Just Because I Talk Like A Bigot And Think Like A Bigot That Does Not Make Me A Bigot
Here in Maryland this election year, my heterosexual neighbors will be deciding whether or not their gay neighbors can get married. Oh, gay Marylanders can vote on it too…all possibly two to ten percent of us depending on who you ask are the percentage of homosexuals in a given human population. On the one hand homosexuals are a small minority whose needs can be easily and casually erased by the heterosexual majority with a simple flick of a voting booth button. On the other hand we are a terrifying threat to civilization itself.
One of our local numbskulls…no not Don Dwyer…state delegate Emmitt Burns (note: a Democrat), threatened Baltimore Ravens players for speaking out in favor of same-sex marriage. This prompted another NFL player, Chris Kluwe, to pen a scorching hot missive back at Burns, wondering in part…
Why do you hate the fact that other people want a chance to live their lives and be happy, even though they may believe in something different from what you believe, or act differently from you? How does gay marriage affect your life in any way, shape, or form? Are you worried that if gay marriage became legal, all of a sudden you’d start thinking about penis? (“Oh shit. Gay marriage just passed. Gotta get me some of that hot dong action!”) Will all your friends suddenly turn gay and refuse to come to your Sunday Ticket grill-outs? (Unlikely. Gay people enjoy watching football, too.)
All in good fun…right? Burns backed off a tad, allowing that even football players can speak their mind from time to time. But of course the kook pews couldn’t let the matter rest there. It was starting to look like the most manly of sports was open to the idea of gay people being something other then human garbage. So out comes another Ravens player, Matt Birk just to prove that football hasn’t entirely succumbed…
I think it is important to set the record straight about what the marriage debate is and is not about, and to clarify that not all NFL players think redefining marriage is a good thing.
The union of a man and a woman is privileged and recognized by society as “marriage” for a reason, and it’s not because the government has a vested interest in celebrating the love between two people. With good reason, government recognizes marriages and gives them certain legal benefits so they can provide a stable, nurturing environment for the next generation of citizens: our kids.
Children have a right to a mom and a dad, and I realize that this doesn’t always happen. Through the work my wife and I do at pregnancy resource centers and underprivileged schools, we have witnessed firsthand the many heroic efforts of single mothers and fathers — many of whom work very hard to provide what’s best for their kids.
But recognizing the efforts of these parents and the resiliency of some (not all, unfortunately) of these kids, does not then give society the right to dismiss the potential long-term effects on a child of not knowing or being loved by his or her mother or father. Each plays a vital role in the raising of a child.
Marriage is in trouble right now — admittedly, for many reasons that have little to do with same-sex unions. In the last few years, political forces and a culture of relativism have replaced “I am my brother’s keeper” and “love your neighbor as yourself” with “live and let live” and “if it feels good, go ahead and do it.”
The effects of no-fault divorce, adultery, and the nonchalant attitude toward marriage by some have done great harm to this sacred institution. How much longer do we put the desires of adults before the needs of kids? Why are we not doing more to lift up and strengthen the institution of marriage?
Same-sex unions may not affect my marriage specifically, but it will affect my children — the next generation. Ideas have consequences, and laws shape culture. Marriage redefinition will affect the broader well-being of children and the welfare of society. As a Christian and a citizen, I am compelled to care about both.
I am speaking out on this issue because it is far too important to remain silent. People who are simply acknowledging the basic reality of marriage between one man and one woman are being labeled as “bigots” and “homophobic.” Aren’t we past that as a society?
Don’t we all have family members and friends whom we love who have same-sex attraction? Attempting to silence those who may disagree with you is always un-American, but especially when it is through name-calling, it has no place in respectful conversation.
A defense of marriage is not meant as an offense to any person or group. All people should be afforded their inalienable American freedoms. There is no opposition between providing basic human rights to everyone and preserving marriage as the sacred union of one man and one woman.
I hope that in voicing my beliefs I encourage people on both sides to use reason and charity as they enter this debate.
You can almost hear him pleading with his readers to pay attention to all that I Am Not A Bigot hand waving at the end and not the fact that an editorial against same-sex marriage ending with a call for reason and charity had absolutely none of either of those things to offer.
How much longer do we put the desires of adults before the needs of kids?
Chris Kluwe shot a response back that pretty well sums it up:
The only impact same-sex marriage will have on your children is if one of them turns out to be gay and cannot get married. What will you do (and I ask this honestly) if one or more of your kids ends up being gay? Will you love them any less? What will your actions speak to them, 15 years from now, when they ask you why they can’t enjoy the same relationship that you and your wife have now? And if your response is “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”, well, for a lot of people that bridge is here right now. They’re trying to cross it, but the way is barred…
But pay attention to how reliably that Save Our Children rhetoric pops out of their mouths. When you see this, it’s a red flag, because as Kluwe says, some kids are gay. What you’re seeing there isn’t about kids at all, it’s about the old slander that homosexuals are child molesters. Birk isn’t thinking about the welfare of gay kids when he argues that same-sex marriage is a threat to children because there aren’t any gay kids. Nobody is born gay, they’re recruited into it. It’s knowledge so deeply ingrained within him it colors everything he says throughout the editorial. There are no gay kids so I don’t have to worry about my kids being gay. I worry that they’ll be recruited into the lifestyle. I worry that homosexuality will be normalized.
That’s the problem he has with same-sex marriage. But don’t call him a bigot because…you know…he has Reasons. Just don’t ask him for any.
Marriage is in trouble right now — admittedly, for many reasons that have little to do with same-sex unions.
Er…Matt… In this entire editorial you don’t give Any reasons that have to do with same-sex unions. It’s marriages is about the welfare of children and if we let same-sex couples marry that will destroy marriage which would be a very bad thing for children. But don’t ask me why letting homosexuals get married will destroy marriage when we let heterosexual couples incapable of having children get married all the time because then I’ll have to say something like because….homosexuals! And then you’d call me a bigot and I’m not so stop trying to silence me!
I am not a bigot. I respect everyone. Even the folks whose ring fingers I want to cut off and whose lives I don’t have clue one about…
Children have a right to a mom and a dad, and I realize that this doesn’t always happen. Through the work my wife and I do at pregnancy resource centers and underprivileged schools, we have witnessed firsthand the many heroic efforts of single mothers and fathers — many of whom work very hard to provide what’s best for their kids.
Seems you never worked with any same-sex parents Matt. But you have an opinion about the fitness of their families. Why is that Matt? Where did that opinion come from if it wasn’t first hand experience knowing and being a part of the lives of gay couples and their families.
In a video for the Minnesota Catholic Conference, Baltimore Raven center Matt Birk doubles down on the anti-gay sentiment he expressed in an op-ed for the Star Tribune this week in support of Minnesota’s upcoming ballot measure that would constitutionally ban same-sex marriage.
First comes the editorial, then the video, and this was a spontaneous display of support for the heterosexual prerogative like all those Mormons coming together spontaneously to work for Proposition 8 was.
This is the Catholic church talking through a willing football player. But again…take notice of all that I Am Not A Bigot And Calling Me One Amounts To Censorship hand waving at the end. His critics aren’t trying to silence him, he’s trying to silence his critics. This is How Dare You Take Issue With My Sincerely Held Religious Beliefs You Bigot! It’s the only song they have left now apparently. The only reason people support the right of gay couples to marry is because they hate Jesus.
I encourage all Americans to stand up to preserve and promote a healthy, authentic promarriage culture in this upcoming election.
Same-sex marriage is not healthy. Same-sex marriages are not authentic. And charity is you treat me better then I am willing to treat my homosexual neighbor. And don’t be calling me a bigot simply because the only reasons I have for denying gay couples the right to marry are my religious beliefs and a knee jerk reflex that homosexuals somehow threaten my children.
Republicans have enjoyed a state-level resurgence even as they have lost — and lost big — their once commanding national majority. The GOP was once the landslide party, the party of Eisenhower ’52 and ’56, Nixon ’72, and Reagan ’84. Even Bush I’s 53.4 percent in 1988 was very respectable. Reagan’s 50.7 percent in 1980 wasn’t a landslide but still demonstrated that an outright popular majority supported the Republican. In the five elections before ’92, the GOP won popular majorities in four.
You should go read this article in full. It’s a take down on today’s republican party, not bitter, but clearly ticked off. He comes close to saying it outright: the republican party is now the party of southern christianists and wall street financial barons, locked in a deadly embrace of money and highly motivated southern tribalists each demanding fealty from republican politicians…one for their money, the other for their votes.
Because the world view of each is so self-centered, insular and disconnected they have made the nation nearly ungovernable. They have their own facts, their own news channel, their own pundits all telling them their deranged conceits are the highest wisdom. There was a time when I could hope the money guys would eventually come to their senses: economic disaster has a way of making you pay attention to reality. But as their world has become more and more infected with Ayn Rand’s poison that seems a lost hope too.
They’ll let it all burn down: the christianists because Armageddon means Jesus is coming…the financiers because they won’t stop believing in their own Atlas-like infallibility until they’re jumping out their wall street windows because they’ve lost everything and this time there isn’t any money left in anyone’s pockets to bail them out.
I really wish I knew what the answer was. But it seems all there is left to do now is ride it out to wherever it’s going, and maybe grab whatever small piece of America you can as the pieces all float past and hang on to it.
Hoisted From The Archives: You Were Played. You Were Conned. You Were Used. Some Of You Anyway. You Dopes.
Because Eugene Volokh enjoys watching laws meant to protect hated minorities being used against them, and to restate a point I made back in 2007, when Shrub the Junior was still our president…
…I would have been unable to resist saying that Republicans have shown no sign of believing in “the right to keep your own money” or in limited government or in a “strong defense”. Allowing rich people and corporations to make use of (and often ruin) public services without paying for them is not giving you “the right to keep your own money”; in fact, it’s making you pay for the things they get more use from. Limiting the power of government to protect your Constitutional rights is not “limited government”; neither is allowing a president the power to summarily deprive individuals of those rights “limited government”. Bankrupting the Treasury in order to give the DoD money it doesn’t need (and doesn’t spend wisely) while you go blow up other countries that posed no threat to the US is not “a strong defense”.
Conservatives have always supported intrusive government, they have always endangered Americans by aggravating other countries, and they have always been very happy to collect taxes from ordinary working people and use that tax money to fatten the Malefactors of Great Wealth while depriving the rest of us of our freedoms. Those same people conned a number of libertarian-minded young people in the ’70s and ’80s into believing that conservatism was liberalism and vice-versa because a few intolerant lefties went overboard in their objections to morally reprehensible expressions of racism and sexism. I would have thought these kids would have grown up by now and realized that they’re still paying taxes but under the Republicans they’re getting less for them – and that’s before the bill for all that “strong defense” comes due. How dumb they have to be to think it makes sense to be both Republican and gay after all this just doesn’t bear thinking about.
I was one of those who were conned…right up until Reagan gave me a clear understanding of what kind of government we were likely to end up with when market forces become the moral standard and the rule of law bows to the rule of money. But I think the final nail in my libertarian phase’s coffin was the reaction of many of my ersatz fellow libertarians to the supreme court decision in Hardwick v. Bowers, that upheld the sodomy laws. I heard a lot of applause for the court standing up for state’s rights, while at the same time paying lip service to the proposition that individuals should be free to have whatever sex they wanted to, as long as it was mutually consensual. How, I asked them, don’t sodomy laws violate the fundamental libertarian principles of individual freedom and freedom of association? To which I got the standard “state’s rights” reply.
Me: But…sodomy laws are wrong…they’re evil…
They: The federal government has no business telling the states what laws they can pass.
Me: But…you Do agree that state don’t have the right to trample on the individual’s liberty…?
They: The federal government has no business telling the states what laws they can pass.
Me: But…states don’t have any more right to abridge the freedoms of the people then the federal government does…
They: The federal government has no business telling the states what laws they can pass.
…and so on. That was when I realized that a lot of libertarians were merely right wing conservatives cloaking themselves in libertarian rhetoric about individual freedom when it suited them. I’ve watched them play that game ever since. And amazingly, as President Nice Job Brownie has proven, they can rip the rights guarantees right out of our constitution, eliminate the right to a trial by a jury of our peers, eliminate access even to the courts, spy on Americans and laugh at the need to get a warrant, lie the country into war, assert that the government has the right to determine what is, and what is not a family, declare same sex couples to be legally strangers before the law with no recourse to marriage or even civil unions, and wave our tax dollars in our faces before stuffing them into their cronies pockets…and those gen-X knuckleheads who bought into it during the Reagan years will still insist that republicans and conservatives are for individual rights and democrats and liberals hate freedom and are for big government.
Rubes…
Seriously…Plaintiff should have joined the International Association For Heterosexuals Who Can’t Stop Whining About Teh Gay Flaunting IT IN OUR FACES. I’ll bet Avis would have given Plaintiff a discount off any car in the lot. Double discount for the jacked up pickup truck model with the confederate flag bumper sticker that says Heritage Not Hate.
Citing their Christian faith, Mike and Mari Fuller, owners of the Waha Bar & Grill in Idaho, say they will no longer sell Pepsi or MillerCoors beer because of those companies’ ties to the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce.
Others have pointed out the list of products they still sell that also support gay equality. But the first thing that struck my inner Baptist boy about this story was…er…wait…this is a bar for goodness sakes.
The home I grew up in had no car, and when I was very young we took the bus downtown to go shopping and then walked my little legs off. I remember, and I am not kidding and not exaggerating, how my Baptist grandmother would point to the bars along our way and say “The devil lives there!”
Eventually I became a teenager and the instant some high school friends of mine gave me my first taste of illegal (for my age) rum and Coke I decided the devil might not be so bad after all. I’m a middle-aged gay man now with a taste for sugary cordials and fine tequilas. But I still count that distrust of the pleasures of drink as one of the pluses of the religious training I got way back when. It’s that little bird perched on my shoulder whenever I am miserable and depressed, telling me that there is no path to happiness in a bottle. I’d Like A Drink is fine. I Need A Drink is…ooooohhh…then you don’t get one Bruce Albert Garrett…
Unlike a reflexive distrust of sex and sexuality, a reflexive distrust of alcohol actually does have something to be said for it. Alcoholism, unlike homosexuality, really does cause health and social problems. And there is a pretty well known period in the history of this country of massive Christian opposition to the making and selling of alcohol on those grounds. So…listen…Mike, Mari…I appreciate your right to carry whatever products you choose, for whatever reason you want. But…seriously…I don’t think the Christian Women’s Temperance Union would approve of your line of work. Don’t you know how destructive alcohol is to the family and society?
First, denial. My country hasn’t gone crazy…it’s just going through a very bad patch. Then Anger. YOU FUCKERS KILLED THE DREAM I HATE YOU! Then bargaining. Maybe I can just ignore everything and pursue my job and my art and find peace and happiness that way…
RUSH LIMBAUGH: Have you heard, this new movie, the Batman movie — what is it, the Dark Knight Lights Up or something? Whatever the name of it is. That’s right, Dark Knight Rises, Lights Up, same thing. Do you know the name of the villain in this movie? Bane. The villain in the Dark Knight Rises is named Bane. B-A-N-E. What is the name of the venture capital firm that Romney ran, and around which there’s now this make-believe controversy? Bain. The movie has been in the works for a long time, the release date’s been known, summer 2012 for a long time. Do you think that it is accidental, that the name of the really vicious, fire-breathing, four-eyed, whatever-it-is villain in this movie is named Bane?
“Eight years was awesome, and I was famous and I was powerful. But I have no desire for fame and power anymore,” he said in a new interview with the Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson.
Then acceptance. I live in a country that has gone completely fucking nuts and the more it drives me crazy the more I fit in.
The Sexual Degenerates Are In Your Bathroom Mirror…Looking Back At You…
Jesus’ General (an 11 on the manly scale of absolute gender) points us to a discussion about women wearing pants, which Thinking Housewife regards as a despicable feminist renunciation of feminine femininity, and quotes Thinking Housewife Contributor Jesse Powell thusly…
If there was a general societal norm that men wore pants while women wore dresses it would be very clear that there was a difference between the sexes.
To which my low key apologetic libido says…
Or a guy’s ass. Seriously…pants make it easier to tell a person’s sex. If both sexes are wearing pants it would not typically be very difficult to identify the sex of the person wearing them. I admit you can still occasionally be fooled. I once mistook a gal named Martha for a guy and no she was not big and ugly, she was lithe and handsome and very very cute. But she had small hips and butt for a gal, and she liked wearing big floppy jackets so I never got a good look at her breasts and it threw me. But that’s not the usual case. The usual case is it’s pretty obvious.
But you’d only know that if…you know…you ever looked carefully. In the A Coming Out Story episode above the joke is I was only looking at guys. Little teenage me grew up without much of an interest in girls and tons of interest in guys and it showed, to my embarrassment whenever it was pointed out to me, in my artwork. The joke here I suspect is we’re witnessing more firsthand evidence that a childhood drenched in right wing sexual mores result in grown adults with pitifully arrested sexual development. If you need gender restrictions in clothing and dress in order to tell the boys from the girls it isn’t society that’s sexually degenerate.
Oh I know…I know…it isn’t that they can’t tell the difference…it’s that clothing as a personal expression of beauty and sexuality is a symptom of evil taking of joy in life. The clothes you wear should remind you of your place and reenforce keeping you in it. More then a uniform, clothes must be a prison within which, hidden and contained, is the shameful flesh, within which is doubly imprisoned the damnable human soul. Else the person inside might escape and have a life of their own.
A woman participating in a Hooters Swimsuit Pageant notices a video camera recording her in the dressing room. That was the excuse the owner of the camera gave to the cop who arrested him. I suspect the reason he’s never had a girlfriend is he hasn’t figured out yet how to treat women like people. Hey guy…there’s this perfectly legal thing called Pornography you can buy with lotsa lovely women willing to take their clothes off for your onanistic pleasures…
I read about this on Fark, read the comment hilarity that followed, and cringed inside.
There’s a flashback scene at the end of The Detective, where the William Windom character (Colin MacIver), a closeted self hating homosexual (who turns out (naturally) to be the real killer the Frank Sinatra character was looking for all through the movie), confesses the killing to his shrink in a sickening display of the kind of acid self hatred Hollywood was only too happy to tell everyone was the natural state of homosexuals.
It begins with MacIver walking back to his car with his girlfriend. They’re assaulted by robbers who call MacIver a faggot. Somehow this causes him to go looking for sex with another guy. You have to remember this is 1960s Hollywood being all edgy and gritty now that they can take on taboo subject for mass entertainment and ticket sales. Even though he has a girlfriend, MacIver is really a sick and pathetic queer and the encounter with the thieves triggers his perversion and now he has to go get him some cock even though the very thought disgusts him. MacIver tells his shrink: “The thought of turning…of turning involuntarily into one of them frightened me…and made me sick with anger.” Nonetheless he promptly drives down to the docks for a quickie. Because queers can’t help themselves.
“I went down there. I had heard about the waterfront. People giggle and make jokes about it. I had had only two experiences before…once in college, once in the army. I thought I’d gotten it out of my life…but I hadn’t.”
Experiences. Experiences. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Anyway, it all builds up to MacIver going to the docks, then to a gay bar, walking slowly past every homosexual stereotype in the Twentieth Century Fox prop department, all leering back at him archly. Because homosexuals always look back at you archly.
“I looked at them. Was this what I was like? Oh my god…”
He stares in horror at the “twisted faces”…but he can’t help himself. He’s just gotta have some cock tonight…
“And here I was and I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t stop. I thought if I could have just one night, I could get it out of my system. Just one more time…”
Just one more…experience…
Oh that poor pathetic faggot…pass the popcorn… It’s bullshit…yes, sane people these days understand that. But that was the accepted view of homosexuals back then, back when I was growing up, and what angers me about this film and that sequence in it is thinking about all my generational gay peers who accepted that this was what it was to be a homosexual; that they could either try as desperately hard as they could to overcome their “condition”, become straight or live their lives as pathetic faggots or psychotic killers, either way spending the rest of their lives loathing the person they were. Because a man having sex with another man was the most disgusting thing you could imagine, and to desire such a thing even if you never acted on it meant that you were the most loathsome thing there ever was. This is what Hollywood taught them about themselves, it’s what Hollywood taught their parents, their siblings and all their friends…and mine: to look at us with the same disgust and contempt with which MacIver looked upon himself.
This is what I grew up on. This was pretty much the constant barrage from the culture around me about homosexuality. And it’s a big reason why, when I finally came out to myself, I swore I wasn’t going to live my life in the closet. Never mind the “Twisted faces” MacIver stared at with equal parts horror and desire that sickened him. At least they knew what they were about hanging out there. I’d fallen in love…I knew what I was and what I wasn’t. The ugly stereotypes of homosexuals didn’t frighten me because I knew I wasn’t that and for the honor and dignity of the one I loved I would never become that…nor would I allow myself to become a self hating basket case, horrified by my own sexuality. The twisted face I was afraid of becoming, resolved never to become, was MacIver’s.
So I dug in my heels and lived an honest life. And for that I can take some pride. And yet…and yet… I never found my other half. And in the background of my life was another twisted face, another pathetic stereotype that I am still, deep in my heart, afraid of.
“Man to man, I did it because I’ve never had a girlfriend.”
It’s illogical, it’s irrational, I am simply not the sort of person who would ever do what this guy did. I dallied with gay pornography back when I was younger and found I didn’t even really like that all that much. Yeah, there were lots of very attractive hot bodies in it. But there was no romance. I am just not voyeur material. Sometimes I sit down to my drafting table and I draw myself a fantasy boyfriend and dream on him. That’s about my speed. I could never do what that guy did. Certainly not to someone I thought was beautiful. Desire should awaken something more noble in a person then that or it’s just empty greed.
But I have been single for so very very long and I read these things and get depressed. Is this what the rest of my life is going to look like? Is this how others see people like me? Alone. Single. Old. Creepy. How do you get to be fifty-eight years old and you’ve never had a boyfriend? There must be something wrong with you. Sometimes I wonder now, if maybe there is after all. And I read stories like this about creepy single guys and I cringe inside.
“I looked at them. Was this what I was like? Oh my god…”
In the 1950s Evelyn Hooker realized that all extant studies of homosexuals were conducted on homosexuals who had been imprisoned for sex crimes, in therapy or committed to mental institutions, and so they were concluding homosexuals were sick because they only studied sick homosexuals. Her 1957 study, The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual was the first to systematically examine homosexual men who weren’t in prisons or mental institutions or undergoing therapy and, surprise, surprise, discovered that if you study gay men the same way you study straight men they look pretty much alike.
In 2012 Mark Regnerus studied broken families with gay people in them, compared them to intact families headed by heterosexuals, and concluded that gay people make lousy parents, thereby proving that the religious right wants social science and the view of gay people to stay back in the early 1950s.
The more things change, the more they stay the same…
It Seems The More You Make The More Entitled To A Free Lunch You Are
Considering all the bellyaching going on around here about the just enacted Maryland state tax increase on wage earnings over 100k I figured I might have to sell the house and the Mercedes and go live on a steam grate. Preferably one that was close to work. Except those might all be full of students who coudn’t afford to pay back their student loans after they graduated and found out there isn’t any work. So I was bracing myself to finally lay eyes on the awful horrible details and trying to decide if I could get accustomed to the taste of dogfood. I was thinking maybe if I deep fried it and sprinkled it with a little Old Bay.
So finally I see the extra I’m being asked to chip in for running the state of Maryland. Under $300 more a year.
Wow…I just don’t know if I can spare another $300… Oh bullshit. I make six figures and I’m being asked to chip in an additional < $300 and I’m supposed to be outraged. Swear to god it’s a good thing I didn’t grow up in a wealthy family expecting to make the kind of money I’m making now or I might not know how good I have it and how hard everyone else is struggling and I might be making the same kind of jackass fool of myself other six figure earners in this state are making of themselves right now. $300! $300! Lawd have mercy I’ll be penniless! Penniless I tell you!
You there…peasant…fetch me my free lunch…
I appreciate that government should not spend tax money wastefully. I also appreciate that one taxpayer’s waste is another taxpayer’s necessary program. I do not appreciate a lot of jackass babbling about high taxes without any sort of follow-up about what it is you’d like to see cut. Don’t just give me this crap about taxes being too high. It costs money to run a state government. When the statehouse is taking in more money then it spends, and it has no debt it needs to pay back, then I’ll agree with you that taxes are too high. I don’t want to hear one more fucking word about high taxes. I don’t even want to hear that phrase ever again or I will simply tune you out because you aren’t being serious you just want to complain that you’re being asked to pay for services rendered. Tell me that government expenditures are too high. Tell me what the fuck you want to cut out of the budget. Tell me why anyone should think cutting it is a good idea. Or just shut the fuck up.
Pardon my liberal use of the f-word here. But I am getting really, really tired of this crap.
[Update…And Furthermore…!] Just so we’re all on the same page here, listen…if the government is running a deficit and you believe in a balanced budget then either government expenditures are too high or taxes are too low. Do not babble at me about high taxes. I can see arguments for deficit spending, particularly during an economic downturn, but regardless of where I or anyone stands on that matter, taxes cannot be too high if government isn’t taking in enough money to pay its bills. Spending might be too high. Fine. If you can get enough voter agreement to cut spending here and there, do that. I might be with you on it depending on what it is you want to cut. Do not cut taxes without first cutting spending and then tell me that you are a fiscal conservative, I’ll laugh in your face.
A pastor turned Mississippi legislator is fearing for his life after activists say he endorsed the killing of gay men on his Facebook page.
Rep. Andy Gipson cited a Bible passage earlier this month to slam President Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage, saying he believed that homosexuals shouldn’t have the right to marry.
“The only opinion that counts is God’s,” he said, then quoted a Bible passage that he interprets to say that being gay is a sin.
He also quoted another passage:
“If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”
The man behind the pulpit cites a passage from Leviticus, the one saying that God detests homosexuals and gives everyone a free pass to kill them, and now he’s worrying about death threats. Worry’s kinda like hindsight isn’t it…always 20/20. Here’s the thing about death threats…they’re worse then bullets. Bill Cosby gave a talk once about inner city gun violence in which he said that once you pull the trigger you can’t call that bullet back. Death threats are like that but worse. You can’t call them back and they multiply faster then tribbles. Some of them might come back home to you. Some of them might go zipping off to find people you love. I think the bible had something to say about that too…preacher… For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind…
Ah…here’s what I was looking for…
“Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ends and means. Ends and means. Look at your means…there’s your ends. All you pulpit thumpers out there, pounding away, waving your arms at your flocks about the homosexual menace…do you not understand you are talking about your neighbors…and all the people in your pews looking back at you, hanging on your every word as you wave the bible around like a damn trophy…it’s their neighbors too that you’re babbling about. Don’t you get that? Their neighbors. And their kin. Their homosexual children. Their homosexual brothers and sisters. Their homosexual aunts, uncles, cousins. Their kin. That blood that verse talks about, the stuff that’s on the heads of homosexuals…that’s their blood too you moron! And yours…assuming you’ve got any in you.
The longer I am in this debate, the more something emerges. Most people don’t really care much about gays. The subject doesn’t come up; and most adjusted straight men do not feel passionately on the subject one way or the other. And so you notice patterns. You find that most of the really impassioned anti-gay activists are just as motivated by personal passion – whether as an early victim of sex abuse (Paul Cameron), or as the father of a gay son (Charles Socarides), or as a single mother abandoned by her boyfriend (Maggie Gallagher), or someone fighting to restrain their own gay feelings (Ted Haggard, Larry Craig) – as pro-gay activists are.
He’s commenting on the story that the father of anti-gay junk science Paul (homosexuals live an average of 36 years) Cameron acknowledged finally his homosexual urges, saying that he’d been sexually abused as a child. You would watch that creep on various TV interviews and your gaydar would go off like a fire alarm. The only thing that surprises me here is he finally admitted it. Yeah, yeah…he claims he’s overcome his urges. Spends every waking hour of every day obsessing about the homosexual menace, but he’s overcome those homosexual urges. I’m going to overcome my chocolate chip cookie urges by spending nearly every waking hour thinking about chocolate chip cookies.
There was a time I understood what Sullivan is saying there to be occasionally true, but just too pat to rely on as an explanation for the extremely passionate homophobes. Now…not so much. Decades of seeing it over and over and over…it’s the other shoe that almost always drops eventually. Oh, they have a gay child…oh, they had a gay spouse…oh, they were abused as kids…oh, they’re gay…
But make no mistake, you also see the thoroughly heterosexual anti-gay crusader, who cheats on a spouse, has their own history of sexually abusing other people, or otherwise fails morally in some miserable spectacular way, and needs a scapegoat. And that’s where we come in. Newt Gingrich. Rush Limbaugh. They’re not all dealing with their own private confictedness about homosexuality, but they’re all nursing a private moral failure they need a scapegoat to dump it on.
Posted to Twitter: “Man, Diablo III is super hard. I’ve been playing for 30 minutes and haven’t even defeated the login screen. #error37”
For some really, really good laughs, try the #error37 hashtag. If nothing else you’ll discover how very quick witted a lot of gamers are. But I suppose you need to develop that if you’re going to spend any time in that world.
I haven’t owned a game console since the ColecoVison I had way back when, just to give you and idea of how much I am into gaming (still have my box of cartridges for it though). This massive twitter howl of agony is interesting to me mostly to the degree it shows me where DRM is headed. There’s a saying about how passions increase in reverse proportion to the substance of the issue. That’s not always true, but it sure seems to explain why it’s the entertainment business that’s so hyper about losses due to theft of product.
Listen to me: you are selling entertainment. You need to be entertaining.
This first #Diablo3 screen seems suspiciously similar to Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. #error37
According to poll workers and a freelance journalist who was present, the wife of the author of North Carolina’s Amendment One says that her husband wrote the bill to “protect Caucasians.”
Chad Nance, a Winston-Salem freelance journalist who is currently active in electoral campaigning, says poll workers outside the early voting site at the Forsyth County Government Center in downtown Winston-Salem reported to him that the wife of NC Sen. Peter Brunstetter remarked today that her husband sponsored legislation to put the marriage amendment on the primary ballot “to protect the Caucasian race.”
When I read that headline I assumed it would be some crackpot bullshit about the birth rate. But no. The article goes on to quote her saying that…somehow…protecting the Caucasians from same-sex marriage involves protecting their state constitution from activist judges.
If you’re not sure how opposing same-sex marriage protects Caucasians don’t worry…it doesn’t have to make sense to you. To the bigot everything is about the war against the hated other, whether it’s gays, people of color, other religions, people who speak funny languages…whomever. They have a lot of racism down there and I’m sure somehow this makes sense to all of them. Opposing same-sex marriage is about protecting the white race. Probably opposing daylight savings time is too.
Sean Harris, pastor of Berean Baptist Church on Glensford Drive, said he does not advocate hitting children and wishes he could take back a remark encouraging fathers to punch boys who act effeminately…
…and let’s just forget completely about that part about cracking their wrists…
…But he defended his belief in the need to reinforce traditional gender roles in children. “If I had to say it again, I would say it differently, no doubt,” Harris said Tuesday. “Those weren’t planned words, but what I do stand by is that the word of God makes it clear that effeminate behavior is ungodly.”
Preaching at parents that they need to break the bones of their gay kids however being the epitome of godliness. So long as you say it differently. As the twig is bent so grows the tree…so parents I give you special dispensation to crack those dear little twigs back into Straightnesswhen you see them going limp…
Coming Soon To A fundamentalist Church Near You! Pat downs for recording devices, and petitions to make taping anti-gay child abusive rants in church a class one felony punishable by stoning…
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