Are there no prisons?   Are there no workhouses?

Continuing our gallery of morose, possibly horror story grade film or novel scenarios, here’s another based on the stream of thought I had contemplating the plot device in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That’s the one you may recall, where the two lovers break up and one decides to undergo a procedure which erases the other from their memory, and the other, sad to learn of it, does the same.   Then they reconnect anyway which only goes to show they were really meant for each other to begin with and love isn’t always a fairy tale but a lot of hard work for both people. Yes, yes…so very romantic. Actually, I love that plot device. But somehow it always turns a tad dark in my imaginings…

I have an idea. It’s a story about a heterosexual man…

When he was a teenager he was well liked by his teachers and friends. He’s very open minded, somewhat more so then his parents who are mostly liberal, but with some hang-ups about class and gender and race. They’re not raving prejudiced, because that isn’t fashionable, and they try, really try their best, to teach their kid not to be that way.

In school he befriends a gay kid and right away they start to get along really well. He defends his gay friend from bullies and takes his part in political arguments about gay civil rights and same-sex marriage. They become very close friends. Brothers almost. But as often happens, not just in gay/straight relationships either, he finds his perfect girlfriend, and the gay kid finds a nice boyfriend, they slowly begin to drift apart.

The gay kid’s boyfriend turns out to be a real jerk, and as he grows older it becomes a pattern with him. He falls into a bitter cycle of one disastrous affair after another. Nothing seems to work for him.

The straight kid’s girlfriend on the other hand is his perfect match. They have a lovely, almost fairy tale romance that grows ever more beautiful over time. They marry, have beautiful kids, he finds the career of his dreams, they settle down in a nice suburban community with good schools and decent shopping.

Fast forward. The straight guy is in his late middle age, and he is reflecting on how happy his life has been. Especially compared to most of his classmates from way back when. Many of them have had it really hard. One day, he reconnects with his gay buddy from back in the day. His gay buddy has had it hard. Very hard. He’s still single, and bitter.

They have lunch together one day and they instantly reconnect like old and dear friends. The gay friend is happy that his old pal has had it so good and it is obviously sincere joy. Seeing how happy his old friend from high school is makes him a bit happier too, brings him out of his gloom and lifts his spirits. It makes him believe once more, after so long, that life maybe doesn’t have to suck after all. It can get better.

He decides to tell his straight friend that he’s re-considering something his parents tried very hard to talk him into back when they were teenagers. There’s a procedure…it’s frowned upon in more liberal circles, but not illegal…that can change a person’s sexual orientation from gay to straight. It’s just been so hard living my life as a gay man, he says, so lonely, so terribly terribly lonely... For all his accomplishments as a gay political activist, his private life has been completely miserable. I’m not sure I want to go on the rest of my life like this, he says. His straight friend is appalled. He urges his gay friend not to do it, it would be a sell-out, not just to the cause he’s long fought for, but to himself, to his soul. Yes, says his gay friend, but…it’s so hard being so alone. At least as a heterosexual, I’d have more of a chance at finding the kind of life you’ve had.

It is a sad conversation, but by the end of it the straight guy has mostly convinced his gay friend to hang on, and live an authentic life. Even if you change he says to his gay friend, how do you go on knowing that it isn’t really you, but something that was done to you? Then his gay friend lays one more thing on him. The procedure can be coupled with a memory wipe, so you never know you were once gay. New memories are introduced to make you believe you were always straight. That’s completely outlawed now against children, but he says, even on adults it’s a lot harder to do that to someone our age. Too many memories…the risks of complications are much higher. No…he finally says, it isn’t worth it.

They get up to go their separate ways and now it seems the gay friend has had a definite change of heart. No…it’s too late now to even think about changing. Better he had done it back when he was a teenager. But really…better still to live an authentic life. And anyway he says with a shy smile that takes his straight friend back to their school days, the worst thing would be having to forget you.

They part ways. The straight guy had always known his gay friend had a crush on him, and for his part he was always very fond of his gay friend. Back in school they were almost inseparable. Brothers almost. But it was always clear to both of them that it could never be. He is thoroughly heterosexual. He has always liked women. And now he has a wife he loves very much, and even at their age they still have a great sex life.

But now something is bothering him. He does a little digging into this ex-gay procedure. It was something he’d never really looked at before. He’d always opposed it, had always spoken out against it. There had been attempts to outlaw it completely that he had supported.   But activists had only succeeded in outlawing the practice on children.   Mostly he avoided the issue altogether.   And now that he thinks of it, that seems a little strange.   In his own low key way he is actually very politically aware and active. But his style was more behind the scenes then his gay friend’s upfront activism.

It quickly falls entirely out of his mind. Then he gets an email from his gay friend thanking him for the visit after all these years, and the encouragement. He writes that he’s redoubling his efforts to find a mate after all, and getting back into the fight for full gay equality. He would still like to see the ex-gay procedure completely outlawed, and he tells his straight friend he’s getting back into that fight now.

Oh yes…that. Now it begins to bother him how uncharacteristically he’d just put it all out of his mind. It was something that should normally still bother him about the world he lived in. His parents had raised him to be tolerant and progressive, even if they’d had their own repressed doubts and prejudices. Homosexuality wasn’t something they’d ever much discussed when he was a teen. But as an adult, often while remembering his gay schoolmate, he had always worked for the better, more inclusive world.

Now he looks more deeply into it, forcing himself at times, posting reminder notes just to make sure he follows up on things he finds out about the ex-gay process…its invention, its history of usage…the patterns of its use…the political controversy. Sometimes it’s a struggle to maintain an interest…he has so much else he’s busy with in his own life. But soon his wife, also very much the progressive and pro-gay rights person, gets involved and begins helping him with it. He has told her the story of his gay friend’s struggles and she is very sympathetic, and as disgusted by the very existence of the ex-gay clinics as he is. With her help, he maintains focus.

So he digs for information and learns more and more about the procedure that turns gay people straight and wipes their memories of ever having been gay. What he learns appalls him. He periodically writes his gay friend back and tells him about what he has uncovered…much that was never really fully aired in public. His gay friend is overjoyed to have his old pal back in the fight.

But at night the research is also causing him very unpleasant dreams…dreams about sudden violent arguments with his parents…or someone’s parents, he is not sure. He wonders if they are real memories or just his own projections of what his friend’s home life must have been like.

One morning, saying nothing to anyone of his plans, he goes to a private investigator, someone who he has read about, who has done much of the main investigation for various gay rights groups concerning the ex-gay clinics. This man has a reputation for uncovering secrets in not always legal ways, but his revelations were crucial in getting the procedure against children stopped. He asks this man to check to see if anyone in his high school class had been taken to one of the ex-gay clinics, and then had their memory of being gay wiped.

The investigator takes him into another room, stacked with filing cabinets, some bulging. Through various court cases, and a few not completely legal methods, he has acquired tens of thousands of what were once secret files, documents, recordings, some he is still not at liberty to disclose the contents of publicly. These files have proven critical in the search for victims, the investigator says, and the prosecution of some of the people who ran the clinics, as well as the outlawing of the procedure against children.

Tell me a little about the school you all went to, says the investigator. Tell me about the neighborhood, the area churches, politicians, community leaders. Certain ex-gay clinics were intimately connected to certain churches, and certain politicians. Tell me a little more about the students…and…about yourself… The whole sordid story of these clinics is in these files. Tell me what I need to know, and I can give you the information you are looking for.

He spends hours talking to the man, who all the while is entering data into a small computer. Then the investigator gets up, walks over to a filing cabinet, and after a little flipping through the files inside, pulls one out. He hands it to him. In it is a name and a case history. Somehow he is not completely shocked to learn that, yes, there was one kid from his high school that got sent to an ex-gay clinic.

Him.

He reads. The evidence in the file suggests it was done to him against his will. His memory of ever being gay, of ever even suspecting he was, was completely wiped. He checks the dates. It had to be he realizes, very soon after his parents found out about his gay friend.

And then and there in that office, reading the notes on his case for himself after all those years, he remembers it all in a sudden rush…about when his parents first learned about his gay friend. They had turned suddenly angry and suspicious. They’d had an awful argument. The next day some men had entered his bedroom in the middle of the night, and taken him to a place…somewhere…somewhere dark…

He can recall no more then that. But it is enough.

He walks back home in a daze. He loves his wife. Really deeply and truly loves her. And without a doubt she loves him. Their sex life is great, even in late middle age. They have beautiful kids, grown now and pursuing their own careers and love lives.

But…he loved his gay friend too. To his gay friend he has always been a straight buddy. Yes, his gay friend had a crush on him…that was always something they both knew, but it was always clear to both that it could never be, because he was straight. Except he wasn’t. At least, not born straight. He looks back to their teen years together and sees it clearly. They were always more then just friends. They were soul mates.

I…I loved you…

And he sees the life his gay friend had…his very lonely, bitter struggle…and sees now, clearly, the life he could have had…the life they could have had.

But…what does he do? What Can he do? Who does he tell? What good would it do to say anything to anyone at this point? His parents have both passed on…he, his wife, his gay friend, are all at the doorstep of old age. What good would it do to tell anyone? But there is more. The last words the private investigator spoke to him before he left the man’s office echo in his brain: You know don’t you, that the procedure can be reversed. You can be the man you were born to be again. If you want. Others, many others, have had the procedure reversed.

But could he really, after so much time has passed? And what would happen to his family then? What would they have? He loves them very much.

It’s not true that there is only one perfect soul mate out there for each individual. His gay friend still has a chance to find someone to love, and be loved by. They both know this. He decides to say nothing. The investigator had assured him that nothing would be said about him unless he specifically authorized it. Privacy laws forbade it. When he gets back home he finds an email from his gay friend telling him he’s dating someone new now, hoping that this time it would be different.

He agrees to meet them both for lunch somewhere, he and his wife and his gay classmate and his new boyfriend. And at that pleasantly cheerful little gathering of old friends and their lovers, he sees that this new guy is nice on the outside where it doesn’t count, but isn’t any better deep down inside where it does then any of the other guys his friend has hooked up with in the past. He can see another broken heart coming for his friend all over again.   And it makes him angry, angry at the new boyfriend/creep, angry in a deep dark place inside where he had never been angry before.

His wife sees the broken heart coming for his gay friend too. He’s such a beautiful spirit, his wife says to him later. It’s so tragic he never found someone. I hate how this world treats people like him. Not just that he’s gay, but that he’s such a beautiful spirit. It’s so hard for people like that to find love. So hard for everyone really. I’m so glad I found you.

Not all horror stories have blood splashing everywhere.

“Evil enters like a needle and spreads like an oak tree.”
-Ethiopian Proverb

Another one of the Big Three major loves of my life finally decided to get himself a Facebook account recently…I discovered during another of my periodic name searches.   I mentioned on my status update that I wished there was a Forget You pill I could take, but that I’d only take it for one of the Big Three (Hi Keith!).   A friend then directed me to the film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

I was already aware of that film, although I haven’t watched it yet.   But the central plot device is a beautiful one for a romance story: Two people who choose to undergo a procedure that makes them forget about each other, who then hook up again later anyway, which means they were really meant for each other to begin with. Yes, yes…a very lovely tale of true romance. And one I’d happily read myself, if it were presented to me in a gay context.

Writing it myself is another matter, and not just because I’d have to copy it outright from somebody else, a thing I regard with distaste when I see other would-be artists doing that.   On the other hand, Picasso himself said a mediocre artist copies and a great artist steals.   And this plot device is just brimming with possibilities.

Unfortunately for you dear reader, those possibilities always seem to take a dark and morose turn with me.   I can’t imagine why that is.   But in the interest of getting some of this stuff that has always been percolating in me ever since I can remember…I seem to be able to think up more ideas then I ever have time to follow through on…let me belabor you with a few scenarios for a novel or movie.   Go ahead and use them.   If they flop and everyone hates you for making them sit through it, you can always blame me.

Here’s Scenario 1…there isn’t much to it.   Call it, The Good Life…

It’s about a gay guy who tries all his life to find his soul mate.   Comes out to himself as a teen, but instead of going through fear and loathing about his sexual orientation, he accepts it, and tries extra hard to make himself worthy of a nice boyfriend.   Gets good grades, graduates near the top of his class, never cheats or lies or steals.   He’s no cardboard prude by any means, but he tries extra hard to be a worthy lover, so he can attract the man of his dreams.   Unfortunately for him, all he ever gets are the boyfriends from hell…the ones attracted to Nice Guys because they’re easy to manipulate and fun to cheat.

That’s his life.   One bad, failed romance after another after another after another.   His gay friends are no help either.   Oh they believe in love all right…but they think our hero is a tad childish to believe in Romance and finding that man of your dreams.   Better they keep telling him, to settle for Mr. Right Away instead of Mr. Right.   Who knows they say, that sexy rent boy you purchase for an evening might turn out to be a steady thing.   And if not, hey, he’s affordable at least.   Time and again, though he never finds out what the audience does, they fail to connect him to other guys who might actually be right for him.   Romance is for daydreamers.

Eventually he’s a very old man.   And one day he realizes this is all that will ever be.     He sees that he will never find that love of his life after all, that he is going to die alone and loveless, never having been loved, never having had that life affirming body and soul relationship with another person, never known that quiet peaceful joy of holding, and being held in the arms of the one you love.   Now, at the twilight of his life he sees, finally, the reason that there are so many beautiful love stories out there isn’t because there really are so many beautiful love stories out there, but that so terribly many people are like himself, lost and lonely and aching for a love that will never come.   He wishes he had never been born.

But all is not hopeless.   Modern technology has an answer for everything.   He takes the last little bit of his life savings and goes to a clinic, where they replace all his bad memories of failed romances with a fake memory of meeting his soul mate when they were both teenagers and they have a happy life together and then in their shared old age his soul mate dies (peacefully of natural causes) and he morns.   But then he goes on with his life because they both promised each other that they would if one of them died before the other.

He leaves the clinic knowing only that he had checked himself in for a very normal and natural case of depression after his one true love had passed away.   The doctors and nurses there he remembers, were all very kind to him, and all said he’d been a very lucky man to have found such a beautiful meaningful love, and he left the clinic feeling a little sorry for them, because they were still searching for it.

He spends his last few years peacefully remembering his lover, spouse and soul mate, and dies one day a happy man, knowing he had lived life to its fullest.

You see?   Even horror stories can have happy endings.

.

Via Good As You. Orson Scott Card retells Hamlet. Yes. Seriously.

Anyone who thinks they’ve witnessed the heights of bigotry, look…if you haven’t read any of Orson Scott Card’s rants about homosexuality you absolutely Have Not seen the pure unadulterated thing…

Outcry over Hamlet novel casting old king as gay paedophile

A small American press has been swamped with complaints after publishing a version of Hamlet by the science fiction author Orson Scott Card in which King Hamlet is a gay paedophile.

Hymned by the publisher Subterranean Press as a “revelatory” retelling which shows “what’s really going on” in Shakespeare’s play, the story suggests Hamlet’s father wasn’t murdered by his brother Claudius, but Horatio, in revenge for being molested by him as a child.

…

The book is not a new release, having been published twice before, for the first time in 2008, but an explosive review at the Rain Taxi Review of Books has unleashed a wave of criticism.

“Here’s the punch line: Old King Hamlet was an inadequate king because he was gay, an evil person because he was gay, and, ultimately, a demonic and ghostly father of lies who convinces young Hamlet to exact imaginary revenge on innocent people,” writes William Alexander. “The old king was actually murdered by Horatio, in revenge for molesting him as a young boy – along with Laertes, and Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, thereby turning all of them gay … Hamlet is damned for all the needless death he inflicts, and Dead Gay Dad will now do gay things to him for the rest of eternity: ‘Welcome to Hell, my beautiful son. At last we’ll be together as I always longed for us to be.'”

For anyone who has read Orson Scott Card’s The Hypocrites Of Homosexuality and Homosexual “Marriage” and Civilization (the scare quotes are his), this is as unsurprising as the sight of the sun rising in the east. But bear in mind as you are reading all this, the National Organization for Marriage finds him fit enough for its board of directors…a man who once said that if same-sex couples are universally allowed to marry, every pledge of allegiance he ever uttered since he was a child becomes null and void…

“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.” -Orson Scott Card, Homosexual “Marriage” and Civilization.

Perhaps someone should ask Brian Brown if he feels the same way about his allegiance to the United States of America. Oh…and civil war.

I honestly don’t think Card hates homosexuals. Bigotry isn’t always hate. The gutter has no bottom and there is a step down even from hate, where the complete dehumanization within oneself of the hated other is achieved. Did the architects who designed the gas chambers of Auschwitz hate the Jews, or were they simply doing their best to rid Europe of what they regarded as a pestilence? Hate is not the bottom. If your entire concept of “bigot” is such as Fred Phelps who wave their signs screaming that Matthew Shepard is burning in hell and Thank God For Dead Soldiers, it can come as a shock to see a human heart even more depraved, and worse, to see it so matter of fact about it, as if discussing the weather or last night’s baseball game. But the further down in the gutter you go, the more peaceful it seems.

Card doesn’t scream and shout. He doesn’t stand on a street corner and wave the bible and preach hell fire and damnation. If you sit him down to discuss it (ask people who have interviewed him) he will tell you calmly and matter-of-factly that gay rights is a collective delusion… that granting rights for deviant behavior is ridiculous… that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… that when two homosexuals start telling people they’re a couple they are just “playing house” (his words)…that they might think that they have deep feelings towards one another but that’s all that it is…just wishful thinking, just pitiful trying to convince themselves that their deviant sexual urges are something higher and nobler then empty lust. He will tell you calmly and matter-of-factly that a homosexual’s highest allegiance is to the community that gives them access to sex… that homosexuals recruit children into homosexuality by molesting them and that is how everyone or nearly everyone who ever was a homosexual became one.

He will tell you all of this simply, calmly, and matter-of-factly. So matter-of-factly that you do not, simply cannot doubt this man will never be moved from his prejudices, no matter how much evidence to the contrary moves past his eyes. He does not deny the evidence, he simply does not see it. He can’t. He’s a bigot.

Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Homosexuals are a threat to children. Homosexuality must be actively suppressed by force of law, preferably in a discrete, non-confrontational way, brutally if necessary, or the homosexuals will eventually recruit so many others into homosexuality that civilization will collapse.

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society. -Orson Scott Card, The Hypocrites of Homosexuality.

Orson Scott Card will tell you this, as if he is telling you the time of day.

Some prejudice is simply misinformed. Some prejudice is cultural…like the song says, you have to be carefully taught. Even in the most vehement of haters of that kind, there is humanity buried somewhere within. It can be reached. Maybe. Then there is the prejudice that is an abyss. You cannot move an abyss, you can only stare into it, while it stares back into you.

In my Twitter feed, Think Progress asks, “Is the media going to let Governor Perry get away with abandoning specific positions he detailed in a 9-month-old book?”

Yes.

This has been another edition of Simple Answers To Simple Questions…

VLADIMIR: We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless Barack comes.

ESTRAGON: And if he comes?

VLADIMIR: We’ll be saved.

(Beckett…slightly altered…)

A default looms, but not the one everyone has on their minds just now.   I’m glancing at my Twitter feed, and I see Think Progress tweet: “$2.8T in spending cuts is essentially a quadruple reverse-stimulus.” Yes, but it’s more then the stimulus that’s being drawn back.   It’s two-hundred plus years of American democracy that is being drawn back.

The republicans haven’t just screwed our economy, they’ve trashed our democracy by finding and exploiting a fatal weakness in the system of checks and balances our founders created.   They’ve found, to use the metaphors of my trade, a bug in the code, and they created an exploit.   They have discovered that as long as you have enough votes to sustain a filibuster you don’t have to stop at merely blocking certain specific bills you find particularly odious, you can run the entire ship of state simply by threatening to bring everything crashing down unless you get what you want.

If the democrats capitulate on this, and it’s looking like they will, then we are lost.   The American Experiment in democracy will be over.   We have simply stopped living in a democracy at that point, and the grip of a bitter, brutal radical cult unlike anything our history has known will have taken its place.   And that cult is passionately determined to cut the American Dream down to their liking.

It’ll be an America where women and minorities have no rights a straight white protestant male is bound to respect.   Where workers have no right to a safe work environment, let alone the right to organize into unions strong enough to push back against the steady loss of our middle class.   Where once again the elderly die alone and in poverty.   Where factories can once more dump whatever toxic sludge they like into the water you drink and the air you breath.   Where no science that contradicts fundamentalist dogma can be taught to school kids. Where the sale of contraceptives are once again outlawed.   Where your gay neighbors can once again be denied a job, a professional license, a place to live, be thrown in jail simply for being what they are.

None of this is hyperbole.   The so-called tea partiers say these things time and time again.   That they are a movement mostly concerned with small government and not social issues is a convenient fiction of a corporate news media that desperately wants not to be seen taking sides.   Yes the tea party sings a mantra of smaller less intrusive government, but one only has to pay attention to see that is simply the means by which they mean to achieve their hard right ends.   A government big enough to protect minorities is too big.   A government big enough to make the states butt out of people’s private sex lives is too big.   A government big enough to protect the environment, the rights of workers, the economy from corruption, is too big.   Small government is the oligarch’s friend.

I’ve often wondered if this is how it felt to be living in Europe in the 1930s, as another bitter, brutal radical cult methodically undermined the democracies tentatively rising from the ashes of monarchy.   Step by bitterly determined step they smashed what they could, and with every new success came new demands, which were followed by more appeasements that were supposed to finally mollify the radicals.   What it did was convince the radicals they had nothing to fear and everything to gain.   Everything they said they would do, that nobody believed they would actually do, they eventually did.   And afterwards the world wondered at how people could have been so blind to have not seen it coming.

Look around. Now you know.

Details of the horrific events in Norway will continue to unfold no doubt for weeks, if not months to come. So it is well that we all just take a deep breath and wait for solid information to come out. I understand the impulse to think it was radical Islamic terrorism when the news first hit; it was my first reaction too. But I remembered Oklahoma City and held my peace and waited. And now it seems from the facts coming to light, that this was indeed more Oklahoma City then 9/11…

UPDATE 2, Saturday, July 23, 11:06 a.m. EDT: Oddmy Estenstad, an employee of agricultural retailer Felleskjøpet, tells CNN that Utoya shooting suspect Anders Behring Breivik bought six tons of fertilizer from the company in May:

She did not think the order was strange at the time because the suspect has a farm, but after Friday’s explosion in Norway’s capital, Oslo, she called police because she knew the material can be used to make bombs.

“We are very shocked that this man was connected to our company,” said Estenstad. “We are very sad about what happened.”

That sounds vaguely familiar. But bear in mind there is still an investigation going on and we really still don’t know much. This passage from the suspect’s postings to an anti-Muslim website struck me though…

I dare not even think of how many Norwegian children who have been suicide because of these experiences (assault, robbery, rape, psychological terror committed by Muslim youths). There are probably several hundred in the last 15 years.

….Non-Muslim youth in Oslo aged 12-18 are in a particularly vulnerable situation in terms of harassment [from] Muslim youth.

This from a man who (it is said) methodically killed 80 kids at a youth camp, some while they were swimming away for their lives. Always, the monster the bigot sees in others is themselves. And they are right to fear that monster.

Andrew Sullivan this morning:

Last night, it struck me that every single statement on gay rights by the GOP candidates, however brutal, could have been leavened by some small concession that gays are serving their country honorably, that gays are a part of many families and indeed the American family, that they should not be demonized by the majority, etc. But none of the candidates could say a single positive thing. Or rather they believed they could not survive a GOP primary by saying anything even vaguely positive about gay Americans. In some ways, that’s more telling.

If in the process of conducting your political campaign you give a silent consent to hate then you are just as much a part of the mob as if you had born one of their torches yourself and screamed for blood.   Anyone who cannot muster the moral backbone to denounce hate is unfit to be director of public parking, let alone president of the United States.   It is that simple.

I just have one comment to make on the unfolding story of Kirk Murphy. This can’t be shouted out loudly enough: The subject of this study, which formed much of the basis for the ex-gay movement’s claim to scientific legitimacy, killed himself and his therapy so deeply wounded his family they are still, decades later, suffering from it.

The Ex-Gay movement was born in the blood of innocents. In his book, Anything But Straight, Wayne talks about the formation of the very first ex-gay ministry, Love In Action, its first clients, and how one of them, Jack McIntyre, chose to end his life rather then keep failing at becoming heterosexual.

In 1973 John Evans, who is gay, and Rev. Kent Philpott, who is heterosexual, co-founded the original “ex-gay” ministry, Love In Action on the outskirts of San Francisco. Philpott soon wrote The Third Sex?, the first ever “ex-gay” book which touted six people who supposedly converted to heterosexuality through prayer.

Although time eventually revealed no one in his book actually had changed, the people reading it had no idea the stories were fallacious. As far as they knew, there was a magical place in California that had figured out the secret for making gays into straights. Inspired by his book, a few enthusiastic individuals spontaneously began their own “ex-gay” ministries.

Evans, however, denounced the program he co-founded after his best friend Jack McIntyre committed suicide in despair over not being able to “change”…

McIntyre wrote a suicide note. If the ex-gay movement could be said to have a heart and soul, here it is:

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.

And as Wayne writes…

Still, Love in Action survived because many people who read The Third Sex? came to California in hopes of changing.

And George Rekers was still citing his success at fixing Kirk years after Kirk had taken his own life. When reporters caught up with him recently Rekers dismissed the idea that Kirk’s suicide could have had anything to do with the experimental gender identity therapy he’d inflicted upon the child. Oh no…that was years ago…

“That’s a long time ago, and to hypothesize, you have a hypothesis that positive treatment back in the 1970s has something to do with something happening decades later. That would, that hypothesis would need a lot of scientific investigation to see if it’s valid…”

More apparently, then the initial therapy got according to Jim Burroway who writes of his surprise that there was little to no independent verification of Reker’s claims. But according to his family Kirk was a troubled soul the rest of his life, though he had moments when it seemed he had made peace with himself. And it bears noting that the therapy deeply disturbed then, and continues to this day to disturb, his mother and his straight older brother, his sister being too young at the time to remember any of what happened.

“I do grieve for the parents now that you’ve told me that news. I think that’s very sad.” – George Rekers

Look carefully at this: Kirk was the patient who made Rekers’ career and he only just now learns of his suicide when CNN reporter tracked him down? Yes. Of course. He never stayed in touch, clearly and sickeningly never felt the slightest curiosity about how his most famous patient was doing. This is not science, it is politics. The client is not important. The client’s family is not important. It’s the message, that that there is no such thing as a homosexual only broken heterosexuals, that is important. Because inside that message is another: that homosexuals bring their own persecution upon themselves, since they can choose whenever they want to not be homosexual.

…no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed… The Ex-Gay movement was born in the blood of innocents. It continues to destroy lives and wreak families with no more tangible regard from its leadership for the human toll now then in the moment of its birth. Their allegiance is to a higher agency. No…not God. The culture war. Failure is not a bug, it’s a feature. The scapegoat must hate themselves too.

Joe Jervis over at Joe.My.God posts what looks like the cover of NOM’s current mailer…

So it looks like NOM is doubling-down on their The Homosexuals Are After Your Children card that worked for them so well in California.   How…unsurprising…

When you have reduced your neighbor to the status of a scarecrow that drives voters to the polls, or a scapegoat for every failure of moral character you would rather not be held accountable for, when you cannot see the people for the homosexuals, then threats to their lives become meaningless abstractions. They’re not your neighbors, they’re not people, they’re things…and the safety of things isn’t something that often crosses the mind. It’s not hate exactly…it’s what hate does to the heart eventually.   That may look like a photo of a cute little boy with his daddy’s glasses on, reading a book about two kings who fall in love, but look closer. That is a photo of human souls in free fall.   To win elections, to prevent loving same-sex couples from having access to marriage, NOM is belly flopping into the gutter, and they know it, and they don’t care.   Not honor, not morality, not any shred of basic human decency left within them matters to them any more.   All that matters is striking out at the Homosexual Menace.   This is what hate does to the heart, eventually.

The Homosexuals Are After Your Children!!! It’s a message that gets attention and, for now, wins elections. The trump card you can play when it looks like too many voters are starting to view the homosexual as their neighbor. It also gets people killed. But for that to weigh on your conscience, you have to see gays as people, not things.   You have to be able to see the people for the homosexuals.   Bigots can’t.

Apparently Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown believe that gay people have to die so that marriage can be sacred.

Joe Jervis over at Joe.My.God has a post up containing a video of Brian Brown speaking at Sen. Ruben Diaz hate rally in the Bronx this afternoon. It’s worth a look to get a feel for the heated atmosphere Diaz, Brown and company feel is appropriate for addressing the place of their gay neighbors in society. At the 2:55 mark, Brown shouts the following out at the crowd:

“It changes what is taught in the schools. Kids as young as kindergarten are taught in Massachusetts that their parents are bigots because they believe marriage is the union of a man and a woman.”

It just isn’t possible by now, that Brown and Gallagher don’t know their claim that the curriculum of kindergarten in Massachusetts has anything to do with same-sex marriage is false. But the smear that The Homosexuals Are After Your Children has a long history, even before Anita Bryant embodied it with her Save Our Children campaign, which was not so much about saving children (certainly not any gay ones at least) then it was making sure gay citizens could loose their jobs simply for being gay. But if it’s not possible that Brown and Gallagher don’t know that Massachusetts isn’t teaching kindergarteners about same-sex marriages, it’s also not possible that they don’t know how useful it is to say that it is.

So here is Brown doubling-down on it. Not only is Massachusetts teaching kindergarteners about same-sex marriage, but their teachers are telling them that their parents are bigots. And he’s doing it in a community that’s already had some pretty spectacular anti-gay violence recently…

Bronx gang accused of torturing gay man and 3 others make first court appearance

Eight gay-hating Bronx gangbangers accused of one of the city’s most savage crimes in years appeared in court Sunday to face charges in what Mayor Bloomberg called an act of “pure evil.”

They stand accused of torturing and terrorizing a gay man, his older brother and two teenagers over the course of many hours Oct. 3 in Morris Heights.

“Is it true you’re a fag?” ringleader Idelfonso (Cheto) Mendez allegedly demanded of his bound victims before punching them in the face.

Prosecutors said he repeated the query and the punch over and over again.

Straight Teen Killed in Queens Gay-Bash Attack

Anti-gay bias attacks don’t always target gays. Sometimes violent perpetrators screaming anti-gay epithets target straight men instead. Such may have been the case in the March 12 beating death in Queens, New York, of 18-year-old Anthony Collao, a heterosexual recent high school graduate, reported the New York Daily News on March 15.

Several young men who reportedly broke windows, scrawled on the walls with red markers, and made hand gestures associated with gangs invaded a party hosted by two gay men. The men also reportedly attacked and beat Collao while hurling anti-gay epithets, the article said.

The news account said that Collao tried to avoid violence by leaving the party once the four intruders entered. The gang chased him down, the article said, threw him up against a car, and pummeled him mercilessly. Collao was reportedly was reportedly punched, kicked, and stomped. One assailant was said to be carrying a pipe.

Four suspects were later placed under arrest. One of the young men was wearing Collao’s baseball cap, and the other three were “covered in blood.”

Do you really think that Ruben Diaz doesn’t know about any of this? Or Brian Brown?

“Kids as young as kindergarten are taught in Massachusetts that their parents are bigots because they believe marriage is the union of a man and a woman…”

The homosexuals are coming for your children!!! This is the kind of thing that gets people gay bashed and killed. And NOM’s utter indifference to the climate of violence this sort of rhetoric can enable speaks volumes. Perhaps it’s true that Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown do not hate gay people. Perhaps. Clearly they regard hate as a useful tool. It gets people to the voting booth. It gets their checkbooks opened up.

A few months ago Maggie, you asked, rhetorically, “Do I have blood on my hands?” And you know, I’ve been wondering why you didn’t bother wearing your wedding ring to the DOMA hearings a few weeks ago. They say the wedding ring embodies the continuous flow of love, a never-ending circle symbolizing eternity, where there is no beginning or end, the gold symbolizing purity…gold being one of the noble elements that are said to be incorruptible. But the spilling of innocent blood corrupts everything it touches. That simple, elegant and beautiful symbol of eternal love…you’re turning it into a thing of shame Maggie. I don’t think very many couples want their wedding vows sealed with a ring of blood.

[Posted over at Truth Wins Out…]

“Why stop at transgender identity? Why not species identity — someone wants to get in touch with their inner horse.”
-Matt Barber, speaking at The Awakening

Lest you think it was all bile and venom at The Awakening, they also discussed ways of approaching homosexuals from a Christian perspective. “We have to reach out to those trapped in lifestyle that ultimately leads to death,” said Cynthia Dunbar, assistant law professor at Liberty University. Ryan Sorba, chairman of the Young Conservatives of California who threw a fit at gay participation at last year’s CPAC, offered these helpful insights for Christians wishing to reach out to homosexuals:

“‘Gay’ is a left-wing socio-political construct designed to create grounds for fundamental rights [based on] whimsical capricious desires. Gay identity does not exist.”

According to the article he then proposed several alternatives to “gay” including, “same-sex attraction”, “same-sex intercourse”, “unnatural vice” and the ever popular “sodomy”. Later it was proposed that gays also be called “anti-Christian.” But in a reaching out kind of way.

Whatever they were awakening there at Liberty University it wasn’t their conscience. Perhaps they should have held a seance instead.

This is another edition of what Atrios said…   Actually, Rotwang…

It is very difficult to get someone committed against their will, unless they have committed violent acts. After all, I’m still at large. In states with big public sectors, aid for the mentally ill — assuming they accept assistance — can be very spotty. There are agencies with phone numbers, but try calling and getting some service. (I have.) In Arizona, forget it.

The icing on the cake is that in some places almost everyone has access to firearms. Efforts to deal with guns or magazines or bullets are doomed, like Prohibition or ‘The War on Drugs.’ There are just too many around, and too many people who want them. Better coverage of mental illness would be worthwhile, but it wouldn’t stop homicidal people from reflecting back the hostilities of extremists with prominent platforms. We know who the extremists are.

P.S. I would concede that some kind of gun control would make it more difficult for incompetent, crazy people like Nutboy to get guns. As crime control, however, forget it.

P.P.S. An attack of this intensity on a Congress person is an exceedingly rare event, so in that sense it’s futile to diddle with ‘how could this have been prevented.’

Glenn Greenwald Tweets somewhat sarcastically, “Remember the 1960s, when 1000s of people were involuntarily locked up in insane asylums and there were no assassinations? http://is.gd/kAbza”

I remember part of the impetus for getting people out of the asylums was far too many were committed who didn’t really need hospitalization, and the ones who did weren’t getting it as long as they were being held safely out of public view.   In far too many cases they were more dumping grounds then hospitals.

It’s tempting to engage in a little sarcasm myself when I hear my fellow liberals start yapping about gun control now.   Hey fellas…I’ve got a Swell idea on how to lower the temperature of the rhetoric in this country…let’s start making noises about gun control…!

Yes…this will certainly lower the temperature of the dialogue in this country.   But then there’s this…

Joe Wilson ‘You Lie’ Slogan Etched Onto Line Of Assault Rifle Components

Rep. Joe Wilson’s (R-S.C.) health care-era “you lie” interruption of President Obama is now reportedly being commemorated with a place on a new, limited edition line of assault rifle components.

The Columbia Free Times reports that the words are being engraved on a series of lower receivers manufactured for popular AR-15 assault rifles. Lower receivers are one of the primary pieces of the firearms.

“Palmetto State Armory would like to honor our esteemed congressman Joe Wilson with the release of our new ‘You Lie’ AR-15 lower receiver,” the weapon manufacturer’s site writes on the product description. “Only 999 of these will be produced, get yours before they are gone!”

I believe the 2nd amendment guarantees the right of individual citizens to keep and bear arms.   I believe that freedom is part and parcel of democracy itself.   And I despair.   Never mind the lunatics who are selling the above back handed incitement to kill a president (I sincerely hope the Secret Service is watching where those rifles are going!).   Never mind the NRA’s grotesquely dogmatic stances on gun regulation and crime.   The biggest reason we can’t have a rational discussion about gun control in this country is the gun control crowd was very successful back in the 70s in convincing people that their ultimate aim was to eliminate private gun ownership in this country.   People quite correctly concluded that even the smallest most perfectly rational regulations on gun sales and ownership was just a first step toward total confiscation.   That wasn’t paranoia…it was often stated quite openly by gun control groups.

That seems to have changed on the democratic side of the isle.   Good.   But it isn’t enough to get us to where we need to be regarding guns.   There’s a lot of things I think we could do, including bans on high capacity clips for instance.   But the first step has to be acknowledging Americans, if they are peaceful and law abiding, do in fact have a basic right to own their own guns, which is to say, the means to defend themselves.

How denying that somehow became a staple of democratic politics completely baffles me sometimes.   I understand and share the liberal democratic impulse to hate war, revere life, nurture love and defend liberty, to work for justice and toward the peaceful society where we are all equals in the eyes of the law.   I am completely disgusted by the the republican lock them up and throw away the key approach to crime.   That we incarcerate a higher percentage of our own citizens then any other industrialized nation should be a matter of shame to all of us.   But if democrats represent the interests of the common everyday working people as opposed to the rich and powerful, then they really need to remind themselves from time to time that the lot of the common people is not greatly improved by rendering them defenseless.

I am not going to stand here and argue that had someone in Gifford’s crowd been armed some or all of the killings may not have happened. I’m certainly not going to argue that a state that can’t at least Try to keep guns out of the hands of mentally unstable people isn’t asking for trouble. The argument I often hear that an armed society is a peaceful one seems grotesque on its face.   You need your gun when the peace has broken down, not when its alive and well.   So the first thing is to nurture the peace.

I was bullied horribly during part of my grade school years, the middle school ones, and it left me with a perfect understanding of how it is that your personal safety and security is ultimately on you and you alone.   You need to prepare yourself for the worst.     But having a fire alarm in your house is a pathetic excuse for playing with matches and gasoline.   What…I had a smoke detector…why is my house on fire…?? The bromide is that guns don’t kill people, people kill people.   But turn that around.   Guns don’t make a peaceful society either.   People do.   And one way you Don’t make a peaceful society is this:

Or this…

Or this…

And this…

And this…

That last is from an ad that was televised in West Virginia as part of the campaign to enact an anti-same-sex marriage amendment in that state.   It’s a family in the crosshairs of an unseen homosexual sniper.   More specifically, the unseen homosexual sniper is targeting their children.   This is what gets people killed.   This is what makes a society violent.   This is creating the climate of hate that can set off a mentally unstable individual.     But also the perfectly, murderously sane gay basher.   Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been on the receiving end of this hate incited violence now for decades.   What’s changed is now the right is doing it more broadly, and more openly, and with even less compunction.   What we’ve been seeing in this country in recent years, your gay and lesbian neighbors have been seeing for decades.   A climate of hate, meticulously, relentlessly cultivated for political and social ends.

There’s your problem.   Not guns.   Hate.   Last Saturday it was a crazy man.   Tomorrow it might be the chillingly sane.   Timothy McVeigh.   Eric Rudolph.   Scott Roeder.   One political party has been ginning up hate as a way to win elections for decades now.     The problem is when the inevitable violence results the other party responds by calling for more gun control, as if that’s even possible in a nation that hates itself as much as this one is starting to.

I understand that first amendment freedoms are sacred to a democracy.   If we can’t talk to each other we can’t govern ourselves.   Speech, even ugly disagreeable speech, is a right government cannot be allowed to trample on without opening the door to tyranny.   Our ability to speak truth to power depends on that freedom.   My hope is the killings in Arizona can finally, finally, enable us to also speak truth to hate without fear that we could sabotage freedom of speech in the process.   If we don’t confront hate we will loose that too.   Hate will silence the democratic dialogue if we let it, and then we Will loose our precious democracy.

All the gun control in the world won’t matter if we hate each other enough.   And if we love and care about each other as neighbors, as fellow Americans, regardless of race, creed or religion, then guns cannot do us any great harm.   Just there in the background, like the fireman’s hose if you need it, but the point is not to.   How much crime could be eliminated if we actually cared about each other as fellow Americans enough to make our schools strong, and the economy work for everyone?   How many gun accidents could be avoided if we cared about each other enough that we held our neighbor’s safety, and their children’s, as if it were our own?   Yes actually, guns do kill people.   When people hate each other enough.   If you’re worrying about the availability of guns in this country you are worrying about the wrong thing.

The pushback from the right started almost immediately, and with all the acid vitriol by which they inflamed the violent passions that almost certainly led to the shooting in Arizona last Saturday in the first place.   You could watch the bogus Jared Lee Loughner Facebook pages…the ones where he admits his loathsome liberal tendancies…being created and deleted as fast as the Facebook administrators could catch them going up.   You can really tell they learned their lesson from the killing of Matthew Shepard.   If now was then, they’d have been calling Shepard a meth using sex addict and McKinney and Henderson a couple of drugged out psychopaths and the killing a Tragic robbery gone bad long before the body had a chance to get cold, let alone buried.   And as always, a key ingredient in the smokescreen building are the uncertainties, inevitable so close to the event itself, if not for far, far beyond it.   What actually did motivate the killer?   Was he a leftist or a hard core Tea Partier?   Did he read Marx or Hitler?   Did he surf The New Republic or Daily KOS?   And if we can’t answer those basic questions then dare you lay blame for this horrible, horrible tragedy at the feet of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party you treasonous America hating liberals.

And so on…and so forth…

What does it mean to “lay the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at the feet of Palin and the Right”?   That they gave the killer the gun and some money and sent him on his way?   That they deliberately incited this specific killer to this specific act?     That they fueled a dangerous climate of violence against their political opponents, deliberately, to intimidate their political opposition without particularly caring if any one of them actually got killed, because long ago they stopped seeing the opposition as their neighbors, their fellow Americans, but rather as an enemy to be defeated by any means necessary, and if one of them Did get killed it would teach the rest a lesson?

“Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: ‘Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!'”
-Sarah Palin via Twitter

Angle: I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who’s in the military. This not for law enforcement. This is for us. And in fact when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny. This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical…

Manders: If we needed it at any time in history, it might be right now.

Angle: Well it’s to defend ourselves. And you know, I’m hoping that we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.

Responsibility.   If our fingerprints are not actually on the murder weapon itself then we are not responsible.   It is immoral for you to use this National Tragedy for partisan political advantage.   And if our violent eliminationist rhetoric did happen to motivate that poor psycho to pack a gun and kill an elected officeholder we’ve placed our crosshairs on, well then logically liberals are the ones who are responsible.   Because if it wasn’t for all that ACLU liberal freedom of speech stuff he would never have heard us talking about 2nd amendment remedies for adverse election outcomes.   Responsibility.