Pardon Me While I Mock That Petulant Self-Righteous Resentment Of Everything Fine And Noble About Human Beings That You Keep Mistaking For A Religion…
What you have to understand about this…what I could wish everyone understood about this…is the problem here isn’t Islam. The problem is fundamentalism. Fundamentalism, and the fatal conceit it infects its followers with: that they are not merely the possessors of absolute Truth, but are its very definition. The rest of us can only be heathen scum, who had better obey if we know what’s good for us. It is not a faith, it is a self congratulatory fraud, a spirituality whittled down to the level of cheats and cowards who cannot deal with the demands of life, let alone existence, and passionately hate those of us who not only can, but find beauty and nobility in it.
And if there is anything a cheat hates, it is being mocked…
A Somali man has been charged with trying to kill a Danish artist whose drawing of the Prophet Mohammed sparked riots around the world.
The suspect, who was shot by police outside cartoonist Kurt Westergaard’s home in the city of Aarhus on Friday, was carried into court on a stretcher.
Police say he broke into the house armed with an axe and a knife.
The suspect, who denies the charge, was remanded in custody. Police say he has links with Somali Islamist militants.
The radical al-Shabab group in Somalia hailed the attack.
Al-Shabab spokesman Sheikh Ali Muhamud Rage told AFP news agency: “We appreciate the incident in which a Muslim Somali boy attacked the devil who abused our prophet Mohammed and we call upon all Muslims around the world to target the people like” him.
Yadda, yadda, yadda. I guess it’s time to bring this cartoon out again. I did it back in February of 2006, as the note by my signature says “…in solidarity with the Danish 12.”
Morons. I know…I know…we’ll all get along just fine as long as everyone obeys you…
In 1989, Juan Navarete came home to find his beloved Leroy Tranton lying bloody on the concrete driveway to their house. He’d fallen off a ladder while doing work. What happened to Juan next is the stuff of nightmares. Or…righteous devotion to Godliness depending on your point of view…
Juan and Leroy lived together in Long Beach for eight years. One day, Juan came home from the grocery store and found Leroy, who had fallen off a ladder, lying on the concrete patio. Leroy was rushed to the hospital where he stayed in a coma for several days. Although Leroy regained consciousness, he remained hospitalized for nine months. Juan visited Leroy once or twice each day, feeding him and encouraging him to recuperate.
Leroy’s estranged brother, who lived in Maine, filed a lawsuit seeking to have himself appointed as Leroy’s conservator.
When Juan accidentally found out, he showed up at court in Long Beach. Although Juan, who was not represented by counsel, stood up and protested, the judge refused to consider Juan’s plea because he was a stranger to Leroy in the eyes of the law.
The brother subsequently had Leroy transferred from the hospital to an undisclosed location. When Juan finally discovered that Leroy was being housed in a nursing home about 50 miles from Long Beach, he attempted to visit Leroy there. The staff stopped Juan in the lobby, advising him that the brother had given them a photo of Juan with strict orders not to allow him to visit Leroy. Unfortunately, no one else ever visited Leroy there.
It took Juan about two weeks to find an attorney who would take the case without charge. The attorney filed a lawsuit seeking visitation rights.
A few hours before the hearing was scheduled to occur, the brother’s attorney called Juan’s attorney, informing him that Leroy had died three days before.
Since the body had already been flown back to Maine where it was cremated, Juan never had an opportunity to pay his last respects.
Juan had no, absolutely no legal standing to do anything other then grieve, and there are those (I’m coming to you in a minute Jeff…) who would likely say that he was lucky to have that, and not be tossed into a jail cell for admitting he had engaged in homosexual conduct. In the eyes of the law, he and Leroy were strangers. Some people to this day think that’s more then we deserve, considering that in the eyes of the law we used to be criminals.
Same sex marriage is allowed in a few states now, and you can call that progress if you wish. But the chilling truth is that in most of the land of the free and the home of the brave, a same sex couple can be legally ground under foot by the local justice system, to the sound of loud hosanna’s from the righteous. It’s not enough that our wedding rings mean nothing. It’s not enough that our love isn’t seen as meaningful to us, let alone to anyone else. Even our grief must be unreal…a cheap imitation of the real grief heterosexual couples feel when one becomes gravely ill, or dies.
Because to permit us even our grief is to erode the sacred institution of heterosexual only marriage…
In his veto message, Republican Carcieri said: "This bill represents a disturbing trend over the past few years of the incremental erosion of the principles surrounding traditional marriage, which is not the preferred way to approach this issue.
"If the General Assembly believes it would like to address the issue of domestic partnerships, it should place the issue on the ballot and let the people of the state of Rhode Island decide.”
At a hearing this year on one of the stalled bills to allow same-sex marriage, Mark S. Goldberg told a Senate committee about his months-long battle last fall to persuade state authorities to release to him the body of his partner of 17 years, Ron Hanby, so he could grant Hanby’s wish for cremation — only to have that request rejected because "we were not legally married or blood relatives."
Goldberg said he tried to show the police and the state medical examiner’s office "our wills, living wills, power of attorney and marriage certificate" from Connecticut, but "no one was willing to see these documents."
Homosexuals don’t love…they just have sex…
He said he was told the medical examiner’s office was required to conduct a two-week search for next of kin, but the medical examiner’s office waited a full week before placing the required ad in a newspaper. And then when no one responded, he said, they "waited another week" to notify another state agency of an unclaimed body.
Homosexuals don’t love…they just have sex…
After four weeks, he said, a Department of Human Services employee "took pity on me and my plight … reviewed our documentation and was able to get all parties concerned to release Ron’s body to me," but then the cremation society refused to cremate Ron’s body.
"On the same day, I contacted the Massachusetts Cremation Society and they were more than willing to work with me and cremate Ron’s body," and so, "on November 6, 2008, I was able to finally pick up Ron’s remains and put this tragedy to rest."
When will it occur to supporters of same-sex marriage that they do their cause no good by characterizing those who disagree with them as haters, bigots, and ignorant homophobes? It may be emotionally satisfying to despise as moral cripples the majorities who oppose gay marriage. But after going 0 for 31 – after failing to make the case for same-sex marriage even in such liberal and largely gay-friendly states as California, Wisconsin, Oregon, and now Maine – isn’t it time to stop caricaturing their opponents as the equivalent of Jim Crow-era segregationists? Wouldn’t it make more sense to concede that thoughtful voters can have reasonable concerns about gay marriage, concerns that will not be allayed by describing those voters as contemptible troglodytes?
Why of course you’re not a contemptible troglodyte Jeff…you’re perfectly capable of looking at your gay and lesbian neighbors and seeing human beings…aren’t you…
I can sympathize with committed gay and lesbian couples who feel demeaned by the law’s rejection of same-sex marriage or who crave the proof of societal acceptance, the cloak of normalcy, that a marriage license would provide.
Because of course, all Juan Navarete wanted when he saw Leroy lying in a pool of blood on their driveway was societal acceptance…a cloak of normalcy.
If you knew what it was your gay and lesbian neighbors wanted, you wouldn’t be a bigot Jeff. But you can’t see the people for the homosexuals, so you don’t. You can’t. You never will. Even a troglodyte knows his neighbor is capable of grief.
Ross Douthat has a great column in today’s times looking at American social conservatism through the lens of Judd Apatow’s movies. All three Apatow films have, as he points out, strains of conservative values running through them. But in The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up conservative choices wind up working out suspiciously well. In the darker Funny People, by contrast, bad choices have unchangeable consequences and doing the right thing proves painful…
And that’s the one movie of his that didn’t do too well at the box office. Now why would that be…? I’ll hazard the same guess Yglesias does: Because the United States is a country that’s “conservative right up until the moment that it costs us.
I think this explains a lot about the appeal of anti-gay crusades to social conservative leaders. Most of what “traditional values” asks of people is pretty hard. All the infidelity and divorce and premarital sex and bad parenting and whatnot take place because people actually want to do the things traditional values is telling them not to do. And the same goes for most of the rest of the Christian recipe. Acting in a charitable and forgiving manner all the time is hard. Loving your enemies is hard. Turning the other cheek is hard…
Christianity…honest to goodness Christianity…is Hard. When you hear someone vacantly telling you that becoming a Born Again Christian has taken all the hardship, lifted all the burdens of their lives from their shoulders, you can be pretty damn confident that you’re dealing with a Mega Church christian. Yes, yes… when your church has its own Olympic size swimming pool and a Chick-Fil-A in it the life of a Christian must be very easy indeed. But…it isn’t. Forgiveness, for example…is Hard. Damn near impossible sometimes. Ask me how I know…
Homosexuality is totally different. For a small minority of the population, of course, the injunction “don’t have sex with other men!” (or, as the case may be, other women) is painfully difficult to live up to. But for the vast majority of people this is really, really easy to do. Campaigns against gay rights, gay people, and gay sex thus have a lot of the structural elements of other forms of crusading against sexual excess or immorality, but they’re not really asking most people to do anything other than become self-righteous about their pre-existing preferences.
No fooling. Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been pointing out for decades now that these people have been waging a culture war on us, but not…oh…divorce…infidelity…premarital sex…teenage pregnancy. Yes, they will bellyache about those things, but not throw millions and millions of dollars into political campaigns against them. Nobody on the religious right is trying to get constitutional amendments passed making divorce or adultery or pornography or having babies out of wedlock illegal. They’re not putting planks in the republican party platform about divorce. But homosexuality? Oh…ThATs the biggest threat to western civilization since Earl Warren. Since Roosevelt. Since Lincoln even.
This isn’t rocket science. We’re their scapegoats. Their scarecrows. The disposable lives of faceless Other People they can pave their highway to heaven with. It wasn’t enough that Christ died for their sins. We have to bleed so they can tell themselves they’re righteous. Because otherwise they have to deal with their own lives, their own sins, their own cheapshit failures of moral character, and anything but that. As long as they can wage war on the Homosexual Menace, they don’t have to look at themselves.
Right there is where that venomous ferocity against homosexuality comes from. You see parents who do absolutely horrific things to their gay children that they would never do even if they’d committed some terrible crime like murder or rape. It’s not that they suddenly think their kid is some kind of unspeakable monster. It’s that first hand face-to-face evidence that the monster isn’t real pulls out from under them a vital pillar of self respect. I may be an unfaithful husband…I might be cheating on my spouse…I might be stealing from my employer…I might be abusing my own children…but by god I am not a faggot.My cheap little crimes aren’t as damaging to society as Homosexuality. God will forgive me…but not Them… You take away that scapegoat, that punching bag, that Faceless Other who has to die for their common everyday bar stool sins, and suddenly morality isn’t something they can beat someone else over the head with whenever their conscience starts tapping them on the shoulder. Nothing on this earth gets more enraged then a cheat caught in the act.
At a hearing earlier this year on one of the stalled bills to allow same-sex marriage, Mark S. Goldberg told a Senate committee about his months-long battle last fall to persuade state authorities to release to him the body of his partner of 17 years, Ron Hanby, so he could grant Hanby’s wish for cremation — only to have that request rejected too because “we were not legally married or blood relatives.”
After struggling for years with depression, he said, Hanby took his own life.
Try to picture Goldberg’s state of mind right then. The death of the one you love is hard enough, but this was a suicide. He must have been absolutely devastated. But then, homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. So now is just the right time to twist the knife in his heart…to make sure he knows how much he is hated.
Goldberg said he tried to show the police and the state medical examiner’s office “our wills, living wills, power of attorney and marriage certificate” from Connecticut, but “no one was willing to see these documents.”
He said he was told the medical examiner’s office was required to conduct a two-week search for next of kin, but the medical examiner’s office waited a full week before placing the required ad in a newspaper. And then when no one responded, he said, they “waited another week” to notify another state agency of an unclaimed body.
After four weeks, he said, a Department of Human Services employee “took pity on me and my plight … reviewed our documentation and was able to get all parties concerned to release Ron’s body to me,” but then the cremation society refused to cremate Ron’s body.
“On the same day, I contacted the Massachusetts Cremation Society and they were more than willing to work with me and cremate Ron’s body,” and so, “on November 6, 2008, I was able to finally pick up Ron’s remains and put this tragedy to rest.”
They treated this man, this grieving lover, like so much human garbage. And without a doubt they all did it, every single mother fucking one of them in this chain of events, with a sense of moral righteousness.
The right to bury the one you loved, and shared a life together with, is just one out of the great plenty of rights heterosexual couples take for granted every single day. It is a safe bet, none safer, that a lot of folks in Rhode Island think extending even that one to gay people is far too much. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…
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…?
Point Taken…But You Still Aren’t Paying Attention…
Andrew Sullivan updates his post on Virginia Foxx and Matthew Shepard…
I should be clear: I do not for a minute believe that the bigotry behind the Matthew Shepard murder was a hoax. I think it was murkier and more complicated – i.e. more human – than some want it to be. Of course, if you believe that his murderers deserved the maximum sentence because they brutally murdered someone, and not because they were meth-fueled bigots, it doesn’t matter. I want the same laws against the same acts enforced equally on everyone. If police don’t enforce the law equally, get on their case. But leave the laws alone.
Okay…point taken and granted. He’s not saying hate had nothing to do with the murder, which is Exactly what the kook pews are saying. As to his horribly misinformed attitude about anti-lynching laws hate crime laws, I’ll leave that argument for another time. But this business that the murder of Matthew Shepard was "murkier and more complicated" then it at first appeared is a load of horseshit.
In his confession to DeBree, McKinney had denied using meth the day of the murder, and while McKinney had been arrested too late for the police to confirm this through blood testing, DeBree felt certain that McKinney had for once told the truth. Obviously it’s unsurprising that the lead investigator would disagree with the defense, but DeBree had some compelling reasons on his side. "There’s no way" it was a meth crime, DeBree argued, still passionate about the issue when I met him nearly six months after the trial had ended. No evidence of recent drug use was "found in a search of their residences. There was no evidence in the truck. From everything we were able to investigate, the last time they would have done meth would have been two to three weeks previous to that night. What the defense attempted to do was a bluff." Meth crimes do have hallmarks. One, "Overkill," certainly seems to describe what happened to Matt, but no others so seamlessly fit that night: "A meth crime is going to be a quick attack," DeBree pointed out. "It’s going to be a manic attack… No. This was a sustained event. And somebody that’s high on meth is not going to be targeting and zeroing in on a head, and deliver the blows that they did in the way that they did," with such precision. "Consistently it was targeted, and even if you’re drunk, you’re going to have a tough time trying to keep your target. No. There’s absolutely no involvement with drugs."
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 133 – 134
A week after we met in his office, Rob [DeBree] took me to the crime scene. As we drove out to the fence in a Sheriff’s Office SUV, he stopped in mid-sentence by the Wal-Mart" "Here’s where it began," he told me and gestured in imitation of McKinney striking Matt. We restart the conversation, but he’s made his point: the drive to the fence seems unimaginably long. It’s not far – no more then a mile or two – but the rutted dirt road they turned on to makes for extremely slow driving. When I say something to Rob about how long it takes, he agrees. "They were coming here to finish him." On that dirt track, it is hard to believe the defense attorney’s claims that the two killers had been drunk or high on drugs or crazed by homosexual panic. It just takes too long to get to the fence…
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 155 – 156
"I have never worked a homicide with this much evidence," Rob says, all these months later a bit of wonder still bleeding into his voice. "It was like a case of God giving it to us. I’m not kidding. The whole way it broke down from the beginning to the end – it was like, here it is, boys: work it. It’s almost like it pissed off God, and he says, oh well, come here, let me walk you over here, walk you over there, pick up all this, pick up all that. It was just a gift.
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 157
There is more. Much, much more. But that last paragraph I quoted pretty much sums it up. There is absolutely nothing murky or mysterious about the death of Matthew Shepard. It is one of the most crystal clear examples of purely venomous anti-gay murder in the record. They spent time torturing that kid. That is not hyperbole, it is the one overwhelming fact at the heart of what happened. That, and that they made an effort to take him where they did. Whatever their intent when they walked into that bar that night, when they walk out of it with that kid, they were about torturing and killing a homosexual.
The only confusion regarding this case, is what has been deliberately and maliciously injected into the national conversation about it by the religious right. And to understand why they’ve been so vehement about denying that anti-gay hate was the root of it, you have to consider not only the political context of their opposition to hate crime laws, but the context in which Shepard’s death came to light.
What happened was that Shepard’s death brought to a grinding halt, their brand new nationwide 600,000 dollar anti-gay ad campaign. That summer, starting with a full page ad in the New York Times that proclaimed "I’m Living Proof That The Truth Can Set You Free", a group called "Truth In Love" sponsored by fifteen arch right anti-gay groups began a national campaign to roll back the gains gay activists had won, using ex-gay therapy as their ruse, not to talk about curing homosexuality, but to demonize homosexual people. Wayne Besen in his book, Anything But Straight, documents the brutality of that campaign. Behind the smiling faces of people who were now free, free at last from the loathsome taint of homosexuality, the campaign was peppered with lies about gay recruitment in schools, child molestation, the spread of AIDS, and how homosexuality leads to drugs, disease, and death and many biblical condemnations of homosexuality. Don Wildmon, whose group was one of the sponsors, was busy telling people that…
Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, the only way for them to "breed" is to RECRUIT!"
In the midst of this propaganda onslaught, comes the news that a gay college student was practically crucified on a deer fence in Wyoming…that the kid who found his dying body thought a first that it was a scarecrow. And then a couple days later, news that Fort Collins Colorado fraternity revelers during their homecoming parade, entered a float that bore a scarecrow with a sign that read "I’m gay" And disgust swept across the nation. The ad campaign now seemed less an outreach to homosexuals in the public mind, and more like what it really was, an attack on their lives.
Almost Immediately the religious right set about blaming Shepard for his own death. It’s not hard to understand why. They deliberately created the climate of hate toward gay people that made that both kid’s death and the mockery of it in Fort Collins not merely inevitable, but intentional. Desired. The homosexual monster must be feared. The homosexual monster must be eliminated from our midst. The very last thing they wanted was that the climate of hate would be held to account…that terrorizing homosexuals would be considered criminal.
For generations the act of beating, and even murdering, homosexuals was considered less a crime and more a distasteful consequence of homosexuality in society. Randy Shilts related how a young gay man who was raped sought medical help, telling a doctor what happened, only to have the doctor look at him and say "Well you’re a homosexual aren’t you?" Matthew Shepard put a human face on all that…the face of anyone’s kid…and suddenly it seemed as if for once beating and killing a homosexual wouldn’t just be swept under the rug as par for the course…no more then what you got, and probably deserved if you were a homosexual. Instead, the nation was appalled at what happened to that kid.
And that made the religious right livid.
They began Immediately to smear and slime that poor kid’s memory. What ABC News and 20/20 did by taking that smear campaign and elevating it to the level of "respectable journalism" is unforgivable. ABC News ground another cigarette into a dead gay kid’s body so they could get some ratings. At least the hatred of Fred Phelps is genuine.
There is nothing murky about what happened to Matthew Shepard. Nothing. The evidence leaves absolutely no doubt that a 112 pound gay college student was tortured and murdered by two thugs because they thought homosexuals were human garbage and their contempt for them justified anything they did to that kid that night. They had Fun. They enjoyed themselves. Anyone who cites that 20/20 hit piece is in about the same category as William Bennett, citing Paul Cameron on the shortened lifespan of homosexuals. You are dispensing bullshit that even Baghdad Bob would laugh at.
"I have never worked a homicide with this much evidence," Rob says, all these months later a bit of wonder still bleeding into his voice. "It was like a case of God giving it to us. I’m not kidding. The whole way it broke down from the beginning to the end – it was like, here it is, boys: work it. It’s almost like it pissed off God, and he says, oh well, come here, let me walk you over here, walk you over there, pick up all this, pick up all that. It was just a gift.
Take a wee stroll around that lonely prairie grass field of evidence sometime. It’ll rip your comfortable 20/20 myths…and then your heart…to crying pieces.
The footprints and the tire tracks were perfectly etched; Matt’s watch, his student ID, and a quarter were laid out by the fence like props. All that told DeBree a pretty clear story about what had happened there, including something I’d never heard in all the reporting of the crime – that Matt had made a run for it that night. First, he had desperately "tried to stay in the truck," Rob believes. Once out, he tried to escape. "Henderson had made a statement to Chasity Pasley that she told us about, that Matt was able to break free and tried to run. And according to what we were able to see at the crime scene, we could pretty well put that together. His wristwatch was located twenty-three feet or so from where he was tied up, and I think that’s essentially what he was trying to do, was just to run. He was tackled down; then he was drug over to the fence and tied by Henderson."
The Cluelessness Of Bigots, And The People Who Wonder What Makes Them Tick
Andrew Sullivan and Damon Linker wonder what makes Rod Dreher so fixated on gays…
Damon Linker challenges Dreher’s fixation with gays:
Why, given the myriad ways that our society and culture diverge from the long list of archaic norms, practices, and beliefs upheld in the Bible, does homosexuality inspire such anxiety, even panic? What are you afraid of?
It’s a good question.
Well here’s a simple answer: he’s a bigot. I know…I know…saying someone is a bigot is supposed to be nothing more then ad hominim name calling designed to shut down debate. Kinda like the way calling someone a Nazi invokes Goodwin’s Law and the argument is over. But the problem with Goodwin’s law is that it makes it impossible to identify facisim when its staring you in the face, and the same goes for this notion that ‘bigot’ is merely the equivalent of a grade school taunt. It isn’t. It’s a good old fashioned English word and it has a real meaning. People like Dreher fall into that meaning exactly. Why? Because his mindset when it comes to gay people springs from a deeply rooted animus that will not suffer examination or question. He cannot see the people for the homosexuals.
That animus will reliably outrank any higher consciousness the man has, assuming he still has any left. Case in point: his recent brouhaha about that family in East Texas who were killed in a violent home invasion. Dreher, you may recall, was shocked, shocked, not at the deaths, but at one offhanded statement by the grieving father, that bisexuality was ‘hip’ in his little East Texas town…
UPDATE: To clarify: I’m not saying that the teenage culture of bisexuality is worse morally than murder, for heaven’s sake. Obviously murder — and murder of one’s own family — is about the worst thing imaginable.. I’m simply saying that I was more shocked by this tidbit about the decadent teenage culture in a tiny Texas town than I was by the foul crime itself. Big difference.
He really believes there is a "big difference" there. He just doesn’t notice, is not capable of noticing, the wildly disproportionate response to the vicious murder of an entire family, verses one offhanded statement by a father probably crazy with grief that bisexuality is cool among the teenagers in his town. Dreher sees nothing unusual in his own shocked response to the idea of bisexuality in an East Texas town, verses his offhanded notice of the killings. Yes, yes…they were all killed…but OhMyGod bisexuality is becoming cool in East Texas!!!
He doesn’t see the problem here. He can’t. He’s a bigot. The homosexual will always loom larger in his consciousness, then any brutal crime of violence, because his animus sees nothing other then The Homosexual. The Homosexual is the burr under his saddle. The Homosexual is the devil in the darkness. The Homosexual is the monster knocking on the door. Never mind the man’s family was butchered, just look at what kids are saying about bisexuality in East Texas! This is how bigots think.
Linker, like a lot of people, simply cannot believe that is all there is to it…
I find this especially perplexing in Rod’s case because he denies so strenuously that his views flow from anti-gay animus. As he puts it in a recent post,
Gay-rights supporters typically believe people like me hold to our opposition to gay marriage and so forth because of some animosity towards gays. I know that it’s true for a lot of conservatives, but in my case — and in the case of most people I know who share my views — it’s not an emotional matter. We have gay friends, are comfortable around gay people, and simply don’t share that visceral reaction that used to be commonplace in American life, and (regrettably) still is in many quarters.
Yet the visceral reaction was there for all to see when he posted about the murders in East Texas…er…sorry…the Bisexuality in East Texas. And we know, and acknowledge in the law, that murder can be hot blooded or cold blooded. Yet cold blooded bigotry seems to completely baffle people. Why, some of my best friends are… after all. I quit one job I held years ago, when I overheard the owner state flatly that he’d hire a black man, but only if he shinned his shoes and called him Massah. And it wasn’t with any rage or passion he said it. He was simply stating a fact. Like the weather, or the time of day. If Dreher has any gay friends, it’s because they shine his shoes and call him Massah.
Linker asks Dreher a few questions in a desperate attempt to find something, anything, rational at the bottom of Dreher’s little corner of the human gutter…
Why, given the myriad ways that our society and culture diverge from the long list of archaic norms, practices, and beliefs upheld in the Bible, does homosexuality inspire such anxiety, even panic? What are you afraid of? Is it that you fear that if orthodox religious communities stop denouncing gay marriage (to the faces of married gays, which seems to be what you’d like them to do) the human race will stop reproducing itself? Or is it that you worry that if your children aren’t taught in church that homosexuality is an abomination they’ll shack up with same-sex partners when they grow up? But isn’t the decision to do something like that far more a product of nature than culture? I don’t know about you, but no amount of pro-gay propaganda could tempt me to sleep with a man — because I’m by nature sexually attracted to women. Some of what you write about homosexuality leads me to believe you worry that naturally straight men and women will be seduced into being gay by watching too many episodes of Project Runway. But you can’t seriously believe that. Can you?
Here’s the problem. For Dreher, and bigots like him, this isn’t about what they believe. It’s a knee that jerks first and justifies itself later. Any excuse will do, even if it is transparently self serving and utterly unconvincing. He doesn’t have to convince you of anything Linker, he just has to dig in his heels and not be moved. If you can’t make him admit that his prejudices are irrational he wins the argument. It really is that simple.
And not only can you not make a bigot admit their prejudices are irrational, you can’t make them take responsibility for them either. It’s not his fault that he has to go on the warpath against gay people…it’s the gay’s fault. They’re Making him do it, every time they Flaunt themselves in his face thereby provoking him to act. If we stop denouncing homosexuality then the entire human race will cease reproducing and become extinct. Yes, it’s a staggeringly irrational argument. But understand this if you understand nothing else about it: the point isn’t that it’s a good argument, the point is that it puts the blame on gay people for his hostile behavior toward them. Homosexuality is a threat to our very survival…I Have to do this to them…I am Forced to confront the Homosexual Menace…
Homosexuals molest children. Homosexuals spread disease. Homosexuals have caused the fall of every great civilization… The Homosexual is a threat we must confront… Homosexuals are tortured souls…sexually addicted…unable to function normally in society…desperate to be freed from the bondage of their homosexuality…We Must Help Them…We Must Save Them From Themselves… The Homosexual needs our salvation… These aren’t arguments that withstand the slightest critical glance. But they don’t have to be. They’re not offered as reasons…they’re excuses. Excuses to blame gay people, for the bigot’s hostile behavior toward them.
And if Dreher can’t blame gay people for his cheapshit bar stool prejudices, he has one other trump card he can play: he can blame God…
I suspect that Rod’s first instinct will be to respond that the issue isn’t really homosexuality at all. It’s "authority." Rod, after all, believes
that you simply can’t discard a teaching on which the Bible — in both testaments — and (for Catholics and Orthodox) authoritative church tradition could not be more clear, simply because it doesn’t suit contemporary mores.
And that’s all well and good until Linker comes to the obvious point that Dreher, like every other bigot making this argument, picks and chooses his religious beliefs to suit himself. God is not the reason. God is the excuse.
Does Rod have any non-question-begging answer to this question? An answer that doesn’t just amount to saying, "because the church says so"?
In the post Scott mentioned earlier, Dreher insists that the jarring juxtaposition that occasioned many readers to question his values and priorities, has been the subject of a significant misinterpretation. It’s the surprisingness of the "bisexuality is cool" claim that motivated his post, not it’s relative wrongness.
Many commenters remain, understandably, unpersuaded by his effort to explain his bizarre post. But it’s necessary to take Dreher at his word to fully grasp the depravity of his position. So let’s grant him: a) that a remark by one (horribly traumatized) parent is sufficient evidence to to grant that bisexuality is indeed "cool" in the high school culture of one East Texas town, and b) that while this doesn’t rise to the level of parricide in an index of moral wrongs, it is a disturbing and troubling trend that suggests something that was once right with the world has gone wrong.
The nature of the typical experience of non-heterosexual adolescents in our schools and our society is hardly a secret. The ostracization and bullying of those suspected to be non-heterosexual takes an enormous psychological toll, and has life and death consequences, as evidenced higher rates of depression and suicide amongst non-heterosexual youth. They typically live in fear: fear that something is horribly wrong with them, fear of being rejected by their friends and family, and fear of violence. But: in one small town, at least for some non-heterosexual youth, there’s a chance this status quo might be changing. For anyone whose moral worldview contains any compassion, changes to this horrific status quo are a sign of hope. For Dreher, it’s the precise opposite.
Dreher was adamant in that post that he was "so keeping his kids away" from modern American culture, if that meant a toleration of bisexuality…let alone one supposes homosexuality. But what if one of those poor kids is gay themselves?
Tens of thousands of gay kid come of age in that hostile environment every generation and many of them don’t make it to adulthood alive. And it’s a fact that many of their parents would actually rather they killed themselves, or were killed, then grew up to be happy, contented gay adults. It doesn’t take much to imagine where Dreher fits in. He reads a horrific news article about a home invasion massacre, and instead of grieving for the dead kids, their mother, and the father who has to now carry those horrible memories to his grave, he goes on a rant about something the father said offhandedly about how cool bisexuality was in his town. I read something like this and I can’t get out of my head how horrible their last moments must have been (which is why I avoid crime stories in the newspapers). Dreher, reads it and is just stunned by the fact that bisexuals in one small East Texas town aren’t hated.
This is eminently typical of what hate does to a person’s conscience. This is the conscience of the culture warriors. Look at it if you have the stomach for it. There is the Pit, grinning back at you. The grotesque indifference to human life in that crime story, and in Dreher’s callow, superficial response to it, are of a single piece. What is more shocking then the murder of a man’s entire family? Why…bisexuality of course.
Don’t look for too long. Nietzsche was right about the dangers of staring into an Abyss.
By now you’ve probably heard about the nine year old Brazilian girl who was sexually abused and raped by her step-father. She became pregnant with twins. Her mother arranged an abortion to save her life. Doctors were found to do the procedure and the little girl’s life was saved.
The danger to a little nine year old girl’s life under those circumstances isn’t something you’d think a rational person would even question, let alone condemn the adults who took the measures they had to in order to save her life.
A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication in Brazil of the mother and doctors of a young girl who had an abortion with their help.
The nine-year-old had conceived twins after alleged abuse by her stepfather.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re told Italian paper La Stampa that the twins "had the right to live" and attacks on Brazil’s Catholic Church were unfair.
…
The girl, who lives in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, was allegedly sexually assaulted over a number of years by her stepfather, possibly since she was six.
The fact that she was four months pregnant with twins was only discovered after she was taken to hospital in Pernambuco complaining of stomach pains.
…
Brazil only permits abortions in cases of rape or health risks to the mother.
Doctors said the girl’s case met both these conditions, but the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho said the law of God was above any human law.
He said the excommunication would apply to the child’s mother and the doctors, but not to the girl because of her age.
Upon learning of the abortion, the regional archbishop excommunicated the doctors, as well as the girl’s mother. He did not excommunicate the step-father, saying the crime he is alleged to have committed, although deplorable, was not as bad as ending a fetus’s life.
Emphasis mine. As Andrew Sullivan said today, "I guess the Vatican is used to finding ways to see the lesser evil of raping and molesting children."
Sullivan also notes today that Rod Dreher is shocked, shocked to learn that there are bisexual teenagers in East Texas. Here’s the Dallas News story that fairly curdled poor Dreher’s blood…
Terry Caffey awoke to gunshots and his wife’s guttural screams.Instinctively, he threw his right arm over her body – taking three bullets in the forearm and three in the shoulder – before a seventh round caught him in the right cheek and exploded through his ear.
That one blew him out of bed, face down.
Moments later, someone shot Caffey three more times in the back.
"He came up and kicked my foot to make sure I was dead," he said. "There was heavy breathing, and I could hear them reloading. I was basically just waiting for them to shoot me in the back of the head. But it got very quiet, and he walked off."
Caffey passed out.
When he regained consciousness, furniture crashed, glass shattered and footsteps marched upstairs toward his children’s bedroom.
His right arm hung limp because a bullet had severed a nerve. He scrambled to his knees.
Then he heard his 13-year-old son Bubba cry out – "No, Charlie! No! Why? Why are you doing this?"
Caffey collapsed again…
No, No…wait just a moment… That’s not the part of the story that shocked Rod Dreher. This is:
Penny home-schooled the children soon after the family moved from Celeste, population 800, to Emory, population 1,200, about three years ago.
The transition to a larger school district was bumpy.
"I guess you’d call it culture shock," Caffey said. "Emory has a lot of bisexual kids; it’s like it was almost cool to be bisexual. One of the first things that happened was some girl wanted to be Erin’s little girlfriend. And I was like, ‘That ain’t happenin’.’ "
But after three years of home schooling and much discussion, the children re-enrolled in public schools in 2008. The boys seemed to thrive, but Caffey and his wife were concerned about Erin.
Emphasis mine. No, really, Dreher wrote an entire post off of this news story about a man surviving the home invasion massacre that killed his entire family, about how shocked he was to discover "a bisexual culture" in East Texas. If you think I’m exaggerating that, let Rod tell you all about it himself…
…the killings aren’t what shocked me about this story. What got me was this: This is a tiny East Texas town — and there’s a bisexual culture in one of them, among the teenagers? WTF? What do I not get about teenage life these days? What do I not get about the cultural air kids breathe?
And now of course, he’s getting all pissy because people are questioning his sanity in the post’s comments…
UPDATE: To clarify: I’m not saying that the teenage culture of bisexuality is worse morally than murder, for heaven’s sake. Obviously murder — and murder of one’s own family — is about the worst thing imaginable.. I’m simply saying that I was more shocked by this tidbit about the decadent teenage culture in a tiny Texas town than I was by the foul crime itself. Big difference.
UPDATE.2: Reading the comments, what on earth is wrong with some of you? I’m not saying bisexuals killed that family.Good grief. It’s obvious that the murderers include the daughter and her boyfriend. The bisexuality thing was a mere aside that I found more startling than the murders, given the small-town culture where this crime took place. I freely admit that I am out of touch with teenage culture today. If you’re bound and determined to conclude that I think bisexuality is worse than murder, you’re completely wrong, and you’re willfully misreading my post for whatever reason. At least understand what you’re doing, and the bad faith in which you’re doing it.
A pastor was shot dead in his pulpit today in Illinois. That appalls me. It doesn’t shock me. This kind of thing happens these days. Sad but true. You don’t hear every day about a tiny Texas town whose teenagers are engaged in a culture of bisexuality. At least I don’t.
UPDATE.3 Ah, so now I get where the unusual traffic has been coming from.
Andrew Sullivan linked to this post, calling my point of view "clinical." So it must be to someone with his values. I think I have said five times here that murder is incomparable to bisexuality in terms of moral meaning, but why let that clarification get in the way of a good snit? The point of my post was not that one thing is worse than the other, but that I personally found one thing more shocking than the other. Shocking, in the sense of being surprised by something.
Well that sure clears things up doesn’t it. Rod…you’re done. Whatever humanity you may have once had within you…it’s gone now. Don’t even bother trying to figure out why your readers are appalled. You will never know.
You can wonder whether the culture war has utterly corrupted what might have otherwise been decent human beings, or whether they never actually took that belly flop into the gutter because they were there to begin with. But if nothing else the culture war has made it pretty plain that there is a difference between spirituality and religious dogma, and the two are not compatible. Dogma destroys the human spirit as surely as rust, because it demands we give it our conscience, our integrity, and eventually everything we are, and everything we might have become. Dogma fashions out of our living bodies and empty shell for it and it alone to fill, and we stop being the person we are, and we become dogma.
Jacob Bronowski put it perfectly in his series, The Ascent of Man…
There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts – obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.
It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. it was done by ignorance. When people believe they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken".
…We have to cure ourselves of the itch of absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.
But this is precisely what dogma demands we do not do. We cannot touch people, lest the scarecrow that dogma insists to us they must be, comes undone, and we see a human being not that much different from ourselves.
The state of mind, the state of society, is of a piece. When we discard the test of fact in what a star is, we discard in it what a man is.
Likewise, when we discard the test of fact in what a homosexual is, we also discard in it the human being that they, and we are. Integrity. Dogma will not share power with it. And that is the lesson people are learning…
When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers.
The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.
These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.
"More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself,’ " says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.
Among the key findings in the 2008 survey:
• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, "the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion," the report concludes.
• Catholic strongholds in New England and the Midwest have faded as immigrants, retirees and young job-seekers have moved to the Sun Belt. While bishops from the Midwest to Massachusetts close down or consolidate historic parishes, those in the South are scrambling to serve increasing numbers of worshipers.
• Baptists, 15.8% of those surveyed, are down from 19.3% in 1990. Mainline Protestant denominations, once socially dominant, have seen sharp declines: The percentage of Methodists, for example, dropped from 8% to 5%.
…
The ARIS research also led in quantifying and planting a label on the "Nones" — people who said "None" when asked the survey’s basic question: "What is your religious identity?"
The USA Today article goes on to postulate a number of causes, from increased mobility to sex abuse scandals in the clergy. But it doesn’t take on the most obvious one: culture war weariness. People are sick of it. They are sick of being told over and over again to hate their neighbor. Sick all the more, for being told to hate their neighbor in the name of love. And sick still more, for having that message of hate preached to them by the likes of this…
He did not excommunicate the step-father, saying the crime he is alleged to have committed, although deplorable, was not as bad as ending a fetus’s life.
I’m simply saying that I was more shocked by this tidbit about the decadent teenage culture in a tiny Texas town than I was by the foul crime itself.
Religion isn’t on the decline in America. People are just getting sick of being lectured by moral degenerates. Life is good. This good earth is a wonderful place to be living it. Our families and friends give it sweetness. Love and sex bring it joy and contentment. To ask questions, to search for knowledge is not only a good thing, it is a great adventure. Life is good. The gutter is no place to be living it.
Scott Lively, author of the revisionist Pink Swastika, is in Uganda. Lively has previously traveled to eastern Europe, and the former Soviet block, to tell the people there that the Nazis who massacred millions of Slavs during World War II were homosexuals. Here’s what I wrote about it a year ago January…
Alex Shevchenko has been arraigned for a hate crime tied to the assault and eventual death of Satender Singh in July. According to prosecutors, Mr. Shevchenko and Andrey Vusik taunted Mr. Singh in a park because they thought he was gay. Mr. Vusik eventually threw a punch that toppled Singh, dashing his head, they charge.
Gay leaders in Sacramento say the incident followed several years of escalating tensions with some Slavic immigrants.
"The gut feeling of the [gay] community is that preaching among the local Russian evangelical community is breeding hate and that something would happen. And Satender was the something that happened," says Ed Bennett, a gay Democratic activist.
While Slavic leaders say their community is being unfairly scapegoated for legitimate political protests and deeply held religious beliefs, some monitors warn that an emerging group called the Watchmen on the Walls may be fomenting a dangerous atmosphere within the ranks of Slavic immigrants here.
I’ll say it’s dangerous. Scott Lively, one of the group’s founders, is also the author of The Pink Triangle…a Holocaust revisionist book that argues that the Nazis were basically a homosexual movement and that rather then being among the victims of the Holocaust, homosexuals were the primary instigators of it. Consider that Lively is now preaching this message to Slavs in what was the eastern Soviet bloc at one time…a people who suffered a staggering loss of life at the hands of the Nazis during world war two…
Videos of Watchmen conferences abroad suggest some leaders are less modulated, and their audience less against violence. One video shows Lively giving a version of Singh’s killing different from reported facts, including the notion that Singh was undressing in front of children. The audience cheered twice as Lively recounted the punch and the death of Singh – a reaction Lively rebuked, saying: "We don’t want homosexuals to be killed. We want them to be saved."
The camera was on and Lively knew it. There is no way on God’s green earth Lively doesn’t know the impact his message that the Nazis were homosexuals and homosexuals are all basically Nazis has on this particular group of people. He knows Exactly what he’s doing. He has never publicly condemned the killing of Satender Singh by a group of young Slav men in Sacramento. There’s a reason for that.
Eastern Europe taken care of, and sufficiently incited to murder, Lively has now traveled to Africa, with basically the same message: African genocide is caused by homosexuals…it is the homosexuals who are killing Africans… Jim Burroway reports…
According to anonymous blogger GayUganda — as we said, Ugandan gay bloggers need to remain anonymous for their own safety — American Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively provided the much-anticipated red meat on day three of the anti-gay conference taking place in Kampala.
On Saturday, Lively repeated his discredited historical revisionist theory in which he claims that the cornerstone of Germany’s Nazi lies firmly in the gay movement, and that the gay movement today, if left unchecked, will result in a similarly murderous fascism wherever it goes. In Kampala, he went further by expanding his examples of what he calls homosexuals’ murderous impulse by blaming the 1994 Rwanda genocide on gay men.
Now consider the environment Lively is pouring his gasoline into…
Lively was asked about the current state of Ugandan law, which provides for a life sentence for homosexuality. Lively reportedly approved of the existing law, and endorsed adding a provision mandating forcing convicted gay men and women into ex-gay therapy. Conference speakers had called for such a law on the second day of the conference. Adding more fuel to the fire, GayUganda had earlier noticed that this apparent press release was posted on The Earth Times:
Kampala Anti-gay activists in Uganda Saturday formed a pressure group to discourage homosexuality, following a two-day conference of religious leaders, teachers and social workers in the capital Kampala.
The group, to be called the Anti-Gay Task Force, is intended to “fight against the spread of homosexuality and lesbianism in the country,” spokesman for the group Stephen Langa told reporters. Same sex-relationships and marriages are illegal in Uganda, and human rights groups have criticized the government for harassing homosexuals.
The task-force said that it would one day “wipe out” gay practices in the African state.
The threat to “‘wipe out’ gay practices” is not an idle threat in a nation that provides a life sentence for those convicted of homosexuality. Further, Uganda witnessed at least three seperate campaigns of government sanctioned and media-led vigilantism between 2005 and 2007. The last spate of violence was sparked by a press conference of LGBT leaders calling on the nation to simply allow gays and lesbians to live in peace. The LGBT leaders at the conference wore face masks out of fear of being identified.
This conference poses a very dangerous development in a country with such a volatile history in how it treats gays and lesbians.
Which is precisely what Lively went there to accomplish. Is there any doubt now that this man wants to rise the mob against gay people, in order to enact his final solution? This is deliberate incitement to violence. There is just no mistaking it for anything else. Like so many other Culture Warriors, Lively wants gay people dead. But unlike most of the others, he has a plan to accomplish it. Step one: Go to nation that has suffered genocide. Step Two: Teach the people of that nation that the ones who killed their kinfolk were homosexuals. Step Three …
Satendar Singh was a native of Fiji. At age 19 he immigrated to the USA and lived with relatives in the Sacramento, California area. He worked at an AT&T call center. He was well liked by both his co-workers and friends.
On Sunday afternoon July 1, 2007 he and 6 friends, reportedly 3 couples of Indian and Fijian descent, were partying at a California State park at Lake Natoma, east of Sacramento. Trouble broke out between Singh’s group and another group, reportedly Russian speaking and of Russian descent. Verbal assaults were traded between the groups. The Russian group allegedly made racist and homophobic comments to Singh’s group and singled him out for homophobic comments.
About 8pm that evening as Singh’s group was leaving, the men of the Russian group confronted Singh’s group in the parking lot. During the confrontation one man punched Satendar Singh in the face and Singh fell backward hitting his head. Singh slipped into a coma never to regain consciousness. Four days later on July 5, 2007, family removed Satendar Singh from life support and he died.
This is why I read SLOG. I’m going to steal this entire post from Dan Savage, because it perked me up when I really needed it. But you should read SLOG from time to time.
Sitting in the fake Irish pub, eating my fake Irish chow ("Irish white cheddar" makes a burger Irish—who knew?), drinking my real Irish beer. Two women at the next table are talking up Jesus. They’re trying to save a man’s soul from the dark and sinister clutches of… I think he said "lapsed Catholicism" but I’m not sure. This fake Irish pub is located in the actual American south, and overhearing conversations like this is known risk of venturing outside your hotel room. I go back to my book.
But my ears perk up when the man cites the gays as one reason he can’t quite see himself converting to… whatever strain of Christianity the two women were pushing. Knowing what we know now about sex and what science tells us about what makes people gay—he’s referring back to an earlier point he made concerning what we know about the age of the planet and the evolution of the species ("God gave us brains and reason for a reason, so we could figure these things out based on the science and evidence, right?")—it seems to him that putting people to death for being gay, per the bible, is, "a little cruel."
No, no: the bible is without error. And if our nation were more Godly, if bible-believing people would only stand up for what’s right… well, we might not be putting gay people to death, say the girls, we wouldn’t be stoning them and stuff, but we would ban gay sex and gay marriage and gay adoption and gay/straight student alliances and repeal all gay rights laws and keep gay characters off the TV. Not out of Old-Testament style vengefulness, but out of New-Testament style love and compassion and concern. Because if persecuting homosexuals—a.k.a. "fighting back against the gay agenda"—convinces even one gay person to leave their lifestyle and come back to God, "it would save a soul."
I set my burger down. "Hello, I’m a fag," I say. I assure them that I’m not angry or upset or hurt by anything that they’ve said. I just wanted them to know that I was sitting there, a big fag, eating my Irish burger within earshot. "And you’re free to think I’m going to hell and say so while I’m forced to listen. But I’m free to think you’re ridiculous and that your God is a delusion and say so while you’re forced to listen."
One of the young women assured me that they didn’t mean anything they’d said, you know, personally. "And I’ll be praying hard for you," the other one of said, giving me a wink.
"And I’ll be fucking butt for you," I replied, winking back.
Yes! Just…Yes!
You people…you callous, fucking ignorant, gutter crawling maggots who think our hopes and dreams of love and contentment are your stepping stones to heaven… If I could wave a magic wand I’d make each and every one of you loveless soulless louts re-live every gay bashing victim’s final moments every night for the rest of your lives, until you figured out that the people you are knifing in the heart with your pusillanimous cardboard McLove are human beings, not your scapegoats.
I despise you. Every night I go to bed I lay my head down on the pillow despising you a little more. You took what ought to be this life’s most wonderful experience…falling in love, and being loved…and turned it into a nightmare for so many people, so that God would know how much you love him. It wasn’t enough that Jesus died for your sins…the rest of us have to die too. Because you’re afraid that even Christ on the cross can’t cleanse the open sewer that is your love. And you may just be right…
I sat down when I came home from work today, and started writing a post about Maureen Mullarkey, the pretentious jackass of a painter slash art critic who painted gay pride parades and was discovered to have donated a thousand dollars to help pass Proposition 8. I have it all pretty well written out in my head just now. I actually started writing it a moment ago. And then I just go tired.
I’m sick of this fight. Just sick of it. I never wanted my life to be a war zone. I never wanted to be the scapegoat for every cheap character flaw that heterosexuals are ashamed of. I never wanted my hopes and dreams of love to be other people’s stepping stones to heaven. But this is the world I was born into.
So I’m sitting here listening to Debussy’s Reverie, and the world I thought I was going to grow up in, and the life I thought I was going to have, keeps coming back into view from between the notes, keeps floating out there in the melodies…just out of reach…and I just can’t keep on writing my post. I’m sick of it all. Just sick of it. I think of this monster with a paint brush using our lives to gratify her soulless ego…selling our lives in her art gallery…cutting our ring fingers off without compunction while selling her twisted vision of our lives to the highest bidder…and I just want to walk away from this world. I really do. Except there is nowhere to go.
There Can Be No Morality Without Religion…(continued)
Via Sullivan… Pope Ratzinger welcomes into his fold, a bishop who claims the Holocaust never happened…
Pope lifts excommunications of 4 bishops
Pope Benedict XVI has lifted the excommunications of four bishops consecrated without papal consent 20 years ago by the late French ultraconservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the Vatican announced Saturday.
One of the four bishops was shown this week in an interview saying that the Nazi gas chambers probably didn’t exist. The report prompted Rome’s chief rabbi to ask the Vatican to halt plans to rehabilitate him.
Lefebvre rebelled against the Vatican’s modernizing reforms of the 1960s, including replacing Latin with local languages at Mass.
Benedict has already reached out to the rebels in the hopes of bringing them back into the Church by making it the old Mass more readily available.
"The Holy Father in this decision was inspired by the wish that full reconciliation and full communion can be achieved soon," the Vatican said.
Richard Williamson said in a Swedish state TV interview that historical evidence "is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed." The Vatican had no comment on the report.
Traditionalist bishop: ‘There were no gas chambers’
Bishop Richard Williamson is a hardline ultra-conservative bishop of the Society of St Pius X. He is excommunicated from the RC church, along with his three brother SSPX bishops but as we report, and also according to reports coming out of Rome, the excommunications could be lifted soon by the Pope. It could even be lifted by Sunday, according to the usually reliable Rorate Caeli. And that while he faces possible prosecution for Holocaust denial in Germany after an interview with a reporter from Swedish TV in which he claimed that six million Jews did not die in the Holocaust, merely a few thousand, and that the gas chambers did not exist. CathCon has the translation of the Der Spiegel report and more on the likely lifting of those excommunications. Could the clock really be turned back this far on Nostra Aetate and the teachings of Vatican II?
In an earlier story in the Catholic Herald, Bishop Williamson was exposed as endorsing the forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion…
…
If he brings them back in with Williamson on board, then truly it will be a disaster. Vatican II might as well never have happened and it won’t just be the Jewish community that would be justifiably disgusted. For many thousands of lay Catholics the world over, this could be the final proof that what the atheist bus campaign suggested was true: ‘There probably is no God.’ At least not the God that Williamson and his like believe in. Who could blame them, then, if they put traditionalist Catholic guilt aside, and get on and enjoy their lives.
I hope people don’t get it into their heads that this is merely Ratzinger’s German heritage coming to the fore because this sort of thing horrifies a lot of Germans. It’s his fascist soul that’s peeking out now. They say men don’t change, they just reveal themselves. Well…this is Ratzinger.
…and he’s eminently representative of that vein of fascism in the Catholic church that was not only on Hitler’s side once upon a time, and the Spanish dictator Franco, but actively helped many of his henchmen escape justice after the war. The reason strongly Catholic Spain can have same-sex marriage regardless of what the church thinks of it is because so many Spaniards remember how cozy the Catholic church was with Franco while Spain suffered under his thumb, and they care more about the church keeping its fingers the hell out of their government then what the Pope thinks about anything.
American protestants shouldn’t be feeling too smug about all this either because while there are folks in the Henry Ford heartland who think the Catholic church is the whore of Babylon, they also think Protocols is as literally true as the King James bible. The only reason the kook pews give a good goddamn about Israel is their nutty end times theology. They could care less about the fate of the Jews…they need Israel to exist so the world can end. Then American right wing Jesus will come back to earth and cast them all into the lake of fire along with the other non-believers. And…presumably Catholics. And Mormons for sure. And Unitarians. And Quakers. And the heathens in the church across the street. Especially them.
Hell’s a big place all right. As big as the human capacity to hate each other. As big as our ability to excuse ourselves for killing each other. And heaven is so very small. So very, very small. Just big enough for me…but probably not big enough for you too. And remember…there can be no morality without religion…
There’s been some conversation over on SLOG today that the author of those threatening letters to gay bars in Seattle might actually be a gay man himself. I wasn’t convinced, until I saw this…
Remix in comments flagged an important clue about the author of the Ricin Letters. The line…
…is from a poem, "A Display of Mackerel", from a collection by poet Mark Doty. The poem appeared in Atlantis, a 1996 collection of poems that Doty wrote after the HIV-related death of his partner in 1994.
They don’t care they’re dead
and nearly frozen,
just as, presumably,
they didn’t care that they were living:
So whoever wrote the letter knows—and plagiarizes—his gay poets.
That’s…pretty telling. It’s not conclusive, but I’m not making any more assumptions about this guy until he’s caught. Let’s hope that happens before he actually kills someone…
From SLOG… Here is the letter one gay bar in Seattle received…
Read between the lines of every love the sinner hate the sin sermon you have ever heard, and you will see these words. There must be no homosexuals… The ex-gay movement gets back to basics…
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