My cartoon for Friday’s Baltimore Pride issue of Baltimore OUTLoud.   Oh you think she was a nice lady do you…?

I suppose the first thing most people hitting this blog post over at Towleroad are thinking about is Phil’s knuckle-dragging prejudices.

“They were mad at me…You say, why’d they get mad at you? Cuz instead of acknowledging their sin, like you had better do, they railed against me for giving them the truth about their sins. Don’t deceive yourselves. You want the verse? The news media didn’t even know it was a verse! They thought I was just mouthing off. Is homosexual behavior a sin? The guy asked me. I said, ‘do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God?’ Don’t be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor the idolators nor adulterers nor male prostitutes, nor homosexual offenders, nor thieves, nor greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”

…and so on and so forth.   I’m seeing what a con artist the man is, and what a bunch of rubes his audience are. By now everyone has seen the family dress code before redneck became marketable.

Never mind that for a moment. Look at that photo of Phil again. Really look at it. Ignore for a moment the ostentatious shaped like a cross pulpit. Look at that allegedly god fearing man behind it, speaking of his reverence for the Word against the godless secular world outside. See…I actually went to church when I was a kid. I was raised in a Baptist household. I went to Vacation Bible School. Did a mercifully brief tour of duty in the Royal Ambassadors. If I’d tried to walk into a church looking like that mom would have spanked me all the way to next Sunday. If I’d tried to do it on Easter Sunday no less I wouldn’t have been able to sit down for months.

Now look at that shot of the Robinsons before redneck became a business Theme, and look again. That is not a poor old country man coming to Easter worship, in the words of the old Baptist hymn, Just As I Am, this is a millionaire businessman wearing his TV costume, and his act along with it, into a church on Easter Sunday.

I’m telling you friends you’ve got trouble…right here in River City…with a capital ‘T’ and that rhymes with ‘G’ and that stands for GAY…

You find yourself just staring in awe and wonder at the rags people will dress a pig up in, as though it’s actually hiding the fact that it’s a pig. This bullshit from Rick Warren for example…

Swear to god if I see that in my Facebook stream one more time I’m going to explode.  Yes, yes…you just Love gay people don’t you Rick. And your love is worth its weight in gold.

The weasel word there is “disagree”. Yes, Rick…you Dis A Greeee with my Lyfe Sty El. And if I call you a bigot for reducing my humanity to a Lyfe Sty El that would be so unfair of me. And I suppose it would also be unfair of me to call Al Capone a crook just because he disagreed with the police about things like robbing banks and murdering people. They threw Al Capone in jail just because he disagreed with them! People just aren’t fair are they Rick.

And oh goodness I know Exactly what you mean there about agreeing with every fucking little annoying thing people do. Like for instance watching football. I know so many otherwise lovely people who can’t tear themselves away from the TV when football is on. It just boggles my mind how they can get any pleasure out of watching that. I can’t begin to tell you how much I loathe having to watch football. I go into a nice local bar for some good drink, good food and a little company, and the goddamned playoffs are blasting at me from every fucking screen in the room. I absolutely hate it. That said, people would have reasonable grounds to doubt how much I loved them if I waged a ferocious multi-million dollar political campaign to deny any of them the right to marry, simply because I can’t stand their entertainment choices. And if I went to Africa and stirred up violent religious passions against people who like football, those people could reasonably doubt how much I loved them while the mobs were beating them to death. So many doubting Thomases in this world aren’t there Rick?

I know…I know…God forgives you because you love Jesus. Poor Jesus doesn’t know what he’s in for.

Le Dance Pathetique…as choreographed by Richard DeVos…

Q: You gave $100,000 to the effort to defeat the recognition of gay marriage in Florida. Why did you choose to put money behind that cause?

Un…

Because I believe in it.

Deux…

That’s just a sacred issue of respecting marriage.

Trois…

I have been hung in effigy by the gay community for a long time, from when I was on President Reagan’s first AIDS commission…

Quatre…

From that point on, that’s when they were hanging me in effigy because I wasn’t sympathetic to all of their requests for special treatment.

Cinq…

And I said, “You are responsible for your actions, too, you know.  Conduct yourself properly,” which is a pretty solid Christian principle. You’ve got to take responsibility for your actions.

Six…

It went from there to a series of requests for special treatment…

Sept…

Call [gay marriage] something else. Call it anything you want to. But marriage is a sacred document, OK?

Huit…

A sacred sacrament in the church and in the world. Don’t mess with it.

Neuf…

Go do something else.

Dix…

I deal with a lot of wonderful gay people. I hire a lot of them. I use a lot of them. I respect them. They’re terrific. I am good friends with them.

 

Le Curtian…Applaus a vous…

Meanwhile, while Andrew Sullivan and a gaggle of other apologetic conservative gays were busy telling Brenden Eich how sorry they are he lost his job…

IDAHO WON’T ALLOW 74-YEAR-OLD GAY NAVY VETERAN TO BE BURIED WITH HER WIFE

She went to the Idaho Veterans Cemetery and asked officials to reserve a spot for interment, along with her partner’s ashes. The cemetery allows spouses of veterans to be buried or interred with them.

They said no.

“I’m not surprised.” Taylor said. “I’ve been discriminated against for 70 years, and they might as well discriminate against me in death as well as life.”

A spokesperson with the Division of Veterans Services told KBOI 2News that they “have to abide by the Idaho state constitution,” which only recognizes marriage between a man and a woman.

“I don’t see where the ashes of a couple old lesbians is going to hurt anyone,” Taylor said.

But of course the point isn’t that it hurts them, but that it hurts her, that it reminds her of the fact, as Orson Scott Card put it,  “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…”

Tolerance is we just quietly and without complaint let people keep sticking knives into our hearts because they’re entitled to their belief that our hearts don’t experience pain any better than they experience love.

This has been bouncing around the Internet Tubes today…

TX-Gov: Abbott (R) Advisor Charles Murray, “No evidence that women are significant thinkers”

Murray you may recall, is the guy who wrote “The Bell Curve” which among other things argues that black people are genetically inferior to white people intellectually. The thing about bigotry is it may look tightly focused on one particular object of contempt and loathing but it isn’t. It’s a superiority complex, and usually they’re fine with the inferior beings provided they know their place. It’s when the inferior beings assert their equal humanity the snarls and rage come blasting out. So Murray, the white man, knows that black people are inferior to white people.  So Murray, the man, knows women are inferior to men.

I’ll just bet he knows a lot more too. At some point you have to figure The American Enterprise Institute will eventually end up with a collection of Charles Murray books and papers, each individually making its case that one particular branch of the human family just doesn’t cut it, which when taken together prove conclusively that only white Aryan males are civilization builders.

Either tonight or tomorrow I’ll have episode 18 of A Coming Out Story posted. For those of you not following lately, I’m in the middle of a short, three-part story arc within the story that concerns the horrible sex ed class I had back in junior high school, back in 1968. This little story arc is meant to explain why I can’t seem to grasp the fact that I’m gay even while I’m crushing massively on “T.K.”

What I’m about to relate in episode 18 is what I was actually told about homosexuals and homosexuality at the end of this sex ed class.   Going over it all I’d begun to worry that people reading it would think I was hysterically exaggerating.   You were told What!?

But I needn’t have worried…

Gay Soldiers Undermine The Military Because They Have To Take Breaks In The Middle Of Combat To Change Their Diapers

You read that right. Go follow the link…it’s to an article about one of Gordon Klingenschmitt’s latest rants. I’m tempted to add him as a reference to the series, a kind of homophobia’s greatest hits appendix, for when someone tells me I’m exaggerating the level of ignorance and prejudice gay people faced around the time of Stonewall.   Actually, it’s still out there, alive and well.

Robert Reich in my Facebook stream this morning…

House Republicans sang “Amazing Grace” at a closed-door meeting this morning after deciding they’ll stick to their plan to alter the Affordable Care Act and risk a government default, according to Darrell Issa, a Tea Partier from California. But if they were once lost and blind, they’re giving no hint of being found and seeing what a mess they’ve created.

I’d have thought Nearer My God To Thee more appropriate…

I grew up in the Washington D.C. suburbs. I was a very small kid when the Capital Beltway was being built. I remember when I-270, the spur that goes through Montgomery County where I grew up, was called I-70s and it was two lanes in each direction with a big grassy median. It’s 12 lanes now and even that is not enough. I watched the traffic nightmare that is the normal every day environment people live in down there reach epic proportions, even with the really nice subway system they built starting in the mid 1970s. It really is an amazingly good system, but it was overcapacity from the moment the first car doors opened.

Nothing has ever helped even slightly, even at some miniscule level, to stem the rising tide of automobiles competing every minute of every day for whatever asphalt space they can find that isn’t already occupied by another car (and sometimes even if it is), because there was never any political will to stop the land developers from building more things, which inevitably attracts more automobiles to the area, but people were always able to tie up regional highway infrastructure development in the courts. The joke is someone gets a flat tire in Tyson’s Corner and it backs up traffic in College Park…

And I am seeing these links in my Facebook stream now about a bunch of truckers who are going to “slow down beltway traffic” until some congressmen are arrested and I honestly can’t stop laughing. Oh you are, are you? Slow it down, did you say? I read one guy saying they weren’t going to allow anyone to drive over 55mph unless they had an anti-Obama bumper sticker. Well that’s a pretty all order men. I’d say you’ve got your work cut out for you.

Look…Seriously…you folks want to get noticed during rush hour in Washington D.C.? Have your people park their trucks and take the Metro into the city, and they all stand on the left side of the escalators and don’t move.

Headline this morning on Andy Towle’s blog…

Family Research Council VP Says Same-Sex Unions ‘Threaten…The Well-Being Of Countless Families’

I suppose so, since zero means there is nothing to count.

So what I think is happening at this point with German passenger car diesels, and Daimler in particular, is this: Automakers are under a mandate here in the U.S. to improve fuel economy across their fleets. It seems Daimler is counting on its diesels to do that for it, hence the reintroduction of the four cylinder diesel ‘E’ class after a long hiatus (it’s always been available in Europe). And given the ‘E’ class is a large high end vehicle, that engine gives it fantastic fuel economy for its class.   But this strategy comes at the same time the fuel these engines use is getting hard to find in some places, mostly the mid-west.

It looks to me now as though they’re just going to keep selling these cars anyway, and act as though telling everyone they can only use B5 and no higher absolves them of responsibility when their customers find out they can’t drive the cars in some states because the fuel they require isn’t available…vis…

Mercedes-Benz diesel vehicles utilize advanced emission control technology that is designed to comply with current stringent exhaust emissions regulations. Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel (ULSD) fuel with no more than 5% biodiesel content must be used. Mercedes-Benz approves the use of B5 biodiesel in all BlueTEC engines as pure biodiesel (B100) and biodiesel blends greater than B5 (e.g. B10, B20, etc.) are not factory-approved and can damage the engine, fuel system and exhaust aftertreatment system. The only approved biodiesel content is one that both meets ASTM D6751 specifications and has the oxidation stability to necessary to prevent deposit/corrosion-related damages to the system (min 6th proven by En 14112 method). Please see your service station for further information. If the B5 biodiesel blend does not clearly indicate that it meets the above standards, do not use it. The Mercedes-Benz New Vehicle Limited warranty does not cover damage caused by non Mercedes-Benz approved fuel standards. BlueTEC models are not available in Ohio.

That’s from the fine print at the bottom of the specifications page for the new E250 Bluetec.   I have no idea at present why Ohio is being singled out there…on the diesel car forums what I’m reading is Illinois and Minnesota are the worst spots, and I have heard Daimler is no longer selling its Sprinter vans in Illinois for the reason that B20 is just about all you can get there now.   But this looks like the plan; say you warned the customers that they shouldn’t use anything other than regular petroleum based diesel or B5 at most and anything more just isn’t your responsibility.   I think plan B is to point their fingers at the biofuels industry and state governments.

I don’t think that’s going to fly. If they know their cars cannot be operated in some states without risking engine, fuel and emissions system damage, they probably should be telling their customers that too.

But…we’ll see…

To: “MBUSA Customer Support” (support@mbusa.com)
From: Bruce Garrett
Date: 09/24/2013 09:27 AM

I was just looking at the new model E250 Bluetec diesel, and checking the specs to see if it would run on biodiesel greater than B5. I see it won’t. So it seems Daimler is not responding to the increasing proliferation of higher than B5 diesel in the U.S. Are your dealers telling their customers who buy your diesel vehicles that there are parts of the U.S. now where they may not be able to find fuel for their cars? I see there in the fine print on the spec page that you are warning people not to use biodiesel greater than B5, but are you warning people that such fuels are almost all they can find in some states now? And that problem is getting worse.

Do you understand the problem here? I bought my 2012 E350 Bluetec because I wanted a Mercedes diesel since I was a teenager, for their longevity and fuel economy. I wanted a car I could explore the country with. Now it seems I have a car that I can’t drive in some parts of the country and which will someday not be drivable at all.

…and Lo and Behold, I get a reply almost immediately!

To: Bruce Garrett
From: Robyn L. – MBUSA Customer Support
Date: 09/24/2013 10:38 AM

Dear Mr. Garrett:

Thank you for your email to Mercedes-Benz USA, LLC.

That is correct Mercedes-Benz only recommends B5 or less Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel fuel. Nevertheless, your feedback is sincerely appreciated and duly noted.

We appreciate the opportunity to respond.

Sincerely,

Robin L.
Mercedes-Benz USA
(800) 367-6372

At some point, probably in the not too distant future given the rate at which B15-B20 is starting to proliferate, lawyers for a lot of angry people who bought some very, very expensive automobiles they can’t drive in large swaths of the country anymore, are going to be asking Daimler why they didn’t tell anyone who bought their diesel motor cars that there were so many places they wouldn’t be able to drive them before they took their money.

I could sell Spirit now and maybe just break even on the car loan.   Then where would I be?   Without a car and no down payment that could get me another Mercedes for a long, long time.   Besides, I can’t sell a car in good conscience that I know is going to be worthless later on.   Or I could try to work a trade-in deal that would have me paying through the nose for less car than I have now.

Or…I could keep the car…it is an excellent car…my dream come true car…and be a trouble maker…

I should start writing some letters to my congress critters…and see which consumer protection agencies would benefit most from knowing that Daimler is withholding some arguably important information from its customers at the point of sale…

It’s spit on atheists day at Time Magazine.   Joe Klein steps up to the plate…

Time’s Joe Klein Takes Obligatory, Inaccurate Cheap Shot At Nonbelievers

While discussing the aftermath of last month’s tornadoes in Oklahoma, Klein writes:

But there was an occupying army of relief workers, led by local first responders, exhausted but still humping it a week after the storm, church groups from all over the country — funny how you don’t see organized groups of secular humanists giving out hot meals…

Yeah…funny that. But as that Huffington Post article says, it isn’t true.

At the Friendly Atheist blog, Hemant Metha runs off a list of other post-tornado aid efforts from humanist organizations:

— Foundation Beyond Belief raised over $45,000 for Operation USA and the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma.

— Atheists Giving Aid raised over $18,000 that will be given to local relief groups in Moore, Oklahoma and directly to families that need help.

— Members of the FreeOK atheist group helped families who needed wreckage removed from their property.

— Local atheist groups such as the Oklahoma Atheists, Atheist Community of Tulsa, the Lawton Area Secular Society, Norman Naturalism Group, and the Oklahoma State Secular Organization have organized volunteers, resources, and blood drives.

— Organizers of the FreeOK conference going on this weekend held a literacy drive yesterday to “benefit the schools affected” by the tornadoes.

There were more examples in that article from Red Dirt Report, and also this which struck me as soon as I read it as eminently typical of the sort of people Klein is holding up as selfless godly saints…

Red Dirt Report also relays an unfortunate anecdote in which members of a religious organization called Freedom Assembly of God walked off a cleanup site after learning that the volunteers working next to them were atheists. They apparently couldn’t bring themselves to work alongside nonbelievers, even to help a family whose home had just been destroyed.

Charles de Gaulle once said that patriotism is where love of country comes first, and nationalism is where hatred of everyone else comes first. In the same vein American is where love of your fellow countryman comes first and Christianist is where hatred of everyone outside your church comes first. You can be one but not both.

It was the autumn of 1973. I’d graduated from high school the previous June, come out to myself two Decembers before, and that summer I’d just discovered my first crush had moved away without telling me his family was going anywhere.   But also that summer I’d also somehow attracted the notice of a cuteling at a coffee house a friend and I frequented, who took an interest in me.   He was beautiful and I was dazzled and unlike my first crush, he was perfectly willing to let my camera give him some love. Looking at it in retrospect, I think I might have even been his first crush.

One day he invited me to go with him to watch the quarter mile fuelers run at a drag strip somewhere in southern Maryland. He bought the tickets and even bought us both pit passes. I drove us both in the car I had just bought with money from my first good job at Industrial Photo. It was the first time I got to see the fuelers up close.   I love high energy smoke and belching fire stuff like that, and it was a thrill to see them up close like that.

But it was the time of the first oil embargo and I was young and a tad too self absorbed for my own good. As the races went on into the night I got scared the gas stations would close before the races ended and we would be stranded. He noticed and asked me if I wanted to leave early and I said yes. Just as we left the track he remarked wistfully that one of his favorite racers was probably making his last run just then. I was too busy calculating how far we could get on what was still in the gas tank and didn’t notice.

I saw him again the next night at a city park we both used to rendezvous at.   It was usually packed with other teens and young adults on the weekends and that night was no exception.   I can still see the sad, dejected look on his face before he saw me approach.   He gave me a smile and I noticed then how there had always been a little something extra in that smile before because it wasn’t there then. We chatted for a bit and then somehow we both wandered off with other friends.   A few months later he had pretty much stopped seeing me altogether.   I was still in a knot over the sudden disappearance of my first crush that summer and wasn’t really paying attention to what was right in front of me, and I let it slide.

I’ve been kicking myself over this memory ever since. If I hadn’t been quite so self absorbed back then I might have figured that getting stranded for the night would have been a good thing. Maybe even the best thing ever.

That memory has been nagging at me a lot recently for some reason, so yesterday I decided to see if I could find that drag strip and try to refresh my recollections of the place. I’d heard it had closed ages ago, but thought I could find where it used to me and perhaps scope out the surrounding area and put some of my memories of that night to rest…or at least give them some clarity. I’d thought the strip was somewhere near La Plata, so I drove down Highway 5 to 301 but didn’t see anything I recognized. So I wandered for a bit and then gave in and went home and started Googling. Eventually I found some links and a few images of the drag strip as it is today. Loneliness and regret are like the two pale horses of my love life. This photo could almost be the path I took through it…

But no…it’s what’s left of the Aquasco Speedway. They say some of the most famous names in quarter mile racing raced there. It may have been where I lost the only race that ever mattered.

If you’re out there reading this now…I’m sorry I was a jerk.   I hope you’ve won your race.

Via Andrew Sullivan…Mark Oppenheimer, who thinks same-sex marriage might just pass muster as long as we still get to stigmatize someone…if not the homosexuals…

So here’s my question to Douthat, Maggie Gallagher, Ross Douthat Brian Brown, the world of conservative evaneglical preachers, and others who are so concerned about same-sex marriage: What does it do your perception of Ronald Reagan that he was a divorcé—and in being the first divorced president certainly helped remove any last shreds of stigma? Would you have voted against him for that reason—as many would have in 1952? Would you discourage people from listening to radio hosts who have divorces in their past (Limbaugh, Dennis Prager), or voting for divorcés like John McCain? If our goal is to work our way back to 1950 Marriage, how are we going to re-stigmatize divorce for wealthy white people? How are we going to make their divorces seem unseemly? In 1950, when a divorced woman moved into the neighborhood, people whispered about her. Are we prepared to whisper again?

As they used to say back in the day…matter of fact as some of my elementary school teachers used to say to my face…I’m the product of a broken home.   Oddly, I would not have known my home was “broken” had it not been for so many helpful adults back in the day.   Kids hear those whispers too Oppenheimer.   But that’s part of the fun isn’t it?

Here’s my problem with shaming divorcees..

That’s my dad under that sheet.   Mom divorced him when I was two and raised me herself.   And but for the fact that mine was a household with a single divorced women at the head of it, you might even say that I was raised in a good Baptist home.   But for that one fact.   I remember how mom was treated back in those days.   I remember how she raised me by setting an example.   Never mind church.   Yes I got taken to church.   She never cheated anyone, never took advantage, never said anything about anyone in my presence she wouldn’t have said to their face, never drank or uttered a curse word in my presence, paid her bills, lived frugally (well…we had to…) kept her promises and when she passed away people in the town she retired to would come up to me on the street and tell me what a ray of sunshine she always was.   But no…it was a shameful thing being a divorced woman.   The head of my household growing up should have been the crook.   Why, I might not be homosexual if my father had been there.   A boy needs a father, and better to grow up learning how to rob people of their savings than to be a homosexual.   Provided of course I share some of the loot with a few conservative think tanks.

Dad, let it be said, was always nice to me, and nice to mom.   To other people…not so much.   And mom loved him until the day she died.   But she knew better than to let me be raised by him.   Let me tell you a brief little story about that.   When I was a teenager dad was earning a semi-honest living driving trucks and cargo around the country.   More about that “semi-honest” part in a bit.   One summer mom felt comfortable enough letting dad take me with him on one of his cross-country runs and one afternoon we stopped somewhere to eat and rest up a bit.   I chowed down in the restaurant and Dad went into the bar next door.   He came back, sat across the table from me and with a cheerful smile pushed some papers and a pen across the table at me and asked me to make a mark on the dotted line.   I must have raised an eyebrow.   Just make a mark there, he said.   You want me to sign it, I asked?   No…just scribble something.   So I’m the obedient son and I did it, and he took the pen and papers back, folded them up and put them in his jacket pocket and smiled warmly at me and said, “You just made your dad five-hundred bucks.”

Aw gee Dad…

So I have this…hunch…that if he had remained the God Ordained Head Of The Household like he was God Ordained supposed to be I probably would not be the sort of person I am now, capable of passing the background check I could so I could be doing the work I do now at Space Telescope.   Still, he was my dad and I loved him all the same and I feel these bitter little smiles come out of me whenever I hear some jackass homophobe saying that you can love people without sanctioning their behavior.   You don’t say?   Know something about that do you? And one day when my brother and I discovered he had no stone for his grave I bought him one, and my brother paid to have it placed, and it reads “Beloved Father” because sometimes you do things not because of what was, but because of what ought to have been.

I have never regretted mom’s divorce.   Regretted dad couldn’t have been a better dad, but I suppose he actually did the best he could, the best that was within him to do, and he loved his sons and his wives (he married again…and…divorced again…) as much as it was within him to love anyone.   But without a doubt was absolutely for the best for both mom and me that I was not raised by him.   And piss on you Oppenheimer, if you think whispering shame at divorcees is a good thing.   Never dawns on the likes of you that divorce might actually be a good thing does it?   Never dawns on the likes of you that the shame you throw at single mothers is felt by their children does it?   We’re just collateral damage in your little culture war aren’t we?

Here’s the problem with jackass social conservatives like him…they seem not to be able to function socially without a bunch of arbitrary rules that can never be questioned lest they get utterly lost in the human relationship thicket.   They have no idea what the rules are for, other than they’re there to prop up some sort of civilized behavior, the reason for which they have no clue whatsoever.   Homosexuality is shameful because it’s against the rules.   Divorce is shameful because it is against the rules.   The rules are Very Important because without them we wouldn’t have a fucking clue how to behave toward our neighbors.

I have a wee suggestion.   Instead of shaming divorce, how about we shame spouse abuse.   How about we shame cheating.   How about we shame not setting a good example for children.   How about we shame not taking care of children. Ah…but spouse abuse was never one of the rules…was it?   Women having to submit gracefully and all.   And children…the only thing they’re good for is a reason why same-sex couples can’t get married and women can’t own their own bodies.   It’s not like we give a good goddamn about their health or feeding or educating them.