episcopalian ship is in trouble,” said the Rev. John Yates, rector of The Falls Church, one of the two large Virginia congregations, where George Washington served on the vestry. “So we’re climbing over the rails down to various little lifeboats. There’s a lifeboat from Bolivia, one from Rwanda, another from Nigeria. Their desire is to help us build a new ship in North America, and design it and get it sailing.”
Together, these Americans and their overseas allies say they intend to form a new American branch that would rival or even supplant the Episcopal Church in the worldwide Anglican Communion, a confederation of national churches that trace their roots to the Church of England and the archbishop of Canterbury.
…
In Virginia, the two large churches are voting on whether they want to report to the powerful archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, an outspoken opponent of homosexuality who supports legislation in his country that would make it illegal for gay men and lesbians to form organizations, read gay literature or eat together in a restaurant.
"I think what upsets people is that Rushdoony [the founder of the Christian Reconstructionist movement] seemed to think – and I’m not sure about this – that a godly society would stone people for the same thing that people in ancient Israel were stoned," he said. "I no longer consider that essential.
"It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things," Ahmanson said. "But I don’t think it’s at all a necessity."
Well…there’s stumbling on such a country, and then there’s bankrolling one yourself. The conservatives can make all the excuses they want for their decision to schism, but the staringly obvious fact is that they are ripping their church apart for nothing more righteous and noble then a bottomless hatred of homosexual people. Nobody is forcing them into the arms of the man who wants to cleanse Nigeria of homosexuals, anymore then anyone was forcing them to take money from a man who still finds it "a little hard to say" that stoning them to death is immoral. They’re going willingly. Joyfully. A ‘lifeboat’ Yates called it, who preaches to his faithful in a state that used to enforce a law forbidding bars and restaurants from serving known homosexuals, and which only last month passed a constitutional amendment that strips same sex couples of all legal rights. But it isn’t enough that the state hates gay people as much as they do. God has to hate them that much too.
When they tell you it’s not about hate, laugh in their faces and point to their new Moses and his promise land, where homosexuals cannot even sit down together in public without facing arrest. Then point to their blood money.
But the president’s performance this week — his refusal to impose any deadlines on Mr. Maliki to start reconciliation talks and break with the militias, and his refusal to give the Pentagon a deadline to stand up an effective Iraqi Army — tells us once again that Mr. Bush does not listen.
That does not bode well for James Baker and the Iraq Study Group, which, according to reports, is likely to call for some pullback of American combat troops along with more aggressive regional diplomacy. Yesterday, Mr. Bush seemed eager to preempt that advice, brushing off suggestions that he talk directly to Iran and insisting that there would be no “graceful exit” from Iraq.
Mr. Bush’s lack of curiosity was well known even before he became president, but as time has gone on and bad news has mounted, that disinterested quality has turned into a stubborn refusal to hear bad news. The country simply cannot afford it any longer. Three years of having Mr. Bush trust only his gut has plunged Iraq into bloody chaos and done untold damage to America. There needs to be an urgent change in policy.
Fat chance.
This administration has been orchestrating a foreign policy disaster of epic proportions, and history will remember both that the president failed to hear the warning bells and that many others failed to ring them loudly enough.
Chocolate Roulade (Christmas Log): Soft Ganache Frosting with a Chocolate Sponge, Meringue Mushrooms, Magnolia Leaves in White Chocolate, Raspberries.
Mini Tartlettes.
Pecan Pie, Lemon Meringue Pie, Orange Chiffon and Chocolate Boston Cream Pie.
Chocolate Truffles.
Homemade, Bittersweet Chocolate Ganache.
Long Stem Strawberries with Dark Chocolate Dipping Sauce.
Warm Macintosh Apple Cobbler With Oatmeal Crumble.
Pumpkin Trifle.
Spiced Pumpkin Mousse with Whipped Cream and Shaved Dark Chocolate.
Look…I don’t begrudge the rich and fabulous their high life. What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours and that’s fine with me. But given the unmitigated failures of this man and his administration, never mind the relentless corruption, all this is just plain obscene. If Bush had only kept America more or less on the same course that Bill Clinton had left it in, with a budget surplus, a good economic outlook for the future, and a decent regard for human rights both here and abroad, I’d offer to wash his fucking dishes. But he’s been a complete disaster. He didn’t earn any of this.
When the president and vice-president are killed by domestic terrorists (of unknown political identity), a radical leftist army calling itself the Progressive Restoration takes over New York City and declares itself the rightful government of the United States. Other blue states officially recognize the legitimacy of the group, thus starting a second civil war. Card’s heroic red-state protagonists, Maj. Reuben "Rube" Malek and Capt. Bartholomew "Cole" Coleman, draw on their Special Ops training to take down the extremist leftists and restore peace to the nation. The action is overshadowed by the novel’s polemical message, which Card tops off with an afterword decrying his own politically-motivated exclusion from various conventions and campuses, the "national media elite" and the divisive excesses of both the right and the left.
It is chilling to note that this man, who detests homosexuals down to the bedrock of his being, wrote the Hugo Award winning novel Ender’s Game, which as it happens, attempts to elicit sympathy for someone who commits genocide (he didn’t really mean to, you see…) against an alien race that just happens to be called throughout the novel "the buggers". Gosh…I guess I shouldn’t read anything into that. And here he is now, thumping a novel that begins with the premise that liberals and progressives intend to start a civil war. You can read the first few chapters online Here. Have a sample, via Alicublog:
"You look pissed off," said Malich.
"Yeah," said Cole. "The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy."
"They won’t be so happy when they see where it leads. They’ve already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders."
"I bet they’re already ‘advising’ Americans that this is where our military ‘aggression’ inevitably leads, so we should take this as a sign that we need to change our policies and retreat from the world."
"And maybe we will," said Malich. "A lot of Americans would love to slam the doors shut and let the rest of the world go hang."
"And if we did," said Cole, "who would save Europe then? How long before they find out that negotiations only work if the other guy is scared of the consequences of not negotiating? Everybody hates America till they need us to liberate them."
"You’re forgetting that nobody cares what Europeans think except a handful of American intellectuals who are every bit as anti-American as the French," said Malich.
What the good guys are fighting for is to get the war stopped before it’s fully started. To enable the country to bind its wounds and end this horrible division, so one of the key decisions I made was having Maj. Reuben "Rube" Malek be a true-blue, red-state soldier, but he’s married to a committed blue-stater who is politically active and involved in Congress but is able to speak the language of both sides. She’s a conciliator. In the novel, her sensibility becomes vital to establishing the nature of the resolution, so that we have a happy ending no matter which camp you’re in.
It’s the same way in the game. When you’re fighting, you’re definitely fighting one side against the other. There are situations that you’re only fighting that way because they’re shooting at you. And all along, you want this sucker to end. It’s a war between brothers, it’s a civil war, but our people never forget that they’re brothers with the people on the other side.
If America becomes a place where the laws of the nation declare that marriage no longer exists – which is what the Massachusetts decision actually does – then our allegiance to America will become zero. We will transfer our allegiance to a society that does protect marriage
So much for binding wounds and brotherhood. But it’s not civil war, or genocide for that matter if you thought it was just a game.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That’s not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
If you read nothing else this weekend, you should read this article by Mark Danner in The New York Review of Books. Reprinted with permission by Tom Engelhardt on his blog, TomDispatch, it’s the best account I’ve seen yet of how that right wing separate reality that Ron Suskind was writing about in that New York Times Magazine article above, dragged this country into the war in Iraq. Read it if for nothing else, to understand that the people responsible for the worst military debacle in U.S. history are Still living in that fantasyland.
…the War of Imagination draped all the complications and contradictions of the history and politics of a war-torn, brutalized society in an ideologically driven vision of a perfect future. Small wonder that its creators, faced with grim reality, have been so loath to part with it. Since the first thrilling night of shock and awe, reported with breathless enthusiasm by the American television networks, the Iraq war has had at least two histories, that of the war itself and that of the American perception of it. As the months passed and the number of attacks in Iraq grew, the gap between those two histories opened wider and wider. And finally, for most Americans, the War of Imagination — built of nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris and administration pronouncements about "spreading democracy" and "greetings with sweets and flowers," and then about "dead-enders" and "turning points," and finally about "staying the course" and refusing "to cut and run" — began, under the pressure of nearly three thousand American dead and perhaps a hundred thousand or more dead Iraqis, to give way to grim reality.
Why was there no plan for what to do After Saddam fell? The only figment of a plan existed at the Pentagon, and that was simply to install Ahmad Chalabi and his exiles as the new Iraqi government. But President Junior vetoed that plan as running too Obviously counter to his professed goal of spreading democracy in the region. It just wouldn’t do to be Seen imposing a new set of rulers on the Iraqi people. So plan A was discarded, and they never came up with a plan B.
And if you’re asking why Junior didn’t notice that there was no plan B, you probably weren’t paying attention back when he was running for president in 2000 either. This entire debacle is what happens when you give a pampered jackass who never learned the value of a dollar and never had to fix anything he ever broke, responsibility for something. His entire skill set in 2000 consisted of knowing how to bully people into giving him what he wanted, and getting them to clean up after the messes he made. That’s all there was on his resume, because that’s all he’s ever had to do in his life to get by. And when the republicans on the Supreme Court short circuited the electoral process to get him in, Bush brought his skill set right into the White House with him. That he’s made an unmitigated mess of everything he could get his hands on in the Executive branch since, plus everything he could bully his rubber stamp republican congress into giving him, should surprise no one. There was no plan B for Iraq, not because of overconfidence, but because in Bush’s entire life failure was always someone else’s fault, and someone else’s problem.
Subtract Iraq from the books, and you have a disaster. There’s the wreckage he’s left in the constitutional balance of powers. There’s the wreckage he’s left of the rule of law. There’s the wreckage in the arts and sciences. There’s the wreckage of the City of New Orleans. We Lost A City On His Term. This Thanksgiving nearly one-hundred thousand refugees from an American City were still living in FEMA trailors. There’s the staggering debt he’s piled up in just six years, dispensing favors to cronies. There’s the wreckage of the health care system. And not just domestically. In Africa, the rates of HIV infection have started to rise as a consequence of Bush’s ideological opposition to condom use. And there is the wreckage of the American political landscape. Republican scorched earth politics have made it nearly impossible for Americans to talk with each other across the isle. The cold war has turned inward. Subtract Iraq and you still have a disaster of mind boggling scale. Factor it back in and you have an unmitigated nightmare. And that nightmare will be running its course long after he is out of office.
We are well down the road toward this dark vision, a wave of threatening instability that stands as the precise opposite of the Bush administration’s "democratic tsunami," the wave of liberalizing revolution that American power, through the invasion of Iraq, was to set loose throughout the Middle East. The chances of accomplishing such change within Iraq itself, let alone across the complicated landscape of the entire region, were always very small. Saddam Hussein and the autocracy he ruled were the product of a dysfunctional politics, not the cause of it. Reform of such a politics was always going to be a task of incalculable complexity.
Faced with such complexity, and determined to have their war and their democratic revolution, the President and his counselors looked away. Confronted with great difficulties, their answer was to blind themselves to them and put their faith in ideology and hope — in the dream of a welcoming landscape, magically transformed. The evangelical vision may have made the sense of threat after September 11 easier to bear but it did not change the risks and the reality on the ground. The result is that the wave of change the President and his officials were so determined to set in course by unleashing American military power may well turn out to be precisely the wave of Islamic radicalism that they had hoped to prevent.
How did it come to this? The blame for it cannot rest entirely on Junior’s stooped shoulders alone. It isn’t as though anyone with half a brain couldn’t see him for what he was back in 2000. There’s talk since the election about how Bush fooled a lot of people. Perhaps. But not the majority of those who voted for him. It is worth bearing in mind that the changes that swept through congress and the statehouses last election day, came largely on very thin margins of victory. In the face of one major Bush administration scandal, one disaster after another after another, these voters simply cannot be taken for chumps. No. They know what they’re voting for.
The politics of resentment has a large constituency. The fact that Al Gore was the more qualified candidate in 2000 counted against him with that voting block. His intelligence and wonkish grasp of the issues was like nails on a blackboard to them. They liked Bush precisely for his know-nothing sense of entitlement, his cheapness of spirit, and all his simmering resentments which were theirs too. He was their ideal man, living the good life they’d always dreamed of. A life of power over others, new toys every day, and the canned respect of doting sycophants who always have to smile at you, and do whatever you tell them, and never ever ever tell you that you’re wrong about anything, because you never are, everyone else is.
The support the Bush republicans have today now rests on nothing more profound then a desire to put a thumb in the eye of everyone who can deal with the world as it is, not as they might wish it to be. The more their imaginary world collapses around them, the more they’ll be blaming the reality based community for it. And when the bills come due, the constituency of resentment will blame everyone else for the mess it made, probably including Bush too.
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq’s civil war worsened Friday as Shiite and Sunni Arabs across the country engaged in retaliatory attacks following coordinated car bombings that killed 215 people in a Shiite slum the previous day.
They’ll say Bush deceived them. He didn’t. He promised them their dreams would come true. They have.
What Would You Do For A Million Dollars? What Would You Do For A Million Votes…?
There’s this ethical question that goes something along the lines of, If someone offered to give you a million dollars to kill some random person, with the certainty that you would get clean away with it…would you do it? There was a time when I would have been shocked to hear people admit that they would.
What I would like to do now is change the terms of the test a little…
If you were running for President of the United States…and someone offered you a million votes in a swing state to kill some completely random person, with complete certainty that your name would never be attached to that murder…would you do it…?
Subject: re: you
From: "P. BELL"
Date: Wed, November 22, 2006 3:39 am
To: pam [at] pamspaulding.com
Why should you get the same privledges as we married couples do? I am not here to judge you. Love the person, hate the sin. But about you and Bush? I pray that law will be passed so you will NEVER be recognized in the US. Your beef will him is because he actually wants us to be more like we were when we first started this country-Chrisitian roots and all. I am not talking about the nutso Chrisitians out there who make a fool of themselves to be seen, I am talking about the people who really have a relationship with God, living the truth.
Did you know that homosexuality is specifically mentioned in the bible? Listed as ABNORMAL, DISCUSTING, and an ABOMANATION. You were not created to be this way, and so when you SLANDER a person who is againist you, mock their beliefs, and try to screw up this nation even more than it is for my children’s future, than you will deal with me.
I am not talking about the nutso Christians… You know this is only going to get worse, now that their White House messiah has lost his rubber stamp congress. And never mind the nutso Christians. Take a long hard look at how Mitt Romney and John McCain are belly flopping into the fundamentalist gutter now that the next presidential election cycle is closing in on us.
The problem the republicans face is that their policies are just not popular. Make the rich, richer…make the poor and middle-class poorer…rape the environment…curtail civil liberties…war, war and more war… There is no majority in America for any of that. So for the past few decades the republicans have been cobbling together a rough coalition of faux libertarians, fascists, Me-First Americans and bigots and with the ascendancy of George Bush, it’s won them elections…barely. Corruption and wild deficit spending cost them enough of the faux libertarians and the Me-Firsts that they lost last time. But make no mistake: the religious right and the rest of the bigot vote stuck with them. They lost the voters who finally got fed up with the spending and the corruption and the war. They loose the bigot vote now, and they’re done for decades to come and they know it.
The point being…don’t assume that as the Gay Bogyman looses it’s power to sway the independent voters that the republicans will stop using it. They can’t take even a middle ground position on gay rights, without loosing the bigot vote.
So republicans running for president in the coming years are going to fall all over themselves in the coming election to prove that they’re bigger gay bashers then the other guys. And in the process, they are going to deliberately rouse the passions of the mob. Because that mob is a vital part of their political base. Even long after it stops winning them elections. Because there is loosing, and there is having the bottom fall out. So they will keep inciting the mob.
And somewhere right here in America, some random gay people are going to die for the sake of giving those campaigning politicians some extra votes they wouldn’t otherwise have gotten. Think about that, the next time you hear one of them talk about Morals, and Values and God and Country.
Galileo was persecuted for revealing what we now know to be the truth regarding Earth’s place in our solar system. Today, the issue is homosexuality, and the persecution is not of one man but of millions. Will Christian leaders once again be on the wrong side of history?
Not all of them. The author Mary Renault once said that politics, like sex, is an expression of the person within. If you are mean and selfish and cruel she said, then that will show up in politics and it will show up in your sex life when what really matters is that you aren’t the sort of person who will behave like that. To that I would only add religion. If you are mean and selfish and cruel it will show up in your religious life, when what really matters is that you aren’t the sort of person who will behave like that. I realize this point of view rubs people who believe in the transforming power of faith the wrong way but it’s been my experience. When contemplating the Eternal, it’s pretty damn hard to separate what’s you, from what is trancendant, and that’s if you’re really trying. For most people, religion is a mirror, and you never know that better then when the discussion turns to homosexuality, and all of a sudden God just seems to agree with every cheapshit prejudice of the believer you’re talking to…
In the USA Today Opinion pages last week, Oliver "Buzz" Thomas, a Baptist minister and author of 10 Things Your Minister Wants to Tell You (But Can’t Because He Needs the Job), tried to reason with his fellow Christians. He might as well have been talking to the wind.
Christianity is not the problem. Christianity has nothing to do with the problem. Christians, just like any other group of random people anywhere, both do and do not accept the homosexual as their neighbor. For the ones that do their faith clarifies and illuminates and sustains that deeply felt need to love their neighbor, and stand with them when they are persecuted. For the ones that do not, Christianity provides an excuse, a cloth they can wrap the rotting core of their hatreds in, so they won’t have to look at it, won’t have to look at what they are becoming because of it. You try to take that cloth away from them and they’ll grip it with a ferociousness the likes of which you’ll never witness anywhere else. Because once that cloth is gone, they have to take responsibility for what they are, for they’ve done.
Last week, U.S. Roman Catholic bishops took the position that homosexual attractions are "disordered" and that gays should live closeted lives of chastity. At the same time, North Carolina’s Baptist State Convention was preparing to investigate churches that are too gay-friendly. Even the more liberal Presbyterian Church (USA) had been planning to put a minister on trial for conducting a marriage ceremony for two women before the charges were dismissed on a technicality. All this brings me back to the question: What if we’re wrong?
Religion’s only real commodity, after all, is its moral authority. Lose that, and we lose our credibility. Lose credibility, and we might as well close up shop.
It’s happened to Christianity before, most famously when we dug in our heels over Galileo’s challenge to the biblical view that the Earth, rather than the sun, was at the center of our solar system. You know the story. Galileo was persecuted for what turned out to be incontrovertibly true. For many, especially in the scientific community, Christianity never recovered.
This time, Christianity is in danger of squandering its moral authority by continuing its pattern of discrimination against gays and lesbians in the face of mounting scientific evidence that sexual orientation has little or nothing to do with choice. To the contrary, whether sexual orientation arises as a result of the mother’s hormones or the child’s brain structure or DNA, it is almost certainly an accident of birth. The point is this: Without choice, there can be no moral culpability.
This is reason’s case. It’s a good case. But it’s the wrong case to make to about half his audience. For the Christians who don’t hate, the evidence of science, and for that matter the lives of their homosexual neighbors, provides further cause to stand with the gay community, and speak out against persecution. But when you try to reason with the ones who just can’t see the people for the homosexuals, you’re talking right past them. Appeals to reason, appeals to the Christian faith, do not reach down to where the hate is. Mr. Thomas is not even talking to half of his audience. He’s talking past them.
For those who have lingering doubts, dust off your Bibles and take a few hours to reacquaint yourself with the teachings of Jesus. You won’t find a single reference to homosexuality. There are teachings on money, lust, revenge, divorce, fasting and a thousand other subjects, but there is nothing on homosexuality. Strange, don’t you think, if being gay were such a moral threat?
On the other hand, Jesus spent a lot of time talking about how we should treat others. First, he made clear it is not our role to judge. It is God’s. ("Judge not lest you be judged." Matthew 7:1) And, second, he commanded us to love other people as we love ourselves.
This is also reason’s case. The rules of evidence have merely changed from the scientific, to the theological. But it is still an appeal to reason.
Scroll down to the comments below his opinion article, and you can see what reasoning with bigots gets you…
Sodom and Gomorrah??? And you are a Baptist Preacher?? Shame on You. What would Jesus do? He’s already done it (Death, burial and resurrection) "Grace"! God’s Word is the same yesterday, today and forever. Choice is everyone’s decision: Heaven or Hell. This is the reason no one fear’s God, is pastors like you that is suppose to be preaching the Truth, are tickling the ears with what the people want to hear. All of us will stand before the Lord’s judgement; you and me included…….Now do your JOB! Their house is on fire….Tell them to come to the Lord for salvation. Talk about discrimination are you discriminating against GOD??? God won’t let you starve, if He Called you to the ministry? Have a good day.
In spite of what you try to "prove" and your smear tactics against good Christian people, Bible-believing Christians will NEVER accept your lies and propaganda for a sinful lifstyle which God Himself in the Bible condemns. Homosexulality is sin and no one is born with it. Your hatred of the church only reflects your own bias. I you want to promote this perversion you have a right to do so, but don’t condemn others who choose to believe the Bible instead of your lies and distortion!
Oliver Thomas seems to believe that disagreement with gays on matters of sexual beahvior is equivalent to persecution and bigotry. Since when is it a crime or a sin to hold certain standards of behavior, or to disagree with liberalized views of sexual conduct? When did Christianity require indulgence of urges strengthened by genetics? Why must Jesus expressly condemn an activity for churches to be justified in opposing it? (If that were the case, Christians would be compelled to accept substance abuse, pedophelia, pornography, and a whole host of other inborn attractions Jesus didn’t mention by name.)
Yes I am disappointed and I’ll get to that in a moment. What Oliver "Buzz" Thomas has forgotten are scriptures such as; [Romans 1:26-27]…
Ah yes…the Some Of My Best Friends Are defense…
I’m no homophobe or gay basher, I have had good friends that are gay, but I never compromised my standing on the word of God to accommodate their feelings. Believe it or not they actually over time appreciated the fact that I stuck firmly with my convictions and didn’t conform to what society sees as tolerance. I accepted them for who they were as people but not their sexual sin and they knew that from the beginning and know it still to this day. If I were to run into them again at the market we’d joyfully catch up on lost time and laugh at college memories.
The, Shoot Your Bible Verses Back At Them Like A Machine Gun approach…
Sexual immorality is explicitly discouraged in the Bible passages below. The full texts of a few representative verses from Paul’s genuine writings are included…
Old Testament
Exo 22:16,17
Deu 22:13-29
New Testament
1Co 6:15-20; 7:1,2
You know that your bodies are parts of the body of Christ. Shall I take a part of Christ’s body and make it part of the body of a prostitute? Impossible! Or perhaps you don’t know that the man who joins his body to a prostitute becomes physically one with her? The scripture says quite plainly, “The two will become one body.” But he who joins himself to the Lord becomes spiritually one with him. Avoid immorality. Any other sin a man commits does not affect his body; but the man who is guilty of sexual immorality sins against his own body. Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and who was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourselves but to God; he bought you for a price. So use your bodies for God’s glory. A man does well not to marry. But because there is so much immorality [from the Greek word porneia, Strongs #4202], every man should have his own wife, and every woman should have her own husband. (TEV)
In the last passage listed above, Paul commends marriage as a means to avoid "fornication" (KJV), "immorality" (NAB, NIV, REB, TEV), "sexual immorality" (NRSV), which is a translation of the Greek word porneia (Strong’s # 4202). That Greek word and its related Greek words porneuo (Strong’s # 4203), pornos (Strong’s # 4205), and ekporneuo (Strong’s #1608) are discouraged throughout the New Testament, as in the following verses:
New Testament
Mat 5:32
Mat 15:19
Mat 19:9
Mar 7:21
Joh 8:41
Act 15:20,29
Act 21:25
Rom 1:29
1Co 5:1,9,10,11
1Co 6:9,13,18
1Co 7:2
1Co 10:8
2Co 12:21
Gal 5:19
Eph 5:3
Col 3:5
1Th 4:3
Heb 12:16
Jude 1:7
Rev 2:14,20,21
Rev 9:21
Rev 14:8
Rev 17:2,4
Rev 18:3,9
Rev 19:2
Homosexual acts are explicitly discouraged in the Bible passages below. The full texts of a few representative verses from Paul’s genuine writings are included.
Old Testament
Lev 18:22-30
Lev 20:13
New Testament
Rom 1:24-27
24 God has given those people over to do the filthy things their hearts desire, and they do shameful things with each other. 25 They exchange the truth about God for a lie; they worship and serve what God has created instead of the Creator himself… 26 Because they do this, God has given them over to shameful passions. Even the women pervert the natural use of their sex by unnatural acts. 27 In the same way the men give up natural sexual relations with women and burn with passion for each other. Men do shameful things with each other, and as a result they bring upon themselves the punishment they deserve for their wrongdoing.
1Co 6:9,10
9 Surely you know that the wicked will not possess God’s Kingdom. Do not fool yourselves; people who are immoral or who worship idols or are adulterers or homosexual perverts [from the Greek word apsenokoites, Strong’s #733] 10 or who steal or are greedy or are drunkards or who slander others or are thieves—none of these will possess God’s Kingdom.
If you bother to look in the bible you will find problems for these kind of people. In God’s world they were not born this way. If I was a gay male I would start looking at women closer and become a member of God’s Church, and If I was a gay female I would look closer at men and become a member of God’s church.
First, Poppycock! Second, I am sick of the Matthew 7:1 argument…
Third, yes Jesus never mentions homosexuality per se. He does, however, discuss adultery several times.
Just another liberal screed trying to downplay religion and lift up their homosexual agenda. There is a reason that homosexuality has been looked down upon by almost every civilization and religion. It’s is against god’s will and nature. Homosexuals can’t reproduce so they have to coopt your children to advance their agenda and the bible is a major stumbling block in their way, so that is why the attacks on religion and the bible.
There’s this old joke about how protestantism represents the ascendancy of Paul over Peter, and protestant fundamentalism represents the ascendancy of Paul over Christ…
Mr. Thomas you do yourself quite a disservice by showing your complete ignorance of scriptures. First of all, the Old Testament law was given to the Jewish nation and it was never expected that non-Jewish individuals would follow these laws. So for you to say that if I apply the verse in Leviticus 18 and therefore I must therefore keep the whole law shows you incompetence in interpreting and applying scripture. Paul explicitly tells the Gentile converts in New Testament that they were under no obligation to keep the law (see Galatians 2 and 3)of the Old Testament.
Sir, I will never make any apologies for my beliefs because there is no need for me to do so since my beliefs can be backed up by the word of God.
Gay, Homosexuals whatever, you trust in the lord, your way is wrong, but he still loves you, while I find you kind of sickening. Ya see, I am not performing according to God’s plan by my feeling as I do.
And for anyone who thinks religion is a cause of prejudice, and not just another one of its excuses…
What I don’t understand is how homosexuality differs from any other congenital birth defect or condition (ie downs syndrome, spina bifida, or any of the myriad of other birth defects). Something goes wrong in the development of the fetus and alters the funtioning of the brain. So while it’s debatable whether or not their behavior is moral or immoral I don’t think there’s any reason why there shouldn’t be research into preventing whatever changes the brain chemistry in the first place. Homosexuality is a disease… we shouldn’t be embracing it… we should be looking to cure/prevent it.
hate the sin, not the sinner.
to know the LORD is to fear…to fear the LORD is to love…to love the LORD is to obey his comandments.
You may believe there is a God and in Jesus, but this is not enough, you must make a formal commitment to them. Remember Jesus says there is no way to the Father except thru me. There must be a vocal (or prayer) some action by you to make a commitment. Your belief only may leave you in a place you do not want to be. You may say I believed, why am I being denied eternal life. For some belief may be enough, but for others there is eternal death. Some of us who claim to be Christians may not receive eternal life (I may be one I do not know). My wife tells me I am to judgemental. Maybe I should listen closer. Anyway go to a bible study and find out why you should be a Christian.
Take the following steps!
In my belief there are two steps to becoming a member of God’s family. Formally accepting Jesus as savior, (I believe Jesus is the Christ the son of the liveing God, I believe in my heart he is Lord and God raised him from the dead).
Be, Baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
You have been forgiven at this point and the Holy Spirit now lives within you, to give you strength and help you in your sinful ways which will require much prayer.
As a straight woman, I don’t understand what it’s like to be attracted to the same sex, but I have had conversations with those who have never felt any other way. However, as a Christian, I do believe in the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality, and fornication, adultery, etc.
Even if I followed your line of logic that some people can’t help it, how far should we extend these "rights"? What’s never addressed is the "gay today, gone tomorrow" crowd, who argue for gay "rights" while only temporarily in gay relationships.
Ann Heche (straight, gay, straight again…Julie Cyphers, married to Lou Diamond Phillips, "married" to Melissa Etheridge, now married to a man again…) the list goes on. If we’re supposed to believe that gay people can’t love anyone of the opposite sex, these actors aren’t very good ambassadors for the cause.
I’m apt to believe that hormones gone awry explain at least some cases of homosexuality. The stereotypically effeminate man or masculine woman, (no bra, short hair, no makeup, etc.) would fall into that category. I have even seen people whose sex is hard to determine at first glance. This of course does not excuse any form of sexual immorality, adultery or fornication, gay or straight.
What those who believe in gay marriage are really asking for is nothing less than acceptance of their behavior. Tolerance already exists. (And please dont bring up Matthew Sheppard – his murderer admitted that he only killed him for money; didn’t even know he was gay!)
If gay "marriages" were allowed, children could be taught in schools that these are perfectly acceptable lifestyles. I don’t claim to know what it’s like to feel "gay", but I also don’t want 6 year olds recruited into the lifestyle.
Mr. Thomas there is NO conclusive scientific evidence that homosexuals are born that way. 60 Minutes did a piece on this very subject a few months ago and these scientific theories were all over the place. (1) Its the mother’s fault — hormonal imbalance or triggers during pregnancy. However, on this program they showed faternal twins (same mother, same hormones) who had different sexual orientations. (2) Its in the DNA: again identical twins who share the same DNA — one is gay the other is heterosexual. (3) And there was the big brother theory which supposedly says the more big brothers a man has the more likely he is to be gay. Again, how do you explain the eldest brother being gay or no brothers being gay?
It was also interesting that NOT ONE of these theories explain lesbianism. According, to the scientist spouting this nonesense, when they viewed the dna of lesbians, looked at the hormonal balance/triggers/whatever of their birth mothers, or the status of their sisters — they could find no genetic reason to explain lesbianism. So where does that leave these scientific theories?
Mr. Thomas you have the absolute right to defend the practices of homosexuality. However, please do not mislead individuals reading your op-ed or other works that this practice can be backed up by science because that IS A LIE.
Finally, if you and others want to embrace homosexuality as a right, privilege, or whatever you see it as — fine, great, bravo, and more power to you. However, please do not lecture to me or tell me that I need to or will need to apologize to anyone because of my belief in God’s word.
The Scripture also says, "Fornicators and adulterers God will judge." Jesus doesn’t address homosexuality, because in the world of the Hebrew, that’s a "no brainer." If God condemned it as an abomination, and if He is not the author of sin or evil, it follows that He stands against it now.
With the author’s convoluted logic, God will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.
We, like the apostle Paul, should determine in our minds to know nothing save Jesus Christ and him crucified [1]; but what does this mean? For Paul, and every preacher, preaching Christ crucified is condemning, among many things, homosexuality. How do I know that?
In 1 Corinthians 6:9, Paul did not only condemn homosexuality in general, but got REALLY SPECIFIC by naming the “effeminate” or catamite (PASSIVE homosexual partner) and “abusers of themselves with mankind” or sodomite (ACTIVE homosexual partner). Who can misunderstand and misapply Paul’s word under inspiration?
Obviously, Mr. Thomas is tickling many ears having turned aside unto fables [2], which is great for crowd seekers because the world hears them [3]. Mr. Thomas, you need to remember, “Let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment” [4]. Do your homework. Preach the word. Have backbone. Quit tickling ears.
I could easily address your abuse of other points e.g. Leviticus, Jesus & love, Mt. 7:1; but I want to keep this response short to be read by all.
It’s the truth, not fables, that makes men free [5].
[1] 1 Corinthians 2:2
[2] 2 Timothy 4:3-4
[3] 1 John 4:5
[4] James 3:1 NKJV
[5] John 8:32
We find ourselves living in a society, where the moral climate is at it’s lowest point (2 timothy 3:1-5). There are several million people on this plantet, Earth, who still have a love for God and His Word. True lovers of God’s Word are now in the minority but they will be vindicate and so will Almighty God and His Son Jesus Christ. The family arrangement will perish if They do not bring an end to the selfish greed and depraved sexual appetite of those, who "claim" that God made them that way!!
How sad that a so called "minister of God" feels justified to support this "lifestyle" that the Word of God clearly condemns. If a heterosexual couple who are not married is condemned, how much more so a homosexual one!! God is not one to be mock, whatever a man sows, he will reap-Galatians 6:7.
Any religion claiming to be christain should have the courage to stand up for Almighty God and His Son Jesus Christ and not allow the moral climate to shape their views!!
The following individuals did not allow the world to shape their moral stand or views.
Foremost Jesus Christ, Moses, Abraham, Apostle Paul just to name a few.
If we are ashamed of God, he will be ashamed of us and not acknowledge us. That is a dangerous position to be in. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God-Hebrews 10:31
Another Some Of My Best Friends Are…
A few thoughts for you and others to consider. 1)Your intentional selective Scipture usage is interesting in that this is exactly what you usually accuse the "bible beleivers" of doing. There are much more difficult passages in the Bible for you and others who agree with you to consider. I know you are aware of them, but instead of intelligent, informed dialogue, you chose selective banter that only seduces the uninformed. Jesus certainly didn’t speak on homosexuality, but that is only an argument from silence, which isn’t very convincing. If your reliance on science is so strong, maybe you ought to investigate the false claims of scientist throughout history and the damage they have caused as well. Investigate the claim that five years from now nearly half of what is claimed to be scientific fact will be disproved.
In Romans, Paul writes of the corrupted nature of man from birth. The idea that every one of us is predisposed to sin. The mere discovery of something that the Bible has claimed for centuries doesn’t change what sin is nor does it change our response to it. I do believe that homosexuality is outside of God’s desire for His creation. I also believe that Christ calls us to compassion for those that disagree with me. I am a local pastor with homosexual friends and a fellow staff member who struggles with homosexuality. He is one of my best friends. Can anyone speak the truth on the matter and have compassion without trying to make a political point? You are intentional in what you write and don’t write. To me your silence speaks so loud it is hard to read your words.
I give an "amen" to the person who reminded everyone that just because Christians view homosexuality as a sin, they are not "persecuters." Be reasonable! I am a Christian and do not for a minute think I will be able to understand the difficult trial of same-sex attraction. However, we are all sinners, we all have our individual hardships, temptations, lusts etc. For homosexuals, if they feel this is not a choice, then maybe they should focus not on the cause, but how to live in accordance with God’s law. I am not Catholic, and they certainly are not the moutpiece for all Christian religions, however I applaud them for standing firm with Biblical doctrine and not be swept up in what pop culture wants to feel is ok. The bottom line is if we want to be happy, we must obey God’s commandments. We cannot treat the commandments like a buffet, picking and choosing what is easiest for us to obey, and expect to feel satisfied. Wickedness never was happiness.
Here we go again. Pick out the parts you don’t like, inflate the ones you do and call it scholastic whatever. Agchhh. That’s an expression of disgust combined with frustration. It is because these so called "Men of God" lack the courage to apply the important spirit of the scripture, while amplifying the value of the "spices and mints", so to speak. It is in-obvious to these particular brand of "Pharise opaques", the ones who justify homosexual lust-gratification, that is, that the overall meaning and lesson in the Bible is the negation of the animal, or in more modern terms, carnal, in human nature. While they trumpet restraint in wrath, so long as it is not against their particular "natural-ness". While they limit lust, so long as it is not against children, yet. While they desparge greed, against the lastest poster children for oppression. And while they consult the latest trend, without thinking, of course, as to who or what they should be "against" in any particular month, week, day or hour, they do seem to forget that Christ told them that there is a Ghenna for those who do not seek him. If they believe they can do so while making "love" to the same sex, or children or animals or themselves or money or whatever, what person can argue to change them? If they believe that there is no righteous wrath, no one, not even Christ himself as to His correction of the Pharises, can turn them from their self directedness. They are what they are. Rationalized animals, the carnal self-purified and the makers of their own god and religion. It is the same as it has always been, with the only change being the technical mass media distribution of so polarized a view by so many that have been inculcated into the "sacredness" of our carnal roots. These are the same that would have pronounce "sin" upon Christ for whipping the money changers from the Temple. They never would have guessed they were defining "sin" upon the ultimate definer, of them, and, lest we forget, us.
I hear it all the time: "Wishful thinking" presented as fact – that homosexuals cannot help themselves; that they are born that way and that their is "scientific" evidence indicating a genetic basis. On the contrary, there is NO solid scientific evidence and what little there is has been effectively refuted. Why also doesn’t the liberal community want us to know what EX-GAYs have to say and how they fell into the lifestyle? Most will tell you that they were subjected to some form of dramatic emotional trauma (ie., parental or peer rejection and sometimes molestation) that caused them to go into a kind of self-defense withdrawal. One man said his dad always put incredible pressure on him as a youth to excel in sports…but he had no interest. Eventually his dad (and other boys) essentially rejected him, calling him a wimp. He withdrew and found relative safety in the company of his mother, sister and other girls that seemed to understand his emotions. He longed for the love and acceptance of his father and eventually tried to substitute other men for it. He also stated that the gay lifestyle means hundreds of gay partners but ultimately the lifestyle is empty, lonely and unfullfilling. His journey out was not easy because its emotional and mental…but there is a way out. He and many others are living proof.
The idea that got Galileo in trouble with the Roman church, that the earth is the center of the Universe, was from Aristotle and not the Bible. Such human philosophy invaded the church and was partly responsible for the Reformation. This makes the author’s main premise that science is superior to the Bible in this case null and void. After this absurdity he then tries replace biblical teachings again with human philosophy. This would recreate the same error he was trying to condemn. Anyone who thinks this article has any merit needs to take a logic course.
Now the bottom line is this? Should we change every law that exists to accomodate a group of people who are living outside what is considered the legal bonds of marriage. NO. We wouldn’t do if for other special interest groups. If they want to live together as companions and partners, then finding a way to make it work for them is part of the burden of choosing that lifestyle. Because whether they like it or not, homosexuality may not be a choice; maybe it is something that happens at birth, but deciding to live a gay lifestyle is a choice. If being gay wasn’t a bad thing, then why do so many homosexuals say that they tried to live a heterosexual lifestyle; made every attempt to live straight? Why did they not tell anyone when they were very young and first had those strange attractions to the wrong sex? Because something within their own PERSONAL moral structure let them know it was wrong. The apostle Paul said in Romans that "nature itself lets us know there is a God." Nature also lets us know the lifestyle that God ordained for man to live. You rarely see two male dogs trying to mate…they would kill each other.
Anyway. I love you. Whether you are gay, lesbian, straight, Pentecostal, Church of Christ, Church of God, Mormon, Seventh Day Adventist, Catholic: I love you because I love HIM, and he has allowed me the capacity to love you all.
Now one last word for "Buzz." SHUT UP!
If I am travelling South on I-75 and I approach an exit from the flowing highway I must choose to leave it. But my journey has begun with me travelling south on I-75.
If I am alive I am on a heterosexual journey. I do not need to choose to be heterosexual, I am. I must however choose to exit that journey.
Homosexuality is a choice, and a sin. And the fact that I don’t choose to be hetrosxual does not disprove homosexuality’s status as a choice.
I believe in compassion and acceptance, but not absolution. Those who are debating the scripture are demonstrating their lack of understanding of a very complex issue regarding God’s law as reveled across time. The Bible does teach against homosexuality from a variety of perspectives, and does not contradict itself in doing so.
The scientific community says that alcoholism is in the genes and murderers have a gene that makes them predisposed to kill. Let’s just say that everything is OK. It sure makes it hard to figure out what a morally pure life is. I guess you have all the answers and we have had it wrong for years.
When it comes to tolerance, where is yours?
The problem with this very old tactic is that Mr. Thomas discredits the Bible in order to discredit Leviticus, then appeals to that very same Bible (presumably Matthew, Mark etc.) in order to support his position on homosexuality. This "Cafeteria" approach to Scripture supposes that some Scripture is wrong while other scripture is right. Thus Scripture is only inspired in spots, a so-called "Dalmatian theology". The problem with this faulty approach is the question of who decides what parts of scripture are inspired or right and what parts are wrong. In his article, Mr. Thomas has appointed himself the supreme determiner of Biblical rightness. Thank you, but I will let Scripture determine that for itself.
Mr. Thomas if you want to condone homosexuality that is your God given right but don‘t “try“ to change “The Word of God“ to fit your beliefs? The Bible says we were all born sinners.
It is irrelevant that a person is born gay. Your sin may have included homosexuality etc.., mine included lying, fornication etc… Thank God I had parents and “The Word of God” to give me standards to live by or I would still be a liar today. The problem is, who is teaching someone who is born gay, that it is wrong. Someone needs to teach a pedophile, yes, you may be attracted to little children, but it is wrong. I don’t believe that a person wakes up one morning and yawns and says “I think I will be attracted to little children today”. No, they were born that way. Does that make it alright? Are there any studies being conducted on that subject?
There is good news for the homosexual, the pedophile, and the liar you don’t have to be.
To every person who has made up their minds to live life their own way and not according to “Godly Principles”. There is no need to argue. It is your God given choice.
Ironically, homosexuality is one area where religion and science agree. Contrary to what the author states, a close reading of scientific literature shows there is NO scientific PROOF that homosexuality is innate, genetic, inborn or biologically pre-determined (scientists are backing off from the gay gene theory). There is ample "common sense" evidence that homosexuality is, however, very harmful to people involved, witness the AIDS crisis and numerous diseases such as anal cancer for which homosexual men are at greater risk.
No one is born homosexual. With that being said, no one chooses to be homosexual either. It is like other psychologcial issues, a matter of development, beginning with childhood. But no one has to be homosexual. I know this because I am a man who left homosexuality. I am not just talking about behavior here, but patterns of sexual response and fantasy. I can’t say it was easy but it can be done. A truly liberal and tolerant approach would make people aware of this alternative. This is the message that needs to get out to people yet is rarely, if ever, heard.
With all due respect, I believe you’ve been "bonging the yahe"( When religion loses its crdibility 11/20/06). Comparing Galileo with gay rights is an absurd straw man argument. You want to talk persecution?… try being a devoted follower of Jesus in secularized American society today. As for Christianity’s moral authority, try admonishing anyone by quoting from the Bible…you might get a blank stare and a laugh. I don’t know where you are getting your "fact" and "truth", but I am not aware of a "gay gene" being discovered…scientists who have spent years studying this issue, simply do not know. Sure there may be a predetermination at an early age, but an argument from nature is flawed, because as everyone (not just Christians, Jews and Muslims) knows, nature is flawed. As for your quoting from Scripture, the Law ( for followers of the Christ) is fulfilled in Jesus…so we are not under the law, but not free of moral living (Acts 15), including sexual morals in the context of Hebrew Biblical morality. Of course,if you are not a follower of Christ, this doesn’t apply to you and you can ignore it like you ignore the letters of St. Paul, etc. Unfortunately your article, to me, supports what the " Religious Right" has been saying about a " Homosexual Agenda"…biased judgemental statements without hard scientific proof used to attack the demonized " narrow-minded, Bible thumping Christians", etc. I don’t think this email has much of a chance of being published in USA Today, but I thought I would try and check your open mind.
If Mr. Thomas has proved anything from his essay, it is his complete ignorance of the Bible. There is no text in scripture stating that the Earth is the center of the solar system; the Bible makes no mention of a solar system, and never states that planets go around anything. Venus, Mars, and Jupiter are never discussed. Galileo was persecuted by the mediaeval Roman Catholic Church, an organization dominated by tradition, not scripture; an organization that burned many people alive for reading the Bible or translating it into the language of the common people. Going on, eating catfish might have been forbidden by Leviticus, but there was no death penalty stated for this offence, or for many others. Premarital sex might have been forbidden, but if the two were single, the penalty was not death, but rather marriage forthwith to the partner in question. Mr Thomas totally fails to catch the basic distinction made by the New Testament regarding ceremonial laws specially applicable to the Jewish nation at that time (cf Acts 15), and moral laws which applied to all humans for all time (see Jesus’ statements, Matthew 5, the Sermon on the Mount). Jumping with Mr Thomas to Genesis, it is stated that everything that God made was good. This statement was made at Creation, and not after the Fall or the entrance of sin into the world. Mr Thomas and his logic would imply that rapists and child molesters are good, since God made them. Traveling to Romans 1 or any other references by Paul to homosexuality, there is absolutely no hint that minors are being discussed by Paul; it is another wishful dream by the august reverend to try to prove his desired conclusion. Homosexuality, with no special qualifications, bells, or whistles, is held forth as a prime example of the moral depravity of the Gentile world, and all who engaged in that sin or many other sins listed there, at the conclusion of the chapter are declared to be worthy of death. Mr Thomas begs to argue that Jesus never mentions homosexuality. Nor does he mention rape. Guess Jesus thought that rape was a very trivial thing. Get a brain. Garbage in, garbage out.
I have no doubt homosexual desire is genetic. I also have no doubt that if medical science bothered to look, it would find genetic links to all of mankind’s evil desires. God created a perfect man and woman, but their own choice to sin condemned their offspring to be imperfect. The obvious way that this imperfection is passed down is through the now-imperfect genetic code.
A complete reading of the Bible leaves no doubt that God is Love, but He is also Perfectly Just. Jesus was compasionate to sinners, but He left no doubt that sin keeps man separated from God, and that only by believing in His Perfect Sacrifice could man be saved from God’s Judgement. To quote (completely) from the Gospel when the adulerous woman was accused: "…neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more."
There is much more…Thomas’ opinion piece really opened up the sewers…but in a way it was all worth it, for this one response, from a reader named David. Here’s the bedrock of pain, right here. Here’s what this piss ignorant worthless useless sickening prejudice does to people, to families, to the bond between parent and child. Here is why I am not a Christian. I simply cannot follow Jesus where I’m pretty sure he would want me to go. He would say I need to forgive, and I cannot. This is why:
I thought some might be interested in what happened when I sent this article to my Christian family. First, the response from my older sister. Second, the response from my dad.
David,
Do you not realize how painful it is to receive something like this from you? Your lifestyle choice is your choice; I don’t agree with it, but it is your choice. In fact, I am very sad for you. You will never experience the joy of marriage, or the joy of becoming a father. The family name, Peery, has ended with our generation. You have lost your excitement for living the Christian life. Need I remind you that you were the head of the Christian club in high school; started the Christian group, the Core, at Santa Clara; worked at Hume Lake Christian Camp; and worked at a Baptist Church. Were all these Christian activities a cover-up for your true soul?! I’m not sure what turned you away from living the Christian lifestyle. If I recall correctly, you even were considering becoming a youth pastor. When I listen to my Christian music on my way to work many days I nearly come to tears when I think about you when listening to many of the words in the songs. I wonder how the evil one took hold of you, but I will never lose the faith that you will return and come to your senses. I only hope it is not too late. I think of our very own Uncle Jim and how he lost his life over making the decisions he did. I don’t know how, knowing that, you could repeat the cycle of this.
It’s not me who has to live your life; it is you and you alone. I don’t send you articles on how morally correct it is to be heterosexual; therefore, I don’t appreicate you sending me articles on how morally correct it is to be homosexual.
I will continue to pray for you in hopes that you might change. Until then, I am very sad for you.
Sarah
Hi David,
For yourself, don’t you think that homosexuality was a choice you made?
I’ve read up on a lot of scientific claims about homosexuality. The arguments I’ve read are weak at best. This article doesn’t cite specific scientific claims. If you want to, we can discuss the various studies.
Environment and family life are big factors too. Relationships with fathers are a huge factor. Were there people who influenced you?
Sodomy is discouraged all over the Bible; but the Corinthian church had some who came out of that lifestyle:
"Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God." I Cor 6:9-11
Homosexual sin is like heterosexual sin is just like a lot of other sins. Jesus can forgive it all if you ask for forgiveness. Let Jesus do the changing.
You are my son. I am proud of many things you do. I love you. God has used you in the past and wants to do great things through you in the future. The homosexual thing is not the real you. The scars will be there for a long time but it doesn’t have to define you. I hope we can talk more about it in the future.
Jesus said, "Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne." Rev. 3:19-21. Jesus won’t barge in; he waits outside until the guy inside opens the door.
I won’t put you on the spot this Thanksgiving. You’re welcome here anytime. If you want to discuss more then or at another time, let me know.
Love,
Dad
Love. There is no knife that cuts like the one families wield upon each other. Strangers can beat the living crap out of you, can take your life away from you. But only family can chew your heart up, and spit it back out again in shreds. Love. Look at it. And if you are brave, consider that this is Exactly what the gutter means by it. If you’re not bleeding, then we’re not loving you enough…
Picture Minister Thomas trying to patiently reason with David’s father…a man who is slowly twisting the knife in his son’s gut out of…oh not hate surely, but Love. The problem is that you even think you can reason with a man who would do that to his own son, after having absolutely convinced himself of his own compassion in doing it. The more the kid hurts, the more Dad is loving him. And it is especially useless to reason with such as him from religious faith. All this man’s religion ever did for him, was take away his brakes. That was probably all he needed it for. Otherwise, how else could he put the knife in his son’s heart and still look at himself in the bathroom mirror every morning? In the end, Blaise Pascal said it best when he remarked that "men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." But the religious conviction did not put the evil there. It was merely waiting for something to come along, and give it purpose.
To appeal to someone’s better nature, they first have to have one. And now you know why you can’t bring reason to a knife fight.
On October 29 the state of Tennessee essentially washed its hands of the question of whether or not Love In Action needed to be licensed in order to treat mentally ill "clients". Tennessee agreed to pay LIA’s legal bills in exchange for their dropping a lawsuit that claimed they had a religious exemption from any department of health oversight. Tennessee is accepting the word of a man who said God could make him see blue walls were there were yellow, that he has not, and will not be dispensing drugs to his "clients".
The fact of their forcing ex-gay therapy on unwilling gay teenagers, which was what started the public outcry over LIA practices, was never at issue, unfortunately. At least one gay teen has publicly accused the ministry of forcing him to take Prozac, which he did not have a doctor’s prescription for. LIA denied it, and apparently Tennessee never performed more then a perfunctory investigation of the allegations that they were giving clients drugs, let alone that they were forcing them on unwilling gay teenagers as part of their therapy to cure them of their homosexuality. What their dangerous mix of religion and invasive psyco-therapy does to adolescents, apart from any issue of drugging them, was never even looked into. So the abuse of gay youth in Memphis will continue. Probably until some catastrophe happens, at which point everyone will be wondering why nothing was done sooner…
A former LIA "client" and now booster takes issue with this post of mine. Here’s my reply…
—–
> I, having been a client at LIA (March, 2005), would like to know some of
> Lance’s horrendous experiences caused by his time there.
A client were you? Swell. You know the difference between being a "client" and being an inmate…right? There’s the beginning of the horror right there buddy, and what’s disturbing right off the bat about your comment is that you seem utterly unable to even notice it. So you my friend, are part of the horror.
Those kids are not in there by choice. Most of them had either made peace with their sexual nature, or were at least beginning to, when they were dragged into LIA by parents terrified from the cesspool of anti-gay propaganda that the religious right vomits into the public discourse, much of which John happily repeats. Joe Stark was on Pat Robertson’s 700 club, mindlessly babbling that gays only live an average of 36 years. Where the hell did he hear that claptrap, if it wasn’t John? Even Paul Cameron isn’t claiming 36 years. But John doesn’t seem to care where he gets his facts on homosexuality, as long as they’re sufficently ugly.
For months at least, if not longer, John was linking his LIA website to a group called The International Organization Of Heterosexual Rights, and using their bogus statistics to paint a picture of homosexuals and homosexuality that was relentlessly perverse and disgusting. After community activists started pointing out how unChristianly it was to be linking to a hate site, John pulled the link. But he kept their bogus fact sheet online. So at least for a time (I haven’t been there recently), people visiting his site were still being given this crap from a hate group…only they weren’t being told who the source of this information was. Dig it. John responded to the accusation that he was spreading hate rhetoric, not by taking it down, but by making it harder for people to discover that the facts on his website were coming from a hate group.
I think part of the reason he does it is because he knows that it frightens parents, and that’s his last best source of clients now: Helpless gay teens who cannot legally refuse his dangerous blend of anti-gay religiosity and junk psychology. As more and more comes to light about the practices of these ex-gay ministries, and their spectacular rates of failure, fewer and fewer grown adults are checking in. So the kids, who cannot legally refuse, are his last best source of income, which he needs to keep the operation afloat. Never mind what it does to kids, to their parents, to the bond between parent and child…John’s on a mission from God, and Gods don’t feel shame.
Imagine a teen who is left handed. Imagine they’re told that their left-handedness is unnatural, perverse, a God condemned abomination. Imagine sending that kid to a place that claims to be able to treat left-handedness through prayer and counseling, and establishing a closer relationship to Jesus. They claim that left-handedness is a form of addiction, that using your left hand to do things like writing is no different from people who use their hands to rob, assault, and murder, people and animals. Imagine that left-handed kid being forced to sit next to grown men who’ve used their hands to do all manner of cruel and perverse things to animals and humans alike, while the staff of this treatment facility is telling him, perhaps not so much in word but sure as hell in deed, that he’s no better then those men. Someday, his desire to use his left hand instead of the God ordained right hand, will lead him into all manner of brutish, deviant, ugly acts.
Imagine this kid trying desperately…trying, trying with all his heart and soul to pray away his left handedness. But he can’t…he’s left handed. And every time he feels the urge to use his left hand, it only serves to remind him that he doesn’t love God enough, that he’s headed for the same life that all those robbers, and murderers live. He’s going to become just like them one day…
What does that sort of thing to to a kid? Well we all know what it does to an adult because it happened. Does the name Jack McIntyre ring any bells? Or has John finally erased all memory of Love In Action’s bloody birth? McIntyre was one of LIA’s first clients (I say client because he went in of his own accord…a choice of free will that neither Lance nor Zach nor any kid in the horrifically misnamed Refuge "program" are allowed) A few months ago I finally stumbled on a copy of his suicide note. You want to know what the horror is my friend? Well…take a peek into the Pit then…
TO: Those left with the question, why did he do it?
I loved life and all that it had to offer to me each day.
I loved my job and my clients.
I loved my friends and thank God for each one of them.
I loved my little house and would not have wanted to live anywhere else.
All this looks like the perfect life. Yet, I must not let this shadow the problem that I have in my life. At one time, not to long ago, that was all that really mattered in my life. What pleased me and how it affected me. Now that I have turned my life over to the Lord and the changes came one by one, the above statements mean much more to me. I am pleased that I can say those statements with all the truth and honesty that is within me.
However, to make this short, I must confess that there were things in my life that I could not gain control, no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed.
It is this constant failure that has made me make the decision to terminate my life here on earth. I do this with the complete understanding that life is not mine to take. I know that it is against the teachings of our Creator. No man is without sin, this I realise. I will cleanse myself of all sin as taught to me by His word. Yet, I must face my Lord with the sin of murder. I believe that Jesus died and paid the price for that sin too. I know that I shall have everlasting life with Him by departing this world now, no matter how much I love it, my friends, my family. If I remain it could possibly allow the devil the opportunity to lead me away from the Lord. I love life, but my love for the Lord is so much greater, the choice is simple.
I am not asking you to sanction my actions. That is not the purpose of my writing this at all. It is for the express purpose of allowing each one who will read this to know how I weighed things in my own mind. I don’t want you to think that, ‘I alone,’ should have been the perfect person, without sin. That would be ridiculous! It is the continuing lack of strength and/or obedience and/or will power to cast aside certain sins. To continually go before God and ask forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and all He stands for in my life.
Please know that I am extremely happy to be going to the Lord. He knows my heart and knows how much I love life and and all that it has to offer. But, He knows that I love Him more. That is why I believe that I will be with Him in Paradise.
I regret if I bring sorrow to those that are left behind. If you get your hearts in tune with the word of God you will be as happy about my ‘transfer’ as I am. I also hope that this answers sufficiently the question, why?
May God Have Mercy On My Soul.
A Brother & A Friend.
No. May God have mercy on yours, because I don’t have any to spare for the likes of you. Jack McIntyre killed himself, rather then make one more promise to God he knew he could not keep. Bad enough John Smid is doing this to grown adults. Now he’s dragging kids into his little psych room, where he’ll sit them down right next to grown men who have engaged in the most extreme sexual perversions imaginable, and let them know that they’re just like those men are, that their sexual orientation will lead them into all of that and worse. This is what John is subjecting gay teenagers to. He takes in kids who are more or less fine with their sexual orientation, or getting there, and puts his crowbar to their self esteem and tries systematically to utterly destroy their deepest sense of their inner selves, to make them see their sexual nature as ugly and perverse and foul, and that only a relationship with Jesus can save them from their homosexuality. But it won’t. They’re Gay. What happens is that they loose their faith, and often enough, loose their family too. But as long as the checks clear, John doesn’t seem to mind.
> I speak on behalf of LIA, not only because I believe in what they’re doing, but also
> because I care a great deal about John Smid and the LIA staff.
If you care about any of them then you need to do whatever you can to convince them to stop tormenting gay people, and particularly gay teens who are content with who they are. John is trying his best to gut their ability to ever feel good about themselves as gay people, and ever experience what it is to love and be loved, body and soul. He is systematically trying to put as much fear and loathing into teens and adults of their sexual nature so that they’ll never be able to love wholeheartedly without feeling ashamed and dirty. To assault someones sense of self to the point where they cannot see one of this life’s most wonderful, beautiful, amazing things as anything other then ugly and perverse is a crime against them of absolutely staggering magnitude. To do that to children is a crime against humanity.
> Zach Stark’s opinion of "reparative therapy," as it’s being dubbed, variegated a
> great deal after his experience at LIA. "Love In Action has been misrepresented
> and what I have posted in my blogs has been taken out of perpective and context,"
> as Zach is quoted at 365gay.com on 8-1-05. My question to Lance is this: What
> specific occurrences at LIA made your experience so horrendous?
As for Zach…I’m a little fuzzy about how you expect a kid who was forced into ex-gay therapy against his will, and who said in an update to that blog post you’re quoting from there that he could only post blogs his father approved of, to speak out publicly against his treatment. Actually, I’m being sarcastic. You know damn well he couldn’t. Since he’s still underage, and cannot speak for himself without suffering whatever consequences his parents (you know…the ones who put him into LIA in the first place) can dictate, it’s unreasonable to expect him to get on a soapbox about his feelings toward LIA. If I were you though, I would strongly suggest that his silence on the matter since those first couple of posts speaks volumes.
I was with Lance at a protest against reparative therapy in Silver Spring, Maryland. John Smid was there too, but too cowardly to come out to the line and speak with Lance himself. One of the other LIA staffers, a new guy, did come out because, as he said, he wanted to hear from Lance himself why he was upset about what LIA did to him. Lance gave him an earful, the gist of which was that he resented being made to feel horrible about himself simply because he’s gay.
John likes to boast that he brings families together. What happened to Lance after he left LIA was horrible, and he finally had to move out because his mom had become so abusive. The day he moved out, his mom cornered him and started beating the crap out of him. He’s told this to reporters and gave a more detailed account to Morgan Jon Fox who is doing a documentary on the LIA protests. Morgan and Lance let me sit in on the interview to take some photographs and Lance’s story nearly brought me to tears and I had to concentrate on what I was doing and I almost couldn’t. John did nothing, nothing for that family, except tear it apart. Oh…and he cashed the check.
You care about the LIA staff do you? Then dig up whatever stunted whithered stump of a conscience any of them still have left in them, and make them see two things they really, really need to see. First, that they are committing a monstrous assault on the human identity of the people they’re "treating" and their capacity to love and accept love from another. Second, that John has no brakes, and one of these days he’s going to push a gay kid too far and then they’re be more then Jack McIntyre’s blood on the LIA account books, and if you think the judgment on LIA has been harsh up till now, you haven’t seen anything. Yet.
Well I guess we can put a fork in the republican party now…because it’s done. For decades they waged a long bitter battle to gain total control of the federal government. They told us the liberals were wicked, immoral, godless, anti-American, anti-family. They said democrats were corrupt tax and spend big government pigs, lining their pockets with money taken from hard working people. They waged a scorched earth campaign for power. And then they got it. And look at them now.
What most of us with a functional conscience and a sense of basic human decency see as the sexual exploitation of teenage congressional pages, the republicans now see only in terms of political warfare. Their pathological hatred of anyone outside of the tribe has so completely gutted them of any sense of decency and humanity, of anything at all beyond the reflexive need to attack liberals and democrats, that they are utterly incapable of seeing the sexual exploitation of teenagers for what it is. They cannot see, cannot even grasp, Mark Foley’s actions apart from the political war.
And in the blogosphere, all those fine honorable men who once upon a time fancied themselves liberals, but then supposedly 9-11 changed everything, and who keep on yap, yap, yapping that they didn’t leave the democratic party, it left them…all those fine honorable men with all their ostentatious regard for America and virtue and civilized behavior. What do they do when confronted with a man in their own party who regarded the congressional page pool as his own little sexual buffet? What do they do when confronted with evidence that their party leadership covered up that man’s behavior so as not to rouse the ire of the voters?
Well of course…they start attacking the teenagers Foley was hitting on…
Pajamas Media, Instapundit Facilitate Outing Of Foley Victim
An obscure right-wing blogger, Wild Bill, has outed one of Mark Foley’s victims, a former Congressional page. It is a despicable act. Wild Bill however, gets almost no traffic, so the damage done to the victim’s life could have been minimal.
All that ended, however, when some of the most highly-trafficked right-wing bloggers decided to direct their readers to Wild Bill’s site. First, Roger L. Simon, co-founder and CEO of Pajamas Media – a portal and advertising broker for nearly every major right-wing blog – posted a link to Wild Bill on his personal site. (The Pajamas Media portal also linked to Wild Bill.) Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit – probably the most highly-trafficked right-wing blog – followed suit by linking to Simon’s post and the Pajamas Media post.
You may recall this is generally how the right wing smear machine works. First the smear appears in some obscure nutcase’s blog. Then someone like Drudge picks up on it. Then Instapundit links to it. Then it starts appearing in a few right wing tabloids and magazines. Then the more respectable conservative press gets into it. Then it goes mainstream. Instapundit has been facilitating smear campaigns now for years, and it’s given him a high place in the right wing honor roll. Recently the hack novelist Roger L. (I didn’t leave the democratic party, it left me) Simon formed Pajamas Media to share in some of that glory. It now comes to this: Glenn Reynolds and Roger L. Simon are facilitating child sexual predators, if that’s what it takes to keep the republican party in power.
They both know perfectly well that outing this one teenager, will make other teens who have been victimized by congressmen, or anyone else holding a position of authority on Capital Hill think twice before coming forward. It increases the pressure on the entire family to keep the kid’s mouth shut. It Is Supposed To.
The complete shitheads that are the leading lights of the conservative blogosphere.
No ethics, no scruples, no morals, no compassion, no sense. Just really bad people.
Brad DeLong likes to say that the Bush administration is worse then you think, even accounting for the fact that it is worse then you think. But that’s true of all of them…every…single…one of them…in the Bush base. That 35 percent who will support the republican party no matter what. Because there is nothing worse then the prospect of a democratic congress…not even the sexual exploitation of minors. Not even covering up the sexual exploitation of minors. Garrison Keiller was right…they are republicans first, and Americans second. Every time you think you’ve found the bottom of that cesspool you soon realize that…no…there is no bottom.
Via Firedoglake… Behold the open sewer that is the republican party today…
I…words simply fail me.
In the fine tradition of George W. Bush standing under the "Mission Accomplished" sign, or any one of the Katrina backdrops (where no expense was spared to bring power to an area for a photo op, and then just as quickly cut off), we now have the head of the NRCC, Tom Reynolds, using small prop children as set decoration in a press conference devoted to the topic of…yes, predatory online sexual solicitation of minors.
Even the reporters present could not contain themselves:
Reporter: Congressman, do you mind asking the children to leave the room so we can have a frank discussion of this, because it’s an adult topic. It just doesn’t seem appropriate to me.
Reynolds: I’ll take your questions, but I’m not going to ask any of my supporters to leave.
[]
Reporter: Who are the children, Congressman? Who are these children?
Reynolds: Pardon me?
Reporter: Who are these children?
Reynolds: Well, a number of them are from the community. There are several of the "thirtysomething" set that are here and uh I’ve known them and I’ve known their children as they were born.
Reporter: Do you think it’s appropriate for them to be listening to the subject matter though?
Reynolds: Sir, I’ll be happy to answer your questions, I’m still, uh…
Swell. Just swell. They have a uTube up of the press conference at Firedoglake, and the still clearly shows Reynolds surrounded by a room full of very small children and a few other adults. So. We have one congressional republican using kids for Internet sex, and another one using them as literally human shields to deflect hard questions from the press. I don’t think America can take much more of all this Family Values stuff.
Years from now…when hopefully this episode in American history is just a bad dream…take this one thing away from it if you take away nothing else: It isn’t the quest for virtue and morality and values that turns people into this. It’s the belief that you embody those things. It isn’t power that corrupts absolutely…it’s arrogance.
The Open Sewer That Wants To Remake America In Its Image
Pam’s House Blend has a poll up, from the right wing World Net Daily, which asks the question…
What does the Rep. Mark Foley’s resignation mean for the Republican Party?
The highest affirmative response, at 37.66 percent, is…
What Foley did is inexcusable, but if the U.S. is to win the war on terror, republicans must win in November.
Well what a coincidence. As it turns out, 37 percent seems to be about the floor beyond which Bush’s approval ratings never seem to drop any lower, no matter what jackass thing he says or does. Iraq. Katrina. A mountain of debt amid corruption and cronyism that would make Grant blush. None of it seems to matter. Bush never gets below the mid thirties in the polls no matter what.
Well now we now where that 37 percent is coming from don’t we? This is the Bush power base talking. They are the 37 percent of True Blue American Patriots who will vote republican, even if it means putting a grown man who hits on vulnerable teenage boys back into office…for the sake of…what was it again? Oh yes…to bring America back to decent Christian Moral Values.
Remember this the next time some republican starts yapping at you about liberal moral relativism.
You know it’s a bad time for America, when the survivors of the Soviet gulags start sharing their jokes with us. Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent 12 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and ersatz psychiatric hospitals for nonviolent human rights activities, shares us this one in Sunday’s Post …
One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. "But, Comrade Stalin," stammered Beria, "five suspects have already confessed to stealing it."
Hahahaha…Get it?
This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad. Now that President Bush has made a public show of endorsing Sen. John McCain’s amendment, it would seem that the debate is ending. But that the debate occurred at all, and that prominent figures are willing to entertain the idea, is perplexing and alarming to me. I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.
Kinda makes you wonder why we fought the cold war anyway, if only to eventually become what the Soviet Union was, if not in principle then in practice. You can call a nation whose single party rule decrees that anyone, even its own citizens can be arrested, imprisoned and tortured on the sole say-so of the party leader a lot of things, but a civilized nation isn’t one of them.
But behold George Bush’s America. Remember when republicans were always bellyaching about liberals and "big brother" government? Well…it all turned out to be just a lot of empty rhetoric didn’t it? Look at what they’ve turned America into in just six short years of total control of the federal government.
Even talking about the possibility of using CID treatment sends wrong signals and encourages base instincts in those who should be consistently delivered from temptation by their superiors. As someone who has been on the receiving end of the "treatment" under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the "Chekist’s handshake" so widely practiced under Stalin — a firm squeeze of the victim’s palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?
Now it appears that sleep deprivation is "only" CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin’s "show trials" of the 1930s. The henchmen called it "conveyer," when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.
Vladimir Bukovsky speaks from first hand experience here. Listen to him. This is our future if the republicans can get away with this.
In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner — through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.
And…You know what…I’m laughing in the faces of everyone who is surprised, let alone shocked at what things have come to now. We all knew who George Bush was long before he dragged America into this sewer. Never mind the gaming of the vote in Florida. Tucker Carlson give us the telling glimpse of the man behind the folksy mask in the premiere issue of the now defunct Talk Magazine, back in the summer of 1999…
In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. "Did you meet with any of them?" I ask. Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn’t meet with any of them," he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions like, "What would you say to Governor Bush?" "What was her answer?" I wonder.
"Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don’t kill me."
I must have look shocked – ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush – because he immediately stops smirking.
If that’s not stomach churning enough, Carlson also says that the exchange between Tucker and King that Bush mimicked never took place. It’s not the big lies Bush tells that you need to pay attention to…it’s the little needless ones like that. They say it all. This is the man the republicans put into the highest office in our land. This is the man they’ve all been marching in lock step with ever since. Now the republican congress of the United States of America is debating…as though a civilized nation considered such things even debatable…the use of torture, while the whole world watches. Send me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free…rooms are still available at Guantanamo Bay, and many other fine locations throughout the American Gulag Archipelago… There isn’t a gutter crawling despot in the world who can’t laugh at us now.
Is there anyone who read Carlson’s article, and who later watched Bush taking the oath of office, who didn’t see this moment coming?
Wait…you just gotta love this. A Pennsylvania pro-family group… Later in the article you discover that it’s the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Family Association. Agape Press is owned and operated by the American Family Association. So it isn’t merely "A Pennsylvania pro-family group", but themselves that they are are talking about here. They can’t even get the first sentence of their "news article" out without being deceptive. Not one single sentence into it and they’re already being deceitful. If there is an answer to all the wickedness in this world, a way out of sinfulness and toward redemption and hope, their religion sure isn’t it, is it.
But…anyway…
…suggests that the recent arrest of a University of Pennsylvania professor on child sex charges should cause the school to consider banning homosexual professors, just as the Boy Scouts ban homosexual troop leaders.
Considering how often heterosexual teachers have been caught recently in bed with their students, your reflex might be to just toss this off as yet another fart from the kook pews. But what’s interesting about this piece is that, for a change, they seem not to be relying on Paul Cameron’s junk science to back them up, but another guy who I hadn’t heard of before. His name is Gene Abel.
The AFA of Pennsylvania leader cites a study of non-incarcerated child-sex offenders by research scientist Gene Abel that found homosexuals "sexually molest young boys with an incidence that is occurring five times greater than the molestation of girls." Abel’s research reports that, on average, 150.2 boys are molested per homosexual offender, whereas 19.8 girls are molested per heterosexual offender.
Well that sounds pretty bad. Bad in the same way mind you, as Paul Cameron’s factoid that the average lifespan of a homosexual is 46 years sounds pretty bad. Right away, even before you look into it deeper, you just know that there is something a tad…er…queer, about it. If homosexuals are molesting kids at a rate several orders of magnitude greater then heterosexuals are, then even if we’re just a tiny fragment of the population as a whole you’d expect to see something like nearly every kid in America having been molested at least once in their lives. And since kids eventually grow up to become adults, nearly all adults alive today must have been molested when they were kids. And yet, that is just not the case. So you know something’s wrong here right away, and that something is either Abel, or Agape is distorting the work of another honest scientist.
But Abel, though he seems credentialed in a way Paul Cameron is not, is a crank. Maybe even a bigger uglier crank then Paul Cameron, because Abel actually thinks that most child molesters are other children, not adults. Paul Cameron is something of a pathetic figure. Abel, at least to the degree I’ve been able to find out anything about him so far, is horrifying.
You can tell that something’s not quite right about this man immediately, simply by doing a Google search on him. What you get, page after page of it, are cites by the right wing kook press and nobody else, until you’re very, very deep in the rankings. So that’s the first tip off right there. A little casual digging further, and you start running across his books, like Stop Child Molestation, and that’s where it starts getting interesting.
Abel thinks the average age of a child molestor is 13, which means that most child molesters, according to Abel, are children themselves. According to one reviewer at Amazon.Com, Abel blames that on…testosterone, accidental pairings of orgasm with thoughts of younger children, sexual victimization, or "biology that is deviant." Don’t bother looking up "deviant biology" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders because you won’t find it.
Deviant biology. Deviant biology. If you’ve ever entertained the thought that finally convincing the homophobes that our sexual orientation isn’t chosen, isn’t an artifact of poor parenting or ungodliness, but that it is something hard wired into us either at or before birth, if you’ve ever thought for a second that convincing them of this fact would make them hate us a little less, you can disabuse yourself of that notion right now. Repeat after me: Deviant biology. Deviant biology.
There is much in that review of Abel’s book that is worth noting. The emphasis in the following is my own…
The first sign that something is amiss is his claim that one out of every twenty boys develops pedophilia, usually in childhood or puberty. He never explains how he arrives at this figure, one which cannot be found anywhere else in the literature. This 5% prevalence rate would mean that pedophilia is one of the most common serious childhood diseases in America, similar in prevalence to asthma.
A handful of influential therapists began promoting the belief in an epidemic of childhood sexual deviance about 20 years ago-at the same time that some of the same therapists convinced the public that satanic ritual sexual abuse was occurring at nursery schools across the nation, and that large numbers of women had been sexually abused by their parents in childhood but had repressed their memories of it. Both of these beliefs were eventually disproved by investigators and researchers, but only after thousands of children were traumatized and adults’ lives were destroyed. However, the myth of rampant childhood sexual deviance has survived, most likely because its believers-juvenile sex offender therapists-comprise an industry mostly hidden from public view and exempt from oversight by the mainstream mental health community. Sexuality researchers have noted that these therapists commonly label children as "sex offenders" for mutually desired sexual contact with each other, then imply that they are dangerous to other children.
Abel recommends that all parents question their sons at around 6th grade about their sexual fantasies. Any boy who is suspected of having sexual thoughts involving younger children, or who has been sexually touched by an older child or adult, is to be referred to a "sex-specific therapist" who will test him for pedophilic symptoms. The test should be either a sexual interest test (developed by Abel himself, in which the boy examines photographs of children and adults in swimwear while a computer measures visual reaction time), a lie detector test, or a plethysmograph connected to his genitals while he looks at or listens to sexually stimulating material.
The problem with such tests (aside from their intensely humiliating and stigmatizing effects) is that they have never been validated, a process which would require testing a representative sample of American children to establish norms. In fact, all researchers are agreed that very little is known about normal sexual feelings during childhood and adolescence. To make matters worse, Abel refuses to release data necessary for independent researchers to evaluate his test.
I’m still digging for a reliable link to this, but I see out there what looks like a news article noting that Dr. Paul Fedoroff (who is a staff psychiatrist with the Law and Mental Health program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, and assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and co-director of the sexual behaviors clinic at the Royal Ottawa Hospital in Canada), said that at least some of Abel’s studies might not be reliable because…
…they were conducted on sex offenders who were given certificates of confidentiality, meaning that they would not be turned over to the police, no matter what they admitted. To get the certificate of confidentiality, the offender had to admit something. The more they divulged, the better they looked in front of their therapists.
So Abel was apparently interviewing subjects who had a vested interest in telling him what he wanted to know. And since he doesn’t divulge his data, we cannot even know whether even this self serving source of information was enough to justify his conclusions.
But never mind. It isn’t science, if you’re not willing to publish your data along with your results. That one fact alone tells us all we need to know about Abel. He is not a man of science. This is why you see him being cited approvingly in the kook pews. And just like all his other neighbors there, while posturing as a defender of children, Abel shows a stunningly depraved indifference toward them.
However, the most chilling part of Abel’s book comes when he outlines treatment methods to cure "pedophilia" among boys: separation from other children (possibly removal from the family), monitoring of sexual feelings and behavior by family members and friends who report to the therapist (and sometimes by plethysmograph), high doses of sex drive reducing drugs, covert sensitization, and aversion therapy with ammonia. The last two methods are intended to eliminate particular sexual thoughts by pairing them with pain, fear, or humiliation. Any of these methods may be imposed on the boy for life by the therapist, regardless of his or his parents’ wishes.
Although Abel refers to them as "breakthroughs in testing, medicine, and therapies," students of history will recognize plethysmographs, sex drive reducing drugs, aversion therapy, and covert sensitization as the methods used decades ago to "cure" homosexuality. Mainstream health professionals and the public (even those who disapprove of homosexual behavior) now consider them ineffective, dangerous, and unethical. Numerous accounts show they lead to nightmares, depression, chronic anxiety, self-hatred, and suicidal thoughts among both gay men and children labeled as "deviant." And no wonder: Considering the fact that we know almost nothing about the development of sexual feelings, it is clear that such efforts amount to messing with something we don’t understand.
Like the "expert" doctors and therapists who justified their use on homosexuals, Abel shows no concern for emotional trauma and intense stigma these methods inflict on boys, instead rationalizing such abuse by writing that the protection of normal children takes precedence over the welfare of deviant children.
Especially disturbing is the apparent endorsement of this approach by some other leaders in the juvenile sex offender industry-an approach that would create a new class of lepers consisting, presumably, of 5% of all boys.
So with utterly no actual science grounding his notions of the developing sexuality of children, Abel proposes to subject any of them, as young as sixth graders, to having their genitals hooked up to a machine while they’re shown provocative images of scantily clad children and adults, and then perhaps a nice regimen of sex drive reducing drugs, aversion therapy, covert sensitization and the occasional lungful of ammonia. Sixth graders mind you. And he figures some of them may have a "deviant biology" which makes them dangerous to the other kids. That…and testosterone. This is the man being cited by ersatz Christian publications as an authority on child molestation. Well…I guess so. Picture him shoving ammonia in a sixth grader’s face while the kid has his genitals hooked up to a machine and he’s being shown a picture of another kid in a bikini.
So by that logic, and accepting the premise (which I do not) that men who molest boys are by definition homosexuals, then we should not only keep gay professors out of colleges, we should keep gay students out of colleges too. And grade school. And you’d better believe that this is also on the agenda of the AFA too. Just…one step at a time please.
Eventually, it’ll be only Christian Nationalists who are allowed to go to school. Well…the straight boys anyway. The ones who pass the plethysmograph test. Because a women’s place is in the house, being gracefully submissive to her husband and bearing him as many children as he wants her to, so girls don’t need much of an education really. And the boys will only be taught by male professors, since women shouldn’t have authority over men. Remind me again…why did we bomb the Taliban?
Tales From George Bush’s America…Special Katrina Remembrance Edition
One year ago today the United States lost a city. And if you’re still wondering why reconstruction has been taking so long to even get really started, then you’ve been missing the point of the past five years. Digby has a post up, linking to a Frank Rich column that pretty much nails it, but I wouldn’t go reading it if you’re still not ready to see that open sewer that is the republican party today for what it is…
Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, “The Great Deluge,” is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. “I don’t think anybody’s getting the Bush strategy,” he said when we talked last week. “The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate — the inaction is the action.” As he sees it, the administration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans’s opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees (“Only Band-Aids have been put on them”), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. “Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains,” Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. “The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state.”
The inaction is the action… People who are thinking that the devistation of New Orleans, and the Bush gang’s shockingly callow response to it are going to hurt the republicans politically still aren’t getting it. New Orleans is dead, but Louisiana is red. The GOP is counting it as a plus, never doubt it.
I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students frm Yale."
George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!
Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.
PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he’s against gay marriage.
So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.
They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with any doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In these Times, and kiss my ass!
This is why George Bush could strum a guitar while New Orleans died. Last year, as the appalling scope of the disaster just kept getting more and more worse, and Brad DeLong was saying, astonished, "I really am naive. I did not expect this degree of unpreparedness and incompetence. I did not expect this even though I knew that the Bush administration is worse than you can imagine, even after having taken account of the fact that it is worse than you can imagine"…I wrote this:
For generations the Republicans have played Americans against one another. As government in the late 20th century began to acknowledge and protect the rights of minorities and women, the republicans began a concerted effort to deliberately weaken government, so it could no longer do that. An America that extends the promise of liberty and justice to all is anathema to them. For decades they poured billions of right wing dollars into a relentless campaign to convince Americans that greed is good, and that their worst prejudices were righteous. American self reliance became self interest. American independence became insularity. In pulpits all across America, the Jesus who taught us to love our neighbor was crucified as a communist and a pervert, and a new one who taught that might makes right was put in his place. The payoff came with the election of George Bush. The punch line came this week in New Orleans.
It isn’t that America can’t respond to the need of New Orleans as well as it can the need of those places destroyed by the Indian Ocean Tsunami…it’s that it isn’t supposed to. That’s what all the vitriolic rhetoric about "nanny government" means. A government that can wage a successful fight against civil chaos after a devastating natural disaster, can also prevent lynchings, wife beatings, and gay bashings. Government isn’t supposed to take care of the powerless, whether they’ve been rendered helpless by a hurricane, or by a lynch mob. Rights are for the powerful. To be able to just get on with your life is a privilege, not a right. That is George Bush’s America.
Somewhere in a corner of the putrid stench the Superdome has become, are the rotting corpses of two elderly New Orleans women, laying where their bodies were dragged to get them out of the way of the still living. Take your mental camera into the Superdome. Pan it across the trash littered bleachers, move down the aisles, through the suffocating stench of hundreds of backed up toilets and cardboard boxes full of human excrement. There…there they are…in that dark corner over there. Two pitiful little bodies you could almost mistake for just another random pile of trash. But they were people once. Your fellow Americans. Slowly zoom your mental camera in on that image. There is the America the republicans have been doggedly leading us to for decades now. There is what is inside the shining city on the hill.
NEW ORLEANS – Buses taking Hurricane Katrina victims far frm the squalor of the Superdome stopped rolling early Saturday. As many as 5,000 people remained in the stadium and could be there until Sunday, according to the Texas Air National Guard.
Officials had hoped to evacuate the last of the crowd before dawn Saturday. Guard members said they were told only that the buses had stopped coming and to shut down the area where the vehicles were being loaded.
"We were rolling," Capt. Jean Clark said. "If the buses had kept coming, we would have this whole place cleaned out already or pretty close to it."
…
Capt. John Pollard of the Texas Air Force National Guard said 20,000 people were in the dome when evacuation efforts began. That number swelled as people poured into the Superdome because they believed it was the best place to get a ride out of town.
He estimated Saturday morning that between 2,000 and 5,000 people were left at the Superdome. But it remained a mystery why the buses stopped coming to pick up refugees and shuttle them away.
Tina Miller, 47, had no shoes and cried with relief and exhaustion as she left the Superdome and walked toward a bus. "I never thought I’d make it. Oh, God, I thought I’d die in there. I’ve never been through anything this awful."
The arena’s second-story concourse looked like a dump, with more than a foot of trash except in the occasional area where people were working to keep things as tidy as possible.
Bathrooms had no lights, making people afraid to enter, and the stench frm backed-up toilets inside killed any inclination toward bravery.
"When we have to go to the bathroom we just get a box. That’s all you can do now," said Sandra Jones of eastern New Orleans.
Her newborn baby was running a fever, and all the small children in her area had rashes, she said.
…
At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses pulled up so some 700 guests and employees frm the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line – much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the Superdome since last Sunday.
"How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead of us?" exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed guests with their luggage.
The 700 had been trapped in the hotel, near the Superdome, but conditions were considerably cleaner, even without running water, than the unsanitary crush inside the dome…
One military official said that as of Friday morning, 4,200 people had been evacuated, including 1,000 frm the convention center, where many times that number spent days without any aid and where several corpses lay on the street Thursday. Another military official said that commanders had not been aware of the large and desperate concentration of people at the convention center until Wednesday, that the focus had been on evacuating the Superdome and conducting other emergency operations in the city.
"It had not perhaps been raised to our consciousness by the reports we had received," Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe, the chief operations officer of the U.S. Northern Command, said in a phone interview.
…
By Friday night, the number of National Guard troops was expected to reach 11,700 in Louisiana and 8,000 in Mississippi, with more than 5,000 troops still to come over the weekend. Add to that more than 2,500 Coast Guard personnel on the scene with more than 50 aircraft. Four Coast Guard cutters are stationed in the Mississippi River to offer communications and logistics support, said U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman Sharon Richey. Even so, one frustrated state senator announced that he has lined up barges to float aid down the Mississippi River to stranded individuals…
…
As reports continued of famished and dehydrated people isolated across the Gulf Coast, angry questions were pressed about why the military has not been dropping food packets for them — as was done in Afghanistan, Bosnia and in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami.
Bill Wattenburg, a consultant for the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one of the designers of the earlier food drop programs, said that he has lobbied the administration and the military to immediately begin something similar. He said he was told that the military was prepared to begin, but that it was awaiting a request frm FEMA.
"We know very well how to do this, and it’s just incomprehensible that we’re not," Wattenburg said.
…
Canaan Spriggs, 31, and his extended family, including three infants, again prepared to sleep on the floor of a nearby parking garage. He said he was pleased by the sight of the military convoys but that the city was far frm tame.
"It’s quiet now, but the night-time is wild," he said. "They’re sugarcoating it on the news. Come out here at night, but only if you have the National Guard with you. There are gunshots, and you hear people screaming for help.
WASHINGTON – Several states ready and willing to send National Guard troops to the rescue in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans didn’t get the go-ahead until days after the storm struck — a delay nearly certain to be investigated by Congress.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson offered Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco help frm his state’s National Guard on Sunday, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Blanco accepted, but paperwork needed to get the troops en route didn’t come frm Washington until late Thursday.
The official version; then there’s the in-the-trenches version
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — Diverging views of a crumbling New Orleans emerged Thursday, with statements by some federal officials in contradiction with grittier, more desperate views frm the streets. By late Friday response to those stranded in the city was more visible.
But the conflicting views on Thursday came within hours, sometimes minutes of each of each other, as reflected in CNN’s transcripts. The speakers include Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, evacuee Raymond Cooper, CNN correspondents and others. Here’s what they had to say:
Conditions in the Convention Center
# FEMA chief Brown: We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need. (See video of Brown explaining how news reports alerted FEMA to convention center chaos. — 2:11)
# Mayor Nagin: The convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for the 15,000 to 20,000 people. (Hear Nagin’s angry demand for soldiers. 1:04)
# CNN Producer Kim Segal: It was chaos. There was nobody there, nobody in charge. And there was nobody giving even water. The children, you should see them, they’re all just in tears. There are sick people. We saw… people who are dying in front of you.
# Evacuee Raymond Cooper: Sir, you’ve got about 3,000 people here in this — in the Convention Center right now. They’re hungry. Don’t have any food. We were told two-and-a-half days ago to make our way to the Superdome or the Convention Center by our mayor. And which when we got here, was no one to tell us what to do, no one to direct us, no authority figure.
Uncollected corpses
# Brown: That’s not been reported to me, so I’m not going to comment. Until I actually get a report frm my teams that say, "We have bodies located here or there," I’m just not going to speculate.
# Segal: We saw one body. A person is in a wheelchair and someone had pushed (her) off to the side and draped just like a blanket over this person in the wheelchair. And then there is another body next to that. There were others they were willing to show us. ( See CNN report, ‘People are dying in front of us’ — 4:36 )
# Evacuee Cooper: They had a couple of policemen out here, sir, about six or seven policemen told me directly, when I went to tell them, hey, man, you got bodies in there. You got two old ladies that just passed, just had died, people dragging the bodies into little corners. One guy — that’s how I found out. The guy had actually, hey, man, anybody sleeping over here? I’m like, no. He dragged two bodies in there. Now you just — I just found out there was a lady and an old man, the lady went to nudge him. He’s dead.
Hospital evacuations
# Brown: I’ve just learned today that we … are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.
# CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It’s gruesome. I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no place to put them, so they’re in the stairwells. It is one of the most unbelievable situations I’ve seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water. There’s over 200 patients still here remaining. …We found our way in through a chopper and had to land at a landing strip and then take a boat. And it is exactly … where the boat was traveling where the snipers opened fire yesterday, halting all the evacuations. ( Watch the video report of corpses stacked in stairwells — 4:45 )
# Dr. Matthew Bellew, Charity Hospital: We still have 200 patients in this hospital, many of them needing care that they just can’t get. The conditions are such that it’s very dangerous for the patients. Just about all the patients in our services had fevers. Our toilets are overflowing. They are filled with stool and urine. And the smell, if you can imagine, is so bad, you know, many of us had gagging and some people even threw up. It’s pretty rough.(Mayor’s video: Armed addicts fighting for a fix — 1:03)
Violence and civil unrest
# Brown: I’ve had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot, or you know, they’re banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I’ve had no reports of that.
# CNN’s Chris Lawrence: Frm here and frm talking to the police officers, they’re losing control of the city. We’re now standing on the roof of one of the police stations. The police officers came by and told us in very, very strong terms it wasn’t safe to be out on the street. (Watch the video report on explosions and gunfire — 2:12)
The federal response:
# Brown: Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.
# Homeland Security Director Chertoff: Now, of course, a critical element of what we’re doing is the process of evacuation and securing New Orleans and other areas that are afflicted. And here the Department of Defense has performed magnificently, as has the National Guard, in bringing enormous resources and capabilities to bear in the areas that are suffering.
# Crowd chanting outside the Convention Center: We want help.
# Nagin: They don’t have a clue what’s going on down there.
# Phyllis Petrich, a tourist stranded at the Ritz-Carlton: They are invisible. We have no idea where they are. We hear bits and pieces that the National Guard is around, but where? We have not seen them. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have seen no one.
Security
# Brown: I actually think the security is pretty darn good. There’s some really bad people out there that are causing some problems, and it seems to me that every time a bad person wants to scream of cause a problem, there’s somebody there with a camera to stick it in their face. ( See Jack Cafferty’s rant on the government’s ‘bungled’ response — 0:57)
# Chertoff: In addition to local law enforcement, we have 2,800 National Guard in New Orleans as we speak today. One thousand four hundred additional National Guard military police trained soldiers will be arriving every day: 1,400 today, 1,400 tomorrow and 1,400 the next day.
# Nagin: I continue to hear that troops are on the way, but we are still protecting the city with only 1,500 New Orleans police officers, an additional 300 law enforcement personnel, 250 National Guard troops, and other military personnel who are primarily focused on evacuation.
# Lawrence: The police are very, very tense right now. They’re literally riding around, full assault weapons, full tactical gear, in pickup trucks. Five, six, seven, eight officers. It is a very tense situation here.
Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N’Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I’m going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I’m not going to forget what I’ve seen." Out of the cameras’ range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.
…
Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA – a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association – admitted he didn’t know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.
Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job."
It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle – Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo’s on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine – lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.
No matter how nervously Kanye West said what he did, it wasn’t some revealed truth, but a long assumed feeling. Bush doesn’t care about black people. No fucking kidding.
The problem is that he doesn’t care about anybody.
The fact that the citizens of New Orleans are now Aligator MRE’s is of concern to Bush, because it may make him look bad. But the world of George Bush is a narrow one, not much beyond his nose. Everything is about him.
Which is why he can praise Brown. Even the French fired Nivelle once he failed and replaced him with Petain. Bush only sees what affects him.
President Bush often complains about lack of transparency in places like North Korea or, more recently, Cuba — and contrasts that with the United States.
Here he is in Vienna in June: "We’re a transparent democracy. People know exactly what’s on our mind. We debate things in the open. We’ve got a legislative process that’s active."
But the reality is that, particularly when it comes to Bush’s foreign policy, the minimal press access to the intensely secret inner workings of the White House and the almost complete lack of effective Congressional oversight have left Bush’s decision-making process largely a mystery.
Case in point: What is really motivating our policy in the Middle East? And who’s really making the decisions? We don’t know.
…
Today, Ron Hutcheson of McClatchy Newspapers writes: "If there’s a starting point for George W. Bush’s attachment to Israel, it’s the day in late 1998 when he stood on the hilltop where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and, eyes brimming with tears, read aloud from his favorite hymn, ‘Amazing Grace.’
" ‘He was very emotional. It was a tear-filled experience,’ said Matthew Brooks, a prominent Jewish Republican who escorted Bush, then governor of Texas, and three other GOP governors on the Middle East visit. ‘He brought Israel back home with him in his heart. I think he came away profoundly moved.’
"Eight years later, Bush is living up to his reputation as the most pro-Israel president ever. As Israel’s military action in Lebanon heads into its fourth week, the president is standing firm against growing international pressure for an immediate cease-fire."
Yesterday, I noted former Newsday and Knight Ridder White House correspondent Saul Friedman ‘s essay on NiemanWatchdog.org: "I believe this to be the first time in modern American history that a president’s religion, in this case his Christian fundamentalism, has become a decisive factor in his foreign and domestic policies. It’s a factor that has been under-reported, to say the least, and that begs for press attention."
Former Clinton official Sidney Blumenthal sees another, related form of evangelism at work: The neoconservative variety. He writes in Salon: "By secretly providing NSA intelligence to Israel and undermining the hapless Condi Rice, hardliners in the Bush administration are trying to widen the Middle East conflict to Iran and Syria, not stop it. . . .
"The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war."
…
And here’s another data point: Joel C. Rosenberg, who writes Christian apocalyptic fiction, told me in an interview this week that he was invited to a White House Bible study group last year to talk about current events and biblical prophecy.
Rosenberg said that on February 10, 2005, he came to speak to a "couple dozen" White House aides in the Old Executive Office Building — and has stayed in touch with several of them since.
Rosenberg wouldn’t say exactly what was discussed. "The meeting itself was off the record, as you could imagine," he said. He declined to name the staffer he said invited him or describe the attendees in any way other than to say that the president was not among them. "I can’t imagine they’d want to talk about it," he said.
"I can’t tell you that the people that I spoke with agree with me, or believe that prophecy can really help you understand what will happen next in the Middle East, but I’m not surprised that they’re intrigued."
The White House press office wasn’t able to confirm the visit for me, but there have been previous reports about White House Bible study groups inviting Christian authors to come speak.
Rosenberg — like Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, the authors of the phenomenally popular "Left Behind" series — writes fiction inspired by biblical prophecy about the apocalypse. The consistent theme is that certain current events presage the end times, the Rapture, and the return of Jesus Christ. Rosenberg’s particular pitch to journalists is that his books come true.
Here he is in a recent interview with Christian talk-show host Pat Robertson , talking about what he thinks is going to happen next: "Now I have to say, Pat, I believe that Ezekiel 38 and 39 — the prophecies that we’re talking about — I think this is about the end of radical Islam as we know it. God says He’s going to supernaturally judge Iran, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, these other countries. We’re talking about fire from heaven, a massive earthquake. It’s going to be devastating and tragic. But I believe that afterwards there’s going to be a great spiritual awakening. We’re seeing more Muslims coming to Christ right now than at any other time in history. But I think that’s just the beginning. We’ve got dark days ahead of us. But I believe there’s a light at the end of that tunnel."
Rosenberg says he got a call last year from a White House staffer. "He said ‘A lot of people over here are reading your novels, and they’re intrigued that these things keep on happening. . . . Your novels keep foreshadowing actual coming events. . . . And so we’re curious, how are you doing it? What’s the secret? Why don’t you come over and walk us through the story behind these novels?’ So I did."
Judy Keen first wrote back in October 2002, in USA Today, that "some White House staffers have been meeting weekly at hour-long prayer and Bible study sessions."
Elisabeth Bumiller wrote in the New York Times last year that "intelligent design was the subject of a weekly Bible study class several years ago when Charles W. Colson, the founder and chairman of Prison Fellowship Ministries, spoke to the group."
All this talk about family values, and preserving the institution of marriage as the best way to raise children, and nurture the next generation, and underneath it all the fervent hope that the end of the world will happen in their lifetimes.
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