Cameron has now documented Early Gay Death Syndrome (EGDS). According to this new research, which Cameron claims is the largest random sex survey ever conducted, the oldest male that could be found who engaged in homosexuality was 54 years old and the oldest female was 49. According to Dr. Cameron the reason for this is because the average life span of a homosexual is 20 plus years shorter than for a heterosexual.
According to Richard Rothstein at QueerSighted, this new Paul Cameron propaganda offensive is bases on his sex survey of a single Canadian community of just over 120, 000 adults. And you just know you can take Cameron’s word for it, that his methods and his data on this were all top notch…
The best part of this story is that Cameron put out a press release that suggests that he presented his latest research during yesterday’s sessions of the annual Eastern Psychological Association Convention in Philadelphia. According to his press release, "Drs. Paul and Kirk Cameron told attendees of the Eastern Psychological Association Convention…" In fact, he did not present and was not on the agenda at this meeting. The fact is that he roamed the public corridors of the convention venue and "told" doctors about his research. Cameron was neither a registered speaker nor a member of the convention faculty.
Yeah…and he once cited a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine, in one of his publications, as if it were an actual peer reviewed article. Trustworthy guy, eh? The Morals and Values crowd just loves him.
Nonetheless he will present this research to lawmakers and judges as data that was "presented" at this legitimate convention and it will be published (@ $27.50 per page) in a so-called scientific journal, a publication that will be slapped down on desks in court houses and legislatures and successfully used against us.
Yes. That’s how the game is played by the Morals and Values crowd. Rothstein gives us an insight into how junk like this effectively poisons the political process…
As an aside, I rarely reference my professional life, but for the purpose of this posting I will tell you that I have engaged in professional lobbying on behalf of private industry both in Albany and in Washington. And this kind of crap really resonates. If it’s easy to read, can be summarized on one official and slick looking sheet of paper, lists titles like PhD, MSS and ARNP and was published in a journal with an impressive name, congressional and legislative staffers and their bosses will not look beneath the surface. Only two things really matter: how will it play with voters and will you be supporting my campaign efforts.
(Emphasis mine…) So the Morals and Values crowd has understood for a long time now, not only that lies are effective, but Why they are effective and How to make them even more effective. And you thought it was us godless heathens who made the best liars.
I’m On The Lord’s Side…And That Must Mean You’re Not.
So after a couple weeks of dodging questions about why he’s busy helping a bunch of gutter crawling bigots pass an anti same-sex marriage amendment in his state, Colts Coach Dungy has finally decided to make it clear just exactly where he stands. Fine.
CARMEL, Ind. — Colts coach Tony Dungy said he knows some people would prefer him to steer clear of the gay marriage debate, but he used a speech Tuesday night to clearly stake out his position.
Dungy told more than 700 people at the Indiana Family Institute’s banquet that he agrees with that organization’s position supporting a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as between one man and one woman.
"I appreciate the stance they’re taking, and I embrace that stance," Dungy said.
…
"IFI (The Indiana Family Institute) is saying what the Lord says," Dungy said. "You can take that and make your decision on which way you want to be. I’m on the Lord’s side."
Pisst…Hey…Tony… The Ku Klux Klan thinks they’re on the Lord’s side too. You think you’re not like them because you aren’t burning any crosses Tony? Think again…
The coach said his comments shouldn’t be taken as gay bashing, but rather his views on the matter as he sees them from a perspective of faith.
"We’re not anti- anything else. We’re not trying to downgrade anyone else. But we’re trying to promote the family — family values the Lord’s way," Dungy said.
Like hell you’re not trying to downgrade anyone. You just said there that anyone who supports equal marriage rights for same sex couples is a tool of Satan. Here’s what comes of that Mr. Righteous Man-o-god…
(New York City) Four men charged in the brutal homophobic assault on gay entertainer Kevin Aviance last summer pleaded guilty in a Manhattan court Wednesday.
Avaince was attacked as he left the Phoenix bar last June. The four beat him unmercifully, breaking his jaw, doing serious damage to one leg and leaving him with cuts and bruises over most of his body.
As they attacked him the four young men yelled homophobic slurs.
(Bartow, Florida) Two men charged with the brutal murder of a gay Winter Haven man have been ordered held without bail following a brief court appearance.
William David Brown Jr., 20, and Joseph Bearden, 21, are charged with first-degree murder and armed robbery in the killing of Ryan Keith Skipper, 25.
The prosecutor said he expects to argue for the maximum sentence on the grounds the killing was a hate crime.
Police had originally begun investigating the murder as a robbery gone wrong until associates of the accused said that Skipper had been killed after coming on to the men.
Skipper’s body was found last week on the side of a road. He had been stabbed more than 20 times.
…
Skipper is described by friends as outgoing and gentle. He was studying computer sciences.
On the Lord’s side. On the Lord’s side. Right. You and every segregationist who ever lived and claimed that mixed race marriages were against the Lord’s will.
I would really, really like it if someday some reporter got in this jackass’s face and asked him straight-up if he thinks that since he’s on the Lord’s side, are people who support same sex marriage on Satan’s side. And if they are, would his sport be better off if Satan’s followers stopped attending games. You want it to be a wholesome family experience, don’t you Tony?
The most commonly approved form of marriage in the past (and the one mentioned most often in the first five books of the Old Testament) was polygamy – one man, many women. Some societies also countenanced polyandry – one woman married to several men. In China and parts of the Sudan, when two families wished to make an alliance but didn’t have an eligible daughter or son still alive, marriages were often arranged between one child and the ghost of another. And at least one society, the Na of China, existed for thousands of years without marriage…
Oh…did you mean the Judeo-Christian tradition…?
The Judeo-Christian tradition does not speak with one voice on marriage. Polygamy, divorce and concubines are all part of the Old Testament tradition. Jesus broke with older religious traditions in prohibiting divorce for men as well as for women. But in doing so, he also challenged the traditional right of a man to take a second wife if the first wife was sterile. Ever since, the validity of a marriage in the Western tradition has not been dependent on ability to procreate.
And despite Jesus’ rejection of divorce, Christianity did not sanctify marriage. (It wasn’t made a sacrament until 1215). In fact, he urged his followers to remain unmarried or leave their families to go off and spread the Christian word.
His definition of family was based not on biological or legal ties but on the community of believers. When he was dying on the cross, he did not ask a disciple to help his mother. Instead, he called a disciple forward and said to his mother, "Dear woman, here is your son." And to the disciple, he said, "Here is your mother."
Perhaps you meant the Western tradition…
The claim that marriage existed unchanged for thousands of years is also false. Two hundred years ago, the generation that produced the Enlightenment and the American Revolution overturned thousands of years of tradition by insisting that the older generation must allow young people to choose their own mates on the basis of love rather than to further their parents’ economic and political ambitions.
Even more radical and recent has been the innovation of giving wives and husbands equal rights in marriage. Until the late 19th century, a husband legally owned all his wife’s property and earnings and could do with them what he pleased. He had the right to physically "correct" his wife and even imprison her in the home for disobedience.
When courts began to treat wives as separate legal entities with their own individual rights, defenders of "traditional" marriage predicted that such a radical social change would "destroy domestic tranquility" and subvert the "order of society."
Actually, making women the literal property of their husbands is probably Exactly what the religious right wants. Tradition.
Go read the whole thing. I haven’t read her book, but I suspect the subtitle, How Love Conquered Marriage, is one to strike absolute terror in the hearts of the kook pews.
Via The Stranger blog (SLOG)… The adventures of Reverend Ken Hutcherson, international man of theocracy…
March 16, 2007
Dear Prayer Warrior,
Thank you for praying for my call to the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. It went very well.
I was honored to receive a commission by the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives as a Special Envoy in the following areas: Adoptions, Family Values, Religious Freedom, and Medical Relief, which allowed me to meet with the Latvian government.
The purpose of the trip to Latvia was to support the Latvian government as they stand for Family Values and Religious Freedom in their country.
I met with all the Religious Leaders in Latvia except two. I also met with the Ministers of Integration, Minister of the Interior, and the Minister of Human Rights and Parliament.
The successful result of the meeting was to foster complete agreement to work together in the future to strengthen family values. All agreed to keep traditional values of marriage between a man and a woman and ensure that marriage remains an institution between a man and woman as well as ensure religious freedom within the country.
During my meeting with the American Embassy I expressed that many in the Latvian Parliament and many of the Latvian people believe that they in the American Embassy support the Homosexual agenda. I talked to them about their funding of many Homosexual groups against the wishes of the majority of the Latvian people.
Pray that my discussions will produce a change of policy. That is what we are expecting when we receive the full report that I requested from the Embassy.
Continue to pray that the new influence that God has granted through me serving as a special envoy for the White House will be effectively used as I deal with the adoption issue in the United States this next week.
Your Pastor,
Hutch
Hutcherson, you may recall, is the righteous man of the cloth who threatened Microsoft with a boycott if they didn’t stop supporting the inclusion of gay people in Washington State’s equal opportunity law. And now that it’s been passed, he’s leading a petition effort to get it repealed. He’s also been a vigorous fighter against gay marriage equality.
So the Bush administration gives him a Special Envoy commission from the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives, and he uses that to take the fight against gay equality overseas.
"The average gay couple is not interested in equality," Hutcherson says. "The average gay couple is interesting in suppressing anyone who disagrees with them."
…And you have to know that they’re not just targeting former Soviet block states. I’m convinced that the uproar over gay equality in the Anglican Church has been largely orchestrated by the American right wing. If you don’t think so too, maybe this investigative series by Jim Naughton for the newsletter of the Washington Diocese will make you think again. If Europe, and the rest of the civilized world, think that the stomping of American religious kooks has nothing to do with them, they need to get a clue. They’re already stomping inside your territory too…you just aren’t paying attention yet.
WASHINGTON, March 14 — Asked if she believed homosexuality was immoral, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, initially said Wednesday that it was for "others to conclude," but later issued a statement saying she did not think being gay was immoral.
Her remarks came a day after Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he should not have publicly expressed his personal view that homosexual acts were immoral and akin to adultery, a position that he said was a factor in his opposition to gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military. His views had appeared in The Chicago Tribune on Monday.
A rival of Mrs. Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois was asked the same question three times on Wednesday and sidestepped the issue, according to an article in Newsday.
But a spokesman for Mr. Obama said last night that the senator disagreed with General Pace’s remarks and believed that homosexuality was not immoral.
In case you missed it, Clinton’s backtracking statement "saying she did not think being gay was immoral" was also issued by a "spokesman". Compare and contrast…
Since 1993, I have had the rich satisfaction of knowing and working with many openly gay and lesbian Americans, and I have come to realize that "gay" is an artificial category when it comes to measuring a man or woman’s on-the-job performance or commitment to shared goals. It says little about the person. Our differences and prejudices pale next to our historic challenge. Gen. Pace is entitled, like anyone, to his personal opinion, even if it is completely out of the mainstream of American thinking. But he should know better than to assert this opinion as the basis for policy of a military that represents and serves an entire nation. Let us end "don’t ask, don’t tell." This policy has become a serious detriment to the readiness of America’s forces as they attempt to accomplish what is arguably the most challenging mission in our long and cherished history.
So, dig it. After Pace babbles his mind about how homosexuality is immoral, two republicans, one a Virgina senator no less, and still in office, and the other a former senator and still a force in his party, decisively and very publicly rebuke the sentiment. Yet the current front runners for the democratic presidential nomination reflexively equivocate. And when they finally do say the right thing, they have to say it though a spokesdroid.
Teaching became a source of great satisfaction, and she earned a reputation as one of the best. It was in this capacity that the invitation came to conduct research with homosexuals. A very bright student in one of Hooker’s classes (1945) sought to extend the relationship outside of class, and in so doing met Hooker’s husband (she had married Donn Caldwell, a freelance writer, in 1941). As a couple, they were invited to social occasions with her student and his friends.
After several years, the former student began urging Hooker to conduct research with them. She finally did some exploratory research with them. However, her life had changed, including a divorce in 1947, so the project was put on ice. She was married again in 1951 in London, England to Edward Niles Hooker, a distinguished professor of English at UCLA.
In 1953, Hooker applied to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for a six-month grant to study the adjustment of nonclinical homosexual men and a comparable group of heterosexual men. If the study section thought it worthwhile, she would pursue it. The reply was not long in coming. John Eberhart, chief of the Grants Division, flew out to spend a day with her. The application, she was told, was quite extraordinary, especially because it was then the height of the McCarthy era. The legal penalties for homosexual behavior were severe. The psychiatric diagnosis was severe and pervasive emotional disorder. There were simply no scientific data about nonimprisoned, nonpatient homosexuals. Eberhart said, "We are prepared to give you the grant, but you may not receive it, and you won’t know why and we won’t know why." Not only did she receive it, but NIMH continued the renewal until 1961, when she received the Research Career Award.
Hooker’s research (1957) demonstrating that expert clinical judges could not distinguish the projective test protocols of nonclinical homosexual men from a comparable group of heterosexual men, nor were there differences in adjustment ratings, was validated soon thereafter by other investigators. Not until 1973, however, did the American Psychiatric Association delete homosexuality from its diagnostic handbook. Meanwhile, the gay and lesbian liberation movement in the 1960s took cognizance of these research findings. It was a source of great satisfaction for Hooker to have contributed in some measure to this new freedom and to a partial lifting of the stigma. Her life was immeasurably enriched by the research and by friendships with men and women across the entire spectrum of occupations and life styles.
Fifty years since Hooker next year. Fifty-three years since Kinsey. Over thirty since the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality as a category of mental illness. The science has been staring people in the face now for half a century. But the story of homosexual people, throughout the human experience, has been there for millennia for all our brothers and sisters to see clearly, plainly, unmistakeably. From the poets and story tellers of ancient Greece to the stories of countless gay men and women alive today, our essential humanity is there for anyone to see. But to see it, you have to want to.
And there’s the moral issue. Does the truth matter? If General Pace fails because he cannot see the people for the homosexuals, and whatever dogma or prejudice it is that’s telling him they are behaving in an immoral fashion regardless of what he can either see with his own two goddamned eyes, or learn any time he’s willing to take a stroll outside the door of his cheap conceits, then what of Clinton and Obama, and all the other cowardly democrats who would rather duck the issue then address it straight on? If the context is a question about the morality of homosexuality, and you believe that it is possible for a gay person to live decent, honorable, moral lives according to their nature, that they can have completely healthy and moral intimate relationships according to their nature, then how moral is it not to plainly say so?
Does the truth matter? You want to know why the republican machine keeps winning the "values" argument it isn’t because anyone with a spine is addressing their beliefs head-on. It’s because by equivocating they’re telling the voters they don’t think the truth matters. It’s one thing to say that we are not Gods, that we are not perfect, that we do not have the perfect God’s eye view of reality, of right and wrong. It’s another to act like you don’t care, or that it doesn’t matter.
Democrats need to stop being afraid to address moral questions. When did a political party that, at least since Roosevelt, championed the common working citizen, children, the needy, the environment, and the ideal of liberty and justice for all, suddenly loose its moral confidence? And in the face of what? A party dedicated to the ideal that greed is good? Rape the environment now because Jesus is coming later? The party of corpses floating in New Orleans? The party of lying the nation into war? The party of sexual purity for everyone but itself? Is this what they’re letting bully them into silence on the issue of the rights of gay people …?
Here’s a summary of Gingrich’s family life: 1) Gingrich marries his high school teacher, Jackie, who was seven years his senior; 2) Jackie puts Gingrich through college and she works hard to get him elected to the House in 1978 (Gingrich won partly because his campaign claimed that his Democratic opponent would neglect her family if elected — at that time it was common knowledge that Gingrich was straying); 3) Shortly after being elected, Gingrich separated from his wife — announcing the separation in the hospital room where Jackie was recovering from cancer surgery (the divorce was final in 1981); Jackie Gingrich and her children had to depend on alms from her church because Gingrich didn’t pay any child support; 3) Six months after the divorce, Gingrich, then 38, married Marianne Ginther, 30; 4) "In May 1999, however, Gingrich [55] called Marianne [48] at her mother’s home. After wishing the 84-year-old matriarch happy birthday, he told Marianne that he wanted a divorce." This was eight months after Marianne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; 5) In 2000, Gingrich, 57, married ex-congressional aide Callista Bisek, 34, with whom he was having a relationship while married to Marianne.
Its grotesque, watching the democrats fritter away the moral high ground to a pack of thugs who would have been gangsters had they not chosen to go into politics instead. The war and President Junior’s botching of it gives them a chance to forge a new governing majority, but they’ll loose it all again if they keep equivocating on questions of values and morality, and allow the republicans to once again define themselves as the champions of virtue and godliness. The answer to that question, "Do you believe homosexuality is immoral", should have been: "No. Adultery is immoral. Leaving your children destitute is immoral. Divorcing your wife after you found out she has multiple sclerosis is immoral. Morality isn’t a matter of what sex your partner is. It’s a matter of how you treat them. And if you can’t treat your spouse decently, if you can’t treat your own children decently, then who would you? This country can entrust itself to a government comprised entirely of homosexuals, all in faithful, loving same sex relationships, more then it dare one cheating wife abusing child neglecting heterosexual."
GILLETTE, Wyo. A lesbian couple in Gillette have been told they can’t receive communion at the church they’ve attended since 1998, in part because they publicly opposed a bill that would have barred Wyoming from recognizing gay marriages. Leah Vader and Lynne Huskinson have attended Saint Matthew’s Catholic Church since 1998, and were married two years ago in Canada. Earlier this year, when the Legislature considered a bill that would have barred Wyoming from recognizing such marriages, the two said the bill amounted to discrimination.
Last week, they got a letter from the Reverend Cliff Jacobson of Saint Matthew’s, telling them they can no longer receive communion, in part because of their public position.
Jacobson says the church reaches out to homosexuals, but that it must do so within its own moral structure. He says the Cheyenne Diocese played a role in the decision to bar the women from receiving communion.
(emphasis mine…) Yeah the church reaches out to homosexuals. With a clenched fist. This is just the first crack of the whip. They’ve been hinting for years now that they’ll start using communion, and possibly even excommunication, as a way of punishing dissent. It’ll come down on the gay people in the pews first, because we’re the easy target. But heterosexuals who don’t vote the way Pope Ratzinger dictates, or who are politically active in politically incorrect ways, will be next. Never doubt that.
The religious right is having another one of its puppet shows this weekend. This one is in San Francisco…which they insist was only chosen for the venue because of it’s abilty to host their event. Certainly not because they wanted to incite anti-gay passions in a city with a large gay population…
A two-day event called BattleCry starts Friday at AT&T Park, the downtown baseball stadium. Organizers say the gathering, which includes performances by Christian rock bands and inspirational speakers, is a way for young Christians to speak out against what they view as destructive cultural elements, including sex on television, obscene music and violent video games.
…
Tasha White, 18, attended the event last year and said it had opened her eyes to “a culture leading us into brokenness.”
“You look at Britney Spears, and what she did and that leads to divorce and rehab and drugs, and that’s a negative influence,” said Ms. White, who lives in nearby San Bruno and said she had had problems with under-age drinking herself. “And that’s not something I believe our generation should be looking forward to.”
Ms. White added that she did not think there was anything antigay about the event, though she believes gay people are “misguided.”
Mr. Luce echoed that sentiment, saying his group loves gay people, but does firmly believe their sexuality is sinful.
“We see homosexuality like a lot of other things that do harm to us, like lying, or cheating, or stealing,” he said, adding that he said he had seen studies suggesting that many gay people are depressed or unhappy. “And it’s not very loving to leave them in that state and not show them another way.”
It’s really touching how a movement that routinely lies through its teeth about homosexuals and what science reveals about sexual orientaion and family life teaches its puppets to say that homosexuality is as harmful as lying and cheating. And yes…these kids are being cynically used as puppets. Add to the long list of crimes against humanity perpetrated by the religious right, their willingness to take idealistic and passionate youth full of concern about the state of world and its people, cram their trusting heads full of tactical lies, and set them loose to destroy the very thing they’re so ardent to save. You could teach them to think for themselves, so they might find the answers this generation could not. But then they might question authority instead of "question homosexuality", and that would be a sin.
If you’ve followed the anti-gay agenda for very long, you’ve probably noticed a few dozen or so pat phrases that keep popping up, along with an assortment of words that don’t seem to mean the same thing in the twilight zone of the religious right that they do in the real world. As a public service, I thought I’d provide a few helpful definitions…
Homosexual: There is no such thing. Just people who keep having sex with persons of the same sex, no matter how much fear of God and acid disgust and self loathing we manage to cram into them.
Gay: A word that was full of cheerful carefree happiness until the homosexuals turned it into a code word for disgusting behavior.
Family: A word that was full of loving, nurturing, caring, security and warmth until we turned it into a code word for heterosexual supremacy.
Family Friendly: The civil way of saying "No Faggots Allowed".
Homophobe/Homophobia: Made up words, created by militant homosexual activists to stigmatize Christians who speak out against sin. Similar to how the word ‘xenophobe’ was invented by bleeding heart one-world liberals to stigmatize patriots who merely wish to keep their communities safe from foreigners and immigrants. Other invented words include Hydrophobic and Hydrophobia.
Ex-Gay: A person who is no longer one of those homosexuals that do not really exist.
Ex-Gay (II): A person who found freedom in the ten commandments of God, and the 1,287,094,873,922 1/2 commandments of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Ex-Gay (III): A person who did not question homophobia.
Ex-Gay (IV): A person graced by Christ after 50 years of prayer and repentance with blessed relief from the sexual temptations they had when they were a hot and bothered teenager.
SADD (Same Sex Attraction Disorder): Since there are no homosexuals, we needed a new word for people who keep having sex with persons of the same sex. And it had to be the opposite of ‘Gay’, since that’s how those people who aren’t homosexuals keep identifying themselves and we must disagree with everything they have to say about who and what they are.
Struggling with Homosexuality: A person with Same Sex Attraction Disorder who keeps insisting that there isn’t anything wrong with them.
Struggling with Homosexuality (II): A person with Same Sex Attraction Disorder who might be cured if only we can love them into hating themselves just a little more.
Struggling with Homosexuality (III): A person with Same Sex Attraction Disorder whose life is careening downward in a reckless spiral of sexual addiction, prostitution, crime and drugs. If only they had listened to us when we told them that homosexuals only lead lives of sexual addiction, prostitution, crime and drugs.
Brokenness: What makes abusing homosexuals justified. ie: if they’re already broken to begin with, then this can’t really be hurting them.
Sexual Sin/Addiction: Having sex and liking it.
Sexual Sin/Addiction (II): Having sex and not being ashamed of it.
Sexual Sin/Addiction (III): Having sex with the one you love and feeling blessed.
Transformed by Christ: Still paying money to their ex-gay ministry.
Found Freedom From Homosexuality: Now employed by their ex-gay ministry.
False Image: What a yellow wall constructs to convince itself that it’s yellow.
Misguided: You’re ignoring me.
Gender Confusion: You don’t fit into any of my gender stereotypes, so you must be confused.
Gender Confusion (II): Your attractiveness is challenging my heterosexuality, so you must be confused.
Gender Confusion (III): Your gender non-conformity is confusing me so I must beat the living crap out of you.
Homosexual Lifestyle: All our most disgusting and perverted sexual fantasies and disorders bundled together and tied with a little ribbon of love, placed on the backs of homosexuals. The cross we nail homosexuals to so they can die for our sins.
Homosexual Agenda: A homosexual who thinks they should be treated just like anyone else.
Militant Homosexual Agenda: A homosexual who expects to be treated just like anyone else.
Militant Homosexual: A homosexual who thinks there isn’t anything wrong with being a homosexual.
Militant Homosexual Activist: A homosexual acting like they think there isn’t anything wrong with being a homosexual.
Love The Sinner: Remember how Lenny in Of Mice And Men loved his puppy? We love you just as much.
…I believe this is a vital issue in the life of the church. The hope of wholeness and holiness of life is integral to the Gospel message. Jesus didn’t die on the cross to save us from throwing gum wrappers on the sidewalk or using the wrong fork to eat our tofu, he died to save our deepest selves from our darkest sins. And, because we are created with human bodies full of hormones and fallen psyches full of what my friend Bill Stafford calls "disordered affections," many of those deepest sins will involve our sexuality. We are not given new life and new power in Christ so we can do what we darn well please. We are not our own, we are bought with a price, says St. Paul. Therefore, he says, we are to glorify God with our bodies.
…
In August of 21003, ECUSA’s General Convention created an uproar when it decided to endorse and bless the consecration to the office of bishop a man publically and proudly living a homo-erotic relationship. This unprecedented decision–made in the face of international pleas that it not take place–created an uproar in the whole Christian and, indeed, the entire mono-theistic world. The Anglican Communion, under the direction of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, created a commission to explore how the communion could and should respond to this provocative, unilateral action by one small branch of the Anglican Communion…
…
The Episcopal Church needs to be called to just the sort of repentance and humility it says it believes. Only that sort of clear, forthright repentance can lead to reconciliation…
Church ousts him after ‘inappropriate relationship’
An Orange Park priest and leading voice in the theologically conservative Anglican movement in America has been stripped of his clerical credentials after having "an inappropriate relationship" with an adult female church member, the parish’s top lay leader said Monday.
The Rev. SAMUEL C. PASCOE was removed Feb. 10 from his position as senior rector at Grace Church (Anglican) and lost his ministerial license as a result of the relationship, said David Nelson, senior warden of the former Episcopal congregation.
Pascoe, who is married with three sons, said he couldn’t comment on the situation and referred all questions to Nelson.
Pascoe, 56, for several years has been an outspoken critic of the Episcopal Church USA for what he and others see as the denomination’s increasingly progressive interpretation of Scripture and its growing acceptance of homosexuality.
When the denomination elected an openly gay priest as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, Pascoe helped lead a movement that resulted in his and several other parishes quitting the denomination and its Jacksonville-based Episcopal Diocese of Florida. He sharply criticized Florida Bishop John Howard for refusing to quit the national church.
"He’s known nationally, for sure, and he’s probably the biggest player in Florida," said David Virtue of Virtueonline.org, an Internet-based Anglican news and commentary site with about 4 million readers.
Pascoe led his parish into the Anglican Mission in the Americas, then orchestrated a $4 million fundraising campaign to build new facilities after the congregation left Grace Episcopal property in 2006, Virtue said.
Virtue said the tragedy isn’t for the Anglican movement but for Pascoe and his family.
"He is a godly evangelical who struggled for the faith, led his parish out … and started all over again, and then suddenly this," Virtue said. "It defies all reason."
The Rev. Kurt Dunkle, a spokesman for Howard and the newly installed rector at Grace Episcopal Church, said the diocese has no comment.
Nor did the Rev. Neil Lebhar, a spokesman for the Anglican Alliance of North Florida and another leader of the region’s Anglican movement.
Nelson said the parish was informed of the relationship and Pascoe’s status during Ash Wednesday services last week and again in services Sunday.
"It’s a painful thing that has taken place," Nelson said. "And it’s difficult for Sam given the comments he has made" on issues of sexual morality.
Ah…just blame the homos. That’s the routine in that glass house you call a church isn’t it? It isn’t Sam’s fault, whatever he did that was…inappropriate. It’s ours…right? Because Gene Robinson became a bishop poor Sam just lost all his moral bearings and he couldn’t help himself. Blame Gene Robinson. Sam’s a righteous man of God so it can’t be his fault he’s a jackass. It has to be the gays fault. Blame us. That’s what you think we were put on this earth for after all, isn’t it?
They say that fundamentalism springs from fear of the unknown. They say it’s a retreat from reality into the comfort of dogma: a mental padded cell where no doubt ever disturbs the peaceful tranquility. It is a place they say, where there are no questions, no doubts, only comfortable certainties. A place where you don’t have to think for yourself, and most importantly, where you are not responsible, only forgiven.
I disagree. Fundamentalism I believe, springs not from fear of the unknown, but from fear of the people next door. Fear that they can cope with the world as it is, better then you can. Resentment of their courage in facing a world that you cannot. Envy that turns into hate. Fundamentalism doesn’t so much give you a place to hide from the world that the rest of us manage, somehow, to go on living in, as give you permission to put your thumb into our eyes.
Here, Mara Schiavocampo captures Peterson Toscano in a couple all-too-brief passages from his one man play, Doing Time In The Homo No-Mo Halfway House. She intercuts excerpts from Peterson’s play, and an interview with him, with an interview of John Smid inside his little ex-Episcopalian church, turned conversion therapy camp. There’s a moment in the video with that’s telling, and it comes when Peterson explains how he finally had to ask himself one day, what he was doing to himself, and John he insists that The Truth…The Truth…The Truth…has set him free…
The Truth…The Truth…The Truth… Jacob Bronowski in his magnificent book and BBC series on the history of science, The Ascent of Man, devoted an entire episode to the difference between truth and dogma, titled Knowledge or Certainty. He begins with the face of his friend, Stephan Borgrajewicz who, like himself, was born in Poland. And he asks us, how well, how precisely, can we describe this man’s face? He asks a painter to render it, and says…
We are aware the these pictures do not fix the face so much as explore it; that the artist is tracing the detail almost as if by touch; and that each line that is added strengthens picture but never makes it final. We accept that as the method of the artist. But what physics has now done is to show that that is the only method to knowledge. There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. That is the human condition; and that is what quantum physics says. I mean that literally.
This episode is the heart of the entire series. In it, Bronowski calmly and methodically rips to bits the view that science is only about dry facts and figures. It is a method of knowledge he insists…a very human one. We are not Gods, we do not have the perfect God’s eye view of reality. So we must approach what we know with humility, and question it, and test it, and verify it, because we do not have that perfect absolute knowledge of Gods. We can be right, we can be wrong, but when we do not test our knowledge against reality, when we set ourselves apart from that need to test our understandings and let nature speak its truths for itself, we open the door to the worst that is possible within us. And that worst has no bottom. Bronowski ends the episode on one of public television’s most powerful, most moving moments, and it ends as it began, with the face of Stephan Borgrajewicz, many years younger, taken when he was imprisoned in a concentration camp…
We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people. The truth John, is that you won’t stop forcing gay teens through your program against their will, because it’s the ones that are comfortable with who they are that you need to force your cheapshit cowardly self loathings into the most. The truth John, is that you sold out every moment of pure and honest happiness you could ever have had, for the sake of pleasing a world that Still thinks you’re a pervert. The truth John, is that now you can’t bear to see a happy, well adjusted gay kid, because they remind you of everything you could have been, everything you could have had. The truth is the wall is yellow John. Take a look at it someday god damn you. An honestly lived life isn’t necessarily an easier one, but it’s…you know…Authentic and Real.
While the vast majority of Hillcrest’s gay population rejects the Bible, it may prove useful to them to at least consider what the Bible has to say about the self-destructive choices they are making. The Book of Deuteronomy reveals the high cost to a community or group of people who reject God’s commandments and laws:
"But if you refuse to listen to the Lord your God and do not obey all the commands and laws I am giving you today, all of these curses will come and overwhelm you: You will be cursed with confusion and disillusionment in everything you do, until at last you are completely destroyed for doing evil and forsaking me. The Lord will send diseases among you until none of you are left in the land you are about to enter and occupy. The Lord will strike you with wasting disease, fever, and inflammation. These devastations will pursue you until you die. The Lord will cause you to be defeated by your enemies. You will be oppressed and robbed continually, and no one will come to save you."
…and so on. Ever get the feeling when you hear people reciting those verses that they’re not so much warning their neighbors about God’s wrath, as cheering it on…? Anyway, Hartline’s post is pretty long and rant-rambling as you might expect from a babbling bible thumper, but here’s a couple passages from it that I think get to the meat of it. First, Hartline recounts his crusade against the annual San Diego (his hometown) Pride Day festival, and how the defiant San Diego gays just kept listening to Satan rather then the prophet Hartline…
During the San Diego City Council hearing on July 25, 2006, over 90 gay activists and their supporters showed up to influence the council’s decision to issue a proclamation to honor the San Diego Gay Pride organization and its annual events. Rather than acknowledge the terrible decisions that the group had made the previous year when San Diego Gay Pride had hired the network of sex offenders, the multitude of gay activists used the city council hearing to lambast Christians opposed to the pornographic gay pride events. In speech after speech, gay and lesbian gay pride promoters attacked Christians and their beliefs. It had now become perfectly clear that there would be no repentence on the part of those gay leaders who have been so determined to continue their rabid quest to indoctrinate San Diego’s youth into their crusade of sexual anarchy.
Well of course they only have themselves to blame for what happened next…
Several days later, the San Diego Gay Pride Festival turned from a celebration of homosexuality and pornography into a tragic blood bath as several gay males were severely beaten outside of the gay pride festival grounds (www.gaylesbiantimes.com/?id=8193&issue=979). The assaults were so severe that one of the victims, Oscar Foster, remained in intensive care for two weeks due to a fractured skull and mutilple facial injuries. Baseball bats and a knife were used in the horrific attacks. James Allen Carroll received eleven years in prison for attempted murder on the victims after accepting a plea bargain with prosecutors. Two other adult attackers also received lengthy prison terms for their roles in the heinous attacks.
Yes…he’s saying their that God sent those thugs to beat the living crap out of the homosexuals to punish them. A little further down Hartline makes it specifically and abundantly clear:
While there may not be any apparent moral conviction for embracing such anti-christian discrimination, is it possible that these same gay leaders will ever consider that their actions are reaping a judgment from God on their community? Is it actually possible that God is angry with their mockery of the Bible that has become a cornerstone of the gay community in San Diego? If so, will there be any reconsideration by San Diego’s gay community for their anti-god, anti-christian behaviors? Is Hillcrest being warned by God? What will happen if they don’t heed such warnings?
Although leaders of the San Diego homosexual movement have rejected any Biblical references to homosexuality and lesbianism as being a sin, perhaps it is time for them to rethink their conclusions. The Bible teaches a premise that the wages for sin include death. While most in the gay community reject that premise, is it possible, that in doing so, they could be wrong? Is it possible that God does judge those that harm children? Is it possible that God is now judging San Diego’s homosexual community for its continued promotion of rebellion against the Bible?
The wages of sin are death… But it wasn’t God striking down peaceful festival goers that day, it was a gang of gay hating thugs acting out in an atmosphere that had been charged for months with Hartline’s venomous accusations that San Diego Pride was facilitating pedophilia, and indoctrinating children into homosexuality. Hartline stoked a climate of hate in San Diego in which violence toward homosexuals attending Pride Day became practically inevitable. And now that it’s happened, he’s telling gay bashers yet waiting in the wings that they’re not responsible. Even if the blood of gay people is literally on their hands, Hartline says as far as God is concerned, that blood is upon the gays themselves. That club isn’t in your hands…it’s in God’s hands…so swing away because you’re only doing God’s will…God smites them through you… Black market arms dealers selling explosives to terrorists for money probably give more thought to the human lives they’re putting at risk then Hartline does.
This is how the game is played below the radar of the mainstream news media, that accepts at face value the protestations of the main religious right celebrities, that they love the sinner, and only hate the sin. It isn’t true. To a man, they all believe what Hartline so blatantly shouts there in that blog post: that violent attacks on homosexuals represents God’s judgment upon them…that violent attacks on homosexuals fulfill the will of God.
Couldn’t You At Least Have Offered A Moneyback Guarantee?
…and…a blender?
Here’s Peterson Toscano and Lance Carroll on the Montel Williams show, briefly discussing how they came to find themselves in reparative therapy. Two things are worth noting here: Peterson went in of his own free will, while Lance was forced into it by his parents. Peterson left of his own accord, finally accepting himself just as he was, and remained very close to both his parents. Lance is now estranged from both of his.
This conversation is all too brief, but I guess that’s the format of the Montel Williams show, to flit from one topic to another to another during the course of an hour. Someone should sit those two down together for a long talk on camera where they can talk about their experiences in more depth, how it felt, what it did to them, what their lives are like now: the one who went in of his own accord out of devotion to God, and the one who was forced in against his will.
And here’s a clip from a Boston Legal episode about a man suing his ex-gay ministry. Great line at the end…
John…are you reading this? Have you given Lance’s parents back their money yet? Bring families together do you? Ever tell Lance you’re sorry? Ever find where you buried your conscience? You had one once…didn’t you? Do you remember what it was like…way back then…to have a conscience…?
A Little Friendly Advice From The Great Unchurched…
Here’s a remarkably sane bit of commentary about the Anglican schism-in-progress over at the London Times Online: Pray Lift Your Eyes Above The Belt. The author, Libby Purves, notes that this isn’t the first time there has been outrage in the pews over inclusiveness.
We have seen this crab-scuttle towards Rome before. When the Anglican Synod accepted women priests in 1992 numbers of high-profile Anglicans turned Catholic in disgust. The other theological differences — the Real Presence in the Eucharist, Papal infallibility, priestly celibacy — seem suddenly no longer to matter, compared with the horrible prospect of women priests.
The following is the sound of a nail being squarely hit by a hammer…
It would be refreshing if the Churches would step back from this stance, and make it clearer that the evil in adultery is not the sexual act but the betrayal of trust, the cruelty, the endangering of children’s happiness. The deep wickedness of rape and paedophilia is not about desire but about misuse of power, invasion, oppression and injury. The sinfulness of promiscuity and prostitution is not about sex but about using another human being for transient pleasure without caring for the physical and emotional damage you do. The Church’s ministry to gays could preach only honesty, gentleness, and commitment, rather than agonising about genital practices. Christianity could just grow up, and stop treating sex as if it were innately toxic or radioactive and yet irresistibly interesting.
Yes.
Let the Churches concentrate on condemning promiscuity, infidelity, exploitation, predation — whether gay or straight. Nobody asks them to go the full Gay Pride, bathhouse-culture route; but let them recognise kindness and mutual support as virtues, and bless all honest unions. Let them condemn proselytising from either side, making it clear that there is nothing cool or clever about random sexual tourism, any more than there is anything evil in being born gay. It just happens. Being gay can, without doing any violence to the Gospels, be accepted as a potential route to holiness.
It won’t be. They’ll squabble and fudge and cling to their hierarchies and their terrors, and some will scuttle to Rome and Rome will feel smug. And the rest of society will sigh and turn away, thinking that Christianity has nothing to offer. Howl, howl, howl!
Yes, yes, yes. Go read the whole thing. This has been your morning dose of Yes There Is Sanity In This World Now Go Get On With Your Own Life…
A gay Baltimore man who’s fighting to keep his late partner buried in rural Tennessee may have to sell his car and home to fund the legal battle.
Kevin-Douglas Olive said the parents of his late partner, Russell Groff, have appealed a court ruling that granted Olive an early win in the case. The appeal effectively restarts the case, making progress a costly proposition.
Olive said he’s committed to continuing a case in which he’s already invested $8,000 — but fears his legal bills may demand another $20,000.
"I’ll do what I gotta do," he said, "but they’re telling me to expect to spend a lot more than I spent before."
Read more at the Washington Blade’s site Here. The article references the comments from the Groffs to this post on my blog that I’m pretty certain are genuine, and which if they are they show just how far into the gutter hate has led them. They’ve lied through their teeth pretty consistently throughout about the condition of Russell’s gravesite and the events that led to their lawsuit, claiming that it was neglect when it was the removal of their cheapshit insults to the man Russell loved that provoked them into going to court.
Olive said Groff became so weak that he couldn’t leave his bed to urinate. To best help the man he loved, Olive would hold the bedpan for him.
“This is my soul mate, so I just did it,” he said. “You don’t even think about it. You just do it.”
Eventually, a staph infection that originated in Groff’s gall bladder spread throughout his body, and on Nov. 23, 2004, he died.
"I just collapsed on the floor of the hospital, face down and shrieking," Olive said. "Part of me knew that was entirely inappropriate, but part of me didn’t care.”
And how does an all-American God fearing family treat the man who cared for their son in his last hours. Well…like dogshit of course…
In keeping with the burial instructions signed Nov. 18, Groff was interred in the West Knoxville Friends Cemetery outside Knoxville, Tenn.
Olive said the grave, located about 30 minutes from Groff’s childhood home, was to remain simple and clean. But Groff’s mother, Carolyn, made changes.
"She made it into this shrine that really offended the sensibilities of the Quakers," he said, "because we’re all about simplicity."
Olive said Carolyn routinely decorated the grave. At one point, she posted a picture of Groff with his female prom date, plus a poem Carolyn wrote wherein her son essentially apologized for being gay.
"I was so insulted by seeing this,” Olive said. "She was trying to paint him as this repentive person who was heterosexual, really."
After seeing that picture and poem, Olive said he could tolerate no more and cleaned his husband’s gravesite.
"When I cleared the grave, that was the final straw for her,” he said. “She filed the caveat and challenged the will."
Without a doubt Russell knew what was coming after he died, and that was why he had that will drawn up. He loved Kevin, and he didn’t want him to go through the kind of hell he knew his parents were going to bring down on him. And without a doubt, the reason why the homophobes want to deny same sex couples not just the right to marry, but Any legal rights whatsoever, is Precisely so they can twist the knife in our guts, just like the Groffs are twisting the knife in Kevin’s. There is no other plausible reason for the all-out assault on any and every possible legal status for a same sex couple, other then to facilitate this kind of grotesque scorched earth warfare where even our lover’s graves aren’t safe. None. When they talk about fighting to preserve the sacred institution of marriage, what they mean is they’re fighting to preserve the right to dig up your spouse’s grave.
A Maryland judge upheld the will, on the staringly obvious grounds that Russell knew what he was doing when he made it. Russell saw it coming. He did the only thing the law in Maryland allows a gay man do, to to protect the man he loved from it. But the Groffs are bound and determined to bleed Kevin as much as they can because now all they have in their lives is how much they hate him. He’s having to sell off possessions now, and perhaps even his house in order to pay the legal bills over this continuing fight.
I want to ask everyone reading this blog to help him out in any way they can, however much. Do you believe in love? Did it make a difference in your life? Do you remember the first time someone you loved took you into their arms? Do you remember that first kiss? Does it make you angry that some people feel as though they have a god-given right to spit in your face whenever moments like those bring you joy and peace and contentment? Kevin-Douglas Olive watched the man he loved and was loved by die, and now he’s having to fight over the ground he laid his body to rest, and I think even more then money to pay the legal bills, it would help him now to know that there are people out here who Care.
Donations can be sent via mail to the Kevin Olive Defense Fund, c/o C.W. Hardy, 715 Park Ave., Apt. B, Baltimore, MD, 21201.
As a point of interest, it looks like Kevin’s lawyer is Mark Scurti. In fact some years ago I had his law firm, Scurti and Gulling do my own will, and Medical Directives document. They’re good people, known and respected in Baltimore’s gay community for their work fighting for our legal rights.
I don’t know why so many people seem so surprised about this…
The Enemy At Home – Dinesh D’Souza
Publisher Comments:
Whenever Muslims charge that the war on terror is really a war against Islam, Americans hasten to assure them they are wrong. Yet as Dinesh D’Souza argues in this powerful and timely polemic, there really is a war against Islam. Only this war is not being waged by Christian conservatives bent on a moral crusade to impose democracy abroad but by the American cultural left, which for years has been vigorously exporting its domestic war against religion and traditional morality to the rest of the world.
D’Souza contends that the cultural left is responsible for 9/11 in two ways: by fostering a decadent and depraved American culture that angers and repulses other societies — especially traditional and religious ones — and by promoting, at home and abroad, an anti-American attitude that blames America for all the problems of the world.
Islamic anti-Americanism is not merely a reaction to U.S. foreign policy but is also rooted in a revulsion against what Muslims perceive to be the atheism and moral depravity of American popular culture. Muslims and other traditional people around the world allege that secular American values are being imposed on their societies and that these values undermine religious belief, weaken the traditional family, and corrupt the innocence of children. But it is not "America" that is doing this to them, it is the American cultural left. What traditional societies consider repulsive and immoral, the cultural left considers progressive and liberating.
Taking issue with those on the right who speak of a "clash of civilizations," D’Souza argues that the war on terror is really a war for the hearts and minds of traditional Muslims — and traditional peoples everywhere. The only way to win the struggle with radical Islam is to convince traditional Muslims that America is on their side.
(emphasis mine) Note the appeals to traditional cultures scattered throughout. There’s a glaring problem at the core of the book, and what’s remarkable to me is that so many people see it, and yet they don’t. D’Souza’s book, which places the blame for the 9-11 terrorist attacks squarely on Liberals and western liberal democracy, has been disturbing the comfortable clubhouse atmostphere on the right ever since it came out. That’s not surprising. Here’s Stanley Kurtz, dancing around it…
Not only does D’Souza downplay and deny the profound influence of Islam on our current dilemma, he ignores an array of non-religious, or only marginally religious, factors that his own explanation is (or ought to be) directly tied to.
With all the post-9/11 attention to Islam, for example, we’ve given short shrift to Middle Eastern kinship structures-like the Muslim preference for marriage to the father’s brother’s daughter (see “Root Causes”). These marriage and family patterns inhibit political and economic development, block immigrant assimilation, and are indeed directly threatened by the sort of cultural productions D’Souza decries. Yet, while Islamists may seize upon Hollywood films and international productions of the Vagina Monologues as symbols of their underlying objections to modernity, the more important sources of conflict are the distinctively Muslim social practices that generate such complaints to begin with.
In other words, if immigrant British Muslims weren’t secluding their daughters in hopes of preserving family honor and protecting an already promised marriage to a cousin back in Pakistan, they’d be far less upset with Western movies in the first place. What’s driving the distress is less the movies that a daughter sees at college than the fact that British daughters go off to college at all, freely meet men there, and freely choose their husbands from among those men. Other British immigrant communities, with less restrictive family practices, may occasionally grouse about cultural depravity. Yet the complaints are less frequent, less deeply felt, and far less deadly. It’s the marriage practice, not the movie, that counts.
To give us insight into the Jihadist loathing for American culture, D’Souza relies on the writings of the father of modern Radical Islam, Sayyid Qutb. Qutb spent two years in America and then returned to the Middle East thoroughly disgusted by American culture. He spent the rest of his life chronicling his hatred for America’s decadent society.
Here’s where D’Souza is dishonest or careless: He informs the reader that Qutb died in 1966. He fails to inform the reader that the time Qutb spent in America was between 1948 and 1950.
Since D’Souza blames our culture for much of the Islamic world’s animus towards America, this is no small matter. The culture of the 1940’s wasn’t what it is today. Perhaps Qutb was scandalized by pop culture products of the time like the overt raciness of “The Best Years of Our Lives” or the raw sexuality contained on the typical Bing Crosby record; the man was after all a lunatic. But the culture of the late 1940’s contained none of the things that D’Souza so obviously deplores and that he postulates are inflaming the Muslim world. The 1940’s had no filthy hippies, no gangsta rap, no gay weddings.
D’Souza may think it would be a swell thing for us to turn our cultural clock back to 1949. No big deal there – to each his own. The point is that even if D’Souza were able to wave a wand and pull off such a trick, the Jihadists wouldn’t care. Qutb briefly immersed himself in our late 1940’s incarnation and emerged full of hatred.
To his everlasting credit, Hewitt specifically denounces D’Souza’s central claim:
Second, and this is also no small thing, it’s not liberals’ fault. Radical Islam hates a respectable Church-going Presbyterian family man every bit as much as it hates a spoiled libertine like Paris Hilton. As far as radical Islam is concerned, the two are in the same basic class; they’re both infidels. Short of conversion or surrender, there is nothing our society can do to appease radical Islam.
This is all true…but the problem civilization faces today isn’t specific to radical Islam.
I think the best review of The Enemy At Home I’ve read so far is Bruce Bower’s over at The Stranger. But Bower, while conservative, isn’t a winger, and he is willing to name the nature of the betrayal that D’Souza’s book represents…
D’Souza (who says he is Catholic) invites us to “imagine how American culture looks and feels to someone who has been raised in a traditional society… where homosexuality is taboo and against the law…. One can only imagine the Muslim reaction to televised scenes of homosexual men exchanging marriage vows in San Francisco and Boston.” Let it be recalled that D’Souza is referring here to a “traditional society” in which girls of 13 or 14 are routinely forced to marry their cousins, and in which the groom, if his conjugal attentions are resisted on the wedding night, is encouraged by his new in-laws to take his bride by force. Such are the sensitivities that, D’Souza laments, are so deeply offended by the American left…
He’s quick to warn, moreover, that in discussing potentially troubling aspects of Muslim culture, “we should be on guard against the blinders of ethnocentrism.” In short, while inviting conservative Christians to buy the idea that Muslim family values are essentially equivalent to their own, he wants them to overlook the multitudinous—and profoundly disturbing—ways in which they aren’t. He labors consistently to minimize this value gap—and thereby reinforce his argument that today’s terrorism (far from perpetrating a centuries-long tradition of violent jihad) is, quite simply, a reaction to America’s post-’60s moral dissipation. He would have his readers believe that if only the U.S. returned to the values of the Eisenhower era, our Muslim adversaries would let us be. But he deliberately obscures the mountains of evidence that for “traditional Muslims,” even small-town 1940s America wouldn’t do.
The question is, would it even do for D’Souza and his neighbors in the kook pews. I’m not being melodramatic here.
For those who cherish freedom, 9/11 was intensely clarifying. Presumably it, and its aftermath, have been just as clarifying for D’Souza, whose book leaves no doubt whatsoever that he now unequivocally despises freedom—that open homosexuality and female “immodesty” are, in his estimation, so disgusting as to warrant throwing one’s lot in with religious totalitarians…the book he’s written is nothing less than a call for America’s destruction. He is the enemy at home. Treason is the only word for it.
Yes. Yes it is. And yet…how many times have we heard the pulpit thumpers of the religious right calling down God’s wrath on America for it’s sins? Didn’t Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwall state flatly, while the rubble that was once the World Trade Center was still smoldering, that America, specifically American immorality, was to blame for 9-11? Isn’t there a traveling preacher named Fred Phelps running around the nation hoisting signs at the funerals of dead American soldiers (like he did the funerals of gay people like Matthew Shepard), that praise the terrorists for killing them? The threat America, the threat civilization itself faces today, isn’t radical Islam, it’s religious fundamentalism. But you can appreciate why Kurtz and Hewitt are loath to say so…that’s a key part of the republican base nowadays after all isn’t it.
Critics on the right dance around one of the key distinguishing features of that fundamentalism, preferring to refer it delicately a reaction to "immodesty", but note that it isn’t the immodesty of males that’s the issue. Kurtz nearly says it when he talks about the culture of arranged marriages in Middle eastern cultures.
…for D’Souza, it’s enough to note that the virtues praised by most traditional cultures make up “pretty much the same list.” D’Souza goes so far as to equate “the traditional morality that holds sway in all traditional cultures” with the “virtual moral consensus in America prior to the 1960’s.”
That would certainly have surprised the 1878 Supreme Court, which unanimously rejected the practice of polygamy on the grounds of its incompatibility with democracy. (See “Polygamy Versus Democracy.”) Polygamy, the court said, embodies a “patriarchal principle” characteristic of societies in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa — a principle incompatible with the American system of government.
Now polygamous relationships where they’re entered into freely by both men and women don’t necessarily embody that patriarchal principal. But where it becomes an enforced polygyny that regards women as the property of men then it isn’t just incompatible with our system of government, it is anathema to the principals of individual liberty and equal justice that is its philosophical bedrock. You simply cannot sustain a democracy where people are literally regarded as property, as the United States found out during the horrors of our civil war. That includes women. And where you find this deeply entrenched religious fundamentalism, you inevitably find a bedrock of hatred toward sexual freedom. Fundamentalism hates all freedom, but in particular, it absolutely despises the sexual freedom of women.
After his 1983 graduation from Dartmouth College, D’Souza moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked for Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a conservative organization strongly critical of coeducation, affirmative action, and campus access to birth control. As writer and editor-in-chief for Prospect, the organization’s magazine, D’Souza wrote a March 1984 cover story identifying a Freshman undergraduate who had begun a sexual relationship with another student against her mother’s wishes. D’Souza offered details of the woman’s sex life, and criticized Princeton University for paying the student’s tuition fees after the student’s mother withdrew financial support.
The ensuing scandal was reported in The New York Times. D’Souza claimed that the woman’s name had been published as the result of a "proofreading error" and that he "care[s] about the girl; that’s why [he] wrote the story."
No, no…I strongly doubt that was any kind of accident. What D’Souza was doing there was little different from what the Saudi morality police do every day when they see women who, in their considered opinion, are behaving immodestly and smack them upside the head if they’re feeling good, or cut it off altogether if they’re feeling…well…traditional.
If you want to know where someone stands in the war between civilization and fundamentalism, their attitudes toward the dignity and equality of women is a good place to start looking. The fundamentalist hatred of modernity points back, time and again, to its core contempt for women. And the republican base is just brimming with it.
A few days ago I posted this cartoon about Bill Donohue (he of of the Catholic League) bellyaching that the Edward’s campaign had hired two "trash talking" bloggers, who in his esteemed opinion were anti catholic bigots. What had apparently set him off was the writing of one of them, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, about the Catholic Church’s war on contraception and abortion. Well…you can see where this is going…right?
Because I had the nerve to be critical of the Catholic church’s stance on birth control and abortion—nevermind their political opposition to distributing condoms to fight HIV, a stance that has helped usher thousands and possibly millions to their untimely deaths—I’ve gotten a number of letters from people who call themselves “Christians”, as Bill Donohue also calls himself.
Bill managed to get his faithful up in arms over what this woman wrote. Here is a sampling of what they wrote back…
Andy Driggers from Dallas, TX was also so moved by my criticisms of religious anti-choicers, that he wrote:
Problem with women like you, you just need a good fucking from a real man! Living in Texas myself, I know you haven’t found that real Texan yet. But once your liberal pro feminist ass gets a real good fucking, you might see the light. Until then, enjoy your battery operated toys b/c most real men wouldn’t want to give you the fucking you deserve b/c the shit that would come out of you ears.
An example, from Paul Bernard of Scottsdale, AZ:
i like the way you trash talk i don’t particularly want to have sex with you but i would like a blow job.
Bud Phelps, another person who opposes "bigotry", as defined by right wing shill Bill Donohue.
It’s just too bad your mother didn’t abort you. You are nothing more than a filthy mouth slut. I bet a couple of years in Iraq being raped and beaten daily would help you appreciate America a little. Need a plane ticket ?
Romanco De Leone was also moved by Donohue’s poignant claims about insulating the Catholic church from legitimate criticisms.
YOU RACIST WHORE. FAT UGLY BITCH. SUCK MY LONG COCK ASSHOLE I HOPE YOU KIDS NEVER LIVE AND YOUR PARENTS DIE A TRAGIC DEATH YOU ASSHOLE BITCH!
I HOPE YOUR WOMB IS BARREN AND YOUR CAREER PLUMMETS TO HELL YOU BITCH
Whore. Bitch. Slut. You just need a good fucking from a real man. There’s the enemy civilization is facing today. There’s the enemy civilization has always faced. And there’s the burning core of hatred it feels for it. We’ve taken their wimmin away from them. And with that comes all the primitive instincts for survival and aggression of the cornered savage. They despise civilization, because it frees women from obedience to them; and with that goes the only way they know how to sire children, and acquire status.
You can argue that American fundamentalists aren’t as violent as Islamic radicals in the grand scheme of things, but I would argue that’s because they don’t feel quite so powerless against their own societies as the Islamists do against the west. A decisive victory in the culture wars by liberals and moderates against fundamentalism, particularly in the struggle against the independence of the courts, a decisive shift in power toward the democrats and against the republicans, and I believe we’ll all be singing a different tune about that.
And Hewitt, perhaps, is more right then he knows. The church-going Presbyterian family man, provided he has even a vaguely live and let live attitude, is hated every bit as much, and regarded as no different at all, from the spoiled libertine in the eyes of the Fundamentalist. He could be opposed to abortion, and yet if he does not object to contraception then he might as well be an abortionist. He could be opposed to same-sex marriage and if he is willing to grant gay couples Any kind of legal status, even merely hospital visitation rights, then he might as well be a homosexual himself. If he is willing to grant people any kind of sexual freedom, no matter how limited, then he is the enemy, and he must be destroyed.
You can argue that the entire religious right mindset is one of assumed priviledge and status over others. That, we are the people of God and the rest of you are the devil’s tools attitude. Nationalism. Racism. Homophobia. But I am convinced now that it all reaches its climax in its need to dominate women. Reading the rhetoric and watching all the flag waving going back and forth between the middle eastern radicals and our own home grown ones since 9-11, I am convinced now that at its core the war between civilization and fundamentalism is a fight who owns women’s bodies. Everything else about it springs from that one central obsession. The attacks on science, the attacks on liberal democracy, public education, science, contraception, sexual license, pop culture…anything that enables a world where women might even want to choose for themselves is the enemy, and must be destroyed.
Even I think, the war on homosexuality. Notice how it’s almost always male homosexuality that they bellyache the most about. People smirk that it’s because lesbians titulate them, but in the kook pews lesbians are thoroughly destested too, because they reject men. But with gay males the hatred seems to burn a tad hotter, and I think it’s more then their regarding us as traitors to our gender. We’re the ones whose sexuality demonstrates that males can take their lovers as equals, that a male doesn’t have to be dominant, that he can be taken and well as take, can give themselves wholeheartedly to their mate as well as recieve, can…well…be fucked after all…and still be gloriously, assertively male. How do you beat into a woman’s head that men were created by God to be the head of the household, to which they must Gracefully Submit, when that kind of thing is going on? We are males whose sexuality completely denies the theology of natural male dominance. The street punk may feel his brittle manhood threatened by the sight of two guys holding hands and lash out, but this is why the mullahs say we have to be stoned to death. We break the sexual pecking order.
At the core of its hatred, with all it’s higher principles stripped away, fundamentalism is about women, of that I am currently convinced. Western civilization and its liberal democracies have taken their wimmin away. For that they have to be destroyed.
Is it really so surprising that a man who plastered the intimate details of a female college student’s sex life across the pages of his magazine because she was defying her parents, that rails against birth control, co-habitation and women who find fulfillment outside of the home, would write a book essentially siding with terrorists from a "traditional culture" that views rape as a legitimate means of controlling its women? No. Not really. What’s surprising is that more of them don’t say so outright like he did. I’ve been waiting now, pretty much since 9-11, for someone on the far right to write the book D’Souza did. If I’m surprised about anything, it’s that it’s taken so long.
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