Via Sullivan…this little nugget from the front lines from Daily KOS…
It is, in short, a movement made up of the enfranchised and enabled; people who have gained every benefit from the politics of America and yet who feel in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones, the ones who have nothing left to lose, so rapidly is America falling away from them. It is rare to run across any movement so deeply angry — or more to the point, a movement which explicitly celebrates anger as the primary mission of their activism. They are not willing to listen to any factual evidence that contradicts their own beliefs in whatever dark conspiracies have been peddled to them; they have in fact made it their publicly proclaimed mission to block any such explanations from even being attempted.
This could be a description of the anti-gay movement in America ever since Anita Bryant. Enfranchised and enabled? Check. They have every right that their gay neighbors are fighting for. Every. Right. Feeling in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones? Check. It’s a constant refrain. Militant homosexuals are oppressing them. Somehow. But don’t ask how exactly because all you’ll get are either vague claims that their "deeply held religious beliefs" are being trampled on every time they’re told to leave gay people alone, or if not that, then outright lies. Remember this?
Another "Yes on 8" canard is that the continuation of same-sex marriage will force churches and other religious groups to perform such marriages or face losing their tax-exempt status. Proponents point to a case in New Jersey, where a Methodist-based nonprofit owned seaside land that included a boardwalk pavilion. It obtained an exemption from state property tax for the land on the grounds that it was open for public use and access. Events such as weddings — of any religion — could be held in the pavilion by reservation. But when a lesbian couple sought to book the pavilion for a commitment ceremony, the nonprofit balked, saying this went against its religious beliefs.
The court ruled against the nonprofit, not because gay rights trump religious rights but because public land has to be open to everyone or it’s not public. The ruling does not affect churches’ religious tax exemptions or their freedom to marry whom they please on their private property, just as Catholic priests do not have to perform marriages for divorced people and Orthodox synagogues can refuse to provide space for the weddings of interfaith couples. And Proposition 8 has no bearing on the issue; note that the New Jersey case wasn’t about a wedding ceremony.
We’re being oppressed…by having to live by the same rules everyone else does…
Not willing to listen to any factual evidence that contradicts their own beliefs? Check. Not only are they not willing to listen to the facts, they’ve built a multi-million dollar industry with dozens of front groups whose only job is to churn out one lie after another about gay people which they insist everyone else accept as holy writ, whereas any actual science is regarded as pro-homo propaganda. Publicly proclaimed their mission to block any actual facts from coming to light? Check. From keeping honest, factual information about sexual orientation out of schools, to keeping it out of public libraries, to keeping it off of television, there is no public space that the facts about homosexuality and sexual orientation can appear that they have not vigorously…and I mean vigorously…worked to shut it down.
This Daily KOS post could have been written years ago, decades even, about about the anti-gay culture warriors. But it isn’t about the fight over gay rights. It’s about the struggle for America…
There seems little question that something odd is going on with the healthcare debate. Foremost is the ridiculous extent to which the debate has been entirely commandeered by flagrant, outright lies — things about euthanasia, and death panels, and the like, abject propaganda peddled directly from House and Senate offices. We have had lying in our discourse since the beginning of that discourse, but it has been a long while since the fabrications have been so blatant, so absolutely without even the smallest grain of truth. To take a Republican-sponsored healthcare provision that rather innocently and uncontroversially extends insurance coverage to those that want to create their own living wills and turn it into a declaration that the government will decide every five years whether or not you should be euthanized is something out of the Protocols, or out of Saddam’s Iraq, or a mimicry of the worst and most stupid and most absurd of North Korean propaganda towards their own citizens.
Likewise, the explicit instruction to protestors not to debate, but to aggressively attempt to shut down the meetings entirely — not normal. It is perhaps the best possible approach for insurance lobbyists to take, if their goal is to protect the profits of their industry — but it is still not normal. We have always had the fringes of such speech, but I cannot recall a time it has been so celebrated as the formal solution to political debate. Certainly not by a major political party, coupled with the majority of their most popular pundits and talking heads, coupled again to lobbyist groups with long histories of corporate astroturfing. And the proud shuffling just-up-to-the-line-of-violence, right in the very faces of their own representatives of Congress, requiring police protection in order to escort those elected representatives safely from the meetings — that part is new. That part is not normal.
It’s been normal in the battle for gay rights for decades now…you’re only just now noticing it, because they’ve moved beyond us. But you have to understand this: you’ve always been the target too. A free, just, and proud America has always been their target. The America of liberty and justice for all has always been their target. Because in that America, they’re then just a bunch of ignorant runts, resentful that the universe doesn’t revolve around them, resentful of everything fine and noble human beings can be, they they never will because it’s too much work.
You haven’t seen the hate like your gay neighbors have seen it. Now you are. Surprised? Shocked? Just wait until you realize, really realize, that there is no bottom there.
One thing to keep in mind is that race, and racism, have rarely ever acted alone. One of the best points that Phillip Dray makes in his classic history of lynching is that epidemics of lynching often coincided, not just with an expansion of black rights, but with increased labor mobility among white women. So fear of white women, and their independence, as well as fear of sexual competition, all worked in concert. It wasn’t simply "I hate niggers" — it never is. It was "I don’t much like black people, and prices are going up, and I have to let my wife work, so I can survive, and I’m scared she won’t stay with me if she’s not dependent on me and I’d die if she left me for a black guy." Or some such.
Ditto for the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t just racism — it was class also. In the South you had this black middle class that always had to be deferential to the most poorest white person in the world. The prospect of losing that deference, of already being lower than the white aristocracy and now also being lower than a class of blacks too, wreaked havoc.
…
We’ve got governors yelling about secession, and major politicians peddling stories of imminent threats to your family and your children by the very government they are supposedly a part of, and every day the town hall footage just seems to look more and more like a modernized version of the mob attacks against citizens and legislators during old anti-desegregation rallies, and we don’t need to say "sooner or later someone will be shot" because it has already happened, and multiple times, and in truth it never really left us, these last fifty years.
It wasn’t about desegregation. It wasn’t about feminism. It wasn’t about gay rights. Those were just the flashpoints…the excuses. It wasn’t about any of those things. Not ever. Think about the other major event of the last half of the 20th century…the cold war. Think about the Iron Curtain. Think about the Berlin Wall. Think about all those people who were shot, trying to get over it to freedom. Think about what was going through the minds of the people who gave the order to shoot and kill those wall climbers. What this has always been about: The Gutter…resentful, hating everyone who ever managed to rise above them, fearful of being left alone in the gutter, afraid of the day when the walls all fall down and everyone who can leaves them behind and all they’ll have is each other to look at, and to blame.
You Can Fool Some Of The People Some Of The Time, And All Of The People Some Of The Time, But You Can Fool Yourself All Of The Time
If the anti-gay petition drive in Washington State fails due to too many invalid signatures, the sweet justice of it might be that their own anti-gay base believed the same signature gathering lies they were telling everyone else. This from The Seattle PI blog:
The numbers for Thursday’s count showed 6,483 checked and 935 rejected, for a cumulative daily error rate of 14.42 percent, said secretary of state spokesman Dave Ammons.
…and this from the comments:
I think the lying on the part of supporters may have hurt them with the error rate.
Imagine someone in Kent waddling up to the Walmart and encountering someone with a petition to "repeal domestic partnerships for gays." They sign it and go in for a triple pounder with cheese before buying lead-filled Chinese crap for their kids.
Then 5 weeks later, they role out of their SUV at the Olive Garden and see someone with a petition to "ban same sex marriage." They go ahead and sign it, not realizing that it’s the same one they signed 5 weeks ago because the paid petition gatherer lied to them.
Gay-marriage supporters and foes on Thursday exchanged vows to take the high road in their campaigns in an anticipated referendum.
The lead organization fighting to keep the state’s gay-marriage law on the books made its request of Frank Schubert of Schubert Flint Public Affairs. Schubert Flint led the successful Proposition 8 proposal to overturn same-sex marriage in California, and it has been hired to do the same in Maine.
"Maine voters expect us to take the high road, avoid poisonous attacks, and make our case based on fact and principle. Today, NO on 1 pledged to abide by that high standard," said Jesse Connolly, campaign manager for NO on 1/Protect Maine Equality.
Reached in Washington, D.C., Frank Schubert said his firm’s campaign to toss out Maine’s gay-marriage law will be conducted in an ethical manner.
"I’m not sure what point they’re attempting to make, but every campaign we’ve run has been an ethical campaign based on factual information. We plan to run exactly that type of campaign in Maine," Schubert said Thursday.
Do I really need to explain the hopelessness of agreeing to a civil debate with the architects of the Proposition 8 campaign? Particularly when these thugs still think that campaign of smears, lies and hatemongering hysteria Was eithical? And…Factual?
Let’s Review some of the ethics and factuality on display in California shall we…?
The campaign promoting Proposition 8, which proposes to amend the state Constitution to ban same-sex marriages, has masterfully misdirected its audience, California voters. Look at the first-graders in San Francisco, attending their lesbian teacher’s wedding! Look at Catholic Charities, halting its adoption services in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is legal! Look at the church that lost its tax exemption over gay marriage! Look at anything except what Proposition 8 is actually about: a group of people who are trying to impose on the state their belief that homosexuality is immoral and that gays and lesbians are not entitled to be treated equally under the law.
That truth would never sell in tolerant, live-and-let-live California, and so it has been hidden behind a series of misleading half-truths. Once the sleight of hand is revealed, though, the campaign’s illusions fall away.
Take the story of Catholic Charities. The service arm of the Roman Catholic Church closed its adoption program in Massachusetts not because of the state’s gay marriage law but because of a gay anti-discrimination law passed many years earlier. In fact, the charity had voluntarily placed older foster children in gay and lesbian households — among those most willing to take hard-to-place children — until the church hierarchy was alerted and demanded that adoptions conform to the church’s religious teaching, which was in conflict with state law. The Proposition 8 campaign, funded in large part by Mormons who were urged to do so by their church, does not mention that the Mormon church’s adoption arm in Massachusetts is still operating, even though it does not place children in gay and lesbian households.
How can this be? It’s a matter of public accountability, not infringement on religion. Catholic Charities acted as a state contractor, receiving state and federal money to find homes for special-needs children who were wards of the state, and it faced the loss of public funding if it did not comply with the anti-discrimination law. In contrast, LDS (for Latter-day Saints) Family Services runs a private adoption service without public funding. Its work, and its ability to follow its religious teachings, have not been altered.
That San Francisco field trip? The children who attended the wedding had their parents’ signed permission, as law requires. A year ago, with the same permission, they could have traveled to their teacher’s domestic-partnership ceremony. Proposition 8 does not change the rules about what children are exposed to in school. The state Education Code does not allow schools to teach comprehensive sex education — which includes instruction about marriage — to children whose parents object.
Another "Yes on 8" canard is that the continuation of same-sex marriage will force churches and other religious groups to perform such marriages or face losing their tax-exempt status. Proponents point to a case in New Jersey, where a Methodist-based nonprofit owned seaside land that included a boardwalk pavilion. It obtained an exemption from state property tax for the land on the grounds that it was open for public use and access. Events such as weddings — of any religion — could be held in the pavilion by reservation. But when a lesbian couple sought to book the pavilion for a commitment ceremony, the nonprofit balked, saying this went against its religious beliefs.
The court ruled against the nonprofit, not because gay rights trump religious rights but because public land has to be open to everyone or it’s not public. The ruling does not affect churches’ religious tax exemptions or their freedom to marry whom they please on their private property, just as Catholic priests do not have to perform marriages for divorced people and Orthodox synagogues can refuse to provide space for the weddings of interfaith couples. And Proposition 8 has no bearing on the issue; note that the New Jersey case wasn’t about a wedding ceremony.
Emphasis mine. Go read the rest of it.
But then, asking how you can possibly have a civil debate with an opponent who lies through their teeth every chance they get is begging the larger question. Tell me please, what exactly is civil about wanting to cut your neighbor’s ring finger off? The very premise of the debate is about as uncivil as they come. There is nothing else this can be, but a knife fight. That’s exactly what our enemies not only need it to be, but want it to be. They hate us. They want everyone else to hate us as much as they do. Or at least be afraid of us. Very, very afraid. There is no such thing as a civil debate about whether or not gay people are a danger to families and children. There is no such thing as a civil debate about whether gay people are seeking to bring about the fall of western civilization. There is no such thing as a civil debate about whether same-sex couples defile the very meaning of marriage. There is nothing civil about prejudice. There is nothing civil about hate. There is nothing civil about mob rule.
I could change the caption on this guy representing the Massachusetts Family Institute to one of any of the dozens and dozens of anti gay crusaders out there who insist when the cameras are turned on them that they want to keep the debate civil while spreading every filthy lie about gay people they can think of to their base and just keep reusing this cartoon over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over…
TRANSCRIPT: Never underestimate the ability of a tiny fringe group of losers to ruin everything. For the past couple of weeks we’ve been laughing heartily at the wacky antics of the "birthers", the far-right goofballs who claim Obama wasn’t really born in Hawaii and therefore the job goes to the runner-up, Miss California Carrie Prejean.
And you know there is nothing you can do to convince these people, you can hand them in person the original birth certificate with the placenta, and have a video of Obama emerging from the womb with Don Ho singing in the background, and they still would not believe it.
"Hey birthers, wanna hear my theory? My theory was that Obama was born in America and you were born with the umbilical cord around your neck. I don’t know what his mother was doing when she was pregnant, but I’m pretty sure your mom was drinking."
Oh, I kid the birthers, there’s one thing that makes me think they could be right. We’re Americans, of course we’re gonna hire an illegal alien to clean-up.
I’m joking, of course. And laughing it off has also been the reaction from Democratic leaders so far. Proving that Democrats never learn. But if you don’t immediately kill errant bulls**t, no matter how ridiculous it can’t grow and thrive like crabgrass or Cirque du Soleil. This birther stuff might be a deluded right-wing obsession, but so was Whitewater and look where that ended up: "What are they gonna do, keep expanding the case until they impeach the President over a blowjob?"
Yes.
I’m telling you that in America there is no idea so patently absurd that it can’t catch on. Have you ever met a Mormon?
Or, more recently, we had the Swift Boat allegations against John Kerry, making him, a genuine war hero, a coward in a race against the guy who never left Texas. It was so stupid Kerry refused to even discuss it and we all know how well that worked out.
Well, you may ask, how something as inane as Whitewater or Swift Boats or the birther-thing gains traction? Well I’ll tell you how, the same way that the story of Elton John almost dying from ingesting too much of Rod Stewart’s sperm gained traction in my high school, dummies talking to other dummies.
It’s just easier now because of the internet. And because our mainstream media does such a lousy job of talking truth to stupid.
Lou Dobbs said recently, "People are asking a lot of questions about the birth certificate." Yes, the same people who want to know where the Sun goes at night and where to put the stamp on their e-mail. And Lou, you’re their new king.
Which is why it is so important that we, the few, the proud, the reality based, attack this stuff before it has a chance to fester and spread. This is not a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It’s sentient beings versus the lizard people.
And it is to the lizard people that I offer this deal, I will show you President Obama’s birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin’s high school diploma.
…because our mainstream media does such a lousy job of talking truth to stupid. Yes. Because they’re not allowed to by their corporate masters. See what happened to Keith Olbermann.
Kilmeade and two colleagues were discussing a study that, based on research done in Finland and Sweden, showed people who stay married are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s. Kilmeade questioned the results, though, saying, "We are — we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other …"
At this point, his co-host tried to — in that jokey morning show way — tell Kilmeade he needed to shut up, and quick, for his own sake. But he didn’t get the message, adding, "See, the problem is the Swedes have pure genes. Because they marry other Swedes …. Finns marry other Finns, so they have a pure society."
You can see the video of it on Salon. I suppose they’ll be touting the benefits of incest on FOX News next. It doesn’t get much purer then that…
If You Understand Nothing Else Understand This: Those Days Are Over
Dan Savage puts his finger on what’s so utterly dumbfounding about the Rainbow Lounge raid…
…The police burst into that bar as if it were still 1968, the year before the NYPD’s raid on the Stonewall Inn, as if the old rules were still in force. They assumed that the other men at Rainbow Lounge that night—the men who witnessed four officers assaulting Chad Gibson—would disappear into the night, grateful that they got out of the Rainbow Lounge without getting assaulted and arrested too. The police didn’t expect the other gay men men at the Rainbow Lounge to talk to the media—or to organize a protest outside Fort Worth’s city hall. The police didn’t even seem to realize that there were men taking pictures with their cell phones during the raid. It’s as if the police in Fort Worth didn’t know what decade this is.
In June 2008, Washington D.C. Council member and former mayor Marion Barry declared his support for same-sex marriage in the District. Three weeks ago Barry co-sponsored the District law that recognizes legal same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. The former mayor now breaks his promise and appears at an anti-gay rally organized by the publicity-hungry gay-bashing Bishop Harry Jackson of the Hope Christian Church in nearby Beltsville. Barry and Jackson call marriage equality "immoral."
D.C. Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), the only council member to vote against the bill today to legalize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, predicted today there could be a "civil war" in the District if the Council decides to take up a broader gay marriage bill later this year.
"All hell is going to break lose," Barry said while speaking to reporters. "We may have a civil war. The black community is just adamant against this."
Barry made his remarks a few hours after a group of same-sex marriage opponents, led by black ministers, caused uproar in the Wilson Building after the Council voted 12 to 1 to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. They caused such a ruckus that security guards and police had to clear the hallway. The protesters shouted that council members who voted for the bill will face retribution at the polls.
U.S. Park Service Police arrested Barry (D-Ward 8) about 8:45 p.m. in Anacostia Park after a woman flagged down an officer to report that a man in a nearby vehicle was "bothering her," police said.
After interviewing Barry and Watts-Brighthaupt, Barry, 73, was charged with one count of "misdemeanor stalking," said Sgt. David Schlosser, a Park Police spokesman. Barry, on probation for failing to pay his federal taxes, was released hours later and ordered to appear in court Thursday.
It’s a girlfriend who broke up with him and says he won’t leave her alone. Except they had lunch together that same day and she’s saying now she didn’t ask for him to be arrested. This is the same girlfriend he bought a eight-hundred dollar coat for at auction while he was struggling to repay the back taxes he’s on probation now for not paying. Moral Leadership.
Tune in again next week when our topic will be: Moral Leaders And Their Soulmates…featuring Marion Barry and Mark Sanford.
Calling it "absolutely the worst thing that I’ve ever done in my life," U.S. Sen. John Ensign admitted Tuesday that he had an affair with a campaign staffer last year.
It was with a staffer who worked on his senate campaign. Oh…and her husband worked in his senate office. Oh… And He’s A Promise Keeper.
"If there was ever anything that I could take back in my life, this would be it," Ensign, 51, said Tuesday afternoon in Las Vegas, reading from a prepared statement in a brief news conference at which he took no questions.
During the height of the scandal surrounding Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, the Nevada Republican denounced the president’s conduct as "an embarrassing moment for the country."
‘I think we have to feel very sad for the American people and Hillary and Chelsea,’ he said.
Weeks later, Ensign would call on Clinton to resign. "I came to that conclusion recently, and frankly it’s because of what he put his whole Cabinet through and what he has put the country through," he was quoted saying at the time. "He has no credibility left," he added.
At the time, Ensign was in a tight Senate race with incumbent Harry Reid, an election he would ultimately end up losing. And he didn’t shy away from trying to exploit the moral trip-ups in Clinton’s personal life to benefit himself and the GOP.
"It could have a dramatic effect on Democrats like (President Nixon’s resignation after the Watergate scandal) had on Republicans in 1974," he said, according to a local AP article from September 14, 1998.
In fact, not only did Ensign envision the Lewinksy affair as a political boon for Republicans, he actively made it an issue in his campaign against Reid. At one point during the campaign, Ensign accused his opponent of having a double standard when it came to politicians and sexual dalliances. Reid, he argued, had been much tougher on former Sen. Robert Packwood — who resigned from the Senate under allegations of sexual harassment — than he was with Clinton.
Ensign would support amendment banning gay marriage
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said he would support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
Ensign cautioned that changing the Constitution should not be done lightly.
After evaluating the idea of President Bush’s recommendation of such an amendment Tuesday, Ensign said he believes it is necessary "to protect the institution of marriage in America."
"In order to defend the institution of marriage, uphold the rights of individual states and maintain the will of the people, I believe we are compelled to amend our country’s Constitution," Ensign said.
So many righteous defenders of marriage. So many marriages needing defending from their defenders. It wasn’t gay people who broke your marriage vows jackass. It was you. Stop blaming other people for your own pathetic failures of moral character. We are your neighbors, not your scapegoats. Leave us the fuck out of your problems. If you had minded your own goddamned business instead of dumping your cheapshit bar stool moralizing on other people you might still have a reputation to defend, let alone a marriage.
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committe held the first-ever hearing on the Uniting American Families Act, which would equalize the status of foreign-born same-sex partners of American citizens. Heterosexual Americans can earn citizenship for their foreign partners by marrying them. Gays, obviously, cannot do that, effectively making a gay American and his or her foreign spouse legal strangers.
Testifying was Shirley Tan, a Fillipino woman who has been with her American partner for 23 years. Together, they are raising twelve-year-old twin boys…
…one of Tan’s children started crying within seconds of the start of her testimony. At the sight of this, Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy stopped the hearing and asked Tan if her son might want to sit in another room, where presumably a Senate staffer would console him for the duration of what was clearly an emotionally fraught experience. For most people, the sight of a 12-year-old boy in tears at the prospect of his mother being deported halfway around the world would invoke some sympathy. Unmoved, however, was Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, ranking minority member of the Committee and the only Republican to bother to attend the hearing. At the sight of the weeping boy, according to a Senate staffer who was at the hearing, Sessions leaned towards one of his aides and sighed, "Enough with the histrionics."
Take Note:
Sessions opposes the bill, stating that it would amount to a federal recognition of same-sex marriage.
I keep drumming on this but it’s a simple fact: Everything we have ever asked for in this fight, from hospital visitation to the repeal of the sodomy laws amounts to recognition of same-sex marriage if you listen to our enemies. This has always been their trump card in Every Fucking battle over any and everything: turn it into a fight over same sex marriage.
So it makes no sense to say that we are wasting energy fighting over same-sex marriage when we could be putting our resources into fighting for anti-discrimination and hate crime laws. Everything is a fight over same-sex marriage. Which is to say, everything is a fight over the legitimacy of our emotional lives. The pieces make up a whole at the center of which is a simple question: do gay people experience life the same way heterosexuals do, or do we, as Orson Scott Card would say, merely play house in hollow mimicry of genuine emotions that heterosexuals feel?
Look at Sessions’ gut level knee jerk response to that kid’s tears again. Histronics. He doesn’t believe they are real. They can’t possibly be. Because that family is only playing house. It isn’t a real family. They don’t have real feelings. It’s just an act they have convinced themselves of. Even the kids. This is the enemy your gay and lesbian neighbors have been facing for decades now.
WICHITA, Kan. – Dr. George Tiller, who remained one of the nation’s few providers of late-term abortions through decades of protests and attacks, was shot and killed Sunday in a church where he was serving as an usher and his wife was in the choir.
The gunman fled, but a 51-year-old suspect was arrested some 170 miles away in suburban Kansas City three hours after the shooting, Wichita Deputy Police Chief Tom Stolz said.
Andrew Sullivan writes that Bill O’Reilly painted a bull’s eye on the doctor during one of his shows. John Aravosis reminds us that President Obama caved recently to right wing demands to bottle up or tone down a report on domestic terrorism. At some point, this naton is going to have to confront its right wing hate mongers and their willing tools. Either that, or let them cow us all into the facist theocracy of their dreams. In the meantime, I am on vacation and I have a new mantra…
…I will not become a misanthrope…I will not become a misanthrope…I will not become a misanthrope…
Lying on his cot in the Longworth House Office Building in the small of the night, Jason Chaffetz had a scary dream: The conservative Republican from Utah had beaten the odds, defeated an incumbent and made it to Washington, only to end up by some bizarre twist of events arm-in-arm with Marion Barry, the crack-smoking laughingstock former mayor of the District of Columbia.
"Oh man, if I had run a campaign saying I’d be working closely with Marion Barry, I don’t know that I would have been elected," Chaffetz says
Mirror, mirror on the wall… Sure you’d have been elected Jason. Your voters are cut from the same cloth you are…the same bolt of cloth Washington’s former Mayor For Life was cut from. Barry wasn’t our ally, we were his tools…his useful stepping stones to political power. Just like we are to you. And to your voters, we’re convenient scapegoats for every cheapshit failure of personal character. We give them someone to blame for how lousy their lives are, how dead and rotten their conscience is, so they don’t have to blame themselves. Useful tools Jason…that’s what gay people are. To Barry. To you. To your constituents. Tools. Nothing more. Look in Barry’s empty smiling eyes Jason, and see yourself.
So go ahead and smoke yourself some crack Jason. It won’t matter. Smoke it right in church if you like. As long as you’re willing to put a knife in the hearts of loving, devoted same sex couples you’ll still be a Mormon in good standing. Because nothing matters more then the war against The Homosexual, not even the resurrection. You could spit in Christ’s face on Judgment Day and as long as you’ve left a trail of destruction in the lives of gay and lesbian people you’ll make it to heaven on a red carpet. Oh wait…Mormons think they get to be gods in the afterlife don’t they…?
First… Robin Wilson, professor of law at Washington and Lee University School of Law, writing in the Los Angles Times…
So what should states do to respond to [these] clashes between same-sex relationships and religious liberty?
What they should not do is what New Hampshire’s Senate did last week: pay lip-service to religious freedom while enacting meaningless protections. New Hampshire’s bill provides that "members of the clergy … shall not be obligated … to officiate at any particular civil marriage or religious rite of marriage in violation of their right to free exercise of religion." But this is a hollow guarantee: The 1st Amendment already provides such protection.
Okay. Got that? All those religious freedom clauses being written into same-sex marriage statutes are hollow, since the 1st Amendment already establishes religious freedom in the first place. Well…duh. But that’s not the point.
Here’s the point…
In her May 3 Times Op-Ed article, "The flip-side of same-sex marriage," Robin Wilson urges state legislators across the country to undertake "the careful crafting of robust religious protections" when they draft laws to recognize same-sex marriages. Her goal in recommending such religious accommodations is to "allow Americans with radically different views on moral questions to live in peace and equality in the same society."
I share Wilson’s goals. States that recognize same-sex marriages should protect the autonomy rights of religious individuals and institutions at the same time that they protect the autonomy rights of gay and lesbian individuals and couples. But Wilson’s column does little to promote the careful crafting of accommodations to achieve the equality she seeks.
Wilson starts off on the wrong foot. She characterizes clauses such as the one in the New Hampshire same-sex marriage bill that reiterates the protection of clergy from being required to officiate at same-sex marriage ceremonies as "meaningless protections" and a "hollow guarantee" since the 1st Amendment already provides such protection.
Where was Wilson six months ago when we had an election in which the opponents of same-sex marriage insisted that the defeat of Proposition 8 would result in churches being forced to conduct marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples?
-Letter to the Editor, Alan Brownstein, May 11, 2009
[Emphasis mine] See…here’s the problem: No Alan…you don’t share Wilson’s goals. Wilson’s goals are that his gay and lesbian neighbors remain second class citizens, Regardless Of What The Law Says. This claptrap about churches being forced to marry same-sex couples, and all the other crap, is what we in the IT profession call FUD… Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. Wilson is a goddamned professor of law…he’ knows goddamned well that the first Amendment prevents states from doing to churches, precisely what the Proposition 8 hatemongers said they would. And no…you didn’t see him taking them to task for it in the pages of the L.A. Times, did you? There’s a reason for that. It isn’t the religious freedom clause in New Hampshire that’s hollow. As far as Wilson is concerned it’s the First Amendment that’s hollow.
So now what’s happening is that states and some gay rights activists are starting to call the religious rights bluff on this and expressly including religious freedom protections in their same-sex marriage and civil unions statutes. And naturally, now we find out the truth…that the first amendment protections aren’t enough. What they want is a religious exemption from the equal opportunity laws that everyone else must abide by. A Specific Exemption in fact, just to accommodate their specific hatred of a specific class of people…gay people. They want to be able to deny gay people health care and medicine, housing, jobs, services…in short, they want to be free to keep on persecuting gay people and same-sex couples regardless of their status in the eyes of the law.
What you have to understand about the religious right is they’ve elevated persecuting gay people to a religious piety greater then that of belief in the resurrection. You aren’t saved by the blood of Jesus Christ…you are saved by your hatred of homosexual people. That is what religion is in the kook pews. If a nurse can’t eject a gay person’s spouse from their hospital room, they have no freedom of religion. Because it isn’t Jesus who saves. Salvation depends on how much you hate your gay neighbor. If we don’t bleed, they aren’t being righteous enough.
There Is No Morality That Stands On A Bedrock Of Lies
Via Dan Savage… I’ve been railing online since the early 1990s about how essentially immoral the anti-gay religious right is. How the scorched earth take no prisoners war they’ve been waging against gay people demands absolute renunciation of everything fine and decent a human being can possibly be, systematically strips away any human nobility they might have possessed, any aspiration to honor and justice and truth, any higher emotion then simple, relentless, pure as venom hate. The culture war leaches out of them anything decent they might ever have been, leaving behind a pathetic caricature of a human being, whose only purpose in life is hating someone a little more today then they did yesterday.
The Moral Majority. Family Values. Traditional Values. Christian. God Fearing. Bible Believing. I grew up in that milieu, and the people waving those flags today have utterly no relation to any of that. None. Morality, virtue, values, these are not things they aspire to, they are masks they hide behind. Time and again back in the Usenet days, I would find myself arguing with a bigot who told me with easy confidence that I didn’t want to get into an argument about morality, so thoroughly had they co-opted the meaning behind the words. Time and again I would beat them over their pathetic heads with their own cheapshit failures of moral character. I was raised in a Baptist household, and I know how fire and brimstone are done. Often I wished that I could see others doing the same, rather then conceding the moral argument to a bunch of gutter crawling louts. Listening to James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, William Bennett, Lou Sheldon, et. al., yap, yap, yapping about morality is like listening to Al Capon bellyaching about crime.
These are not moral people. They are thieves in the house of human virtue, leaching off the efforts of better men and women who have tried over the ages to lift humanity from the caves to the stars. They steal from those of us who love life, and love humanity, and love this good earth and want to leave it a little better for our having walked upon it, the tools we have uncovered over the centuries for testing right from wrong, true from false, good from evil, and turn them against us, to drag us down into their gutter, so that they will shine. They have preached for so long that they are the keepers of civilization’s essential virtues that many of us have come to believe it. They are vampires, feeding on them, never to be nourished by them.
If I’m grateful for anything, it’s that I lived long enough to see the moral crusade being brought right back to them. Here’s a video from YouTube user robtish that shows in neon lights how horribly warped the moral compass is over at the Traditional Values Coalition. What do you call a people who claim FBI statistics show only a small number of violent crimes were committed against homosexuals in 2007, while omitting, among other violent crimes, the category of murder from the tally? Moral? Virtuous? Christian?
This is what the culture war does to its soldiers. It strips them of everything within them that could have been fine and noble and decent. No higher virtue then hating the enemy is allowed to live within you. Not honor, not reason, not any sense of right and wrong is allowed. Hate does not share power with anything else a human heart might be capable of. You let it in, and it will consume you. There is the evidence…right there, laughing in your face.
Many people are going to remember yesterday as the day Arlen Specter switched parties, and it became painfully clear to most Americans how fast the republican party was collapsing into a political black hole of insular nativism and bigotry. But I will remember it as the day I watched, slack-jawed, this article on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown…
I am 55 years old. I still remember the Nixon years as if they were yesterday. I remember Agnew spitting on four dead students at Kent State. I remember Ronald Reagan’s indifference to the growing AIDS epidemic. I remember him laughing at Bob Hope’s sick AIDS joke during the re-dedication of The Statue of Liberty…
I told one of my students that the most memorable Reagan AIDS moment for me was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagans were there sitting next to French President Francois Mitterand and his wife, Danielle. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners Hope quipped, “I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.” As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989 and the Reagan years, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States, and more than 70,000 of them had died.
I will go to my grave remembering how the republicans cynically incited anti-gay hatred in one election after another in order to win votes. I have watched them grow meaner, smaller and cheaper year after year after year and I cannot begin to describe how sickening it feels to think I’d seen them finally hit bottom, only to realize that there is no bottom. Last night on Olbermann Chris Matthews was blunt in the wake of Specter’s defection, that the republicans had made two deals with the devil that they were paying for in spades now. First, they embraced Nixon’s racist “southern strategy” to peel southern states and white working class democrats away from the party. Second, they embraced the culture war of the religious right. Now, after the Bush economic and military debacles, what had been the republican’s only two marketable strengths, national security and the economy, have withered away, leaving decent people to finally, Finally see the Devil’s Deal…the stinking rotten core that has been animating the party ever since Goldwater lost. And they’re flinching away. In droves.
I am 55 years old. I’ve watched all this happen in my lifetime. And watching the Republican Noise Machine on Fox News trying to whip up the swine deadly flu outbreak into a brown-skinned people hatefest still managed to leave me completely dumbfounded. It really is the party of hate now.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
