I Am Not Obsessed With Sex Sex Sex Sex Sex Sex Sex Sex Sex Sex Sex Sex
Roy Edroso writes gleefully about the argument Andrew Sullivan and Rod Dreher are having about what it means to be a good Christian. I won’t go into detail about it here, you should just go read Roy’s post over at Alicublog. But (since I can’t post comments over there because the JS-Kit commenting engine he uses is just too goddamned cranky) I want to just take note of one thing that leaped out at me. This is Dreher speaking…
It’s interesting how so many liberal Christians accuse conservatives of being obsessed with sex, yet so much of their own writing and activism focuses on sex and sexuality, especially homosexuality.
In case you missed it, Dreher is saying right there that whenever you talk about Teh Gay you are talking about sex. Equal marriage rights for gay couples? Sex. Protecting gay people from discrimination in the workplace? Sex. Anti-bullying campaigns in the schools to protect gay kids? Sex. The horrific rise in anti-gay violence in recent years? Sex.
But no, he’s not obsessed with sex. He’s a bigot who can’t see the people for the homosexuals. He is a man who simply cannot grasp that homosexuals might have lives too, apart from their bedroom shenanigans, just like the heterosexuals do. Heterosexuals have lives, homosexuals have sex.
Remember, this is the guy who wrote an entire post off of a news story about a man surviving the home invasion massacre that killed his entire family, to vent about how shocked he was to discover “a bisexual culture” in East Texas. No he’s not obsessed with sex, he’s a bigot. His hated other is that ingrown hair, that burr under his saddle, that itch he just can’t scratch. Everything he reads that even remotely touches on gay people, even the massacre of an entire family, becomes a story about sex because that is all homosexuals amount to. He is not obsessed with sex. He’s obsessed with homosexsexsexsexsexsexsexsexsexsexsexsexuals.
The Friend And Mentor Who Helpfully Hands You That Little Bottle Of Pills
I’ve been meaning to post this since I saw it back in January…
Memories of a gay man’s suicide loom over Fremont Presbyterian Church
On July 23, 1992, Thomas Paniccia, an Air Force sergeant, announced he was gay on national television. On the anniversary of that day 15 years later, Paniccia drove to an undeveloped cul-de-sac in Roseville several blocks from his home and waited to die.
Paniccia, 43, had swallowed an overdose of prescription pills and placed a three-page letter on his dashboard.
The Rev. Donald Baird, pastor of Fremont Presbyterian Church, was one of the people who received copies of the letter. Baird was his mentor, friend and pastor…
Pastor. Mentor. Ahem. Yes. And such a good one.
Fremont, the largest Presbyterian congregation in the Sacramento area, has faced the biggest crisis in its 129-year history: the decision to leave the national church. Fremont leaders believe the national church has strayed from biblical teachings, and they decided to break ties after the denomination approved the ordination of openly gay clergy.
During the debate and following that decision, some church members raised Paniccia’s name. What about Tom, they asked. His death three years ago reminded them that the decision they made would affect people who called the church home.
Despite Paniccia’s struggle, he had felt accepted. They didn’t want that welcoming and inclusive environment to change.
Welcoming. Inclusive.
Outside of a small circle, Paniccia’s story has never been told, yet has weighed on many of those making decisions about the church’s future. They remembered a gay man who loved his church.
“He wasn’t open about it. It didn’t matter anyway,” said Donna Cavness, who was a friend and had worked with Paniccia. “He had a lot of wonderful gifts. He was good to be around.”
Paniccia’s close friends said he was conflicted about his faith and sexuality.
David Larson rented a room in his home to Paniccia and knew him for more than a decade. He also received a copy of Paniccia’s suicide note.
“As a close personal friend, I unfortunately realized Tom’s inability to accept being gay combined with his religious views is what I believe led to his suicide,” Larson said.
Welcoming. Inclusive. Now let’s talk about what it means to be a friend to a gay man…
Baird does not believe Paniccia’s struggle to reconcile his faith with his sexuality drove him to suicide and said that Paniccia would support the church’s decision to leave the national denomination.
Since the October vote, longtime members have left the congregation. As pastor, Baird has received hate mail. Church members may have to pay millions of dollars to the national church to keep the 5-acre church property across from California State University, Sacramento.
And next week, local Presbytery officials will call for an investigation of the Fremont vote to determine whether there are enough church members opposed to the split and who want to stay with the national denomination.
Still, Baird said Fremont must leave.
Following Christ is not supposed to be easy or convenient, he said. “If a church loses its integrity, it ceases to be a church,” Baird said. “The world changes. God’s word doesn’t.”
The pastor said Paniccia believed the same. He was committed to the teachings of his faith, Baird said. “Tom had the same beliefs, he understood.”
He sat in his office looking at a photo of Paniccia in the church directory.
“He was like a son to me.”
Consider for a moment, the horrifying possibility that this is true. Some parents of gay children throw their kids into the street with undisguised contempt. Others buy them the poison, the bottle of pills, buy the rope, hand them the gun, lovingly gift wrapped with a little card that says, I Love You Very Much…
This post is going to repeat a lot of verbiage from a post I made here nearly two years ago, but it’s about a recurring theme I see in our struggle. That theme raised it’s head and laughed at me this morning, while reading a post over at Box Turtle Bulletin. There, poster Rob Tisinai writes about an email he got from Maggie Gallagher…
I got a fundraising email from Maggie Gallagher the other day. It’s unbelievably long (as in, I can’t believe she expects people to read this whole thing). One sentence jumped out at me before I gave up on the piece.
Are two men pledged in a sexual union really a marriage?
Personally I’d answer, No.
Which would be the correct answer from Gallagher’s point of view. Tisinai goes on to rephrase the question in terms that acknowledge same-sex couples might actually be in love, and avers that this is something she knows she cannot admit because it undercuts her entire argument against same-sex marriage.
I don’t think her argument is about same-sex marriage. I don’t think any of them really give a good goddamn about marriage. What they’re adamant about is that homosexuals aren’t really human…that Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. It isn’t about marriage at all. What marriage represents to the homophobes is the final barrier to admitting that homosexuals are fully human and capable of experiencing all the higher emotions of love and devotion and commitment that heterosexuals do…that we are not, as Dr. Laura once famously put it, biological errors, or as you can hear thumped from pulpits all over the bible belt, demon possessed hell bound abominations in the eyes of god.
North Carolina activist Patrick Wooden has become a favorite of groups like the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, and most recently joined Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality at a rally denouncing the Southern Poverty Law Center. On a recent appearance on LaBarbera’s radio show, Wooden called homosexuality a “wicked, deviant, immoral, self-destructive, anti-human sexual behavior” and should make people “literally gag.” Wooden added that gay men have “to wear a diaper or a butt plug just to be able to contain their bowels” by their “40s or 50s” as a result of “what happens to the male anus.”
When you hear them yap, yap, yapping about the sanctity of marriage, what they’re saying is homosexuals are some sort of sub-human…things…that copulate with just about anything handy whether it’s a person or a horse or a cell phone. To lift what homosexuals do to the level of heterosexual love and commitment then, is a profane act of defilement. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Be it with each other or…cell phones.
Which is to say, we do not love. Love is something fully human individuals experience. The homosexual experiences no such thing. That is an article of belief more central to the faith of modern fundamentalists then the resurrection.
Back in April of 2010, I read this by then newly out Christian musician Jennifer Knapp back in an interview in Christianity Today…
Q: So why come out of the closet, so to speak?
Knapp: I’m in no way capable of leading a charge for some kind of activist movement. I’m just a normal human being who’s dealing with normal everyday life scenarios. As a Christian, I’m doing that as best as I can. The heartbreaking thing to me is that we’re all hopelessly deceived if we don’t think that there are people within our churches, within our communities, who want to hold on to the person they love, whatever sex that may be, and hold on to their faith. It’s a hard notion. It will be a struggle for those who are in a spot that they have to choose between one or the other. The struggle I’ve been through—and I don’t know if I will ever be fully out of it—is feeling like I have to justify my faith or the decisions that I’ve made to choose to love who I choose to love.
[Emphasis mine…] The problem after all isn’t sex, it’s love. But asking people to acknowledge that same-sex couples love is precisely the problem. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… People sitting in the pews side-by-side with their gay neighbors aren’t asking them to choose between their love and their faith. When they look at same-sex couples they don’t see love at all…merely sex. They are “struggling with homosexuality”. The bedrock prejudice insists, absolutely insists, that is all there is to same-sex couples. Empty, barren, transient lust.
As NOM board member Orson Scott Card once said, gay couples are just playing dress-up…
“However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. Nor does society benefit in any way from treating it as if it were…”
“They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won’t be married. They’ll just be playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes…”
However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be… There’s the problem. Look at it if you have the nerve. This isn’t about sex. That empty barren, perverted lust is not what makes them angry. What makes them angry is any suggestion that homosexuals do, in fact, experience love the same way heterosexuals do. And it makes them absolutely livid.
It’s often argued that gay couples cannot rise to the level of marriage because they don’t produce children, and marriage is mostly about family life. But this argument is a sham. And it mirrors another sham argument often heard in conservative religious communities, that being homosexual is not a sin, only engaging in homosexual acts is. If only the homosexuals just didn’t have sex, they could be welcomed into the kingdom of Heaven too…just like the rest of us. But heterosexual couples, medically incapable of having sex, are as welcome to marriage as they are the Kingdom and nobody in either group is saying that same-sex couples can marry as long as they don’t have sex.
The heterosexual couple who stick together even if they are denied a sex life are seen as vindicating the power of love. That is why sterility among heterosexuals is no barrier to marriage. But same-sex couples somehow defile the institute of marriage with their very presence, whether they bring children into it (via adoption) or not, whether they can have sex or not. And that is because homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.
It’s not about children. It’s not about family life. It’s not even about heterosexuality. What homosexuals steal from people like Orson Scott Card is the idea that only heterosexuals love. All arguments to the contrary, what this fight is about, Exactly, is love, and who can be allowed to love and be loved, and who cannot. Marriage is love’s sanctuary, a sacred place where lovers can find shelter, protection, support. Letting homosexuals, who are incapable of love, into it defiles that sanctuary, turning it from a sacred place into a brothel.
However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be… In 1983, Sharon Kowalski suffered severe brain injuries in a motorcycle accident leaving her unable to care for herself. Her lover, Karen Thompson, with whom she had exchanged wedding bands and shared a house, had to fight a long and bitter legal battle with Kowalski’s parents, who refused to allow Thompson any contact at all with their daughter. When Sharon, with difficulty, typed her wishes to go back home with Karen on a keyboard provided by a doctor, her parents took the keyboard away. At one point, Donald Kowalski, Sharon’s father, asked a reporter in exasperated frustration “What does that woman want with my daughter…she’s in diapers!” For almost nine years Thompson fought it out in court with Kowalski’s parents, refusing to let the woman she loved be condemned to life in a nursing home where she would be kept isolated from the world outside and denied any therapy that would have allowed her to communicate her wishes to be taken back home to Karen. When she finally won, Donald Kowalski called her an animal.
What does that woman want with my daughter… A same-sex couple who cannot have sex would be, if unrepentant nonetheless, ineligible for the Kingdom, let alone marriage. It’s not about the Act, if not engaging in the Act makes no difference. Their crime is that they love, and love is not permitted to homosexuals.
Antioch Bible Church pastor Ken Hutcherson didn’t sit in the same room as two gay people to debate marriage equality. But he did call into the Seattle Channel studio where gay people were present for a debate on same-sex marriage.
And of course, Pastor Hutcherson went there: “If this law is passed, what is going to happen? Now ask your guests in the studio. Do they believe that if they change the definition of marriage being between one man and one woman, what is going to stop two men one woman, two women one man, one man against a horse, one many with a boy, one man with anything?“
We must be animals. Not sinners in need of salvation, but animals. Why? So we can be their scapegoats. The right wing politician who goes hiking the Appalachian trail with his mistress while his wife and children wonder where the hell he went. The religious right preacher who gets caught visiting prostitutes. The conservative moralizer who gets caught gambling. The problem isn’t that we are moral cheats, the problem is acceptance of homosexuality. Homosexuality is destroying the family and society, not our own failures of moral character. Probably it is also responsible for earthquakes and hurricanes.
Jennifer Knapp didn’t choose love over faith, but love over fame because there was no other way. Karen Thompson fought for nine years to free her beloved because there was no other way. The gay civil rights struggle is not a fight over scripture. It has nothing to do with faith. It is not about sex. It is a fight over the right, the essential human need, to love and be loved. Because love can overcome any obstacle, endure any hardship, hold on to any hope no matter how distant and faint. Because love can move mountains. Because the one thing you never want the scapegoat to do is move mountains.
The so-called “license to bully” bill…would allow students to share any “religious, philosophical, or political views” that are “unpopular,” regardless of their consequences to the learning environment, and limits educators’ ability to curb such harassment.
Equality advocates lodged an email protest campaign against the measure, but were particularly surprised by the reaction of state Rep. John Ragan (R). In a long letter to one opponent of the bill, Ragan replied that gay “feelings” can be controlled by “mentally healthy adult human beings,” and concluded by stating, “Should society avoid disapproving of pedophilia, prostitution, murder, etc., because practitioners of those behaviors may commit suicide at higher rates?”
(Emphasis mine) What you have to understand about the human gutter is it has no bottom. Here is a man who wants to enable the very bullying that causes gay kids to kill themselves, saying the fact that gays are more likely to commit suicide is proof that there’s something wrong with them. Nice way to prove a point huh?
No bigot, there’s something wrong with you. Something profoundly, terribly wrong with you. Mentally healthy adult human beings? I’m laughing in your face. What do you call an adult who can abuse kids, can create a climate where kids can be easily abused, and does not see anything wrong with what they’re doing?
In Tennessee they’re now considering two bills that would do little more then put another knife into the hearts of gay kids in the Tennessee public school system. The Don’t Say Gay bill is back again, along with another, even more insidious if that’s possible, which would allow a religious exception to the current anti-bullying codes. A perfect excuse then, for kids to torment their gay peers to death under the guise of freedom of religion. If you can’t make gay kids hate themselves to death, then obviously your religion is being discriminated against…
Via Good As You. Orson Scott Card retells Hamlet. Yes. Seriously.
Anyone who thinks they’ve witnessed the heights of bigotry, look…if you haven’t read any of Orson Scott Card’s rants about homosexuality you absolutely Have Not seen the pure unadulterated thing…
A small American press has been swamped with complaints after publishing a version of Hamlet by the science fiction author Orson Scott Card in which King Hamlet is a gay paedophile.
Hymned by the publisher Subterranean Press as a “revelatory” retelling which shows “what’s really going on” in Shakespeare’s play, the story suggests Hamlet’s father wasn’t murdered by his brother Claudius, but Horatio, in revenge for being molested by him as a child.
…
The book is not a new release, having been published twice before, for the first time in 2008, but an explosive review at the Rain Taxi Review of Books has unleashed a wave of criticism.
“Here’s the punch line: Old King Hamlet was an inadequate king because he was gay, an evil person because he was gay, and, ultimately, a demonic and ghostly father of lies who convinces young Hamlet to exact imaginary revenge on innocent people,” writes William Alexander. “The old king was actually murdered by Horatio, in revenge for molesting him as a young boy – along with Laertes, and Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, thereby turning all of them gay … Hamlet is damned for all the needless death he inflicts, and Dead Gay Dad will now do gay things to him for the rest of eternity: ‘Welcome to Hell, my beautiful son. At last we’ll be together as I always longed for us to be.'”
For anyone who has read Orson Scott Card’s The Hypocrites Of Homosexuality and Homosexual “Marriage” and Civilization (the scare quotes are his), this is as unsurprising as the sight of the sun rising in the east. But bear in mind as you are reading all this, the National Organization for Marriage finds him fit enough for its board of directors…a man who once said that if same-sex couples are universally allowed to marry, every pledge of allegiance he ever uttered since he was a child becomes null and void…
“If America becomes a place where the laws of the nation declare that marriage no longer exists — which is what the Massachusetts decision actually does — then our allegiance to America will become zero. We will transfer our allegiance to a society that does protect marriage.” -Orson Scott Card, Homosexual “Marriage” and Civilization.
Perhaps someone should ask Brian Brown if he feels the same way about his allegiance to the United States of America. Oh…and civil war.
I honestly don’t think Card hates homosexuals. Bigotry isn’t always hate. The gutter has no bottom and there is a step down even from hate, where the complete dehumanization within oneself of the hated other is achieved. Did the architects who designed the gas chambers of Auschwitz hate the Jews, or were they simply doing their best to rid Europe of what they regarded as a pestilence? Hate is not the bottom. If your entire concept of “bigot” is such as Fred Phelps who wave their signs screaming that Matthew Shepard is burning in hell and Thank God For Dead Soldiers, it can come as a shock to see a human heart even more depraved, and worse, to see it so matter of fact about it, as if discussing the weather or last night’s baseball game. But the further down in the gutter you go, the more peaceful it seems.
Card doesn’t scream and shout. He doesn’t stand on a street corner and wave the bible and preach hell fire and damnation. If you sit him down to discuss it (ask people who have interviewed him) he will tell you calmly and matter-of-factly that gay rights is a collective delusion… that granting rights for deviant behavior is ridiculous… that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… that when two homosexuals start telling people they’re a couple they are just “playing house” (his words)…that they might think that they have deep feelings towards one another but that’s all that it is…just wishful thinking, just pitiful trying to convince themselves that their deviant sexual urges are something higher and nobler then empty lust. He will tell you calmly and matter-of-factly that a homosexual’s highest allegiance is to the community that gives them access to sex… that homosexuals recruit children into homosexuality by molesting them and that is how everyone or nearly everyone who ever was a homosexual became one.
He will tell you all of this simply, calmly, and matter-of-factly. So matter-of-factly that you do not, simply cannot doubt this man will never be moved from his prejudices, no matter how much evidence to the contrary moves past his eyes. He does not deny the evidence, he simply does not see it. He can’t. He’s a bigot.
Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Homosexuals are a threat to children. Homosexuality must be actively suppressed by force of law, preferably in a discrete, non-confrontational way, brutally if necessary, or the homosexuals will eventually recruit so many others into homosexuality that civilization will collapse.
Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society. -Orson Scott Card, The Hypocrites of Homosexuality.
Orson Scott Card will tell you this, as if he is telling you the time of day.
Some prejudice is simply misinformed. Some prejudice is cultural…like the song says, you have to be carefully taught. Even in the most vehement of haters of that kind, there is humanity buried somewhere within. It can be reached. Maybe. Then there is the prejudice that is an abyss. You cannot move an abyss, you can only stare into it, while it stares back into you.
Now You Know The Reason They Seemed So Vulnerable To You
Details of the horrific events in Norway will continue to unfold no doubt for weeks, if not months to come. So it is well that we all just take a deep breath and wait for solid information to come out. I understand the impulse to think it was radical Islamic terrorism when the news first hit; it was my first reaction too. But I remembered Oklahoma City and held my peace and waited. And now it seems from the facts coming to light, that this was indeed more Oklahoma City then 9/11…
She did not think the order was strange at the time because the suspect has a farm, but after Friday’s explosion in Norway’s capital, Oslo, she called police because she knew the material can be used to make bombs.
“We are very shocked that this man was connected to our company,” said Estenstad. “We are very sad about what happened.”
That sounds vaguely familiar. But bear in mind there is still an investigation going on and we really still don’t know much. This passage from the suspect’s postings to an anti-Muslim website struck me though…
I dare not even think of how many Norwegian children who have been suicide because of these experiences (assault, robbery, rape, psychological terror committed by Muslim youths). There are probably several hundred in the last 15 years.
….Non-Muslim youth in Oslo aged 12-18 are in a particularly vulnerable situation in terms of harassment [from] Muslim youth.
This from a man who (it is said) methodically killed 80 kids at a youth camp, some while they were swimming away for their lives. Always, the monster the bigot sees in others is themselves. And they are right to fear that monster.
I just have one comment to make on the unfolding story of Kirk Murphy. This can’t be shouted out loudly enough: The subject of this study, which formed much of the basis for the ex-gay movement’s claim to scientific legitimacy, killed himself and his therapy so deeply wounded his family they are still, decades later, suffering from it.
The Ex-Gay movement was born in the blood of innocents. In his book, Anything But Straight, Wayne talks about the formation of the very first ex-gay ministry, Love In Action, its first clients, and how one of them, Jack McIntyre, chose to end his life rather then keep failing at becoming heterosexual.
In 1973 John Evans, who is gay, and Rev. Kent Philpott, who is heterosexual, co-founded the original “ex-gay” ministry, Love In Action on the outskirts of San Francisco. Philpott soon wrote The Third Sex?, the first ever “ex-gay” book which touted six people who supposedly converted to heterosexuality through prayer.
Although time eventually revealed no one in his book actually had changed, the people reading it had no idea the stories were fallacious. As far as they knew, there was a magical place in California that had figured out the secret for making gays into straights. Inspired by his book, a few enthusiastic individuals spontaneously began their own “ex-gay” ministries.
Evans, however, denounced the program he co-founded after his best friend Jack McIntyre committed suicide in despair over not being able to “change”…
McIntyre wrote a suicide note. If the ex-gay movement could be said to have a heart and soul, here it is:
TO: Those left with the question, why did he do it?
I loved life and all that it had to offer to me each day.
I loved my job and my clients.
I loved my friends and thank God for each one of them.
I loved my little house and would not have wanted to live anywhere else.
All this looks like the perfect life. Yet, I must not let this shadow the problem that I have in my life. At one time, not to long ago, that was all that really mattered in my life. What pleased me and how it affected me. Now that I have turned my life over to the Lord and the changes came one by one, the above statements mean much more to me. I am pleased that I can say those statements with all the truth and honesty that is within me.
However, to make this short, I must confess that there were things in my life that I could not gain control, no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed.
It is this constant failure that has made me make the decision to terminate my life here on earth. I do this with the complete understanding that life is not mine to take. I know that it is against the teachings of our Creator. No man is without sin, this I realise. I will cleanse myself of all sin as taught to me by His word. Yet, I must face my Lord with the sin of murder. I believe that Jesus died and paid the price for that sin too. I know that I shall have everlasting life with Him by departing this world now, no matter how much I love it, my friends, my family. If I remain it could possibly allow the devil the opportunity to lead me away from the Lord. I love life, but my love for the Lord is so much greater, the choice is simple.
I am not asking you to sanction my actions. That is not the purpose of my writing this at all. It is for the express purpose of allowing each one who will read this to know how I weighed things in my own mind. I don’t want you to think that, ‘I alone,’ should have been the perfect person, without sin. That would be ridiculous! It is the continuing lack of strength and/or obedience and/or will power to cast aside certain sins. To continually go before God and ask forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and all He stands for in my life.
Please know that I am extremely happy to be going to the Lord. He knows my heart and knows how much I love life and and all that it has to offer. But, He knows that I love Him more. That is why I believe that I will be with Him in Paradise.
I regret if I bring sorrow to those that are left behind. If you get your hearts in tune with the word of God you will be as happy about my ‘transfer’ as I am. I also hope that this answers sufficiently the question, why?
May God Have Mercy On My Soul.
A Brother & A Friend.
And as Wayne writes…
Still, Love in Action survived because many people who read The Third Sex? came to California in hopes of changing.
And George Rekers was still citing his success at fixing Kirk years after Kirk had taken his own life. When reporters caught up with him recently Rekers dismissed the idea that Kirk’s suicide could have had anything to do with the experimental gender identity therapy he’d inflicted upon the child. Oh no…that was years ago…
“That’s a long time ago, and to hypothesize, you have a hypothesis that positive treatment back in the 1970s has something to do with something happening decades later. That would, that hypothesis would need a lot of scientific investigation to see if it’s valid…”
More apparently, then the initial therapy got according to Jim Burroway who writes of his surprise that there was little to no independent verification of Reker’s claims. But according to his family Kirk was a troubled soul the rest of his life, though he had moments when it seemed he had made peace with himself. And it bears noting that the therapy deeply disturbed then, and continues to this day to disturb, his mother and his straight older brother, his sister being too young at the time to remember any of what happened.
“I do grieve for the parents now that you’ve told me that news. I think that’s very sad.” – George Rekers
Look carefully at this: Kirk was the patient who made Rekers’ career and he only just now learns of his suicide when CNN reporter tracked him down? Yes. Of course. He never stayed in touch, clearly and sickeningly never felt the slightest curiosity about how his most famous patient was doing. This is not science, it is politics. The client is not important. The client’s family is not important. It’s the message, that that there is no such thing as a homosexual only broken heterosexuals, that is important. Because inside that message is another: that homosexuals bring their own persecution upon themselves, since they can choose whenever they want to not be homosexual.
…no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed… The Ex-Gay movement was born in the blood of innocents. It continues to destroy lives and wreak families with no more tangible regard from its leadership for the human toll now then in the moment of its birth. Their allegiance is to a higher agency. No…not God. The culture war. Failure is not a bug, it’s a feature. The scapegoat must hate themselves too.
Who Knew The Wedding Altar Was Also A Sacrificial One…(continued)
Joe Jervis over at Joe.My.God posts what looks like the cover of NOM’s current mailer…
So it looks like NOM is doubling-down on their The Homosexuals Are After Your Children card that worked for them so well in California. How…unsurprising…
When you have reduced your neighbor to the status of a scarecrow that drives voters to the polls, or a scapegoat for every failure of moral character you would rather not be held accountable for, when you cannot see the people for the homosexuals, then threats to their lives become meaningless abstractions. They’re not your neighbors, they’re not people, they’re things…and the safety of things isn’t something that often crosses the mind. It’s not hate exactly…it’s what hate does to the heart eventually. That may look like a photo of a cute little boy with his daddy’s glasses on, reading a book about two kings who fall in love, but look closer. That is a photo of human souls in free fall. To win elections, to prevent loving same-sex couples from having access to marriage, NOM is belly flopping into the gutter, and they know it, and they don’t care. Not honor, not morality, not any shred of basic human decency left within them matters to them any more. All that matters is striking out at the Homosexual Menace. This is what hate does to the heart, eventually.
The Homosexuals Are After Your Children!!! It’s a message that gets attention and, for now, wins elections. The trump card you can play when it looks like too many voters are starting to view the homosexual as their neighbor. It also gets people killed. But for that to weigh on your conscience, you have to see gays as people, not things. You have to be able to see the people for the homosexuals. Bigots can’t.
Who Knew The Wedding Altar Was Also A Sacrificial One?
Apparently Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown believe that gay people have to die so that marriage can be sacred.
Joe Jervis over at Joe.My.God has a post up containing a video of Brian Brown speaking at Sen. Ruben Diaz hate rally in the Bronx this afternoon. It’s worth a look to get a feel for the heated atmosphere Diaz, Brown and company feel is appropriate for addressing the place of their gay neighbors in society. At the 2:55 mark, Brown shouts the following out at the crowd:
“It changes what is taught in the schools. Kids as young as kindergarten are taught in Massachusetts that their parents are bigots because they believe marriage is the union of a man and a woman.”
It just isn’t possible by now, that Brown and Gallagher don’t know their claim that the curriculum of kindergarten in Massachusetts has anything to do with same-sex marriage is false. But the smear that The Homosexuals Are After Your Children has a long history, even before Anita Bryant embodied it with her Save Our Children campaign, which was not so much about saving children (certainly not any gay ones at least) then it was making sure gay citizens could loose their jobs simply for being gay. But if it’s not possible that Brown and Gallagher don’t know that Massachusetts isn’t teaching kindergarteners about same-sex marriages, it’s also not possible that they don’t know how useful it is to say that it is.
So here is Brown doubling-down on it. Not only is Massachusetts teaching kindergarteners about same-sex marriage, but their teachers are telling them that their parents are bigots. And he’s doing it in a community that’s already had some pretty spectacular anti-gay violence recently…
Eight gay-hating Bronx gangbangers accused of one of the city’s most savage crimes in years appeared in court Sunday to face charges in what Mayor Bloomberg called an act of “pure evil.”
They stand accused of torturing and terrorizing a gay man, his older brother and two teenagers over the course of many hours Oct. 3 in Morris Heights.
“Is it true you’re a fag?” ringleader Idelfonso (Cheto) Mendez allegedly demanded of his bound victims before punching them in the face.
Prosecutors said he repeated the query and the punch over and over again.
Anti-gay bias attacks don’t always target gays. Sometimes violent perpetrators screaming anti-gay epithets target straight men instead. Such may have been the case in the March 12 beating death in Queens, New York, of 18-year-old Anthony Collao, a heterosexual recent high school graduate, reported the New York Daily News on March 15.
Several young men who reportedly broke windows, scrawled on the walls with red markers, and made hand gestures associated with gangs invaded a party hosted by two gay men. The men also reportedly attacked and beat Collao while hurling anti-gay epithets, the article said.
The news account said that Collao tried to avoid violence by leaving the party once the four intruders entered. The gang chased him down, the article said, threw him up against a car, and pummeled him mercilessly. Collao was reportedly was reportedly punched, kicked, and stomped. One assailant was said to be carrying a pipe.
Four suspects were later placed under arrest. One of the young men was wearing Collao’s baseball cap, and the other three were “covered in blood.”
Do you really think that Ruben Diaz doesn’t know about any of this? Or Brian Brown?
“Kids as young as kindergarten are taught in Massachusetts that their parents are bigots because they believe marriage is the union of a man and a woman…”
The homosexuals are coming for your children!!! This is the kind of thing that gets people gay bashed and killed. And NOM’s utter indifference to the climate of violence this sort of rhetoric can enable speaks volumes. Perhaps it’s true that Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown do not hate gay people. Perhaps. Clearly they regard hate as a useful tool. It gets people to the voting booth. It gets their checkbooks opened up.
A few months ago Maggie, you asked, rhetorically, “Do I have blood on my hands?” And you know, I’ve been wondering why you didn’t bother wearing your wedding ring to the DOMA hearings a few weeks ago. They say the wedding ring embodies the continuous flow of love, a never-ending circle symbolizing eternity, where there is no beginning or end, the gold symbolizing purity…gold being one of the noble elements that are said to be incorruptible. But the spilling of innocent blood corrupts everything it touches. That simple, elegant and beautiful symbol of eternal love…you’re turning it into a thing of shame Maggie. I don’t think very many couples want their wedding vows sealed with a ring of blood.
Chambers: We’re being portrayed as group of people making judgments on peoples’ lives whereas I and thousands of others like me, who experienced same-sex attraction, are trying to live out our lives through the filter of our faith, not through the filter of our sexuality…
…he said, making a judgment not just on gay people (they live their lives through the filter of their sexuality), but also on gay Christians (they place a higher value on sex then they do their faith). Yes, yes…it’s all about sex with homosexuals, isn’t it, Alan.
You manipulated Cooper so deftly there. I’m impressed. That what years of talking parents into throwing their gay kids into your soul grinder has done for you?
On Monday, the State Department issued a joint statement in the UN’s Human Rights Council opposing the criminalization of homosexuality. Currently, well over 70 countries impose criminal penalties for gays and lesbians, and the statement has the support of 84 countries. According to the Family Research Council, however, the US is committing a great injustice by condemning the criminalization of people because of their sexual orientation. The FRC dubs it “Operation International Tolerance,” complete with a picture of Obama wearing a rainbow helmet
And here comes the double-speak…
Obviously, FRC believes that homosexuals and transgenders shouldn’t be subjected to violence. But this resolution goes well beyond that to endorsing a behavior that dozens of member nations oppose. No binding document of international law has ever recognized a universal “human right” to engage in sex with a person of the same gender. And although even the U.N. admits that “resolutions” like this one “aren’t legally binding,” they do help to create a legal norm.
[Emphasis mine] As though rounding up gay people and locking them behind bars isn’t an intrinsically violent act. But pay attention to that business about legal norms. In his 1990 essay The Hypocrites of Homosexualty Orson Scott Card acknowledges what most other right wing culture warriors only soft peddle in public: that sodomy laws exist mainly to create a climate of fear among gay people…
Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.
The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place…
This can’t be emphasized enough: right wing culture warriors really do want homosexuality criminalized. This fight isn’t just about marriage, hospital visitation rights, the ability of gay Americans to hold down a job, get a professional license, or walk into a restaurant and expect the same service anyone else gets. It’s about fear. Gay people must be afraid. Every minute of every day, we must be afraid. And we are not. And that makes them angry. They are angry that we can live our lives openly, that we don’t have to worry about being turned into the police by some neighbor or co-worker with a grudge and get thrown in jail. They hate it that we don’t have to be afraid.
Because a fearful homosexual is a good homosexual. A fearful homosexual isn’t merely one who does not agitate for civil rights. We must be afraid just to live our lives openly. The closet must be our world. It must go back to this, all over again:
“If only we didn’t hate ourselves so much…if only we could just not hate ourselves quite so very much…” -Michael, The Boys In The Band
We must hate ourselves, at least as much if not more then they hate us. Because then we will never know the one thing we must never be allowed to know: what it is to be loved, and to love another… wholeheartedly… joyfully… body and soul.
Because love stays the course. Because love can move mountains. Because the one thing you never want the scapegoat to be able to do, is move mountains.
Drew Call, 32, a returned missionary who is gay, was a supervisor in the church’s printing department until March 7. At a February private meeting with his Salt Lake City stake president—who declined to be interviewed—Call says he was asked to abandon his gay friends as a condition for renewal of his temple recommend. Surprised and fearing people may not believe him, Call surreptitiously made an audio recording of the follow-up meeting in March so there could be no doubt about what happened.
…The recording makes clear that Call’s association with gay people was the problem.
Call is gay, but celibate as the church (sic) requires. His sexuality wasn’t the issue here…it was his gay friends.
On the recording, the stake president expresses concerns that Call recently had taken his daughters to “gay bingo,” a monthly charitable fundraiser hosted by the Utah Pride Center and the drag/comedy troupe Utah Cyber Sluts. “I think it’s inappropriate to take children, and I really think it’s inappropriate for you to go, myself, to this gay bingo,” the stake president says on the recording. Later, the stake president says of the gay community, “They are conducting themselves in a manner that is definitely in opposition to teaching and practices of the gospel. I’ve talked to you about this, about your association with [gay people]. Last time you left here, you were willing to give up your four, or so, individuals.” Call responded that he’d thought about it, but wasn’t willing to give up his gay friends after all.
To receive or maintain a temple recommend, Mormons must answer certain standardized questions. The stake president says on the recording that the question Call could not answer honestly asks, “do you support, affiliate with or agree with any group or individuals whose teaching or practices are contrary to or opposed to those accepted by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?” The stake president goes on to say that that question applies to Call’s gay friends “because of the moral decay that is going in the world and that’s part of it. The church opposes the relationship between a man and a man and a woman and a woman, and you’re associating with those individuals. I don’t know how to get around that.”
“So what are you going to do?” Call asked.
“You’re going to have to look for a job,” the stake president replied.
Read this carefully. The prohibition against having gay friends, as outlined by this “stake president”, is unconditional. Clearly it applies to Everyone. Mormon or not, gay or straight, it matters not. Anyone can be fired from LDS employment simply for having gay friends.
This is how serious this organization is behind the scenes about its anti-gay kulturkampf. It’s not just a matter of Insular Cult Administration 101, which says you mercilessly punish those who shake hands with people on the other side of the barbed wire fence because once they get the slightest taste of the world outside the compound next thing you know they’re out of there. Beyond that aspect of it there is this: when the scapegoat becomes human, persecuting them becomes immoral.
There’s the bottomless fear. Not of the moral decay of the world, but that the world begins to see, clearly, sickeningly, the moral decay within. That can never come to pass. The people must never be allowed to reach out to the scapegoat, the hated other, for once they do the scapegoat becomes human, and then the questions start. Oh my god…what have we been doing to these people all this time…? So much pain we’ve inflicted on so many for so long…and for what? For what?
Today the subjects in the LDS pews fear the judgement of their leaders. But the reality is the leaders are much more afraid of the judgment of the pews, and that day is coming.
The pushback from the right started almost immediately, and with all the acid vitriol by which they inflamed the violent passions that almost certainly led to the shooting in Arizona last Saturday in the first place. You could watch the bogus Jared Lee Loughner Facebook pages…the ones where he admits his loathsome liberal tendancies…being created and deleted as fast as the Facebook administrators could catch them going up. You can really tell they learned their lesson from the killing of Matthew Shepard. If now was then, they’d have been calling Shepard a meth using sex addict and McKinney and Henderson a couple of drugged out psychopaths and the killing a Tragic robbery gone bad long before the body had a chance to get cold, let alone buried. And as always, a key ingredient in the smokescreen building are the uncertainties, inevitable so close to the event itself, if not for far, far beyond it. What actually did motivate the killer? Was he a leftist or a hard core Tea Partier? Did he read Marx or Hitler? Did he surf The New Republic or Daily KOS? And if we can’t answer those basic questions then dare you lay blame for this horrible, horrible tragedy at the feet of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party you treasonous America hating liberals.
And so on…and so forth…
What does it mean to “lay the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at the feet of Palin and the Right”? That they gave the killer the gun and some money and sent him on his way? That they deliberately incited this specific killer to this specific act? That they fueled a dangerous climate of violence against their political opponents, deliberately, to intimidate their political opposition without particularly caring if any one of them actually got killed, because long ago they stopped seeing the opposition as their neighbors, their fellow Americans, but rather as an enemy to be defeated by any means necessary, and if one of them Did get killed it would teach the rest a lesson?
“Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: ‘Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!'” -Sarah Palin via Twitter
Angle: I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who’s in the military. This not for law enforcement. This is for us. And in fact when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny. This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical…
Manders: If we needed it at any time in history, it might be right now.
Angle: Well it’s to defend ourselves. And you know, I’m hoping that we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.
Responsibility. If our fingerprints are not actually on the murder weapon itself then we are not responsible. It is immoral for you to use this National Tragedy for partisan political advantage. And if our violent eliminationist rhetoric did happen to motivate that poor psycho to pack a gun and kill an elected officeholder we’ve placed our crosshairs on, well then logically liberals are the ones who are responsible. Because if it wasn’t for all that ACLU liberal freedom of speech stuff he would never have heard us talking about 2nd amendment remedies for adverse election outcomes. Responsibility.
What’s in a name? A 12-year-old girl at Hernando Middle School in Mississippi was beaten by five fellow students — reportedly because they said her name, Randi, was “a boy name.””They started talking about me like I was a man,” she told local news station WREG. “That I shouldn’t be in this world. And my name was a boy name.” The four girls and a boy surrounded her after a Fellowship of Christian Students meeting, and, she said, kicked her in the rib and leg, hit her in the face, sat on her, pushed her face into the floor, and threw her onto a cafeteria table.
It was caught on tape apparently. However, officials at Hernando Middle School have tastefully agreed to keep the incident hidden from public view, and keep the police out of it.
A school administrator issued a statement, said WREG, that “fighting is not tolerated and that disciplinary action will be taken to the fullest extent of the law.” No charges were filed, however, because the police were not called. Whether the attack was an isolated incident or part of ongoing bullying remains unknown.
As Savage says, this isn’t simply a disciplinary matter, this was a violent attack on a twelve year old girl whose only crime was having the name Randi. By not calling the police, school administrators are abetting a criminal act. I suppose that because they were part of a Fellowship of Christian Students the school administration felt they must have had noble motives. Perhaps they were just trying to save her soul from eternal damnation for having the name her parents gave her.
The girl in question is said not to be gay herself, and that would be beside the point except for the fact that some parents seem to think that only gay kids are at risk for anti-gay bullying. But bullying is a sickness that pervades an entire school, terrorizing anyone who might even be thought to be fair game, and the message from Perkins and others of his kind is that those who are different, merely by their existence, threaten civilization itself. Out of one side of their mouths they say Love The Sinner. Out of the other its Hate The Sin.
Oh, and that were we to simply let them live their lives in peace marriage will be destroyed, the terrorists will win and civilization itself will crumble and fall.
Here’s how that plays out in the lives of children: Four girls and a boy surrounded a twelve year old girl after a Fellowship of Christian Students meeting, kicked her in the rib, kicked her leg, hit her in the face, sat on her, pushed her face into the floor, and then threw her onto a cafeteria table. Perhaps they then went home and read their bibles. See how much we love you Jesus…look what we did to Randi…
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