Heroes Of The Culture War…(collect the entire series!)
They way the religious right stands up to our modern decadent secular morally relativistic culture to uphold the values of truth and decency is just…just…breathtaking. Sorta like the way catching a whiff of an open sewer is breathtaking…
I have a whole freak’n stable full of Culture War Heroes for you today. First, from Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters comes the usual suspects Peter LaBarbera and Matt Barber, and Laurie Higgins who doesn’t want the the little snowflakes at Deerfield High School in Michigan to read the play Angels In America. Laurie, bless her heart, is responding to Superintendent of Schools, George Fornero’s fact sheet about the controversy anti-gay hatemongers have been stirring up in his schools over the play. Specifically, accusations that the play is obscene, that it is homosexual pornography, that children as young as 14 years of age would be reading it, that parents were never informed that their kids would be reading it, and that students are being required to read it against their parent’s wishes. Point by point, Fornero dispatches each of these. Higgens, responds thusly:
Students studying the play are second semester seniors in Advanced Placement English.(Translation: “We save the most offensive tripe for the most intelligent.”)
In other words, why no actually, only the oldest students in the school would be reading the play…not the 14 year olds. You can see how the rest of this is going to go can’t you…
This play has been taught to similar classes in other high schools.(Translation: “Everyone else is doing it, and we’re lemmings and conformists who cannot think for ourselves.”)
The College Board oversees all Advanced Placement testing; the class syllabus, including all readings was approved through the Board’s audit process.(Translation: “Of all the readings offered through the College Board, we’re including the most offensive.”)
Parents received information about Angels in America that specifically addressed the mature content and potential for offense. (Translation: “We’re using the inaccurate euphemism ‘mature’ for the more accurate term “obscene.”
…and so on and so on. But pay attention, really pay attention, to all the ducking she’s doing there. Fornero directly contradicts one party line after another there and Higgens responds not with facts to counter any of that, but venom. Facts don’t matter, when you’re on a mission from God…
Parents were asked to make an informed decision about the text their child would read. Two viable choices were presented: Angels in America and Albert Camus’ The Plague. They were also given the option of having their students read both texts. Letter to parents requested that they provide permission for their student to read the selected text(s). (Reality: Many parents have neither the time nor interest in reading the entirety of Angels in America; This teacher is much beloved by students, and teens are rebellious, therefore, even parents who don’t want their children to read Angels may feel the force of social pressure, compelling them to allow their children to read the provocative, controversial text.
In other words…why yes, as a matter of fact, parents were notified.
According to Lake County State’s Attorney Mike Waller, the reading and discussion of the material is not a violation of the obscenity laws, or any other laws, of the State of Illinois.(Reality: The fact that it may not technically violate obscenity laws does not mean it is not obscene.
The play is not obscene. It is not homosexual pornography. It is not required reading. Only the most gifted second semester seniors would be reading it. And parents were notified. But never mind…we’ll just keep saying that the school required 14 year old students to read obscene homosexual pornography without parental notification.
Vis:
Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Illinois, recently assigned the pornographic book “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” to students as young as 14 as a required reading. –Mike Adams, Town Hall.
And…by the way…LaBarbra’s anti-gay web site is titled, Americans For Truth.
Atrios called them zombie lies, in that no matter how many times you shoot at them they just keep going and going. Thing is, your gay and lesbian neighbors have been seeing this behavior for a lot longer then when the Bush administration came to town. In fact, I don’t think anyone could possibly have been less surprised by the behavior of the republicans since they took over the government then the gay community. It’s not that facts don’t matter to them, it’s that Eric Hoffer was right when he said that propaganda doesn’t fool people, so much as allow them to fool themselves.
And speaking of TRUTH…
Recall that after Oklahoma representative Sally Kern’s anti-gay bile fest was made public, she immediately began claiming that she was getting death threats in her email…
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation is looking into death threats against a state lawmaker who told a political group that the gay agenda poses a bigger threat to the U.S. than terrorism and "is just destroying this nation," an OSBI spokeswoman said Tuesday.
…
OSBI agents met with Kern, of Oklahoma City, at the state Capitol Monday afternoon after she received thousands of e-mails and telephone calls from people reacting to her comments to a group of Republicans about gays and their lifestyle.
"I’m not gay-bashing. But according to God’s word that is not the right kind of lifestyle," Kern said in the recorded comments.
"Studies show no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted more than a few decades," she said. "It is not a lifestyle that is good for this nation."
Kern said a few of the e-mails she received supported her comments but that most condemned them and some contained death threats and obscenities.
"I hear what you said and you should be killed…," said one e-mail.
Well of course when a government official starts receiving death threats it’s a matter for the police. But the problem with that is then the damn police will be wanting to see…you know…the Evidence…
OKLAHOMA CITY — The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation is sorting through nearly 7,000 e-mails that were sent to a state lawmaker after she said homosexuality is a bigger threat to the United States than terrorism.
Comments by Rep. Sally Kern, recorded several weeks ago but placed on the Internet site YouTube only late last week, have caused a national outcry, resulting in more than 500,000 hits on the Web site.
A fellow lawmaker contacted the OSBI on Monday and suggested that agents go through the e-mails, some of which might be threatening, OSBI spokeswoman Jessica Brown said.
Kern said Monday that she had not received death threats. On Tuesday, she said, "It’s changed," but she did not elaborate.
Brown said Tuesday, "There are a lot of e-mails to the representative that say, ‘You ought to die,’ rather than, ‘I am going to kill you.’
"I wouldn’t characterize them as death threats," she said.
No society that embraced homosexuality ever lasted longer then a couple of decades. Homosexuality is a bigger threat to America then terrorism. Homosexuals are going after two year olds in our schools. Homosexuality is a cancer on our nation that will destroy it. I’m getting emailed death threats. No…wait…don’t look at my goddamned inbox!!! …hey…I didn’t really mean death threats as such…
And via Box Turtle Bulletin…we find that Focus On The Family is Still pushing the death threats story, and just never you mind that there weren’t any…
Oklahoma Rep. Sally Kern reportedly has received up to 7,000 e-mails and hundreds of phone calls — including death threats — since speaking out about homosexuality at a Republican event in January.
"According to God’s word, that is not the right kind of lifestyle," she told the group.
…But lying through your teeth is when it’s for God.
Truth. Morality. Values. The Bible. Jesus. Aren’t we so blessed to have people such as these fighting for them…
Via Dan Savage over at SLOG… Seems like this is my week to revisit some folks I’ve done political cartoons on. This time it’s Oklahoma state legislator Sally Kern, who back in May of 2005 demanded that all Oklahoma public libraries move any book with a gay or lesbian character or theme into a restricted adults only section. Not that Oklahoma has any shortage of office holders who like to gay bash for votes, but Kern if anything, represents a portion of America distinctive for the authenticity and the stamina of its hate. Hear it speak:
Gay America doesn’t really need to hear this. This sort of thing is nothing new to us. We hear it all the time. We know what it is that we’re facing. It is straight America that needs to hear this. All of you, who think that the gay community exaggerates the threat we face every day in a nation where this kind of poisonous vitriol remains largely unexamined, unacknowledged, and unconfronted. The reason Sally Kern can feel free to say that gay people, Gay People, are a cancer spreading throughout America isn’t that she was speaking before a small group of like minded bigots, but that the larger community of heterosexual Americans don’t bother paying attention to the torrent of hate right under their noses. Until it actually kills some poor kid like Matthew Shepard, or Lawrence King. For the sake of your country, for the sake of your own personal safety because more and more these days, straight people are getting gay bashed too, you need to listen to this.
The homosexual agenda is destroying this nation.
Not everyone’s lifestyle is equal. Just like not all religions are equal.
No society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted more then, you know, a few decades.
It’s the death knell for this country.
I honestly think it’s the biggest threat our nation has. Even more so then terrorism.
They’re going after…in schools…two year olds.
They’re going after our young children, as young as two years of age, to try to teach them that the homosexual lifestyle is an acceptable lifestyle.
Gays are infiltrating city councils.
Have you heard that the city council of Eureka Springs is controlled by gays? There are some others…Pittsburgh Pennsylvania…Kensington Maryland…Oregon, West Palm Beach Florida and many other places in Florida… What’s happening? And they are winning elections.
If you’ve got cancer or something in your little toe, do you say, you know I’m going to just forget about it because the rest of me is fine? It spreads. Okay? And this stuff is deadly and it is spreading and it will destroy our young people and it will destroy this nation.
This is what republicans have been driving voters to the polls with for decades now. And it’s been killing people. And they don’t care, as long as it wins them elections.
Via Pam’s House Blend… Right Wing Watch has this video up on McCain’s new buddy, Ron Parsley, whom I’ve done a political cartoon about previously…
“This so-called hate crimes legislation would preferred status to people based on entirely on who they choose as a sexual partner. What if they change their mind the next night!”
“Why is marriage under attack?!…Why is the family coming under such brutal attack from the forces of darkness…”
“I will lift my voice against THE AGENDA of America’s tortured and angry homosexual population…”
“In essence the Supreme Court of the United States on June 26, 2003, legalized the perverted act of sodomy. And we said nothing…”
“This is not about homosexual rights or lesbian rights…this is about THE DESTRUCTION of the VERY COVENANT (organ music rises up in the background as he waves his finger desperately) They are seeking to “redefine” marriage. In other words, they are intending to PERVERT God’s original intention!”
Parsley, an Ohio megachurch pulpit thumper once shouted out at the “War on Christians” conference in 2006, “A spiritual invasion is taking place! Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! Lock and load!” When these righteous men of god, these men of high moral values speak of war, people listen. And here’s the blood payoff…
The mistake when these people rail against hate crime laws, is to take the rhetoric at face value. They’re babbling that those laws will restrict their ability to preach lock and load sermons from the pulpit, but it’s not the loss of their the first amendment rights they’re worried about. When Parsley shouts “lock and load” he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s calling for blood on the streets. If his useful tools, the young male thugs he’s counting on strike fear into the hearts of gay people, suddenly find themselves being held accountable for their actions, then they might think twice and Parsley’s work, and that of his fellow hate mongers will all be in vain. They’re not worried about being silenced. They’re worried that their words won’t have the desired effect anymore, that the bloodshed will stop. A fearful homosexual, is a good homosexual. A dead homosexual, is an even better one.
We’ve Decided, After Much Prayer, To Stop Calling Them Stripes…
Behold, Exodus International’s ministry to persons afflicted with Same Sex Attractions…
…or Was at least, if you take their word for it. You know you can take them at their word don’t you…?
In August, 2007 after a lot of prayer, deliberation and listening to friends and critics alike — but mostly the Lord — we decided to back out of policy issues and our Director of Government Affairs took a position with another organization.
Jim Burroway has more Here. Peterson Toscano notes the shift in Exodus policy in his blog post Lovely Shifts And Dramatic Changes. Allow me to be the grouch here. Take another look at that anti-hate crime laws poster. It’s a damn lie. And they knew it was a damn lie while they were creating it. And in that, it is eminently typical of the quality of Exodus International’s relationship to honesty with regard to…well…goddamn near everything. Homosexuals… homosexuality… Teh Gay Lifestyle… ex-gay therapy… They have lied in the past. Brazenly. Ingeniously. Unashamedly. Unhesitatingly. But we can trust them now, can’t we?
Um….no. Let’s look at what’s being said here. Really look…
It may sound nuanced but we weren’t really involved in “politics.” We never worked for the direct election or defeat of a candidate.
No Alan…that doesn’t sound ‘nuanced’. It sounds duplicitous. Never mind that lobbying politicians and voters on policy issues is politics too, observe the telltale adjective…the Direct election or defeat of a candidate? I’m laughing in your face Alan. Exodus has always been a republican tool in election campaigns. Why have so many of Exodus’ "Change Is Possible" billboard campaigns been waged in swing states, with relatively small gay populations? You know goddamned well why. The republican candidate bashes the democrat over their stand on gay rights issues. You folks come along and tell the voters that homosexuals don’t have to be homosexual if they don’t want to anyway, thereby allowing the republican gay basher to blame gays for their own persecution, and the voters to tell themselves that by voting against gay rights they’re not hurting anyone, because the gays can always stop being gay when they’ve had enough.
The primary function of Exodus has always been to make political gay bashing palatable to voters. I mean…look…you don’t actually Change very many homosexuals do you? If I ran a corporation whose main product failed miserably so often I’d have gone out of business long ago. But Change isn’t your product. Animus toward homosexuals is your product. And by that measure, you’re still worth the money the religious right spends on you, if not quite as much as before.
Ever since John Smid had that brilliant idea of dragging gay teenagers into ex-gay therapy against their will, you folks have had to endure a lot more critical scrutiny then before, and one fall out of that is that people are starting to notice all the political activism you’re doing tends to contradict your ersatz message of love. You’re more effective for the anti-gay right when people really believe that all you’re trying to do is help all those poor victims of Same Sex Attraction Disorder who hate themselves because…well…because of all the goddamned lies your kind likes to spread about them. Hence, the costume change. And notice how it went from "We are not a political organization" to "We are not a political organization Anymore." Nice. But…yes…you are…
One area that we found to be incredibly beneficial was simply sharing our stories with lawmakers. If and when there are opportunities to do that we will.
The word for that is Lobbying Alan.
I know…I know…it’s So Hard to remember what words really mean after spending so many years as a mindless cog a lie factory…isn’t it. But they Do mean things, existence exists, reality is real, and when all is said and done that’s the enemy you’ve been fighting all your life right there, not teh gay, not teh liberal, not teh secular.
"I think what — what I’m saying is — and I had not gotten into the equal protection argument, Texas has the right to set moral standards and can set bright line moral standards for its people. And in the setting of those moral standards, I believe that they can say that certain kinds of activity can exist and certain kinds of activity cannot exist." -Charles A. Rosenthal.
I hadn’t known the details of how Rosenthal’s incriminating emails were discovered…only that they’d seen the light of day via some sort of legal proceedings against him. Apparently it began with a Houston drug raid. Some neighbors took photos of the raid and were later harassed and arrested by the police for it. At trial they were exonerated, and they sued. During discovery proceedings, they subpoenaed Rosenthal’s emails and that’s when the whole shit pile that is Rosenthal’s inner nature came tumbling out…the racist jokes, the pornography, the love notes to his secretary… But wait…it gets Even Better…
But the thing that took Rosenthal down was not his adulterous affair. Nor was it his racism.
Rosenthal scorned the judge’s orders and did not turn over all of his email. Instead, he deleted over 2,500 email just days after being ordered to remit it. This got him in a heap of trouble.
A grand jury indicted a Texas Supreme Court justice Thursday [January 17, 2008] on arson-related charges. But on Friday the district attorney’s office that brought the case to the grand jury in the first place dropped the charges, angering members of the panel and drawing allegations of political backscratching.
Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal, who is himself embroiled in a scandal involving inappropriate e-mails found on his office computer, said there was insufficient evidence to support the charges against Justice David Medina, a fellow Republican.
Rosenthal by all appearances, was trying hard to scuttle the case developing against Texas Supreme Court justice David Medina, a fellow republican (surprise, surprise) for torching his own house due to financial troubles. Here’s how the Dallas Morning News reported it…
AUSTIN – A Harris County grand jury indicted Texas Supreme Court Justice David Medina and his wife Thursday in connection with a June fire at their home in Spring, north of Houston.
But within hours of the indictments – Francisca Medina on an arson accusation, Mr. Medina on an evidence-tampering charge – Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal said his office didn’t think there was enough proof to charge either of them with a crime.
"We don’t feel like there’s sufficient evidence to proceed," Mr. Rosenthal said. "We will be asking the court to dismiss those [indictments] so we can proceed with further investigations."
The district attorney’s decision not to prosecute was the only good news of the day for Mr. Medina, a 49-year-old former district judge who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Gov. Rick Perry in 2004, and for his wife, defense attorney Terry Yates said.
They’ve "done nothing wrong," Mr. Yates said, "and will continue to fight this thing vigorously."
But legal experts say Mr. Rosenthal’s announcement – and in particular, its timing – are unusual.
…
Harris County fire officials believe the June blaze, which destroyed the Medina home and a neighbor’s house and did nearly $1 million in damage, was intentionally set. Their initial investigation focused on six people close to the justice, and was fueled by a trail of financial troubles for Mr. Medina’s family.
In 2004, the Medinas failed to pay nearly $10,000 in county and school district taxes, resulting in a lien on their home. A year later, a mortgage company attempted to seize the couple’s home, claiming they had not made a payment in four months. The suit was resolved out of court.
The Medinas’ home insurance policy had lapsed because of unpaid premiums.
Mr. Medina, a former general counsel to Mr. Perry who makes $150,000 a year as a state Supreme Court justice, has called the financial problems "miscommunications with the bank."
The June fire wasn’t the Medinas’ first. A decade ago, the family’s garage went up in flames.
When Mr. Medina was called before a grand jury last fall, he told reporters he was sure he wasn’t suspected in the fire. He said he had some ideas about who might have started it, and said Mr. Rosenthal had assured him he was only a witness.
On Thursday, Mr. Rosenthal acknowledged that’s what he told Mr. Medina – "at the time."
"Whether anything else came up that would make him a target, I don’t know I can say that," Mr. Rosenthal said.
In an interview with the Quorum Report, Jeffrey Dorrell, the assistant foreman of the grand jury, accused Mr. Rosenthal of playing politics to protect Mr. Medina.
"Rosenthal resisted these indictments with a vigor I have never seen or heard before," Mr. Dorrell told the online newsletter. "The [district attorney’s] office called my office last week and said we should not meet, the case was not viable and we should not indict. Obviously, that came from the top."
Now…consider this: Rosenthal was the second state attorney to argue in defense of the sodomy laws before the U.S. Supreme Court since the Stonewall Riots announced the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. The other guy? Michael Bowers. And Bowers, you may recall, later endured his own episodes of political scandal and cheating on his wife.
It may seem odd…surreal even…that these self appointed moral authorities on the right would keep turning out, time and time again, to have the inner moral character of a gang of crooks. But that’s only if you look no further then the surface fealty to the moral code they claim to embrace. Look deeper. Look at the moral code itself. Where does it come from?
The Bible? No. They pick and choose from the bible like customers in a cafeteria, sliding their trays down the rails…now and then finding a tasty treat to their liking, ignoring the rest. These people, for all their bellyaching about their deeply held religious values, have religious values that are skin deep and no more.
The flag? No. For all their super duper true red white and blue American super patriotism, these people have utterly no commitment at all to the basic values of liberty and justice for all. None. If anything, they find it anathema. Their vision of the American Dream, is one that enriches their own lives, only and to the degree that it kicks into the gutter everyone they personally despise. The American Dream is money in their pocket, so long as it came out of yours. Freedom isn’t a rising tide that lifts all boats, but a ladder with them at the top and the rest of us down at the bottom, holding them up. The American Way, is their way.
Look at the values these people hold, not the ones they profess. Really look at them. All their moral values, all their deeply held religious beliefs, all their breathless reverence for America, amount to one thing only: themselves. They are worshiping a mirror, and calling it Jesus. They are saluting a flag with their face on it, and stripes made of line items in their personal prosperity check list, and calling it America. And that is how the man, the lawyer, could stand before the U.S. Supreme Court and argue that the only justification the sodomy laws needed was that they reflected the moral values of the people. Whether or not they embodied or conflicted with the values this nation was founded upon were irrelevant. If the people believe it is moral to imprison homosexuals said Rosenthal, then that makes it right. It was a statement of his innermost moral character: if he believes it is moral, then it is moral. Or more specifically, if he does it, it must be moral because he did it.
And that is why the man, the lawyer, who stood before the U.S. Supreme Court and said that Texas could draw a bright line of morality for its citizens, could cheat on his wife, use his office to protect a fellow republican from criminal prosecution, and destroy incriminating evidence against himself. Never doubt that in each and every step of the way down that path, in each and every moment of the walking of it, Rosenthal knew beyond any doubt or misgiving, that he was acting morally. It isn’t that he wouldn’t have done it if he didn’t think it was immoral by his standards. He was the standard. His life, his needs, his desires, his behavior. Because he did it, it Was moral.
That’s how these people think. It’s how they measure right from wrong. Jesus is the image in the mirror that nods approvingly back at them. The American way is the shape of their daily lives. Family values, is whatever goes on under their own roofs. Morality, is the stamp of approval they give to their own behavior from one moment to the next. That his how both Rosenthal and Bowers could condemn gay rights as a threat to marriage and family life, and cheat on their wives and still tell the world that they were moral men. Yes, they really believed it.
"While your blogger has nothing personally against gays…"
Deux…
"…and does not care what they do as consenting adults…"
Trois…
"…she does care about Equality NC’s attempts to tie homosexual desires onto the civil rights causes hard fought by black Americans. This is just wrong!"
Quatre…
"These gay militants want to be able to be married, just as heterosexuals are, and that personally offends this blogger."
An evangelical chaplain who leads Bible studies for California lawmakers says God is disgusted with a rival fellowship group that includes people of all faiths.
"Although they are pleasant men in their personal demeanor, their group is more than disgusting to our Lord and Savior," Drollinger wrote on the Capitol Ministries’ Web site.
The comments drew immediate fire from others in the capital, including the Republican lawmaker who sponsors Drollinger’s Bible study group.
Drollinger said "progressive religious tolerance" is an offense against God and causes harm to its practitioners.
He said the other Bible study group was perpetrating a "deadly lie" by presenting Jesus as "a good moral teacher who loves everyone without distinction."
Assembly Republican leader Mike Villines, who sponsors Drollinger’s Bible study group, said the differing approach between the two groups should not be a cause of conflict between them.
Capitol Ministries aims to "reach every elected official in every nation of the world at every level of government with the uncompromised, saving message of Jesus Christ," according to its website. So far, the California-based group has, again according to its website, "singularly focused on establishing biblical ministries in State Capitols throughout our nation … in order to make disciples of Jesus Christ within the political arena, at every level."
…
The growing roster of states is worth noting because of Capitol Ministries’ extremism.
The group’s leader, Ralph Drollinger, is so extreme that the Los Angeles Daily News reported this month without qualification that he "has a long record of bashing Catholics, gays and mothers of young children who serve in the state Legislature."
…
In his keynote address to the May 8th Harrisburg "Commonwealth Prayer Breakfast," Drollinger said it was important to challenge legislators to make decisions to "submit to Christ as Lord," according to Rabbi Paula Reimers of Congregation Beth Israel in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, who attended.
She also noted Drollinger’s remark that it isn’t necessary "to coerce one who has come to Christ as to how to vote."
…
In 2004 he [Drollinger] offended many in the California legislature when he called Catholicism "the world’s largest false religion."
According to a 2005 report in the Sacramento News & Review, the previous year Drollinger "had to move the Bible study from the governor’s suites after he labeled Catholicism, the religion of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a ‘false religion.’" Thanks to the sponsorship of three Republican legislators, Drollinger moved the study to a legislative suite, according to the paper, where its attendance was around a dozen Republican lawmakers. There is a separate study group for staffers.
In 2004 Drollinger wrote a Bible study stating that women legislators were sinning by leaving their children to go to Sacramento. "It is one thing for a mother to work out of her home while her children are in school," he wrote. "It is quite another matter to have children in the home and live away in Sacramento for four days a week. Whereas the former could be in keeping with the spirit of Proverbs 31, the latter is sinful."
Drollinger amplified with a patriarchal assertion about the roles of men and women. "Man’s is, primarily, to be a breadwinner, and women’s is to be at home nurturing their children," according to contemporaneous news reports.
Some members of the state Senate responded by wearing aprons to a legislative session.
In the interview with the Sacramento News & Review, Drollinger differentiated his operation from religious right organizations. They, he said, lobby on bills, whereas Capitol Ministries works to win souls (the same distinction he made at the Harrisburg breakfast)..
He also insisted that he supports the separation of church and state, because the two insititutions are biblically ordained to serve different purposes, according to the SNR.
The group’s own descriptions of its activities suggests quite the opposite. A 2002 "Bible study lesson series" aimed at Tennessee government workers was titled "Decision-Making and God’s Will," according to the Nashville Business Journal.
…
In 2005, in a retort to the speaker of the California Assembly’s statement that all are "children of God," Capitol Ministries’ national "expansion" director, Sean Wallentine, said: "While it is nice to believe that God is everyone’s Father, it is not true." Only those who are "born again" become God’s "adopted children," Wallentine said in a written statement quoted by the California Observer blog.
The Daily News report on the prayer breakfast in Santa Clarita quoted Wallentine disparaging an alternative Interfaith event. "I would just say they’re allowed to have their meeting," he said, "but we wouldn’t be supportive of a meeting that taught that there are many ways to heaven. There are not."
Freedom of religion? You’re very much mistaken citizen…sin has no rights that men of god are bound to respect…
I’m Lashing Out At You Because I Couldn’t Lash Out At Dad…
You see it often, how conservative parents of gay kids fight a bitter, vitriolic battle against gay equality, as a way of punishing their children. There was Robert Knight, who fought gay rights in California till the day he died. Alan Keyes. Phylis Schafly. Charles Socarides. There’s a bromide about how so many anti-gay KulturKriegen are closeted gays themselves. But often, it’s not that they’re gay, but that one or more of their children are. So they lash out at the gay community, as a way of punishing their kids for being gay. Less often you hear about children of gay parents, doing the same after they’ve grown up and left the nest. But it’s there. Just as bitter, just as vitriolic. Case in point, Dawn Stefanowicz, whose new book, Out From Under, about being raised by a gay father, is being pushed by the usual suspects. Here’s Peter LaBarbera gushing over it…
Folks, this is a beautifully written book that testifies to the lunacy of encouraging homosexual parenting in public policy. It can be ordered through Dawn’s website:
Of course…it’s about more then "encouraging homosexual parenting"…
Stefanowicz said she was prompted to write the book in 2004 after testifying before a Canadian senate committee against hate crime legislation and expressing public opposition to the sexual diversity curricula used in her country’s schools.
…it’s about opposing hate crime legislation…and teaching tolerance to kids…because god knows if we don’t bully the little dickens mercilessly when they’re young they might grow up to be well adjusted gay people. But look at this…really look at it. Here’s a woman whose claim to fame is that her childhood was made miserable from having a gay dad, and she’s out there vigorously working to make school kids less accepting of their gay peers, thereby insuring that their childhoods will be miserable too. Does she want kids to suffer abuse in school? No. So long as they’re heterosexual.
But, as it turns out, she doesn’t want other kids, gay or straight, to miss out on the suffering she went through either. Look at this, from LaBarbera…
The author and speaker said writing down her memories about being raised by a father who welcomed numerous male sex partners into the family’s home on a regular basis was a painful process. Stefanowicz said her father’s destructive homosexual behavior created confusion about sexuality in her own life. In the book she chronicles how, as a young girl, she often wished she were a boy.
Of course, and conveniently, Stefanowicz’s dad isn’t around anymore to tell his side of it. Stefanowicz says elsewhere that it was only after both her parents had passed away that she was able to come forward with her story. Okay…that’s entirely plausible. But it’s also very convenient and you learn to be suspicious of these kinds of happy advantages a speaker has when it comes to the religious right. But let’s take that story at face value. There’s two problems here, and below the surface of both, a terrible third. First, any parent, gay or straight, who "welcomes numerous sex partners" into the household isn’t thinking of the effect that has on the kid, on their sense of being loved, and being secure. So right away it’s obvious that it wasn’t her father’s homosexuality that was the problem there, it was his indifference to his kid’s emotional needs.
Second, and reliably, there’s LaBarbera describing that as "homosexual behavior". This is how bigots think. It’s exactly like an antisemite talking about greed as a particularly Jewish behavior, or a racist speaking of black criminality. LaBarbera, who almost certainly knows what he’s doing, deals professionally in every anti-gay stereotype you ever heard. He’s a professional hate monger, who works tirelessly to inflame passions against gay people. That’s how he earns a living.
But look closer into Stefanowicz’s story. Her dad grew up in a time when gay men were deeply closeted, when we were all taught that we were depraved monstrosities deep down inside. That doesn’t excuse his behavior, but it puts it into context. We were given no moral guidance from the men of "virtue" in our culture, other then the knowledge that because we were homosexual, we were beyond the pale. We were given nothing to aspire to beyond the gutter. Some of us managed to escape that trap, and live decent whole lives in spite of the constant message being drummed relentlessly into us, that we were human garbage. But it’s that message that Stefanowicz insists the culture keep teaching to gay men and women.
Stefanowicz may claim that writing about her childhood has helped her to heal, but in painting her experience as a warning, not about what homophobia does to gay people and to their families, but rather a warning not to accept the homosexual into society, she’s working diligently to guarantee that other children have exactly the same childhood she did. Because when the message is that homosexuality is abominable, and that to be homosexual is to be lower then dirt, gay men and women will try everything in their power to not be gay…including getting married and having children. But the human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will upon, and the sex drive is an instinct older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates. You suppress your sex drive and the next thing you know it’s rushing out in all manner of self destructive ways, and you have no control because you never learned control, because denial isn’t control. So what we end up with, when we make the culture more homophobic, are a lot of married homosexuals, in denial about their sex drives, and utterly unable to control them.
Unlike that poor woman who told her story to MSNBC, Stefanowicz is working to insure that more kids will have childhoods like hers. Because she has to. Because if other kids can have happy, fulfilling lives being raised by gay parents, then she’s still all alone in the misery of what happened to her. Instead of rising above it, she’s made it her home.
Reverend Ken Hutcherson, founder and senior pastor of the Antioch Bible Church near Seattle Washington, and one of the three leaders of the hate group, Watchmen on the Walls, is on the warpath over the Gay-Straight Alliance in his daughter’s school…
This poster is hanging in the window of a classrom at Mt. Si High School!
It’s time we wake up and realize we are in a culture WAR!
When teachers are allowed to hang posters like this in our local school, we’ve got a big problem. It’s time to take back our schools.
Pastor Hutch
Timothy Kincaid, over at Box Turtle Bulletin, has more. Apparently Hutcherson is upset that his daughter is being called a stressful presence while "monitoring" those GSA meetings. I can’t imagine why, other then that those kids probably know full well that everyone who attends those meetings, and everything that is said, is being reported right back to Hutcherson, and for all anybody knows, other members of The Watchmen on the Walls. They might as well be holding their meetings in Hutcherson’s church.
The Goths in their black T-shirts were there. So were the punks with fluorescent hair and multiple piercings.
There were even a few adolescent boys carrying skateboards among the nearly 1,000 Oxnard youth and other supporters who turned out Saturday for a hastily organized peace march to pay tribute to Lawrence King, 15, the Oxnard student shot to death in a classroom last week.
"Larry, Larry, Larry!" the crowd chanted before marchers clasped hands in a moment of silence for the fallen student.
There were no bullhorns, no speeches and no politicians. Just a mass of mostly adolescents wearing bright clothing, carrying signs and singing John Lennon’s "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance."
The size of the turnout surprised police, school officials and even the two Hueneme High School sophomores who put the event together just three days ago, spreading the word with fliers, cellphone calls and MySpace bulletins.
"We were expecting maybe 100 or 200 people," said Courtney LaForest, 16, as she gazed at a broad "peace circle" formed by march participants at Plaza Park in downtown Oxnard. "This is incredible."
Courtney said the turnout reflected a community’s anguish over a senseless shooting that has destroyed the lives of two young men. It was also a public plea for tolerance on school campuses for those who are different, she said.
However, "Pastor Hutch" and his friends think it’s time people realize they’re fighting a WAR! And The enemy…? Right here…
And…here…
And…here…
Children are being shot by children. Parents are burying their children. Their friends are being torn apart by shock and loss and grief. And Hutcherson says we’re in a WAR! No shit Sherlock. Two bullets to the head killed a sixteen year old boy and took away from this poor world everything he might have given to it, every moment of friendship and joy and love, every laugh, every smile. Gone. All gone. In an instant. And Ken Hutcherson’s words, and those of his fellow KulturKriegen, were the gunpowder.
If you were wondering why the Archbishop of Canterbury has a sudden fondness for Muslim sharia law, maybe this can help explain it to you…
I have no problem with the argument that liberal, secular law should not be seen as universal. However, Williams is saying something else. He does not want the "conscientious disagreement" that a faith community has with state law to be "overruled by a monopolistic understanding of jurisdiction". What this means is that faith communities should be allowed to opt out of laws that go against their teachings. This, I would suggest, is a recipe for compromising notions of equality and equal treatment before state law.
A telling example shows where all this is leading. Roman Catholic adoption agencies, the archbishop suggests, should have the right to reject gay men and lesbians as adoptive parents. The corollary is that the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches should have the right to stop gays from taking senior positions in church ranks. Ditto for women. The archbishop’s attempt to redefine the relationship between religious conscience and law turns out to be about Christian churches and their position on such issues as gay rights and abortion. The sharia is a distraction.
I am all for enlarging the religious space in a secular state. However, it seems to me that on the issue of equality it is not just the sharia that needs reform, but all monotheistic faiths.
I have a hunch we’re going to be seeing a lot of new found respect for sharia law being declared from ersatz Christian pulpits in the coming years…
Inverness Middle School science teacher Steve Crandall says he chooses to tell students that science doesn’t have all the answers.
No. But it has a few…
"I understand politicians like to compromise and that faced with one group who
say two plus two equals four and another group that says two plus two equals
six, will tend to arrive at a position that says two plus two equals five.
Unfortunately, sometimes the answer has to be four…" -Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education
The middle ground between the right answer and the wrong answer is a different wrong answer.
That would be Bruce Bower I’m referring too, not yours truly. Bower, who wrote in Stealing Jesus how Christian fundamentalists have turned Jesus’ message of love and forgiveness into a religion utterly devoid of love let alone forgiveness, is loosing his mind. And the first hint you get of that in his latest essay, First They Came For The Gays, is that he’s writing now for the 101st Fighting Keyboarders over at Pajamas Media.
Reading Sebastian Haffner’s disturbing memoir, Defying Hitler, I learned two facts that were surprising to me. First, that the German people were delivered into the tender mercies of the Nazis, not by a bunch of weak kneed decadent liberal appeasers, but with the systematic destruction of the Weimar constitution by a series of right wing governments, each of which had declared that harsh measures had to be taken to protect Germany from extremists. And secondly, that the Communist menace was, by the time the Reichstag was burning down, almost completely toothless. It’s leaders and followers had been decimated by a series of anti-labor pogroms in the previous decade.
As it turned out, the communist menace was a convenient scarecrow various right wing governments waved in people’s faces, so it could do away with those constitutional rights and guarantees it found inconvenient. Not that people weren’t seriously afraid of the Communists…they were. But the actual menace to Germany, the domestic one, the Nazis, had much more in common with the rightist governments then people cared to notice. The argument was always that stern measures were needed to quell domestic unrest. But by 1932 that unrest was almost exclusively the work of the Nazis, not the Communists. The grim irony I discovered in Haffner’s book, was that if there was any appeasement going on back then in Germany, it was at the hands of the right who kept trying to appease the fanatics on Their right with the piecemeal dismantling of the democracy the Nazis detested, in order to save Germany from fanatics like…well…the Nazis. But they didn’t save it from extremism, so much as grease the skids for it. Here’s a clue for you Bruce: You don’t defend democracy, by abolishing it piecemeal.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Bower, an American of my own generation who has since migrated to Norway, a gay conservative who just co-incidentally has a new book out titled, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within, plays his part:
The reason for the rise in gay bashings in Europe is clear – and it’s the same reason for the rise in rape. As the number of Muslims in Europe grows, and as the proportion of those Muslims who were born and bred in Europe also grows, many Muslim men are more inclined to see Europe as a part of the umma (or Muslim world), to believe that they have the right and duty to enforce sharia law in the cities where they live, and to recognize that any aggression on their part will likely go unpunished. Such men need not be actively religious in order to feel that they have carte blanche to assault openly gay men and non-submissive women, whose freedom to live their lives as they wish is among the most conspicuous symbols of the West’s defiance of holy law.
Multiculturalists can’t face all this. So it is that even when there are brutal gay-bashings, few journalists write about them; of those who do, few mention that the perpetrators are Muslims; and those who do mention it take the line that these perpetrators are lashing out in desperate response to their own oppression.
The "Multiculturalists" Bower refers to here, and throughout, are strawmen. But more to the point, they are a standard right wing strawman. And that strawman is intended not so much to discredit multiculturalism, as democracy, and its bedrock of liberty and justice for all. In the name of sounding the alarm over the rise of anti-gay violence in Europe, Bower attaches that violence indiscriminately to a people, and to an entire religion. And in doing so he smears, backhandedly, cowardly, in the very manner of the anti-democratic subversive he claims to be standing proudly against, the central idea of democracy itself: that all citizens are equals under the law.
To claim that multiculturalism means tolerating honor rape equally with women’s freedom is pathetic bar stool sophistry, on the order of arguing that anti-lynching laws are just as much the product of bigotry as the lynchings themselves. This boilerplate right wing bar stool doggerel not only cheapens the political conversation, it means to actively shut it down. It’s Orwell’s black is white, up is down, doublespeak. And the idea here isn’t to discredit tolerance, but democracy. Where the promise of democracy belongs only to some, it belongs to no one. Except, perhaps, the ones who decide who is in, and who isn’t. The Europeans are painfully aware of exactly where that leads.
And that’s probably the brick wall that Bower, an American of my own generation, keeps hitting when he babbles on and on about how the Europeans need to wake up to the Islamist Menace, like he thinks he’s Paul Revere and not Father Coughlin. The events leading up to World War II in Europe are not so distant that the people over there have forgotten what happens when you start stigmatizing minorities, and Bower isn’t warning about a rise in intolerance and violence toward minorities: he’s warning them about the Muslims. He’s blaming it all on them. He’s telling Europe that it has a Muslim Problem. That’s probably scaring his audience the hell away. If he’d taken some time to try to understand the people he’s living among now, he might have expected that. But then if he could open his eyes a tad to the world around him, he might not be such a brick brained conservative now either. It’s really sad to watch a keen mind suffocate itself.
The problem facing gay people in Europe, as well as the rest of the world, isn’t radical Islamic fundamentalism, it’s radical fundamentalism period. And that rising, anti-modernist, anti-humanist, fundamentalism isn’t just threatening gay people, and it isn’t just threatening Europe. It’s a threat to democracy everywhere, to gay people, to women, to anyone who won’t bow down to its law. And it wears its Jesus mask as easily as it wears its Mohamed mask. In the end it isn’t about God or piety, it’s about obedience. In Stealing Jesus, Bower almost seemed to grasp that. Now he’s just letting his cheapshit xenophobia do his thinking for him. If I could stop being tired of seeing this kind of crap I might be sad for him.
He need only look to the scorched earth war between the gay haters and everyone else in his own church, the Anglicans, to see that isn’t true. There, the leader of the movement to chuck gay people out of the communion of Christ like so much human garbage, Bishop Peter Akinola, who once said he once literally jumped backward after realizing he’d shaken hands with a gay man, heartily endorse a proposed Nigerian law which would not only have outlawed same sex marriage, but prohibit any association of gays and lesbians, restrict their freedom of speech and movement, even to the point of making meeting in a restaurant or together in their own homes an illegal act. Here’s what Akinola, an ersatz Christian, had to say about the law…
"The Church commends the law-makers for their prompt reaction to outlaw same-sex relationships in Nigeria and calls for the bill to be passed since the idea expressed in the bill is the moral position of Nigerians regarding human sexuality."
And if that wasn’t enough…
"The Church affirms our commitment to the total rejection of the evil of homosexuality which is a perversion of human dignity and encourages the National Assembly to ratify the Bill prohibiting the legality of homosexuality since it is incongruent with the teachings of the Bible, Quran and the basic African traditional values."
So here’s Akinola embracing his Christian, Muslim and African brothers in the war on homosexuality. Multiculturalism anyone? And surely Bowers knows by now that the upcoming schism in his church is being funded in large measure by American right wingers, and in particular Howard Ahmanson, the former Christian Reconstructionist who now claims he no longer considers it essential to stone homosexuals to death, although "It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral…" You can just hear him handing Akinola and his brethren the stones there. Shara law anyone?
In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.
The trio leading the Watchmen are Alexey Ledyaev, leader of the New Generation Church, an evangelical Christian megachurch in Riga, Latvia, Ken Hutcherson, leader of the Antioch Bible meagchurch near Seattle Washington, and Scott Lively, a holocaust denier who wrote The Pink Triangle, in which he claims that Nazism itself is a form of homosexuality, and that the Nazis didn’t so much persecute homosexuals, as were themselves homosexual. This claim he is currently busy spreading far and wide throughout Eastern Europe, a land whose people suffered a cataclysm at the hands of the Nazis during the second world war. That propaganda has done its work on some younger Slavs…
On the first day of July, Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death. The 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age. Singh was delicate and dateless — two facts that did not go unnoticed by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.
According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them "7-Eleven workers" and "Sodomites." The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a "good church" like theirs. According to Singh’s friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh’s party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.
The pregnant woman said she didn’t want to fight them.
"We don’t want to fight you either," one of them replied in English. "We just want your faggot friend."
One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh’s friends to prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial life support July 5.
Outside Singh’s hospital room, more than 100 people held a vigil. Many were Sacramento gay activists who didn’t know Singh personally, but who saw his death as the tragic but inevitable result of what they describe as the growing threat of large numbers of Slavic anti-gay extremists, most of them first- or second-generation immigrants from Russia, the Ukraine and other countries of the former Soviet Union, in their city and others in the western United States.
In recent months, as energetic Russian-speaking "Russian Baptists" and Pentecostals in these states have organized to bring thousands to anti-gay protests, gay rights activists in Sacramento have picketed Slavic anti-gay churches, requested more police patrols in gay neighborhoods and distributed information cards warning gays and lesbians about the hostile Slavic evangelicals who they say have roughed up participants at gay pride events. Singh’s death was the realization of their worst fears.
"After a couple years of fundamentalist and Slavic Christian virulent anti-gay protests at almost every Sacramento gay event in the region," said local gay rights activist Michael Gorman, "what the gay community has feared for some time has finally happened."
Now Bower again…
Not very long ago, Oslo was an icy Shangri-la of Scandinavian self-discipline, governability, and respect for the law. But in recent years, there have been grim changes, including a rise in gay-bashings. The summer of 2006 saw an unprecedented wave of them. The culprits, very disproportionately, are young Muslim men.
Well I guess it was a good thing for Satender Singh that his attackers weren’t Muslims then. Except, he’s just as dead isn’t he? And that didn’t happen in Europe…it happened right here in America. Gay bashings, even killings, at the hands of young men who later claim a divine purpose to their bloodshed are hardly uncommon here. Meanwhile, in pulpits all across America, the religious right is hyping up the Homosexual Menace. We’re destroyers of marriage, and the family, and for good measure, civilization itself. And when the rhetoric from the pulpits is transmuted into blood, the religious right looses no time in declaring itself innocent, and in fact itself a victim of oppression by radical homosexuals.
No, assaults by Muslims always have to be construed as defensive – as expressions not of power but of weakness, not of aggression but of helplessness. To suggest that the culprits, far from being fragile, sensitive flowers who’ve been pushed over the line by something we did, are in fact bullies driven by an overweening sense of superiority and a deep-seated malice – both of which they’ve been carefully taught at home, at school, and, yes, in the mosque – is verboten.
Boy doesn’t that sound familiar. When was the last time you saw the American news media pointing a finger at the hate coming from the pulpits? Can’t remember? Neither can I. And I know I’d have heard about it because the religious right would have been screaming about the liberal news media and it’s anti-Christian pro-homosexual agenda so loud you could hear it on the moon.
By framing this as an exclusively Muslim problem, Bower plays right into the hands of those who raise the race card whenever Islamic extremism is called out for what it is. But worse then that, he’s wrong. Spectacularly wrong. Horribly wrong. Damnably wrong. Shara law, when and if it delivers Europe back into the dark ages, will be wearing a Jesus mask, not a Mohamed mask. In the Arab world it is the Mohammad mask. Maybe elsewhere it will look something like this…
A Jewish invocation will be used by ultra Orthodox rabbis in Jerusalem to curse the organizers of the Gay Pride March and the police who protect them, said a spokesman for the Edah Haredit Monday.
In a ceremony known as “Pulsa D’nura” (blows of fire), rabbis of the anti-Zionist Edah Haredit rabbinic court will convene sometime before the march, which is scheduled for Friday, to conduct the kabbalistic ceremony which is believed to unleash unearthly powers against specified sinners.
According to Shmuel Poppenheim, a spokesman for the Edah Haredit, Rabbi Moshe Sternbach, head of the Edah Haredit’s rabbinic court proposed conducting the ceremony during a meeting of rabbinic judges Monday morning.
“All the rabbis were together at the rabbinic court to proceed over a chalitza (part of a levirate ceremony),” said Poppenheim. “After the chalitza, Rabbi Sternbach recommended doing the Pulsa D’nura.”
Pulsa D’nura is mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud (Baba Metzia 47a) and in the Zohar.
“If done by a competent, God-fearing rabbinic court like the Edah Haredit, the people who are cursed do not live out the year,” said a Jerusalem-based rabbi who preferred to remain anonymous.
In 2005 a young ultra orthodox Jew, Yishai Schlissel, stabbed three gay Israelis during a Pride march. During his interrogation he said,
“I came to murder on behalf of God. We can’t have such abomination in the country.”
What you need to understand is that this violent hatred of the secular world, and all the freedom it brings, and human potential it unleashes, is not a Muslim phenomena, nor is it particular or even necessary to any one religion or faith. And in a deeper sense, it’s not even about homosexuality. It’s about modernism. It’s about freedom, about the awesome human potential that modern democracy has unleashed. It’s fundamentally about the ones who can’t cope with it…the ones who are Left Behind.
In his time, Haffner saw it…
Money came into the country, the currency maintained its value, and business was good. The older generation began to retrieve its store of experience from the attic, burnish it bright, and show it off, as if it had never been invalidated. The last ten years were forgotten like a bad dream. The Day of Judgment was remote again, and there was no demand for saviors or revolutionaries. The pubic sector required only competent officials, and the private sector only hard working businessmen. There was an ample measure of freedom, peace, and order, everywhere the most well-meaning liberal-mindedness, good wages, good food, and a little political boredom. Everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their own personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own tastes, and to find their own paths to happiness.
Now something strange happened – and with this I believe I am about to reveal one of the most fundamental political events of our rime, something that was not reported in any newspaper; by and large that invitation was declined. It was not what was wanted. A whole generation was, it seemed, at a loss as to how to cope with the offer of an unfettered private life.
There’s the root of it. The threat to democracy now, and eternally, is not Islam, but the Left Behind, and their sullen, resentful, hatred of everything a human being can be, of everything humanity can become, that they cannot. Or at any rate could, if only they weren’t so afraid of existence. This isn’t a Muslim thing. It’s a human thing. The Left Behind are everywhere, in every nation, of every race, in every culture. To embrace their cheapshit paranoias about Otherness, is to let them win the only battle that matters…the one for your soul. You embrace their fear and hatred of The Other, and the next thing you know you will be taking the ax to your precious democracy just as cheerfully as they are. Side by side you’ll both systematically destroy it. And then the next thing to get the ax, will be you. Because a race to the bottom is always won by the one that’s already there.
It is not radical Islam that threatens to destroy the West from within Bowers, it is the likes of you and your fellow fighting 101st Keyboarders over at Pajamas. ‘Multiculturalism’ is just one of this period’s trite little buzz-words that simply acknowledges the fact that in a free country your neighbor has the right to dress funny, and worship in a funny looking church if they want to. And maybe, just maybe, there might be something of value in their lives for the rest of us to take note of. Or not. But that’s how melting pots work after all you drooling moron. And as Jefferson said, it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Multiculturalism is no more about giving Muslim men the right to rape women any more then the American civil rights movement was about giving black men the right to rape women, although a lot of white conservatives back then seemed to think it was. Grow up. You’re fighting the wrong enemy, and in the process you are loosing the war.
The Muslim man who looks you in the face hails from a culture that gave humanity the modern decimal system, and which preserved much of what the ancients knew through the dark ages. You know…that period of time in Europe where the Christian church burned faggots and heretics at the stake. And if you think that’s all in your culture’s past, and that the primative, fanatical haters of his kind don’t also have their precise counterparts among yours too, or that yours are at least no great threat to your peace and freedom, you are sadly, horribly, fatally mistaken.
The enemy within, the one you need to fear the most, is the one that wears a face much like yours, and gives you a sincere smile and a hearty handshake, and whispers in your ear that this world would be So much nicer without all those horrible other people in it…
What They Thought Of Us Then. What They Think Of Us Now.
Some random thoughts on homosexuals and homosexuality from back when I was a struggling gay teen…
I think homosexuals cursed, and I am afraid I mean this quite literally, in the medieval sense of having been struck by an unexplained injury, an extreme piece of evil luck whose origin is so unclear as to be, finally, a mystery.
If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth. I would do so because I think that it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure who are forced to live it; because I think there is no resolution for this pain in our lifetime, only, for the overwhelming majority of homosexuals, more pain and various degrees of exacerbating adjustment; and because, wholly selfishly, I find myself completely incapable of coming to terms with it.
They are different from the rest of us. Homosexuals are different, moreover, in a way that cuts deeper than other kinds of human differences — religious, class, racial — in a way that is, somehow, more fundamental. Cursed without clear cause, afflicted without apparent cure, they are an affront to our rationality.
…
I do think homosexuality an anathema, and hence homosexuals cursed, and thus the importance, for me if for no one else, of my defining a homosexual as someone who has physical relations, for it leaves room for my admiration for the man who is pulled toward homosexuality and resists, at what psychic price I cannot hope even to begin to imagine.
…
I was stunned, then angry. I was angry, first, at my own lack of judgment and subtlety in not deducing that Richard was a homosexual; and, second, more intensely, at being victimized by his duplicity. We were not close friends, but I liked him, and not it seemed that every moment we had spent together was a huge sham, an elaborate piece of deception to hide the essential, the number one, fact in his life.
…
I have four sons, and while I do not walk the streets thinking constantly about their sexual development, worrying right on through the night about their turning out homosexual, I have very little idea, apart from supplying them with ample security and affection, about how to prevent it. Uptight? You’re damn right. Given any choice in the matter, I should prefer sons who are heterosexual. My ignorance makes me frightened.
-Joseph Epstein, "Homo/Hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity," Harper’s, September 1970
…and then, from back when I was a struggling gay young adult…
In the case of the husbands at Fire Island Pines, the homosexuals were right about one thing. Their uneasiness did contain a large component of fear. The fear of straight men in the face of the homosexual community, however, is not that they will be tempted to join in but that they are being diminished by it, diminished in their persons and diminished in their lives. As women in a full company of homosexual men feel devalued and sexually rejected – that is the very reason certain women, they used to be called "fag hags", choose to spend their lives in such company – heterosexual men feel themselves mocked. They feel mocked in their unending thralldom to the female body and thus their unending dependence on those who possess it. They feel mocked by the longing for and vulnerability to and even humiliation from women they have since boyhood permitted themselves to endure, while others apparently just like themselves, slowly assert their escape from these things
They feel mocked most of all for having become, in style as well as substance, fmaily men, caught up in getting and begetting, thinking of mortgages, schools, and the affordable, marking the passage of years in obedience to all the grubby imperatives that heterosexual manhood seems to impose. In assuming such burdens they believe themselves entitled to respect, but homosexuality paints them with the color of sheer entrapment.
In Fire Island Pines they were in fact being mocked explicitly, not so much by individual homosexuals as the reigning homosexual fashion. The essence of that fashion was the worship of youth – youth not even understood as young manhood but rather boyhood (and indeed, the straight women among themselves always referred to the homosexuals as "the boys"). On the beach particularly, this worship became all powerful and inescapable to the eye. It was a constant source of wonder among us, and remains so to me to this day, that by far the largest number of homosexuals had hairless bodies. Chests, backs, arms, even legs, were smooth and silky, an impression strengthened by the fact that they were in addition frequently and scrupulously unguented to catch the full advantage of the sun’s ultra violet. We were never able to determine just why there should be so definite a connection between what is nowadays called their sexual “preference” and their smooth feminine skin. Was it a matter of hormones, or was there some constant special process of depilation? But smooth-skinned they were, and, like the most narcissistic of pretty young girls and women, made an absolute fetish of the dark and uniform suntan, devoting hours, days, weeks, to turning themselves carefully to the sun. Nor was this tanning flesh ever permitted to betray any of the ordinary signs of encroaching mortality, such as excess fat or flabbiness or on the other hand the kind of muscularity that suggests some activity whose end is not beauty. In short, year by year homosexuals of all ages presented a never-ending spectacle, zealously and ruthlessly monitored, of tender adolescence.
…
One thing is certain. To become homosexual is a weighty act. Taking oneself out of the tides of ordinary mortal existence is not something one does from any longing to think oneself ordinary (but only following a different “lifestyle”). Gay Lib has been an effort to set the weight of that act at naught, to define homosexuality as nothing more than a casual option among options. In accepting the movement’s terms, heterosexuals have only raised to a nearly intolerable height the costs of the homosexual’s flight from normality. Faced with the accelerating round of drugs, S-M, and suicide, can either the movement or its heterosexual sympathizers imagine that they have done anyone a kindness?
-Midge Decter, "The Boys On The Beach," Commentary, September 1980
Read a good take down on Epstein over at David Ehrenstein’s site…Here. Ehrenstein was one of the gay activists who stormed the offices of Harper’s Magazine after Harper’s doggedly refused to air any rebuttals to Epstein’s public wish to see homosexuals removed from the face of the earth.
Decter’s theses, if you will, in The Boys On The Beach, is that only a conservative and officially anti-gay culture keeps the innately self destructive impulses of gay men in check, whereas liberalism allows those impulses to become fully realized. Thus, according to Decter, persecuting homosexuals is actually a kindness. Anti-gay persecution is necessary in order to save homosexuals from themselves. This is the position that the American movement conservatives have taken ever since, and Decter’s 1980 essay in Commentary is still regarded warmly in winger circles, as an important work. You see echos of The Boys On The Beach in every opinion piece on homosexuals and homosexuality from the movement conservatives, even now. The premise, often unspoken but there between the lines, that culture and the law must be stacked against gay people, for their own good of course, because of the innately self destructive nature of homosexuality, is so ingrained in their rhetoric now that it’s central premise is taken as a given. It is homosexuality, not the persecution of homosexuals, that is destructive. Therefore, the solution is, surprise, surprise, More persecution.
But the Epstein essay gets to the heart of it: Homosexuals are cursed…they are anathema…they are different from us…they frighten us…if we could, we’d remove them from the face of the earth…because we are incapable of coming to terms with them. Yes we’re cursed alright. Not by our nature, but by their hate. Their calm, cool, thoroughly intellectual hate. There is the bedrock of The Boys On The Beach. There is the stinking rotten core of the secular right’s view of gay people. See how it is not all that different from that of the fundamentalists. Just add God, and you have a James Dobson speaking there. Anyone who thinks there is enough difference between the religious right and the secular right when it comes to gay people, that at least the secularists can be talked to, is just not paying attention.
MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — For many who lived through Vermont’s not-so-civil debate over civil unions, the memories remain painfully fresh: hate mail, threatening telephone messages, tense public meetings.
This time around, as the state weighs whether to legalize gay marriage, the debate is noticeably tamer with little of the vitriol and recrimination that surrounded its groundbreaking 2000 decision to legally recognize gay and lesbian couples.
…
Although that absence of an impending vote may be what’s keeping things civil, people involved in the debate have noticed a change in atmosphere.
"It’s a very different tenor," said Beth Robinson, chairwoman of the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force, which supports gay marriage. "People have had an opportunity to come to terms. Vermonters have had eight years to see the two guys next door, or the two women down the street who have a legally recognized relationship under the civil unions law."
Ah yes… Now that they’ve had a chance to see how it works for themselves, and that the sky didn’t fall when same sex couples were allowed to have the same rights as opposite sex couples…tensions have eased, and people are more use to the idea….
"It was a time unlike anything since the Vietnam War era, when you had the sense that the whole world around you was divided," said David Moats, author of "Civil Wars: A Battle For Gay Marriage," a book about Vermont’s civil unions controversy.
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Last summer, the Legislature appointed an 11-member Vermont Commission on Family Recognition and Protection to explore the idea of gay marriage and hear how Vermonters feel about it. The panel, which opponents say is stacked with gay marriage supporters and have boycotted, has held seven hearings and has three more scheduled.
The hearings have generated plenty of input, but no name-calling or personal attacks.
James LaPierre, who has a civil union partner and two children, saw the contrast firsthand. He went to a 2000 meeting on civil unions intending to get up and speak, but he was intimidated by the atmosphere and kept quiet.
"People would stand up and go to the microphone and there was jeering and catcalling," said LaPierre, 43, a nurse from Burlington. "It was hateful, and scary."
Last month, LaPierre went to a hearing by the Commission on Family Recognition. This time, the gathering was "supportive" and he got up and spoke. But it had fewer people — about 100, by his count, compared with about 500 at the 2000 event.
"Instead of a hateful, unruly, mob-like meeting, it was civil and organized. There was representation of the other side, but only two or three people," he said.
Now…you see how that works? When people can see for themselves that gay folks aren’t monsters out to destroy America and Family Life and Moral Values things get a lot calmer.
Oh…wait…
Opponents believe the change in tone may have more to do with their boycott — and the lack of impending action — than acceptance of gay marriage.
There’s the reason things are more civil today in Vermont then they were in 2000. It’s the boycott. The bigots figured they were going to loose…probably even worse this time then in 2000 because their vitriolic hate looks so ugly in retrospect…and so they called a boycott of the town meetings. And so…surprise, surprise…things are a lot calmer now.
This isn’t so much an indication of progress, as a reminder that things would have been a lot calmer back then too, were it not for the hate mongers. Nobody’s really moved on this issue; the majority of Vermonters didn’t object to same sex marriage or they’d have thrown out of office all the politicians who supported it and that wasn’t what happened. Only the bigots care, and of course they still care as much now as they ever did. If you could teach a bigot something they wouldn’t be bigots. The only thing that’s changed in Vermont is that this time the bigots aren’t going to those town meetings to whip everyone into a frenzy of hate. So things are calmer. How…unsurprising.
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