I haven’t sat down for the entire movie, but there’s a scene from Kinsey that keeps popping into my head as I consider the paper Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General, John Holsinger, wrote for the United Methodist Church’s Committee to Study Homosexuality back in 1991. Bear in mind that Holsinger wrote that paper, not as a fellow believer, but as a doctor of medicine.
The scene is a doctor’s office. Kinsey and his wife are trying, uncomfortably, to discuss their unsatisfactory sex with him. The couple is having trouble achieving sexual intimacy. Kinsey’s wife Clara endures great pain whenever he tries to have sex with her. The doctor holds up a ruler and asks Clara to indicate how big her husband’s erect penis is on it. She seems befuddled. But it’s more then simple embarrassment at discussing such an intimate detail. The doctor moves his fingers along the ruler. This big? No? This big? No? Eventually Clara works up a little nerve, reaches over, and moves the doctors finger to a point somewhere Past the end of the ruler. The doctor nods. No wonder you were experiencing pain, he tells her, and he suggests they take a somewhat different approach to intercourse.
The scene is intended as a bit of humor, but it has a point. Clara thought that the problem was with her. She had no way of knowing that it wasn’t. Back before Kinsey began his famous studies of human sexuality, people lived in almost perfect ignorance of how humans actually have sex. Oh most people thought they knew, certainly. But what they knew, as the shock and outrage clearly revealed when Kinsey finally published, was mostly a collection of handed down folk tales and dirty jokes. Real facts about human sexuality were few and far between because no one had actually rigorously and dispassionately studied it. Before they visited their doctor, neither one of the Kinseys understood how physically mismatched they were, and that it meant they had to be a tad creative in their approach to sexual intimacy.
Which leads to this other thing that leaped out at me.
A penis wasn’t designed for an anus. The parts don’t fit. Heterosexual intercourse is complementary…homosexual intercourse is physically damaging… Gay men have had this thrown in our faces for decades now. Never mind that many of us know from first hand experience that it isn’t true…the hate machine doesn’t want to actually hear from the people it’s talking about. On and on and on like a broken record, they keep insisting that male homosexual intercourse is well nigh physically impossible, in contrast to heterosexual intercourse in which tab ‘A’ just naturally slides into slot ‘B’. But that’s not true. Male same sex couples have thrilling and blissfully contented sex every day and the only thing damaged by it are the lies bigots have been pounding into their heads for ages. And even opposite sex couples sometimes just aren’t physically well matched for each other.
I don’t like discussing my sex life in public. That’s not because I’m ashamed of it, or of anything I’ve ever done with another guy in my arms. But those moments are precious to me. And it’s not only my privacy that I have to consider. But I’m living in a time when the sex lives of gay men are a cultural battle ground and our enemies shrink from no filthy lie about us they think they can get away with, so long as it incites fear and loathing and hatred. If we don’t talk about our sex lives, the only people who will are the ones who hate our guts and want everyone else to hate us too.
So let me say that I can relate to poor Clara in some ways. One guy I dated once upon a time, was just simply too damn big for me to comfortably have sex with him. And I’m not just talking anal sex either. But I was in love, so I tried this and I tried that, because I wanted to make him happy, and let’s face it, I wanted to enjoy having sex with him too. But it was a struggle. And to this day I wonder how much that played a part in our breaking up. Thing is, he had tried the ex-gay thing previously, and had been married, and he’d told me that his former wife had the same problem having sex with him. I wasn’t at all surprised to hear it.
A penis is designed for a vagina. No…It isn’t that simple. The fact is, depending on any number of factors, intercourse can be physically very painful, even damaging, to a woman. It can be a struggle for some opposite sex couples to achieve sexual gratification during intercourse. Over the course of my many road trips I’ve probably stopped at hundreds of truck stops, probably beheld hundreds of those ubiquitous condom vending machines…
The anus and rectum, unlike the vagina contain no natural lubricating function…
…each one advertising pre lubricated condoms…
The rectum is incapable of mechanical protection against abrasion and severe damage to the colonic mucosa can result if objects that are large, sharp, or pointed are inserted into the rectum…
…and an assortment of “french ticklers”. Holsinger goes on a tear in his paper about gay men inserting things into the anus of their partners as though it’s someone everyone does, and conversely something opposite sex couples do not do to a vagina. It’s a fact the sex toy industry would be greatly surprised to hear. In the comments section of Atrios post on Holsinger’s paper, one commenter tells of a woman who went to the ER to have rocks removed…
I had to get an ER doc to remove my diaphram once. The damn thing was just stuck. I told the doc that I felt like an idiot and she said, "Oh no way. I take a lot more stuff out of there that shouldn’t be there." So of course I had to ask, "Like what?" And she told me that a few nights earlier she had taken a bunch of rocks out of some woman’s vagina. The woman and her partner apparently experimented with all kinds of objects to "enhance" intercourse.
Notice that the poster had to go herself, to get a perfectly common form of female birth control removed from Her vagina. Now…the very thought of inserting a foreign object into my body, let alone the body of a lover, just completely disgusts me. But that’s my own particular sexual temperament. Don’t fucking tell me that opposite sex couples aren’t doing that to each other every night all around the world. And don’t…don’t even think of trying to tell me that a motherfucking doctor doesn’t know this.
Which brings me to my point. But first…let us pause for a moment and think of poor Clara Kinsey. She’s in the doctor’s office with her husband, and the doctor is holding out a ruler for her to indicate the size of Mr. Kinsey’s erect penis, and she is confused. The doctor is telling her with that ruler, that you can measure the size of most men with a ruler. If you think it’s laughable nowadays that anyone wouldn’t know that men come in all sizes and shapes, let alone that most men don’t actually have foot long dicks, much as some of them seem to wish, strangely, that they do, thank the Supreme Court of the hated Earl Warren, which struck down all those obscenity and censorship laws back in the 1950s, to the absolute horror of American right wingers and fundamentalist kooks. Probably the first male penis poor Clara ever saw, was that of her husband’s on their first honeymoon night. That’s why she thought there was something wrong with her when sex became painful.
She didn’t know. Her husband didn’t either. It would be years later that he undertook to study human sexuality. But their doctor knew. Good thing for that couple. But he had to know.
And so does Holsinger.
When the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur as noted above. Therefore, based on the simplest known anatomy and physiology, when dealing with the complementarity of the human sexes, one can simply say, Res ipsa loquitur – the thing speaks for itself!
What speaks for itself clearly, loudly, sickeningly, are this man’s words. When he sat down to write that penises and vaginas are perfectly mated to each other, he knew, he had to know, that it isn’t always so. He knew…he had to know…that sex with the wrong partner, let alone with an uncaring, aggressive one, can be damaging to a woman’s body. He knew…he had to know…that opposite sex couples resort all the time to lubricants, and sex toys inserted into the vagina to enhance sexual pleasure. He knew…He Damn Well Had To Know…that sexually transmitted disease is easily spread during penile/vaginal intercourse, and that before the advent of antibiotics, it was often as incurable and lethal as AIDS was in 1991
But he also knew this: that he was writing for a bunch of sexually ignorant rubes who would believe it if he told them otherwise, so he could make the sex that gay men have look ugly and unnatural.
He used his degree to give his lies authority. And he did it in the name of God, and in the name of morality. And that is why he’s George Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General. His moral values, his instinctive sense of right and wrong, are those of the religious right, and the republican party. Let’s hear it for virtuous men.
My gay friends are also friends with my family. And they’re glad that we have a healthy heterosexual relationship and a healthy relationship with our kids. But they want to be respected too—their rights, their relationships—and not be scapegoated for things that have nothing to do with them.
I had this conversation with Focus on the Family, and I said I agree with you that family breakdown is a huge crisis, a serious crisis. And I don’t think the Left talks about that enough. My neighborhood is eighty percent single parent families. You can’t overcome poverty with that, with eighty percent single parent families. But how do we reweave the bonds of marriage, family, extended family, and community, to put our arms around the kids? And it’s not just in poor neighborhoods. Kids are falling through the cracks of fractured family in all classes and neighborhoods. So I said to them, I want to rebuild family life and relationships, but explain to me how gay and lesbian people are the ones responsible for all that? which is what their fund-raising strategy suggests. And after about an hour and a half they conceded the point. They said, Okay Jim, we concede that family breakdown is caused much more by heterosexual dysfunction than by homosexuals. But then they said, We can’t vouch for our fundraising department, which says a lot, I think.
Yes, it’s bullshit. But it brings in the bucks. Gay rights wasn’t even a blip on the radar of the religious right until Anita Bryant showed them that it made the fundies come out to the polls in droves, and open their wallets wide to anyone who said they would smite the queers for Jesus. And as long as it keeps making them money, they’ll keep right on waving the gay bogeyman, no matter how obvious it is to everyone that even they aren’t swallowing the bullshit they’re spreading about homosexuals. The fundies have no conscience, and the con artists who are praying on them have no shame.
‘Twas ever thus in the business of hate mongering. I could feel sorry for the little old granny ladies who throw their social security checks at these con men…except for this knife in my heart, and in so many others’, with their names on it. Kinda like those little brass name plates you sometimes see on the backs of pews. Remember, every small tithe of $500, allows us to buy enough stones to properly execute one homosexual in accordance with biblical teachings. These stones are hand polished in our Christian owned and operated factory in Ecuador, and every one has a copy of The Lord’s Prayer hand engraved on it. For an extra $500, we’ll add the personal dedication of your choice (30 characters or less…remember spaces count the same as letters). Give one as a gift. Use it to remember a dearly departed loved one…
Oh…You Noticed That You’re Being Used Now Did You…?
Comes the dawn…
IT’S ALRIGHT MR. KENNEDY, MY UTERUS IS ONLY BLEEDING . Marty Lederman points us to an interesting WaPo article, in which a few members of America’s tiny minority of serious, principled "pro-lifers" have come to see that "Partial Birth" bans are silly, irrational laws whose primary purpose is to separate money from their wallets and funnel it to the Republican Party. Focus on the Family, however, maintains that the bans do have an upside: the law does increase the "danger of internal bleeding from a perforated uterus." If you don’t believe me that most of the American forced pregnancy lobby cares a great deal more about punishing women for sexual choices they don’t approve of than protecting fetal life, well, I say we take their word for it.
And, again, this explains the sexism in Kennedy‘s opinion; you take it away, and the legislation has no connection with a legitimate state interest at all. As you can see, most anti-choicers (despite the bad-faith congressional findings that 2+2=171) don’t really think that these bans on a safer procedure protect women’s physical health. They simply believe that women can’t be trusted to make judgments about their own lives, and if this causes some women to be seriously injured that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s almost impossible to overstate how disgusting this legislation is, and how deeply entwined outright misogyny is with the American "pro-life" movement.
In a highly visible rift in the anti-abortion movement, a coalition of evangelical Protestant and Roman Catholic groups is attacking a longtime ally, Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson.
Using rhetoric that they have reserved in the past for abortion clinics, some of the coalition’s leaders accuse Dobson and other national antiabortion leaders of building an "industry" around relentless fundraising and misleading information.
Misleading? Dobson and company? Oh good heavens no…
In an open letter to Dobson that was published as a full-page ad May 23 in the Colorado Springs Gazette, Focus on the Family’s hometown newspaper, and May 30 in the Washington Times, the heads of five small but vocal groups called the Carhart decision "wicked," and accused Dobson of misleading Christians by applauding it.
Carhart is even "more wicked than Roe" because it is "not a ban, but a partial-birth abortion manual" that affirms the legality of late-term abortions "as long as you follow its guidelines," the ads said. "Yet, for many years you have misled the Body of Christ about the ban, and now about the ruling itself."
…
Another signer, the Rev. Bob Enyart, a Christian talk radio host and pastor of the Denver Bible Church, said the real issue is fundraising.
"Over the past seven years, the partial-birth abortion ban as a fundraising technique has brought in over a quarter of a billion dollars" for major antiabortion groups, "but the ban has no authority to prevent a single abortion, and pro-life donors were never told that," he said. "That’s why we call it the pro-life industry."
In Rohrbough’s view, partisan politics is also involved.
"What happened in the abortion world is that groups like National Right to Life, they’re really a wing of the Republican Party, and they’re not geared to push for personhood for an unborn child — they’re geared to getting Republicans elected," he said. "So we’re seeing these ridiculous laws like the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban put forward, and then we’re deceived about what they really do."
No shit Sherlock. That gang has been manipulating your hatred of women and homosexual people to rise money for fucking decades. Welcome to the real world asshole. Your cheapshit knee jerk prejudices are like keys on a piano to them. And as long as you allow your hatreds to lead you around by the nose, they’ll keep playing you for all the money you’re worth.
When you signed on to a movement to grind hopes and dreams of women, of gay and lesbian people for love and happiness and and that intimate peaceful contentment in the arms of someone they loved into the dirt, I guess it didn’t occur to you that perhaps the people running it might be a bunch of soulless conniving thugs. But think for a moment, if you have a single functioning synapse left in that thing you call a brain…what else could they have been? What kind of person does that to innocent people, jackass? You thought the sort of person who incites fear and loathing and hate toward lovers was trustworthy? Trustworthy? I’m laughing in your face. If you had a shred of conscience you’d have seen him for the predator he is the moment he approached you with his little sales pitch. Give me your money, and I will wage holy war on the sex lives of the heathen… But you couldn’t. You couldn’t do anything but fall for it, because your hate, your contempt, and your cheapshit conceits made you weak. So you got taken advantage of. And if I’m sorry for you about anything, it’s that all you lost was your money. Look into the face of someone who lost the possibility of love sometime asshole. You’re both predators. The only difference between Dobson and you is that he wants to enrich himself. You just want to see hope die, so you can feel righteous.
They say you can’t cheat an honest man. But I’ll tell you something: it’s real easy to cheat a bigot. All you gotta do, is wave that scarecrow in his face, and he’ll dance for you. Like you danced for Dobson.
Quick! Send Money! Now! Before the homos take over!!!
If you’re feeling brave today, perhaps you’d like to take a walk up to the edge of the Pit and peer in. I promise you’ll see something worth knowing.
Hate. Ever wonder what it’s like, to look it right in the face and behold? Hate. Hate. Not to ask it why, or wherefore, but just to look and observe and then walk back away from it…always, always, walk away from it…and remember. Remember what you saw. Remember. I’m not talking Fred Phelps’ circus o’ hate. Fred’s been in it for the shock value longer then he can remember why he hates. He just wants to be the center of attention now. Same with all those poor weak little white power Nazi wannabes you see, gamely giving the stiff arm salute for the cameras, while surrounded by a ring of police protection. Himmler would have considered them little more then useful idiots. No…I’m talking the good stuff. Pure. Uncut. Hate. Hate. I have a hit of it right here for you.
Just be careful. Remember what Nietzsche said…repeat it like a prayer before you look… If you gaze long into the Abyss, the Abyss gazes also into you… When you are done looking, you are going to walk away. You must. It will be hard.
Here, via a Latvian group calling itself Defend The Family, is Scott Lively. He’s delivering a lecture to this group on the dangers of the homosexual menace. Lively may already be known to some of you, as the holocaust-revisionist author of The Pink Swastika. As Jim Burroway says…
Lively goes beyond the small cadre of anti-gay extremists who deny that gays were victims of the holocaust. He claims that ‘homosexualism’ itself was responsible for the rise of the Nazi party and led directly to the Holocaust. He writes that “homosexuality is primarily a predatory addiction striving to take the weak and unsuspecting down with it.”
Despite the crackpot theories manufactured largely from rumor, conjecture and the recycling of popular myths, Lively’s book has become something of a best seller. It’s now in its fourth edition. While it has been dismissed by historians, it has gained a significant following among anti-gay activists, particularly among European neo-Nazi groups who have been responsible for several anti-gay assaults in recent years.
Lively has been active in Latvia recently. On March 21st, he was invited to speak at a Kaunas Police Academy about “the effects of sexual ‘freedom’ that is promoted by the homosexual movement.”
Here is a video of Lively giving his talk during a workshop at the New Generations church in Riga, Latvia last March. This isn’t the Fred Phelps family chanting their obscene slogans, waving their signs at hundreds of angry protesters. This isn’t a group of faux Nazi milk babies strutting around in uniforms they think make them somebody. This is an intelligent man calmly, and methodically demonizing one group of people to another group of people who he knows are ready to accept anything he says to them, and have utterly no way of measuring the truth of anything he’s telling them.
They are people who have been taught since childhood to believe whatever the authorities tell them to believe. Once it was their Soviet masters. Now it’s their church leaders. Those leaders have told them that Lively is a great American author who traveled around the world just to speak to them, to warn them of a danger to everything they have ever known. Watch now, as Lively, calmly, deliberately, methodically, teaches them to hate and fear and loath their homosexual neighbors more then they ever, ever hated the Soviets. Watch his face.
As a compromise, Riga Pride organisers held a private indoor rally at the Berg hotel, following an Anglican church service. The church was surrounded by a group of religious extremists, old women and skinheads. "We tried to leave by the back door but they had put guards there. We tried to move through them but groups of people started to run at us shouting, ‘You deserve to die,’ and ‘Leave our land.’ They were carrying bags, which could have had anything in them," remembers Jolanta Chianovica, a half-French, half-Latvian activist.
The bags were full of human excrement, which was hurled at the mostly female congregation. Meanwhile, more counterdemonstrators had swarmed to the Berg hotel, where they were refusing to let Pride supporters in or out. "I saw two girls trying to leave and people spat in their faces directly in front of the police but they did nothing. When they saw the police weren’t interfering to stop the violence, they felt they could do whatever they liked. That was really frightening," says Chianovica.
This is the situation Lively walked into, this is the situation he knew he was walking into, as he told his audience that the gay rights movement has "destroyed the family structure in a large part of the United States", when he said of homosexuals that "they have no place in a society that protects marriage and family."
Now…walk away. Go find a friend and make them smile. Find a small uncared for corner of your world and make it beautiful. Go. Leave this place. Later, you can remember what you saw…
Peterson Toscano writes It’s About Heterosexism, Silly on the International Day Against Homophobia, and Alan Chambers’ post on the Exodus blog about how he is all in agreement that violence against gay people shouldn’t be tolerated. Chambers writes…
Today is the International Day Against Homophobia. And, you might be surprised to learn that I support this effort. Homophobia does exist. Irrational fear of those who are gay or lesbian is a real problem in our culture. While I believe we have come a long way, I still see true homophobia at work each and every day.
What a swell guy, eh? Almost makes you wonder why they’re all so uptight about hate crime laws over at Exodus. Peterson responds that the lives of gay people are less impacted directly from violence, so much as the premise of heterosexual superiority…
While homophobic attacks happen daily, heterosexism happens by the nano second. A young child gets the message over and over again in books, TV ads, teacher’s examples and even heterosexually paired salt & pepper shakers, that anything other than heterosexual pairing is just not right. Growing up in such a world, with virtually no positive examples of same-sex couples, queer and questioning young people begin to develope a negative sense of self and can even grow quite isolated and suicidal within a society where they do not see themselves reflected or accepted.
Just so. I’ve often wondered of late, how different my own life might have been had I the chance to grow up in a culture as accepting of same sex pairings as opposite sex ones. Maybe I’d have found my soul mate by now. Maybe I did find him long ago, once upon a time, only to loose him due to that relentless hostility toward same sex pairings.
Once while I was working as a stock clerk at a catalog retailer, I met this really nice guy from one of the branch stores who’d come to the warehouse on an errand. I think my jaw dropped a little when I caught sight of him, he was so drop dead beautiful. He saw me looking and flashed a wonderful smile at me. Some weeks later I had a chance to go to the store he worked at on an errand of my own and the look he gave me when he saw it was me was thrilling. We didn’t have any time to talk that day, we were both so busy with work related chores. But I vowed to get his name and phone number the next time we met. Which should have been the following week. But his supervisor caught us sharing a smile and I guess she didn’t like the look of it because the next day we were both fired, me ostensibly because my hair was too long. I never learned why exactly they’d canned him. I only found out when I tried visiting his store afterwords and was coldly told he wasn’t working there anymore.
I never saw him again. I don’t even know his name. It is one of many junctions in my life that I’ve always wondered about since, wondered about what might have been had they left us alone. He was real nice. And that is not the only time something like that has happened to me.
Not one to let a suggestion that gay people be given a measure of human dignity go by without spitting on it, Mike Ensley commented on Chamber’s blog thusly:
The fact is, heterosexuality is innately superior. Only heterosexual partners enjoy the complimentary aspect of their physiology, and only they can produce children.
Ensley is a jackass. Dr. John Corvino in this lecture on the morality of homosexuality , hilariously addresses that The Parts Don’t Fit argument, with the simple retort that, yes the parts Do fit, and that ought to be obvious since if they didn’t, people wouldn’t do that. This isn’t rocket science. It shouldn’t take a micro-watt of brain power to figure that if sex wasn’t gratifying and fulfilling for same sex couples then they wouldn’t do it, let alone take all the risks that same sex couples often have to take, even in this day and age, let alone back when sodomy could still land you in prison, in order to do it. The trick is…well…you have to be gay in order to find it fulfilling. If you’re heterosexual, then you won’t.
Because heterosexuals mate to the opposite sex, it’s easy for them to mistake the complementary nature of their relationship for gender. But the complement isn’t the gender, it’s the person. What people like Ensley are doing in reality, is denying gay people that intimate, body and soul complementary relationship with another person. Then they point to how miserable gay people often are as proof of the innate superiority of heterosexuality. It’s called, building yourself up, by putting other people down. Ensley is doing a little dance there, over corpses of gay people’s dreams and hopes, as a way of demonstrating the superiority of heterosexuality. And he has no idea how ugly it looks to anyone with a conscience.
And thus prejudice, eventually, destroys the destroyer.
It happened in 1999 when Falwell and other Christian conservatives met with a group of gay, lesbian and transgendered people of faith. As gay observers condemned the gay delegation for its involvement and his fellow Christians excoriated Falwell for his, the two groups worshipped together and talked.
Falwell and the Rev. Mel White, leader of Soulforce, a group of gay Christian activists, said they organized the meeting out of a sense that the language between them and the groups they represented had become harsh, acrid, unChristian. If they could not change one another’s minds, they reasoned, perhaps they could at least change one another’s words. In the spirit of the moment, each apologized for hateful language directed at the other. It was a brave and moral moment.
In a column I wrote at the time, I warned both sides that, while it’s easy to stigmatize anonymous others, it would become a lot more difficult after they had spent time in one another’s company, gotten to know each other a little. "How," I asked, "do you go back to being who you were and hating as blindly as you did?"
It’s easy when you just can’t see the people for the homosexuals.
This has been another edition of Simple Answers To Simple Questions…
Max Blumenthal writing for The Nation has an article up about the career of Jerry Falwell that is must reading while the republican candidates for president are busy singing his praises. Most folks know the man’s recent history all too well…
In 1984, Falwell called the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church "a vile and Satanic system" that will "one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven." Members of these churches, Falwell added, are "brute beasts." Falwell initially denied his statements, offering Jerry Sloan, an MCC minister and gay rights activist $5,000 to prove that he had made them. When Sloan produced a videotape containing footage of Falwell’s denunciations, the reverend refused to pay. Only after Sloan sued did Falwell cough up the money.
Falwell uttered countless epithets over his long life…
…but it’s his beginnings that the republicans who are calling him a saint now, would probably like us all to utterly forget. Point of fact, the religious right itself has been busy rewriting that part of their history for the past couple decades. For generations after the trouncing fundamentalism got during the Scopes trial, fundamentalists held themselves apart from the secular world. Falwell himself said that "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners", though at the time he was hurling that one at Martin Luther King Jr. But it was the sensibility of the breed for generations.
They would all have us all believe now, that it was largely Roe v. Wade that brought fundamentalists into politics. It wasn’t.
Falwell started his career like a lot of them did, preaching segregation…
Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church. This opening episode of Falwell’s life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naïvely unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race–not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called "values" issues–that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.
As with his positions on abortion and homosexuality, the basso profondo preacher’s own words on race stand as vivid documents of his legacy. Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled "Segregation or Integration: Which?"
"If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made," Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. "The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line."
Falwell’s jeremiad continued: "The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race." Falwell went on to announce that integration "will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city," he warned, "a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife."
As pressure from the civil rights movement built during the early 1960s, and President Lyndon Johnson introduced sweeping civil rights legislation, Falwell grew increasingly conspiratorial. He enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI manufactured propaganda against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "civil wrongs."
In a 1964 sermon, "Ministers and Marchers," Falwell attacked King as a Communist subversive. After questioning "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations," Falwell declared, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed."
But the spark that lit the roaring fire that eventually consumed the republican party wasn’t integration specifically…
In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right’s genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court’s ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.
While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. Their resentment was compounded in 1971 when the Internal Revenue Service attempted to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until that year.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."
Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His implorations initially fell on deaf ears.
"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."
Dig it. It wasn’t abortion. It wasn’t militant homosexuality. It wasn’t rampant sexual hedonism. It wasn’t the secularization of America’s schools. It wasn’t even racism, that lit the fire the brought the fundamentalist leadership charging into our political system in a blind destructive frenzy. It was their tax exemption. It was money.
Seen in that light, a lot of things fit nearly into place. Their exaltation of the profit motive over helping the needy, their outright contempt for the poor, like spitting in the face of the man who said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle then for a rich man to enter heaven, their private jets, their mansions, their palace like mega churches, their weighty investment portfolios. And that stunningly blind eye all these righteous men of God have been turning to the massive corruption of the Bush administration. They’re not hypocrites after all. It was about money right from the beginning. It’s still about money.
Sometimes, It’s The Things That Surprise Them That Are The Most Telling
Andrew Sullivan apparently missed out on a wee little bit of gay American history, as he had to go look it up…
The same people who have been telling me for years that Jerry Falwell is an anachronistic irrelevance are now singing his praises as a pivotal figure in American politics and culture. Presumably that’s why all the Republican candidates had to bow the knee at the moment of his passing. Dean Barnett recommends this reminiscence by Al Mohler. Money quote:
As a 16-year-old boy, I was in the crowd at the convention center in Miami Beach when Dr. Falwell joined singer Anita Bryant in holding a rally to involve Christians in the struggle against a gay rights ordinance adopted by Dade County. I had never heard of Jerry Falwell until that night – and after that experience I would never forget him.
Er…Wiki?? I don’t think there’s a gay American who was past puberty and self aware at the time who would fucking need to look thAT one up. Yes, Andrew, that was the Dade County non-discrimination ordinance she waged an all-out war on. Yes, all it did was protect us from being fired, simply for being gay. And yes, she based a large portion of her campaign on calling gay people pedophiles. She fucking named her campaign Save Our Children after all, didn’t she.
And that rally that Albert "Let’s Exterminate Homosexuality In The Womb" Mohler says he’ll never forget? I suppose there are a lot of people who won’t forget it. I saw some of the news footage of Falwell and Bryant standing together at the podium. I remember vividly Falwell looking solemnly at the gathered reporters and saying "A homosexual will kill you, as soon as look at you."
Just a few years after Falwell and Bryant were standing together at the podium with Falwell telling everyone what a bunch of blood thirsty killers gay people are, Ronald Reagan was courting him in his presidential campaign. The elephant has made gay bashing one of its primary vote getting tools ever since. I guess if you’d actually lived through that part of our history Andrew, you’d know why so many of us feel nothing but contempt for the republican party. Lame and cowardly as the democrats often are, they’re haven’t been busily inciting fear and hate toward us for the past few decades, simply to win elections. How many gay people have died Andrew, because of the climate of hate the republicans have actively stoked in this country? How many gay kids sent off to ex-gay camps? How many kids growing being hated by their peers, growing up hating themselves?
Yes…it’s the party of torture now, isn’t it? But you had to know this day was coming Andrew, when they threw innocent lovers to the wolves back in the 1980s, because it won them elections. Lovers, Andrew. Not terrorists. Not murderers. Not jihadists. Lovers. Because it won them elections. A race to the bottom is always won by the people who are already there.
I thought he was clear. He does not believe in trial by jury, or the presumption of innocence, or the right to counsel, or an independent judiciary, or the right to liberty. He believes that the government should be disappear people from their homes and send them to prison camps where brutal guards will beat them up at their leisure. He thinks we need more Gitmos and bigger Gitmos. He wants to recreate the gulag. You saw how excited the audience was. They understood it. Why don’t you?
Apparently the only thing Milt isn’t willing to sell out on his quest for the presidency, is his religion. He’s certainly willing to sell out his country.
This debate is a window into what really drives the GOP id. The biggest applause lines were for faux tough guy Giuliani demanding Ron Paul take back his assertion that the terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom, macho man Huckabee talking about Edwards in a beauty parlor and the manly hunk Romney saying that he wants to double the number of prisoners in Guantanamo "where they can’t get lawyers." There’s very little energy for that girly talk about Jesus or "the culture of life" or any of that BS that the pansy Bush ran ran on. (Brownback’s position, forcing 14 year old girls who’ve been raped by their fathers to bear their own sibling, will have to suffice for the compassionate "life" crowd tonight.)
…
Update: Amato has the "torture" segment. Dear God.
Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first;
nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.
-Charles De Gaulle
The American Legion is busting an artery over John Edwards’ suggestion that Americans celebrate this coming Memorial Day by speaking out against the war. Heaven forfend we should take an interest in the welfare of our troops during memorial day. But the Legion is yap, yap, yapping that Edwards is violating a sacred day by injecting politics into it.
But the national commander of the American Legion isn’t happy about a solemn holiday being used for political purposes. In a posting on the legion’s Web site, Commander Paul A. Morin blasts Edwards’ suggestion that Americans bring anti-war signs to local Memorial Day parades, saying that Edwards "has blatantly violated the sanctity of this most special day."
"Revolting is a kind word for it," Morin writes. "It’s as inappropriate as a political bumper sticker on an Arlington headstone."
And you just know the mainstream news media is going to treat the American Legion like it’s some sort of hallowed representative of America’s war veterans, and not the republican party attack dog that it’s always been.
Digby and Jonathan over at A Tiny Revolution are exploring the history of the American Legion in the wake of their sanctimonious outburst. But Rick Perlstein over at Common Sense.Org, author of the forthcoming book Nixonland, remembers the American Legion I once knew…back in the days of Vietnam and good old Tricky Dick…
Historian Tom Wells writes about how, in the fall of 1965, as people were beginning to realize that the Vietnam War was insane, and started marching in the streets to stop it, the government, hiding its hand, organized a pro-war march down Fifth Avenue in New York, with the Legion in the front ranks. The Pentagon’s Paul Warnke lamented such efforts were "quite ineffective" in stemming the antiwar tide. Indeed, not all Legionnaires got with the program. Two weeks later the commander of the American Legion post in Jewett City, Connecticut marched in his uniform with a sign, "Withdraw U.S. Troops From Vietnam Now!" He and his fellow protesters were met by the sign, "You Fairies Couldn’t Pass the Physical." Eleven days later, one hundred members of Post 15 showed the Legion’s true, nonpolitical colors by crowding into a room with 36 chairs to vote him out of the organization, as 500 happy townspeople gathered outside to jeer him as he left.
…
My friend Tom Geoghegan tells me the story of attending Boys State, the Legion sponsored public-service camp for high school kids, that year in Ohio. The lads were to supposed vote unanimously on a pro-war resolution. Tom voted against it. He was promptly kicked out of Boys State.
It was hardly just Vietnam. Also in 1966, Congress debated a landmark civil rights bill that would have banned racial discrimination in housing (it failed). In July the chaplain for the Maryland Legion testified against it in subcommittee. This was what he had to say about Martin Luther King’s open housing movement:
The same church leaders who join subversive forces in demonstrations against the established social structure also agree to banning the Bible and prohibiting prayer in public places. They are the same advocates of the new morality of situation ethics, and of liberation of the moral laws governing sex and marriage.
Nice guys. You’d think this nation’s war dead all gave their lives for the rights of straight white republican males with good incomes to tell everyone else what to think, how to vote and what they could and could not say in public about their government, and not for a land of freedom of speech and liberty and justice for all. But that’s the American Legion. The same one that, as Perlstein notes, literally embraced fascism in the 1920s. No, you won’t see that side of them in the news media reports about John Edwards’ call to protest the war.
I see a lot of chattering around the blogs, more amongst the gay bloggers then the religious right might have credited, telling gay people that we shouldn’t rejoice in Falwell’s death. Fine. I’m not rejoicing. But if I’m sorry about anything, it’s that he had his chance to try and right the wrongs he so eagerly inflicted on this poor world, and on gay people, and he let it sail off into the sunset. Obviously I’m in no mood to forgive now. Atrios said, One hopes he finds that his God is a more forgiving being than he believed. But that’s what they all think. Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven. In his cups I’m sure Falwell always figured that God would forgive him. So he didn’t have to care about the damage he caused.
I have to admit, writing about Falwell’s death poses an awkward challenge for me. When I worked at Americans United for Separation of Church and State for several years, I read Falwell’s materials, I listened to his speeches, I watched his interviews, and got a real sense for who this man was and what he devoted his life to.
In literally every instance, I was repelled and appalled. But is it not callous to bash a man just hours after his death?
I have another idea — I’ll document Jerry Falwell’s professional life and let his record speak for itself.
Great Idea! I’m going to steal most of his post…because in the midst of all the polite sermonizing over Falwell’s coffin, this needs to be said nonetheless…
March 1980: Falwell tells an Anchorage rally about a conversation with President Carter at the White House. Commenting on a January breakfast meeting, Falwell claimed to have asked Carter why he had “practicing homosexuals” on the senior staff at the White House. According to Falwell, Carter replied, “Well, I am president of all the American people, and I believe I should represent everyone.” When others who attended the White House event insisted that the exchange never happened, Falwell responded that his account “was not intended to be a verbatim report,” but rather an “honest portrayal” of Carter’s position.
August 1980: After Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith tells a Dallas Religious Right gathering that “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” Falwell gives a similar view. “I do not believe,” he told reporters, “that God answers the prayer of any unredeemed Gentile or Jew.” After a meeting with an American Jewish Committee rabbi, he changed course, telling an interviewer on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “God hears the prayers of all persons…. God hears everything.”
July 1984: Falwell is forced to pay gay activist Jerry Sloan $5,000 after losing a court battle. During a TV debate in Sacramento, Falwell denied calling the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Churches “brute beasts” and “a vile and Satanic system” that will “one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven.” When Sloan insisted he had a tape, Falwell promised $5,000 if he could produce it. Sloan did so, Falwell refused to pay and Sloan successfully sued. Falwell appealed, with his attorney charging that the Jewish judge in the case was prejudiced. He lost again and was forced to pay an additional $2,875 in sanctions and court fees.
October 1987: The Federal Election Commission fines Falwell for transferring $6.7 million in funds intended for his ministry to political committees.
February 1988: The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down a $200,000 jury award to Falwell for “emotional distress” he suffered because of a Hustler magazine parody. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, usually a Falwell favorite, wrote the unanimous opinion in Hustler v. Falwell, ruling that the First Amendment protects free speech.
February 1993: The Internal Revenue Service determines that funds from Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour program were illegally funneled to a political action committee. The IRS forced Falwell to pay $50,000 and retroactively revoked the Old Time Gospel Hour’s tax-exempt status for 1986-87.
March 1993: Despite his promise to Jewish groups to stop referring to America as a “Christian nation,” Falwell gives a sermon saying, “We must never allow our children to forget that this is a Christian nation. We must take back what is rightfully ours.”
1994-1995: Falwell is criticized for using his “Old Time Gospel Hour” to hawk a scurrilous video called “The Clinton Chronicles” that makes a number of unsubstantiated charges against President Bill Clinton — among them that he is a drug addict and that he arranged the murders of political enemies in Arkansas. Despite claims he had no ties to the project, evidence surfaced that Falwell helped bankroll the venture with $200,000 paid to a group called Citizens for Honest Government (CHG). CHG’s Pat Matrisciana later admitted that Falwell and he staged an infomercial interview promoting the video in which a silhouetted reporter said his life was in danger for investigating Clinton. (Matrisciana himself posed as the reporter.) “That was Jerry’s idea to do that,” Matrisciana recalled. “He thought that would be dramatic.”
November 1997: Falwell accepts $3.5 million from a front group representing controversial Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon to ease Liberty University’s financial woes.
April 1998: Confronted on national television with a controversial quote from America Can Be Saved!, a published collection of his sermons, Falwell denies having written the book or had anything to do with it. In the 1979 work, Falwell wrote, “I hope to live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!” Despite Falwell’s denial, Sword of the Lord Publishing, which produced the book, confirms that Falwell wrote it.
January 1999: Falwell tells a pastors’ conference in Kingsport, Tenn., that the Antichrist prophesied in the Bible is alive today and “of course he’ll be Jewish.”
February 1999: Falwell becomes the object of nationwide ridicule after his National Liberty Journal newspaper issues a “parents alert” warning that Tinky Winky, a character on the popular PBS children’s show “Teletubbies,” might be gay.
September 2001: Falwell blames Americans for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”
November 2005: Falwell spearheads campaign to resist “war on Christmas.”
February 2007: Falwell describes global warming as a conspiracy orchestrated by Satan, liberals, and The Weather Channel.
Father Charles Coughlin he wasn’t…but only because Coughlin didn’t have TV to vent his spleen on. Bad enough Falwell poisoned the American political dialog. Worse, he turned neighbor against neighbor. And worse still, he poisoned the relationship between parents and their gay children. But what is unforgivable is the war he waged on the human heart. He poisoned the deepest, most intimate reaches of the hearts of decent loving people against themselves, deliberately, out of pure unthinking arrogance that quickly turned into venom the moment the sacred purity of his motives were questioned. And afterwords, many gay people never loved wholeheartedly again.
Let God forgive him then, if that’s what will satisfy the Cosmic All. Passing judgment on a soul is not part of my job description anyway, though Falwell and his ilk think often enough that it’s theirs. I cannot forgive the Man. I just can’t. It is not within my power. Some things are unforgivable. Taking the possibility of love away from people is one of those things. Leaving a more barren and angry world in your wake is one of those things. I would strongly suspect doing all that in the name of the man who said Love Your Neighbor, is also one of those things. But that man had a much greater capacity to forgive then I do.
“A Homosexual Will Kill You, As Soon As Look At You.”
Death only closes a man’s reputation and determines it as good or bad.
-Joseph Addison
Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, wager of relentless Kultar Kampf on gay and lesbian America, who once stood beside Anita Bryant and uttered the words above, has died. He had many things to say to us in his lifetime…
If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.
God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve. (On the 9-11 terrorist attacks)
I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!
The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.
I do not believe the homosexual community deserves minority status. One’s misbehavior does not qualify him or her for minority status. Blacks, Hispanics, women, etc., are God-ordained minorities who do indeed deserve minority status.
We’re fighting against humanism, we’re fighting against liberalism … we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today … our battle is with Satan himself.
AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.
[Vice President Gore] recently praised the lesbian actress who plays ‘Ellen’ on ABC Television…I believe he may even put children, young people, and adults in danger by his public endorsement of deviant homosexual behavior…Our elected leaders are attempting to glorify and legitimize perversion.
Someone must not be afraid to say, ‘moral perversion is wrong.’ If we do not act now, homosexuals will ‘own’ America!…If you and I do not speak up now, this homosexual steamroller will literally crush all decent men, women, and children who get in its way…and our nation will pay a terrible price!
Bloomberg news reports laconically that Falwell "had a history of heart trouble." No fooling. Over at Ex-Gay watch David Robers says,
The Rev. Mel White, founder of Soulforce, was once associated with Falwell as a ghost writer among other things. He has devoted a great deal of time and effort into convincing Falwell to change his anti-gay views, as he remembered Falwell changing his anti-civil rights stance for African Americans decades before. Now we will never know how far this change of heart may have gone.
And that’s nobody’s fault but his. I suppose he died thinking he was headed for that great reward in the sky. We know what he left behind. An America deeply divided, families torn apart where there should have only been love, and all the young gay people, who could have brought love and joyful laughter and smiles into someone’s life, and instead let Falwell’s bitter hate stick a knife into their own hearts, killing the lover they could have been. All the joy lost to this world now. All the quiet intimate moments of peace and contentment and fulfillment…gone. Never to be. Because of him. This world is poorer and meaner for his having walked on it. His name is written in a lot of empty places where there should have been joy. It didn’t have to be that way. But it was what he worked for, all his life.
And now, the reputation is closed. People need to think less about the hereafter they’re going to, then about what it is they will be leaving behind when they’re gone. If you seek this man’s legacy, here it is: This world is minus a lot of love, because of him. It’s a little colder, it’s a little meaner, for his having walked on it.
I’ve told this story before, but those of you who’ve heard it will just have to bear up. In the 1992 election when I was making volunteer calls for Clinton, Mary Matalin made a major gaffe she had to apologize for quite publicly. (Doesn’t matter what it was.) I was riding down in the elevator with a high level political consultant (who didn’t know me from Adam, of course) and I smugly mentioned that Matalin had really stepped in it. He looked at me like I was a moron and said, "she got it out there, didn’t she?"
There is a naucent movement happening out in the gay blog world, to hold anti-gay groups like Focus On The Family and their Ex-Gay puppet organizations like Exodus and Love In Action accountable for the use of hate propaganda in their materials, and in their rhetoric. Specifically, their use and promulgation of the anti-gay junk science of Paul Cameron.
Cameron’s bogus factoids, like the greatly shortened life span of gay males, have become so thoroughly embedded in the political discourse that you almost cannot have a discussion about homosexuality in America, without that discussion stumbling over one of his filthy lies about homosexuals and homosexuality. But if Paul Cameron is the source of the lies, it’s been people like James Dobson, William Bennett, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other right wing luminaries who have worked diligently to give them life.
As Cameron has gained greater notoriety, and his deceptive practices given more exposure, the routine for anti-gay groups now is to either use his data second-hand, or without direct attribution. When confronted with unmistakable evidence that they’re citing something of his, the pattern is to first say that Cameron isn’t the only person saying it. When backed into a corner with proof that, in fact, Cameron is the one and only source of the data, they sometimes simply take down the cite, and claim it was just an honest mistake. But They Got It Out There.
It’s time we get something of our own out there…something that, unlike Paul Cameron’s junk science, is actually true. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified Paul Cameron’s group as an active hate group, ranking it right up there with the Ku Klux Klan and various white supremacy groups that actively spread fear and hate toward minorities. They based their findings on a careful study of the whole of his work and career and it is not hyperbole to compare his attitude toward homosexuals with that of the Nazis (Mike Godwin take note), because, as Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin shows us, that comparison actually comes from Cameron himself…
In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report saying, “[Paul] Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany in that these disparaging descriptions of homosexuals are reminiscent of themes found in the ugly history of anti-Semitism…” It turns out that the SPLC didn’t know half the story.
You need to go read Burroway’s article, Paul Cameron’s World. It is a careful gathering together of Cameron’s pronouncements on homosexuality, and his March 1999 report, Gays In Nazi Germany, into one very dark and grim whole, where his thinking, and his approval of the Nazi solution to homosexuality, becomes clear and unmistakable for what it is.
Burroway begins by underlining, using Cameron’s own papers and statements, just what it is he believes about homosexuals, and homosexuality. Unlike even many anti gay groups nowadays, Cameron categorically rejects the idea that there is any biological component to homosexuality at all. It is a choice, he insists, and a corrupting one both to the individual and to society. Therefore, it must be contained. And to do that, it must be not only criminalized, homosexuals must be driven from public life, and kept under quarantine. Homosexuals operate in secret societies, according to Cameron, surreptitiously placing themselves in positions of power or areas where they can recruit new homosexuals to their ranks. Homosexuals according to Cameron, are parasites on society, draining it of resources, and contributing nothing in return.
And it doesn’t necessarily end with quarantining homosexuals. In Cameron’s world, extermination is worth considering too. Yes…you read that right…
And how can we forget this, which Mark Peitrzyk reported in 1995?:
At the 1985 Conservative Political Action Conference, Cameron announced to the attendees, “Unless we get medically lucky, in three or four years, one of the options discussed will be the extermination of homosexuals.” According to an interview with former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, Cameron was recommending the extermination option as early as 1983.
A year later, when Paul Harkavy asked Cameron whether he endorsed extermination, Cameron replied, “That’s not true. All I said was a plausible idea would be extermination. Other cultures have done it. That’s hardly an endorsement, per se.”
But where on earth does he get the idea that extermination would ever be “a plausible idea”? In all of Anglo-American history, I can find no precedent whatsoever for extermination for medical reasons. He says “other cultures have done it,” but we know there is only one other western culture to have sunk to such depths of criminal depravity. Nazi Germany provides the only precedent for such an idea in all of Western Civilization — the very same example that Cameron upheld in 1999 to lend credence to his theories.
Emphasis mine. Burroway makes a clear and utterly matter-of-fact connection between Cameron’s beliefs regarding homosexuality, and his 1999 article where he cites the Nazi persecution of homosexuals as evidence that he is correct.
And remember too, that Cameron proposed that everyone who was HIV-positive should be tattooed — just as everyone who entered Höss’ concentration camps were made to bear the indelible marks of their “undesirable” status.
But now it all seems to come together, doesn’t it? Cameron’s description of Höss’ accounts casts a dark shadow on his own fascination with exterminations, quarantines, tattoos and capital punishment. And yes, while his recommendation for recriminalizing sodomy omitted capital punishment (just as Germany’s Paragraph 175 did), he nevertheless invokes it twice in his manifesto alone. First, there’s this:
An excellent — but by no means isolated — example of the long-term decline is provided by the District of Columbia. When the District was established in 1790, sodomy was a capital crime. Today, homosexuals have more legal rights in D.C. than non-homosexuals.
And again later:
It took 300 years for the Christian paradigm to triumph and express itself in social policy. A law punishing homosexual activity with death appeared in A.D. 342. About 50 years later, the emperors Valentinian II, Theodosious, and Arcadius decreed that “All persons who have the shameful custom of condemning a man’s body, acting the part of a woman’s… shall expiate this sort of crime in avenging flames.” …
… But over time, the Christian truths about God’s hatred of homosexual activity, Sodom and Gomorrah, etc., diminished in the law. As well, punishments for same-sex activity declined in severity — from death to imprisonment to fines.
Burroway has followed this article up with the beginnings of a list of organizations that use Paul Cameron’s data in their anti-gay political campaigns. This follows in the footsteps of work that Ex-Gay Watch has done in the recent past, castigating Ex-Gay groups like Exodus for their use of Cameron’s junk science. It’s time to call all these groups to account for their spreading the lies of this one man, for embedding them so deeply in the political discourse.
To repeat: The Southern Poverty Law Center put Paul Cameron’s group in the same league as the Ku Klux Klan, Neo Nazis, and other active hate groups in America. It’s time, it’s long past time, to call citing Paul Cameron for what it is: pure and unadulterated hate mongering, no different from burning crosses, and painting swastikas on people’s houses. If groups like Focus on the Family, NARTH, Evergreen, The Family Research Council, The American Family Association, Renew America, and others who use Paul Cameron’s data in their political campaigns against gay equality, want to keep on using it, then they need to know they are doing nothing more noble then burning crosses, and painting swastikas. In Paul Cameron’s own words, the Nazis had it right when it came to homosexuality. In Paul Cameron’s own words, the extermination of gay people is a "plausible idea."
When the SPLC said, “Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany,” I dismissed that statement as mere hyperbole even though I found the rest of the report informative. Whenever anyone is compared to Nazism, they all too often wind up diminishing the horrors of what really happened there. The truth is, there was only one Hitler, and there was only one Holocaust. The world looked Evil in the eye during those darkest of hours, and history since then has rendered its just judgment on that unimaginable scourge. So whenever someone invokes Hitler or the Nazis while expressing their outrage over something, it’s usually a good indication that they’ve run out of ideas for their argument.
But what I didn’t know then (and apparently neither did the SPLC, since they didn’t mention Cameron’s newsletter article), was that Cameron himself drew a direct line between his own theories and those of Nazi Germany. I didn’t do it, and neither did the SPLC. These are Cameron’s own theories, expressed in his own words and backed by examples of his own choosing.
Cameron is neither a Hitler, Himmler nor Höss. He’s not even close. He is his own man, and he bears his own unique responsibility for the vile agenda he proposes for our nation.
But that responsibility doesn’t rest with him alone. If no one else were to spread his messages or cite his “research,” he’d quickly disappear into the fog of irrelevance. But that hasn’t happened. He continues to be quoted by anti-gay activists and the conservative press. His reputation is built on the fact that others find his bogus statistics useful to feed their anti-gay animus.
No more excuses. Citing Paul Cameron is like burning a cross. It’s time for the religious right, for the virtuous warriors for Christ, for the noble crusaders for morality and virtue, to decide to either wear the hood proudly, or denounce it. They get it out there, they own it. No more excuses.
Yes, the republicans are horrible on the issue of GLBT equality. Absolutely horrible. I’ve been a yellow dog democrat ever since Connie Morella voted for the Defense Of Marriage Act. Morella, a so-called moderate republican, absolutely did not have to cast that vote to hold onto her seat…if anything casting it helped lead to her eventually being turned out of office. To add insult to injury she said, when questioned about it she averred that the entire same sex marriage issue was too much. She said it was like the world being turned upside down. I wanted to scream in her face, "Lady, spend a few days in Sharon Bottom’s shoes…and you’ll know what a world turned upside down looks like!!!"
But having said all that, we need to remember that not all democrats can be trusted either. Some of them will look us right in the eye, and lie through their teeth. One blogger asks our forgiveness, for supporting one of them…but I don’t think he has anything to apologize for…
Blue America doesn’t ask much of our prospective endorsees. On GLBT issues, for example, we don’t ask them to promise to support a gay marriage bill; we just ask them if they will fight for gay equality, even if they have to exhibit some leadership in a tough environment. If they can’t do that, we may still root for them to beat a much worse Republican, but we don’t raise money for them. We expect the candidates we endorse and raise money for to support a woman’s right to choice, to support serious campaign finance reform, to favor serious proposals to end the occupation of Iraq, to support gay equality– and, like I said, to be willing to exercise leadership on difficult issues. I mean, sure, we want candidates who are for the minimum wage and who oppose the dismantling of Social Security, but those should be the easy issues for Democrats.
Fair enough. But the word of some politicians isn’t even worth the hot air it took them to speak it…
We don’t expect the men and women we support to necessarily support the same position we do on every single vote. But even in the short time Carney has been in Congress, he has moved further and further away from all the other Blue America endorsees who won seats. In terms of supporting progressive issues in general, he has established himself at the bottom of the barrel among the freshmen, along with candidates we chose not to endorse, like Jason Altmire (PA), Rahm Emanuel’s Heath Shuler (NC), Nick Lampson (TX) and Brad Ellsworth (IN). Some of us were disappointed but none of the writers at DownWithTyranny, Firedoglake or Crooks & Liars chose to castigate Carney. And then something happened that has made us decide to speak up. We realized Chris Carney lied to us. When he wanted our support he told us he favors equality for the GLBT community, something he also made clear to the folks at Project Vote Smart, when he checked the little box that indicates he would like to "Require that crimes based on gender, sexual orientation, and disability be prosecuted as federal hate crimes."
So weren’t we in for a surprise a few days ago when Congressman Carney joined 13 of the most die-hard reactionary Democrats in the House– near-Republicans who almost always support a reactionary social agenda– to vote against the Hate Crimes bill. The bill passed 237-180 and all but 14 Democrats supported… well, supported exactly what Carney promised in his campaign he would support, "that crimes based on gender, sexual orientation, and disability be prosecuted as federal hate crimes." I felt betrayed– like I had been kicked in the stomach. Based on my research and interview with candidate Carney, Blue America had endorsed him and hundreds of our members had donated effort and money to his campaign. Some of these donors are members of the GLBT community and others have friends and family who are part of that community and others just like to think that the candidates they contribute to will support equality as a core value. Chris Carney let us down, violently.
I requested an opportunity to speak with him and went back and forth with his office a few times until they finally sent me this e-mail:
Hi Howie, I have a short statement for you that I hope will be sufficient. This statement has been issued exclusively to you. Please let me know that you received it. Thanks.
Congressman Carney has not wavered from his original position of equality. Treating people the same is one of his core values, creating separate constitutional classes detracts from that goal. This was overarching legislation that created too many classes of people, and Congressman Carney could not support it.
This was a difficult decision and some of our supporters will disagree. As always, Congressman Carney voted with what he saw to be the best interests of Pennsylvania’s 10th District.
I explained that sending me the Republican Party talking points — which have long and routinely been used by the party of hatred and bigotry to try to please their rabidly homophobic base while covering their asses is not satisfactory.
Tough shit…he’s in office now. To get him out you’re probably going to have to allow a republican to take the seat back unless you want to put up a scorched earth fight during the primary.
But at least we know. Chris Carney (PA-10). Remember this man. He will look you right in the eye, and lie through his teeth.
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