You knew the ex-gay movement had no conscience when you saw them dragging contented, well adjusted gay teens into their reparative therapy chambers against their will. And if that didn’t cinch it, when you saw them opposing grade school anti-bullying reforms that sought to protect gay kids out of one side of their mouths, while out of the other insisting that they are being oppressed simply for who they are. Right? You knew this. Now behold David Elliott bellyaching in this PFOX press release that gay state representative Jay Fisette does not respect the rights of the rhetorically heterosexual…
When staffing the Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX) exhibit booth at the Arlington County fair last month, I spotted Jay Fisette, my elected county representative who self-identifies as gay. Two years ago at this fair, a gay man had assaulted me because he was upset with my ex-gay story of hope and change from a homosexual identity. Because I did not press assault charges, some gay activists and Fisette falsely claimed the assault never occurred.
When I saw Fisette at the fair this year, I had the opportunity to tell him the assault had actually occurred, no matter how much he may dislike ex-gays like me. I said, "I wanted to let you know that I was hit when I was working at this booth in a previous year." Fisette replied, "What happened to you wasn’t good, but neither is your message." I responded, "Everyone has their own opinion." Briskly, he replied, "No."
Fisette then looked at us and inquired, "Are you guys ex-gays?" Both myself and the other PFOX volunteer affirmed that yes, we are ex-gays. Fisette shook his head and hurriedly walked away.
Question: When Jay Fisette, an elected government official, says "No," does he mean that I do not have a right to my own opinion of not accepting the ‘gay’ label for myself? Or does he mean that he refuses to dialogue on the ex-gay issue?
Gay groups exhibit at this fair too. Does Mr. Fisette also believe that gay groups do not have a right to their own opinion? Or is the right of self-determination permitted only to gays like him?
The Washington D.C. Superior Court recently ruled that ex-gays are a protected class eligible for sexual orientation non-discrimination protection. Does Fisette agree that his county’s sexual orientation law also protects ex-gays?
Jay Fisette is an elected official in Virginia and I would hope that elected officials are tolerant toward others, regardless of their sexual orientation.
To someone unfamiliar with the events described therein, the press release reads like a cry for help amidst the onslaught of the militant homosexual agenda. But to anyone else its in-your-face, any-lie-you-can-get-away-with-oh-see-my-golden-halo mendacity is grotesque. Also par for the course when it comes to PFOX, which is to integrity in discussions concerning human sexuality as FOX News is to integrity in journalism. Let’s start with the biggest whopper first…
The Washington D.C. Superior Court recently ruled that ex-gays are a protected class eligible for sexual orientation non-discrimination protection.
In 2002, the group applied to secure a display at the National Education Association’s annual convention. PFOX submitted an application, signed a deposit check, and prepared its exhibit: an educational display, it claimed, “to promote tolerance and equality for the ex-gay community.” The NEA denied PFOX’s application, citing limited booth space. PFOX suspected there was another motive at play: sexual orientation discrimination.
In 2005, PFOX filed a discrimination claim with the D.C. Office of Human Rights against the NEA for “refusing to provide public accommodations to ex-gays.” When the OHR sided with the association, PFOX appealed. D.C. Superior Court Judge Maurice Ross handed down the decision in June of this year: PFOX’s discrimination complaint was again denied.
But Ross handed PFOX a symbolic victory. While he decided in the NEA’s favor, Ross also held that ex-gays should, in fact, be protected under the sexual orientation clause of the D.C. Human Rights Act. In Ross’ view, the Human Rights Act protects not only groups defined by “immutable characteristics,” as the Office of Human Rights’ decision claimed. The act also protects groups defined by “preference or practice”—like people who previously “practiced” gayness and now “prefer” to practice heterosexuality.
…
PFOX’s celebratory press release about the ruling didn’t mention that the judge saw fit to make an analogy to the KKK. The embrace of D.C.’s sexual-orientation law was a bit of a departure for PFOX, which has spent most of its history rallying against anti-discrimination protections for gays, lesbians, and transgender people…
Dig it…PFOX Lost that case. The judge, in agreeing that ex-gays fall within the protections of the D.C. Human Rights Act, was basically smacking the Office Of Human Rights upside the head for arguing that the act only protected those groups with immutable characteristics. Yes…that’s what they argued. HuH?
A person’s religious beliefs for example, are chosen. Going to church and worshiping in the manner your conscience dictates is a chosen behavior. These sorts of chosen behaviors, expressions of a person’s deepest convictions and conscience, deserve the same protections under law as characteristics of race and gender. And in fact, the first civil rights laws I am made to understand, were passed in New York City ages ago…to protect Irish Catholics.
It’s that Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness thing. Which…ironically…the religious right absolutely despises when it’s granted to the heathens too. But it protects both them as well as the likes of me, and a decent society respects that right to conscience in all its citizens. Even the morons.
PFOX lost the case, because the judge also recognized the right of the NEA to exclude groups based on the content of their message. The same right in other words, that gives the New York City Hibernians the right to exclude gay Irish from their Saint Patrick Day parade, also gives the NEA the right to exclude groups that promote anti-gay intolerance. Groups like…oh…PFOX…
In 1998, two dozen of the country’s leading Christian Right groups convened in Colorado Springs, Colo., at Focus on the Family’s sprawling headquarters complex. Led by Janet Folger of the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, the coalition of anti-gay groups called themselves "Truth in Love." They decided to spend $600,000 on advertisements in the New York Times and USA Today to try to make "ex-gay" a household word.
Folger spelled out the new strategy in an NPR interview, saying, "That ex-gays exist shatters the foundation of the homosexual movement." On ABC’s "Nightline," she admitted to wanting to imprison gays through enforcing anti-sodomy laws that were later thrown out by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. Regardless, Truth in Love officials maintained that their message was one of hope and compassion.
Initially, ex-gay therapists and ministers were elated at the money and attention from the wealthy and powerful Christ Right groups that had shunned them for decades. In 1999, the Family Research Council, created as a political arm of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, gave $80,000 to fund PFOX, or Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays. In return, PFOX president Anthony Falzarano – a former male prostitute and confidante of closeted prosecutor Roy M. Cohn, the rabid anti-communist who persecuted homosexuals before dying in 1986 from complications of AIDS – lobbied to keep anti-sodomy laws from being repealed in Louisiana.
Today, PFOX is headed by Regina Griggs, the mother of an openly gay son. The group’s goals have as much to do with transforming public schools as they do with changing people’s sexual identities. In a move its officials aim to replicate nationally, PFOX, with the help of Alliance Defense Fund and the Thomas More Law Center ("Christianity’s answer to the ACLU"), sued the Montgomery County School District in Maryland for the right to operate a high school ex-gay club. PFOX lost the suit but continues to distribute ex-gay literature in Maryland schools.
For a flavor of how PFOX views same sex relationships…try their article on same-sex marriage…
From a young age, I was exposed to explicit sexual speech, self-indulgent lifestyles, varied GLBT subcultures and gay vacation spots. Sex looked gratuitous to me as a child. I was exposed to all-inclusive manifestations of sexuality including bathhouse sex, cross-dressing, sodomy, pornography, gay nudity, lesbianism, bisexuality, minor recruitment, voyeurism and exhibitionism. Sado-masochism was alluded to and aspects demonstrated. Alcohol and drugs were often contributing factors to lower inhibitions in my father’s relationships.
My father prized unisex dressing, gender-neutral aspects and a famous cross-dressing icon when I was eight years old. I did not see the value of biological complementing differences of male and female or think about marriage. I made vows to never have children since I had not grown up in a safe, sacrificial, child-centered home environment. Due to my life experience, I ask, "Can children really perform their best academically, financially, psychologically, socially and behaviorally in experimental situations?" I can tell you that I suffered long term in this situation, and this has been professionally documented.
PFOX is part and parcel of the religious right’s Ex-Gay dog and pony show, and that show is not about, as they claim, helping people overcome unwanted same-sex attractions, but giving bigots an excuse to blame gay people for their own persecution. If the gays don’t want to be discriminated against they can always change… This is what that "change is possible" rhetoric is all about. Change is possible, so if that hospital shuts a gay man out of his dying lover’s room because only real, as opposed to homosexual fake families are allowed to be together, if a lesbian’s boss fires her because the company doesn’t want sexual deviants in the work force, if a gay teenager got the crap beaten out of him because normal kids are disgusted by homosexuals, it’s their their fault because they choose to live the homosexual lifestyle.
Which brings me to the other big whopper in David’s press release…
Two years ago at this fair, a gay man had assaulted me because he was upset with my ex-gay story of hope and change from a homosexual identity. Because I did not press assault charges, some gay activists and Fisette falsely claimed the assault never occurred.
I’d previously posted on PFOX’s rather hysterical claims a homosexual activist assaulted an ex-gay at the Arlington County Fair. At the time I noted only suspect websites catering to the religious right were reporting on the supposed incident.
Bravo to editor Dave Roberts at Ex-Gay Watch for undertaking an investigation. Roberts contacted the only gay organization with a booth at the fair, the Arlington Gay and Lesbian Alliance. He also contacted the fair’s event manager and the Arlington County Police Department and strangely no one had heard of such an incident. Roberts wrote:
We contacted the Arlington PD and ended up speaking with John Lisle of the Media Relations/Legislative Affairs Office. He had no initial knowledge of such an incident. After checking briefly, he again said that no one was aware of such an incident. So we sent a copy of the PFOX statement to him at which time he agreed to check more thoroughly. After over two days of research, there was nothing he could add to his statement; no report exists and no one recalls such an incident.
Mind you…this was in a fair area packed with people. And nobody saw this attack? Ah Ha says PFOX…but one of the officers Did Confirm It Happened….!
On September 10, we received the following email from John Lisle, our contact at the ACPD. It was our original inquiry to him that started their investigation into the matter and we asked that he let us know if any new information turned up. This was also posted to the original thread by a commenter about an hour after we received it.
One officer told me today he was on patrol at the Fair when a woman approached him and told him a man had knocked over pamphlets at the PFOX booth and assaulted another man there.
The officer then spoke to the alleged victim. He did not want to press charges and therefore no written report was filed.
Based on the description the officer was given, he located the suspect at the Fair. Another officer escorted that gentleman off the Fair grounds.
This was quite exciting, as up to now we were coming up dry everywhere. Contrary to the way it has been framed by some, this obviously isn’t proof of an assault — even the police have no witnesses — but it is something. Clearly the PFOX workers had talked with the officers and we were able to exchange questions with them through Lisle over the next week or so.
We first verified the place and time. Whatever it was, it did in fact occur at approximately 5:00 PM ET, Saturday, August 18, at the PFOX booth located inside the indoor section of the Arlington County Fair. One can get a general idea of how the booths were arranged by the photograph to the left, however we were told that it was more crowded Saturday evening than in this photograph. This was also the time frame during which two witnesses told us they saw what they called a “heated discussion” at the PFOX booth (but no assault or literature thrown).
When questioned by the police, the alleged attacker denied hitting anyone but admitted that “his emotions got the best of him.” So while he could be lying, he could also be truthfully admitting to the “heated argument” that others have reported. Either way, we still have no one from a crowded, indoor location who saw a physical assault or literature being thrown to the floor — at least no one other than those at the PFOX table.
The police asked him to leave based on their belief that he was at the very least involved in some sort of disturbance, as even he admitted to becoming overly emotional. Since they saw nothing themselves, and the alleged victim did not press charges, no other action was taken. Currently, the police do not know the name of the alleged attacker, and they have no witnesses other than the two PFOX workers. If they had seen an attack themselves, they could have arrested the attacker whether the victim pressed charges or not.
So…to recap…nobody saw it happen the officers who responded included, nobody was arrested, and nobody even knows now who this alleged assailant person is. But…All Is Not Lost…
In the mean time, PFOX found a sympathetic ear in Matt Barber, a Concerned Woman for America attorney and writer. In a web audio interview, PFOX executive director Regina Griggs and someone claiming to be the alleged victim, “David,” basically told the same story as before, while Barber read the email above from Lisle as “proof-positive that this occurred.” Again, it is certainly germane, but it is not proof of anything beyond the fact that someone from PFOX relayed this story to the police that evening, and based on that they asked someone to leave.
And the problem with all this is that the word of PFOX is…well…worth its weight in gold…
There were some other issues brought out in this interview. David describes the alleged attacker as “belligerent,” yet in the next breath says he invited him out to his car, away from the booth, to retrieve his Bible — not a smart move for someone he considered so threatening. Also, Griggs stated a couple of times that she was the woman at the booth with David, yet both our witnesses have identified Estella Salvatierra — a longtime PFOX vice president and moderator, who is a civil rights attorney for the FCC in Washington — as the woman there during the incident, and after. While we don’t currently have a photo of Griggs, there are at least 20 years and any number of physical differences between her and Salvatierra.
We don’t yet know why it would matter, but the evidence suggests that Griggs was not there and Salvatierra was, yet Griggs is saying otherwise. Lisle has also said that during her conversations with him, Griggs has never spoken as though she was present at the booth during the incident, as she does in the audio interview and other places. Again, we don’t yet know the significance of this, but she clearly can’t speak about events in the first person if she was not there at the time.
Does it even matter? Maybe there is some yet to be revealed motive for concealing the identity of the second PFOX worker there, but more likely it is just the reflexive lying of the habitually mendacious. As Frank Lloyd Wright once said, no stream rises higher then its source. The ex-gay movement, to the extent it can even be called a movement and not a prop in the religious right’s culture war, is built on a bedrock of myths, lies and superstition regarding homosexuality. Truth is a matter of belief, not facts. What matter who was actually there, or what they actually saw. Concerned Women For America have another story to feed the right wing propaganda mill about the threat of militant homosexuality, which is all that really matters.
Here’s what I think happened, based on nothing more then a middle aged gay man’s lifetime of watching how fanatics readily build up a head of steam when they’re not getting their way. Someone, probably a gay someone, saw the PFOX booth, went over, looked at one of the pamphlets denigrating homosexuals as sexually broken disordered threats to children and families, and got into an argument with the droids working said booth. Said droids, shaken as their kind usually are whenever their scapegoats get uppity, rush to ask fair security to eject the uppity homosexual. But even in Virginia…well…Northern Virginia…you can’t just demand to have a homosexual ejected because they don’t appreciate pamphlets being handed out describing them as sexually broken versions of what a human being is supposed to be. So the threat was…elaborated upon. He didn’t just have an argument with us…he was…Belligerent. He threw our papers to the ground. Yes…that’s what he did. And…and…wait a minute…he trashed our booth. And…and…he assaulted us! Physically assaulted us!
And then we invited him to walk with us to our car so we could read the bible to him…
Mind you…I’m not saying they don’t thoroughly believe their own stories by now. Look up the word confabulation. If it wasn’t for confabulation, there wouldn’t even be a republican party in America right now, let alone a religious right. In the meantime, David Elliot is working the Alexandria County Fair another year, mining it for all the outrage he can concoct, all the evidence that it is ex-gays who are a persecuted minority, and not gay people who face another election year round of state ballot initiatives making marriage a right only heterosexual couples can enjoy…
Jay Fisette is an elected official in Virginia and I would hope that elected officials are tolerant toward others, regardless of their sexual orientation.
No you don’t. No more then you hope school kids are tolerant of their gay peers, or society as a whole is tolerant of same-sex couples. It’s not your sexuality that’s fluid David. It’s not your reality either. It’s your morals. Your word as to what transpired between you and Jay Fisette is worth its weight in gold.
Roman Polanski And The Child Abuse Apologists…All Of Them…
Like many people I suppose, I’m following the story of Roman Polanski reluctantly…drawn into it against my better judgment. It’s an ugly affair but there is far more ugliness in the public chatter surrounding it. In 1977, the year he was arrested and tried, I had just tentatively begun to come out to my circle of friends and I had my own issues with human sexuality. I wasn’t all that interested in the sexual trials and tribulations of a 44 year old Hollywood glitterati, other then how it re-enforced my perceptions of the heterosexual double standard. Had his thirteen year old victim been a boy I had little doubt his film making career would have been over instantly and his name would be poison in the film industry. But Hollywood seemed perfectly willing to forgive him his use of a thirteen year old girl as sexual junk food. Probably because it was something practiced among the Hollywood rich and powerful all the time. His crime it seemed, if any, was that he had allowed it to make headlines.
So now it’s back in the headlines again, and I’m watching the stories fly across my Google News page with the same sense of irritable astonishment. Hello…look at all the people who were outraged at the way the Catholic church aided and abetted child molesting priests, coming to Polanski’s defense. I have to wonder in retrospect how much of that outrage was because they took sexual advantage of kids at the same time they’re preaching about sexual purity, or because they were homosexuals and the victims were boys. How much ink would have been spilled on the scandal had the victims been girls instead? But this passage from Polanski’s victim, now an adult who just wants to not have to deal with it anymore, struck me…
She spoke with People magazine in 1997. After her mother went to police, "all hell broke loose," Geimer said. The European media compared her to Lolita, the young seductress in fiction.
"The fallout was worse than what had happened that night," she told People. "It was on the evening news every night. Reporters and photographers came to my school and put my picture in a European tabloid with the caption Little Lolita. They were all saying, ‘Poor Roman Polanski, entrapped by a 13-year-old temptress.’ I had a good friend who came from a good Catholic family, and her father wouldn’t let her come to my house anymore."
Against that backdrop, the plea deal was struck.
Afterward, Geimer shut down emotionally and rebelled, she told People on the 20th anniversary of the crime.
"I was this sweet 13-year-old girl, and then all of a sudden I turned into this pissed-off 14-year-old,’ Geimer said. I was mad at my attorney; I was mad at my mom. I never blamed her for what happened, but I was mad that she had called the police and that we had to go through this ordeal. Now I realize she went through hell trying to handle things as best she could."
Geimer dropped out of school, got pregnant at 18 and married at 19. She divorced and moved with her family to Hawaii. She later married a carpenter, with whom she had two more children.
Cindy and Dan O’Connor were very worried about Zach. Though bright, he was doing poorly at school. At home, he would pick fights, slam doors, explode for no reason. They wondered how their two children could be so different; Matt, a year and a half younger, was easygoing and happy. Zach was miserable.
The Times story is as heartwarming as the tale of Roman Polanski is grotesque. Zach’s parents loved their gay kid, and tried their level best to make sure he knew it, even as the kid struggled with terrible fears and doubts about himself. But both stories contain this little nugget of fact: both kids turned from sweet little dears into sullen, angry, and self destructive shells of their former selves almost in an instant. And it wasn’t simply a case of raging adolescent hormones that did it. They had both been sexually abused. Geimer directly and physically. O’Connor, though his parents tried their absolute best to protect him from it, by the culture of anti-gay hate he was growing up in.
The misery Zach caused was minor compared with the misery he felt. He says he knew he was different by kindergarten, but he had no name for it, so he would stay to himself. He tried sports, but, he says, “It didn’t work out well.” He couldn’t remember the rules. In fifth grade, when boys at recess were talking about girls they had crushes on, Zach did not have someone to name.
By sixth grade, he knew what “gay” meant, but didn’t associate it with himself. That year, he says: “I had a crush on one particular eighth-grade boy, a very straight jock. I knew whatever I was feeling I shouldn’t talk about it.” He considered himself a broken version of a human being. “I did think about suicide,” he says.
Though I never hated myself for being gay, I know something of the misery that kid was going through. I wrote about it Here…
That was so me. And looking back on it after mom retired, I never really appreciated how bad I was. Then when mom passed away, I inherited her diaries. And I saw it all then. It was very painful reading…
Bruce came home in a very bad mood. Stomped into the bedroom… So I called up J*** & went over to her place for the rest of the evening. He had my stomach just tied up in knots…Oh how I wish he would turn back to the Lord & become like the little boy I once knew, kind, thoughtful, & love for all…
But I wasn’t her little boy anymore, let alone bloody likely to walk back into a church where I would be demonized as an abomination in the sight of God. I was a young man with a young man’s needs and doubts and heartbreaks, all the more confusing and difficult to deal with not so much because I was gay, as that I couldn’t talk to the one person in my life who by all rights should have known me better then anyone, and who might have been able to give me some guidance, but mostly just love, when I needed it most. And love she Did give me…but it had, or so I felt, strings attached. Strings I was terrified to break.
She absolutely positively didn’t want me to come out to her. Every time I even went near the subject of my sexual orientation she would get cold and angry herself and throw up a wall. So I just accepted the fact that we could never talk about it, and I always had to keep that part of me inside when I was in the house. So when my first love left me, and then my second try went very bad on me, and then my third, and I was a miserable desolate wreak inside, I had to keep it inside. I grew increasingly sullen and angry.
Even my friends back then, who were mostly straight, saw it. It was a time before the Internet, and easy access to information about the greater gay community beyond my doorstep. I only knew of a few seedy bars downtown, where I really didn’t want to be. To get my weekly copy of the Washington D.C. gay paper, The Blade, or the Advocate, I had to venture down to this really squalid adult bookstore in nearby Wheaton. Gay kids nowadays will, thankfully, never know how alone and isolated it felt to be gay back then. Most of my friends were straight kids I knew from my high school days, and I really couldn’t talk much to them either, as counter-cultural tolerant as they were (though some of them not so much really). But none of them could have given me what mom might have been able to, had we both lived in a different world.
If only I’d had a chance to open up to her about what was going on in my life, if only I’d had her to talk to then, I might have been a lot less angry, a lot less miserable. My temper was always flaring. I would storm into my room and sulk for hours. I knew I was having "anger management" issues back then, but in retrospect I never thought I was as bad as I was, until I read her diaries.
It isn’t just Roman Polanski’s apologists who are hypocrites here. The deeper, uglier hypocrisy hangs around all the sexual moralists now venting at Polanski’s apologists, who themselves see nothing wrong with sexually brutalizing children. From clergy thumping their pulpits that god considers homosexuality an abomination, to right wing pundits and politicians raging against the homosexual menace, to the hostile hate filled mobs that pack school board meetings to rage against anti-bullying rules that protect gay kids, to the child abusers in every ex-gay ministry that teach gay kids to fear their bodies and hate themselves, the only difference in kind between them all and Roman Polanski is that Polanski, as near as I can determine, never said he boozed up and raped that girl because he loved her and wanted to bring her closer to God.
The age at which the most people are convicted of "sexual assault" is fourteen. Fourteen. And no doubt some of those were actual sexual assaults. But the vast majority of them were not. The vast majority of them were kids convicted of statutory rape. And they are then, in most states, considered sex offenders for the rest of their lives. A taste of why this essay is so important, first on how easy it is to become one of those statistics:
It takes so little for this happen to a child. A girl in school has oral sex with a boy in school. She becomes a sex offender for the rest of her life. Streaking a school event, as a practical joke, becomes a sex crime in the new America. Two kids "moon" a passerby and are incarcerated in jail as sex offenders, where they may well learn a lesson or two about rape. A teenager, who takes a sexy of photo of him, or herself, is paraded around the community as a "child pornographer" for the rest of his or her life…
If you think this was an unintended result of the past couple decades of right wing hysteria over child sexual abuse, you are not paying attention. This is exactly what they wanted to accomplish. Not the persecution of child molesters, but of children. Because they must hate their bodies. Because they must hate themselves, all of them, gay and straight alike. They must hate themselves. And most of all, they must fear joy.
This isn’t rocket science. Our children are our future. The way we treat them is the judgment we pronounce every day upon the human race. When you see someone treating them like crap you have to wonder if that’s not because they think the human race is crap and doesn’t deserve to survive. And many do. If you think child molesting louts like Polanski are the bottom of the human gutter you haven’t looked down into it very far and I can’t say I blame you. Nietzsche was right about gazing for too long into an abyss…
To Polanski’s defenders I can only say this: No means No. That simply should not even be an arguable thing. I understand the reflex to push back against American sexual hypocrisy. But: No means No. Furthermore, if you are a grown adult and the person whose pants you’re trying to get into is a kid, Yes means No too. They may come onto you. They may think they get it. But they don’t. Not the way you do. Your job is to set an example, to show them what it is to be the grownup they ache to become. How often do you bellyache about corporate greed and political avarice? How often do you rail against the coarseness of American culture, the casual off-handed brutality of a might-makes-right morality? Did you ever blast the cigarette companies for pushing their health damaging addictive wares onto kids? You take sexual advantage of a kid, and for sure that kid will grow up with an understanding that taking advantage of someone weaker and more vulnerable then them for your own greedy pleasures isn’t so wrong after all. Is that what you want?
You need to be the kind of person you want that kid to grow up to be. You need to live the kind of life you want the world of tomorrow to become. Yes, sex is wonderful. Sex is one of this life’s perfect joys. But only where No means No and grownups don’t take advantage of naive youngsters, itching to grow up quickly. If you want kids to grow up strong and proud and beautiful and unafraid of their sexual selves, then adults who take advantage of them must be held accountable. For the sake of all those strong, proud, beautiful kids and the tomorrow they represent.
As for the voices from the kook pews now crying hypocrite at Polanski’s defenders: If sex, as your kind is so fond of saying, is for making babies, then hating human sexuality is also a way of hating the future, hating the human race. You warp a kid emotionally to the point they are incapable of having a healthy sexual relationship with anyone, and you are damaging not only that kid, but everyone that kid takes into their arms, and whatever children they might bear. I am perfectly aware that this is fine with you.
You teach them abstinence not to keep them healthy and strong but because you know perfectly well that teenage girls will get pregnant, that kids who don’t know how to protect themselves from STDs will get horribly sick and you believe that motherhood, sickness and death are just punishments for enjoying sex for its own sake, just punishments for living life for its own sake. Didn’t the bible say that Eve’s punishment for disobeying god was to bear the pain of childbirth? Children should be afraid of joy as you are. They should loath their human bodies as you do. They should hate their flesh and blood life and this good earth and all of human existence as much as you will until the day you die. Your problem with Roman Polanski is that he took pleasure in sex, not that he raped a young girl. Women are supposed to submit to the authority of men aren’t they? Were Polanski a moral man he would have broken that kid’s heart without taking any physical pleasure from it.
The next time a case of child sexual abuse hits the headlines, please kindly shut the fuck up, because you are no better then that criminal is. Wait…let me amend that. You are worse.
And though I agree with their sentiment, it’s a gloopy business when a company celebrates the election of a president with the flavour ‘Yes Pecan’. In an age when ice cream companies are melting away and reforming as purveyors of frozen yoghurt, is this dinky piece of homespun cheeriness really the best focus of the company’s efforts?
Ah, yes…the old Don’t We Have Better Things To Worry About sigh. Followed up like night after day with…
That gay people should be able to get married seems to me a basic human right, and I admit that in a completely partisan way I was tempted to justify B&J’s action as part of the ongoing struggle against ignorance and fear. But what would I be thinking if a contrary point of view was being aired? I’d be first in line to denounce them as squalid influence peddlers, shamelessly meddlesome, shiveringly undemocratic tricksters.
Ice cream should be a relief from side-taking…
Yes. And so should getting married. So should taking your kids to the pool. So should having lunch at the local diner. So should a nice quiet stroll along the beach. Life’s simple beautiful pleasures. And next time you’re wondering why so many of life’s simple beautiful little pleasures have been turned into a scorched earth battleground, ask yourself what happens to any neighborhood, any community, any nation, when its people turn a blind eye to crime.
Because that’s what this is. A bunch of low brow back alley, knuckle-dragging thugs are stealing all those beautiful simple life pleasures away from some of your neighbors. In some ways it’s far more wounding then even those acts of outright violence against us. Imagine how it is, to not even be able to walk down the street hand in hand with the one you love, without fear. Life’s simple beautiful pleasures.
Ben & Jerry’s is, in their own hippy-dippy little way, giving it back to us. Yes, it’s corporate marketing. But also…love, marriage and ice cream. Happiness. There are worse things corporations can do to market their wares. Yes, this is taking sides. It is always a matter of taking sides. Every time you pause for a moment to take in the simple beautiful joy of life, you are taking sides against the pain and heartbreak and unmitigated horror that seems sometimes to make life utterly pointless. Your gay and lesbian neighbors struggle to hold onto those moments every day.
Bishop Desmond Tutu, who knows a few things about life under the jackboot of hate, said "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." Why does the right to marry seem like such a basic human right to you, one that same-sex couples should enjoy too, if not that giving that promise to love, honor and cherish, and receiving it, and keeping it in all those endlessly simple day-to-day ways spouses do together, is one of this life’s great joys. If you believe that gay people are people too, then taking sides shouldn’t even be in question. Especially when it comes to the simple things. Especially those.
There are people in this world who wish your gay and lesbian neighbors to never know those joys…great or small. But it seems sometimes, especially the small. Because in their world, if we can love and laugh and live in peace and happiness, and find simple quiet contentment in the arms of the one we love, even for a moment, even for an instant, then they’re not hating us enough. Are you tired of it all? Trust me, you will never be tired of it as much as any of us are. And…trust me…to the extent you can find your own moments of simple perfect joy too, then they hate you too. You don’t have to be homosexual for them to hate you. Just happy and content and in love with life. Even for a just moment. That is enough. That is all it takes for them to hate you. And all it takes for you to defeat them is to reach for one simple beautiful joy and let it remind you that life is good.
Ross Douthat has a great column in today’s times looking at American social conservatism through the lens of Judd Apatow’s movies. All three Apatow films have, as he points out, strains of conservative values running through them. But in The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up conservative choices wind up working out suspiciously well. In the darker Funny People, by contrast, bad choices have unchangeable consequences and doing the right thing proves painful…
And that’s the one movie of his that didn’t do too well at the box office. Now why would that be…? I’ll hazard the same guess Yglesias does: Because the United States is a country that’s “conservative right up until the moment that it costs us.
I think this explains a lot about the appeal of anti-gay crusades to social conservative leaders. Most of what “traditional values” asks of people is pretty hard. All the infidelity and divorce and premarital sex and bad parenting and whatnot take place because people actually want to do the things traditional values is telling them not to do. And the same goes for most of the rest of the Christian recipe. Acting in a charitable and forgiving manner all the time is hard. Loving your enemies is hard. Turning the other cheek is hard…
Christianity…honest to goodness Christianity…is Hard. When you hear someone vacantly telling you that becoming a Born Again Christian has taken all the hardship, lifted all the burdens of their lives from their shoulders, you can be pretty damn confident that you’re dealing with a Mega Church christian. Yes, yes… when your church has its own Olympic size swimming pool and a Chick-Fil-A in it the life of a Christian must be very easy indeed. But…it isn’t. Forgiveness, for example…is Hard. Damn near impossible sometimes. Ask me how I know…
Homosexuality is totally different. For a small minority of the population, of course, the injunction “don’t have sex with other men!” (or, as the case may be, other women) is painfully difficult to live up to. But for the vast majority of people this is really, really easy to do. Campaigns against gay rights, gay people, and gay sex thus have a lot of the structural elements of other forms of crusading against sexual excess or immorality, but they’re not really asking most people to do anything other than become self-righteous about their pre-existing preferences.
No fooling. Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been pointing out for decades now that these people have been waging a culture war on us, but not…oh…divorce…infidelity…premarital sex…teenage pregnancy. Yes, they will bellyache about those things, but not throw millions and millions of dollars into political campaigns against them. Nobody on the religious right is trying to get constitutional amendments passed making divorce or adultery or pornography or having babies out of wedlock illegal. They’re not putting planks in the republican party platform about divorce. But homosexuality? Oh…ThATs the biggest threat to western civilization since Earl Warren. Since Roosevelt. Since Lincoln even.
This isn’t rocket science. We’re their scapegoats. Their scarecrows. The disposable lives of faceless Other People they can pave their highway to heaven with. It wasn’t enough that Christ died for their sins. We have to bleed so they can tell themselves they’re righteous. Because otherwise they have to deal with their own lives, their own sins, their own cheapshit failures of moral character, and anything but that. As long as they can wage war on the Homosexual Menace, they don’t have to look at themselves.
Right there is where that venomous ferocity against homosexuality comes from. You see parents who do absolutely horrific things to their gay children that they would never do even if they’d committed some terrible crime like murder or rape. It’s not that they suddenly think their kid is some kind of unspeakable monster. It’s that first hand face-to-face evidence that the monster isn’t real pulls out from under them a vital pillar of self respect. I may be an unfaithful husband…I might be cheating on my spouse…I might be stealing from my employer…I might be abusing my own children…but by god I am not a faggot.My cheap little crimes aren’t as damaging to society as Homosexuality. God will forgive me…but not Them… You take away that scapegoat, that punching bag, that Faceless Other who has to die for their common everyday bar stool sins, and suddenly morality isn’t something they can beat someone else over the head with whenever their conscience starts tapping them on the shoulder. Nothing on this earth gets more enraged then a cheat caught in the act.
At The Center Of It All: The Right To Kiss The One You Love
I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating again and again because it really says it all. An old high school friend of mine told me once about taking a college course on human sexuality. The course, he said, included a number of films which you might easily expect to find in an Adult Entertainment store then in a university classroom. Most of the kids who signed up for that course did so, according to my friend who probably did also, just to see those films.
What they didn’t bargain for was also having to watch a bunch of sex they didn’t much like. In addition to the hot young babes there was also footage of folks old enough to be their own parents having sex. This was after all, a course on human sexuality, not pornography. My friend said the sections on geriatric sex generally grossed out the audience. But not as much as the section on gay male sex. But it wasn’t just watching two guys having sex specifically, that bothered the audience. Some of them.
Which was what my friend was telling me about, in wide eyed wonder, since he was one of the few heterosexuals I knew back then who were really and truly unfazed by my sexual orientation. We were all in college then and I was in the process of slowly coming out to my friends, one at a time. He was one of the first I’d come out to and that afternoon he was telling me in wonder about his human sexuality class and the gay sex film they’d seen. I remember it well, because in retrospect it was one of those rare moments where I could actually see someone getting it. He said when the gay male sex scenes came on screen, the ignorant jock types in the class burst out laughing and mocked the couple. But then images of them being affectionate with each other came on screen and the atmosphere changed. Those scenes completely offended the jocks he said…far more, far, Far more, then watching them have sex did.
That was 1973 or ’74 as I remember it. Back in those days if you wanted to watch pornography you either got some grainy 8mm stag films from some shady character or you went to an X-rated movie somewhere in the really bad part of town (or Viers Mill Road across from the Zayres if you lived in Rockville, Maryland…). Nowadays you download it off the Internet and teens as young as 13 are way more sexually confidant and secure then my generation ever was. The cultural scolds are bellyaching that the nation is swimming in sexually charged images and that it’s dragging our morals into the gutter. But notice that one of their biggest bugaboos, their deepest fear, their prime target in the culture war isn’t the proliferation of pornography…it’s same-sex marriage. This, this above all else, is their evidence that the culture is sinking into a bottomless pit: homosexuals couples are getting married.
Try this experiment. Open a gay bath house somewhere in the Bible Belt, and nearby, open a same-sex wedding chapel, and see which one gets the most protests. Trust me it won’t even be close. It will be as though the bath house isn’t even there, as long as the chapel is.
The lightning rod, the flash point in homophobic bigotry has always been same-sex love, not same-sex sex. It isn’t that we have sex that bothers the bigots. If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard that "I don’t care what you people do in the privacy of your bedrooms…" bullshit I’d be rich. It’s when we Flaunt It that they start screaming about militant homosexuals. And what, exactly, is flaunting it? Well I can tell you what it isn’t: having sex.
The tectonics of attitude are shifting in subtle ways that are geographic, psychic and also generational, suggested Katherine M. Franke, a lesbian who teaches law and is a director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University. “I’ve been attacked on the street and called all sorts of names” for kissing a female partner in public, Professor Franke said. “The reception our affection used to generate was violence and hatred,” she added. “What I’ve found in the last five years is that my girlfriend and I get smiles from straight couples, especially younger people. Now there’s almost this aggressive sense of ‘Let me tell you how terrific we think that is.’ ”
Yet gay-bashing still occurs routinely, Mr. Patton of the Anti-Violence Project said, even in neighborhoods like Chelsea in Manhattan, where the sight of two men kissing on the street can hardly be considered a frighten-the-horses proposition. “In January some men were leaving a bar in Chelsea,” saying goodbye with a kiss, Mr. Patton said. “One friend got into a taxi and then a car behind the taxi stopped and some guys jumped out and beat up the other two.” One victim of the attack, which is under investigation by the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, was bruised and shaken. The second had a broken jaw.
That Times article begins with a story about how a candy commercial featuring an accidental same-sex kiss generated enough controversy that it had to be withdrawn. The article noted that the incident, "had the inadvertent effect of revealing how a simple display of affection grows in complexity as soon as one considers who gets to demonstrate it in public, and who, very often, does not."
And so it goes. A same-sex couple is brutally beaten in front of a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona simply for holding hands inside. So security guards at a fast food joint throw a same-sex couple out for sharing a kiss and then call the police on them. So a same-sex couple, strolling too close to the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, get handcuffed and arrested for kissing. That arrest for kissing in front of the Mormon Temple, so soon after it became apparent that Proposition 8 was funded by massive amounts of Mormon money and labor, made headlines all over the world. The response of the Mormon hierarchy was to smear the kissers with accusations that they were groping each other in public. Not a shred of evidence exists, apart from Mormon propaganda to support that charge, but look at it for what it says about the thinking here. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…
When they talk about their "deeply held religious beliefs", this is what they mean. Not the belief in God Almighty. Not the belief in Christ the redeemer. Not the belief in the literal truth of the Bible. This is the deeply held religious belief that they will not suffer doubt in. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. A kiss in public between a same-sex couple isn’t a gesture of affection, it’s a sex act.
One denomination after another is stressed — possibly to a breaking point for some believers — by furious battles over the roles of openly gay people in church life and ministry. Can they be clergy or bishops? Can their relationships be blessed?
And the newest protest symbol by gay activists is a kiss…
But this has always been the battle. Not to have sex, but to be allowed to love. The difference between the thugs who beat up Jean Rolland and Andrew Frost in front of the Frasher’s Steak House in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the Mormon church, isn’t so much one of degree as clarity of purpose. It came to this: When Mormon security guards saw a same-sex couple share a kiss, they had to detain them and call the police. When that arrest became a headline all over the world, the Mormon church immediately sought to replace the image of a kiss in the public mind with an image of two men groping each other. You hear the anti-gay warriors say time and again that there is no such thing as a homosexual, there is only homosexual behavior. But look at their attitudes toward marriage generally. Men are the God ordained head of the household. Women must submit gracefully to their husbands. Their union isn’t validated by their joy in one another, but by the blessing of the church. It isn’t something that exists for its own sake, but to further God’s plan for humanity. It is not simply that there can be no homosexuals. There is no such thing as love. There is only authority. There is only power. And a kiss embodies everything that power hates and wants to exterminate from the human spirit.
In July 2008, hotelier and developer Doug Manchester donated $125,000 to help gather signatures for a proposition that would ban same-sex marriage in California. The early money was crucial to getting the initiative—which ultimately passed—on the ballot. At the time, he told The New York Times that he made the donation because of “my Catholic faith and longtime affiliation with the Catholic Church,” which preferred that marriage remain between a man and a woman. Indeed, the Catholic Church has vehemently opposed gay marriage. Then again, it’s also not too keen on divorce.
On Oct. 9, 2008, Manchester ended 43 years, eight months and nine days of marriage to Elizabeth Manchester by moving out of their La Jolla abode. The couple spent the next several months trying to reach a quiet settlement on how best to distribute millions of dollars in cash and other assets. In July, those talks totally broke down, and Doug started playing financial hardball with Elizabeth, allegedly draining the couple’s shared accounts and stealing her mail…
Let me guess…it was all those same-sex marriages the California supreme court allowed to stand that caused their divorce. Manchester was a critical player in the battle over Proposition 8. Specifically, he provided a big chunk of the cash that helped it get on the ballot…
Developer Doug Manchester and other prominent San Diego County businessmen have given significant financial support to an initiative that would ban same-sex marriage targeted for the November statewide ballot.
Manchester’s $125,000 donation has prompted a gay-rights activist to urge a boycott of the Manchester Grand Hyatt and the Manchester-owned San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina.
In addition to Manchester, Mission Valley developer Terry Caster has donated $162,500; Robert Hoehn, owner of Hoehn Motors in Carlsbad, has given $25,000; and La Jolla businessman Roger Benson has given $50,000, state records show.
Manchester said he was motivated by his strong Catholic faith.
“I personally believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman,” he said.
Donations from San Diego residents make up a significant part of the $1 million raised for the initiative.
That has allowed the campaign to hire professional signature gatherers to help collect the 700,000 signatures needed to qualify the constitutional amendment for the ballot, said Andrew Pugno, an attorney for Protectmarriage.com, which is sponsoring the amendment.
So now this prize bigot, after forcibly divorcing thousands of same sex couples in California, is having himself a messy divorce. Sweet. I hope your wife drags you over a bed of hot nails Doug. I hope she makes your life a living hell. And if you ever find yourself wondering why your private life has become so much fun and games for so many total strangers who don’t know you from Adam, go ask the jackass you see every morning in the bathroom mirror who it was that turned marriage into a scorched earth battleground and see if he doesn’t laugh in your face like I’m laughing in your face.
Jones And Yarhouse: We Will Report The Outcome No Matter How Embarrassing Our Badly Skewed Data Is To The Folks Who Are Paying Us For It
Last week the APA released its report on ex-gay therapy, to a somewhat muted response from the charlatans of the ex-gay political machine. Oh yes…we’re so very happy that the APA acknowledges that a patient’s religious needs must be taken into account, they said, politely skimming over the overwhelming evidence that trying to force gay people into straight jackets harms them deeply. You had to expect they wouldn’t leave it at that.
Now comes the "final" release of the Jones and Yarhouse "study" of ex-gay "therapy"…touted in that well known scientific peer reviewed publication, the Baptist Press…
Sure it does. You read through the brief article for a while and, of course, you see little nuggets like this one pop out at you:
Jones expressed frustration that the APA task force didn’t take their 2007 study seriously.
"They selectively apply rigorous scientific standards," he said…
Yes. Of course. It’s all a consperacy of the scientists to further the militant homosexual agenda. Oh…have I meantioned that Exodus paid Jones and Yarhouse for their labors? Naturally that didn’t affect their scientific rigorousity I’m sure.
Or…not…
While Jones and Yarhouse’s study appears to be very well designed, it quickly falls apart on execution. The sample size was disappointingly small, too small for an effective retrospective study. They told a reporter from Christianity Today that they had hoped to recruit some three hundred participants, but they found “many Exodus ministries mysteriously uncooperative.” They only wound up with 98 at the beginning of the study (72 men and 26 women), a population they describe as “respectably large.” Yet it is half the size of Spitzer’s 2003 study.
Jones and Yarhouse wanted to limit their study’s participants to those who were in their first year of ex-gay ministry. But when they found that they were having trouble getting enough people to participate (they only found 57 subject who met this criteria), they expanded their study to include 41 subjects who had been involved in ex-gay ministries for between one to three years. The participants who had been in ex-gay ministries for less than a year are referred to as “Phase 1″ subpopulation, and the 41 who were added to increase the sample size were labeled the “Phase 2″ subpopulation.
This poses two critically important problems. First, we just saw Jones and Yarhouse explain that the whole reason they did a prospective study was to reduce the faulty memories of “change experiences that happened in their pasts” — errors which can occur when asking people to go back as far as three years to assess their beginning points on the Kinsey and Shively-DeCecco scales. This was the very problem that Jones and Yarhouse hoped to avoid in designing a prospective longitudinal study, but in the end nearly half of their results ended up being based on retrospective responses.
[Emphasis mine] So basically their data was corrupted by the same half-assed sloppiness of the Spitzer study. Oh but wait…it gets better. Again from Burroway…
Whenever a longitudinal study is being conducted over a period of several years, there are always dropouts along the way. This is common and to be expected. That makes it all the more important to begin the study with a large population. Unfortunately, this one wasn’t terribly large to begin with; it started out at less than half the size of Spitzer’s 2003 study. Jones and Yarhouse report that:
Over time, our sample eroded from 98 subjects at our initial Time 1 assessment to 85 at Time 2 and 73 at Time 3, which is a Time 1 to Time 3 retention rate of 74.5%. This retention rate compares favorable to that of the best “gold standard” longitudinal studies. For example, the widely respected and amply funded National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (or Add Health study reported a retention rate from Time 1 to Time 3 of 73% for their enormous sample.
The Add Health Study Jones and Yarhouse cite began with 20,745 in 1996, ending with 15,170 during Wave 3 in 2001-2002. But this retention rate of 73% was spread over some 5-6 years, not the three to four years of Jones and Yarhouse’s study.
What’s more, the Add Health study undertook a rigorous investigation of their dropouts (PDF: 228KB/17 pages) and concluded that the dropouts affected their results by less than 1 percent. Jones and Yarhouse didn’t assess the impact of their dropouts, but they did say this:
We know from direct conversation that a few subjects decided to accept gay identity and did not believe that we would honestly report data on their experience. On the other hand, we know from direct conversations that we lost other subjects who believed themselves healed of all homosexual inclinations and who withdrew from the study because continued participation reminded them of the very negative experiences they had had as homosexuals. Generally speaking, as is typical, we lost subjects for unknown reasons.
Remember, Jones and Yarhouse described those “experiencing difficulty with change would be likely to get frustrated or discouraged early on and drop out of the change process.” And so assessing the dropouts becomes critically important, because unlike the Add Health study, the very reason for dropping out of this study may have direct bearing on both questions the study was designed to address: Do people change, and are they harmed by the process? With as much as a quarter of the initial population dropping out potentially for reasons directly related to the study’s questions, this missing analysis represents a likely critical failure, one which could potentially invalidate the study’s conclusions.
[Emphasis mine] Harm…what harm? We didn’t speak to anyone who was harmed…
But look a tad more closely at what Jones and Yarhouse "know"…
On the other hand, we know from direct conversations that we lost other subjects who believed themselves healed of all homosexual inclinations and who withdrew from the study because continued participation reminded them of the very negative experiences they had had as homosexuals.
Healed. Healed. They believed themselves healed. Not cured. Not changed. But…healed. This is the language of religion, not science. And now you know where Jones and Yarhouse were coming from, and why they were good with allowing data into their study that could only weaken it from a scientific point of view.
It didn’t matter. They needed bodies to get a big enough sample size that they could plausibly go on with it and give the kook pews something they could wave around and claim that scientists were conspiring against them on behalf of the godless homosexual menace. They would have known going into it, that the APA would regard their study as flawed because they engineered the flaws into it themselves. Anyone who was serious about it would have gone back to their funding and told them they couldn’t do it without more first year subjects (a lot more), and more participation from the drop-outs. But they kept on with it anyway. Because knowing whether or not ex-gay therapy works wasn’t the point. Knowing whether or not it harms the very people it purports to help wasn’t the point. Having something to wave back at the APA was the point. That promise that they would report the results whether or not they embarrassed Exodus was as empty as the promise that "change is possible". Neither one had a money back guarantee.
[Update…] Yarhouse is identified Here, as an evangelical psychologist and graduate of Regent University. Regent is Pat Robertson’s baby. This man is as likely to be objective about ex-gay therapy as he is to be a flying pig. Jones is of Wheaton College, which is described by The Princeton Review’s Best 351 Colleges thusly: "If the integration of faith and learning is what you want out of a college, Wheaton is arguably the best school in the nation with a Christ-based worldview." Well this team really looks like a couple of objective researchers to me…
[Update again…] Timothy Kincaid at Box Turtle Bulletin goes another round with this "study"…finds it not too much different from the previous round…
In short, the Jones and Yarhouse study was funded and fully supported by Exodus and conducted by two researchers who were avid supporters of ex-gay ministries. They wanted to study 300 participants, but after more than a year, they could only find 57 willing to participate. They then changed the rules for acceptance in order to increase the total to 98. After following this sample for 4 years, 25 dropped out. Of the remainder, only 11 reported “satisfactory, if not uncomplicated, heterosexual adjustment.” Another 17 decided that a lifetime of celibacy was good enough.
Gay Americans…Republican’s Cynical Weapon Against Democrats Since Truman
You hear some folks bellyache about those "Gay Studies" curriculums in various colleges and universities. If they’re not complaining that they’re utterly worthless exercises in pointless "diversity", they’re insinuating that the courses couldn’t be about anything but how to have gay sex.
I’ve never gone through one of these curriculums myself, but if the vast treasure trove of gay history that’s out there is any measure, a Gay Studies course isn’t just a nice idea for promoting diversity, it’s an important part of the human story. Particularly here in America, where gay citizens have been a punching bag, a handy scarecrow, for every hysteria that’s ever swept through the country. Case in point, the red scare of the 1950s.
I’m only part way into David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare, and already its challenging some of my bedrock views of what happened to my country during the so-called McCarthy era. Far from being merely a sideshow to the communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the purges of gay Americans were central to it. And…surprise, surprise, the engine for it all was republican hunger for political power.
Right at the beginning of the book, Johnson describes, using newspaper accounts of the time, interviews, and newly declassified documents, how the republicans in the late 1940s, out of power since Hoover brought on the great depression, saw the issue of homosexuals in government as a useful weapon against the party in power.
They orchestrated a hearing in which they pressed the secretary of state for information about communists in the state department. But it was a game of tag. In the process of defending themselves against the republican charge that they had allowed communists to get and hold jobs in the state department, the democrats described how they were diligently ferreting out "security risks". Far from being lax said the democrats, they’d uncovered and removed 91 "security risks" from the state department.
Which gave the republicans an opening to press them for details. How many of those were communists? It was a question the republicans already knew the answer to, because they’d had all the details in a closed door hearing previously. What they wanted was to get it out in the open. And the democrats, backed into a corner and not wanting to leave it hanging out there that they’d let so many communists into the state department when they hadn’t actually, said, that in fact none of them were communists, nobody had been let go from the state department for disloyalty. The 91 people fired were not accused of being traitors. Just…you know…security risks. Pressed further they admitted that these people had all been fired because they were homosexuals.
That was what the republicans wanted to hear, and get into the papers. Not a communist threat, but a lavender one. Why? Because it was felt that the moral issue played even better against the democrat’s base…working class and poor Americans, then the communist threat did. In other words, it made a great wedge issue against the democrats. And right from the beginning, when Joe McCarthy began waving around his baseless claims of a vast communist conspiracy lurking in the federal government, some republicans…even in his own state…were counseling him to downplay the communist thing and play up the morals charges more, because for one thing they actually were finding homosexuals working in government agencies, but mostly because it made the voters in the democrat’s base even angrier.
McCarthy of course, didn’t take that advise. He pressed on with his communist bogyman and the question echoed in the committee chambers of capital hill, are you now, or have you ever been a communist? But while McCarthy was busy stirring up the Communist Menace and getting headlines, the republican party was busy stirring up the Homosexual Menace and a great purge began which…ironically…led to the formation of the first gay rights groups as gay people began to get tired of being kicked around and started pushing back.
Later, during the black civil rights movement, the republicans would go on to exploit white working class racial fears against the democrats in exactly the same way. But here, even as far back as the late 1940s, you can see them using the Homosexual Menace as a tool to divide and weaken the democrats. Because accusing the democrats of tolerating homosexuality worked even better then nearly anything else the republicans could throw at them…even communism. And it wouldn’t stop working, until we gay Americans, having had enough of it, took to the streets in defense of our lives.
You want to know why it’s so damn important that we make a big deal out of our sexual orientation? Why we don’t just quietly "leave it in the bedroom where it belongs"…? This is why. Because our lives were turned into cannon fodder for the power dreams of politicians and that needs to stop. This country needs to look…really look…at the character of those loud voices bearing moral crusades, waving around scarecrows that have their neighbor’s faces on them.
The moral rot that is on plain view every night on Fox News and in the many health care "town halls" going on all across the country…in the "birthers" and the "deathers"…it isn’t new. Not at all. What’s different now is the gutter that all those country club republicans began playing to back in the Truman years has taken over, and they have their own voice now in the national news media. And you need to understand this: those country club republicans would be fine, even with that, if it could keep them in power.
Perhaps you could see this just as clearly from looking at the history of race relations in America, and republican party race baiting. But the history of the struggle of gay Americans for equality and justice is American history too, and you really see what the republican crusade for "morality" and "family values" is made of when you study it.
Via Sullivan…a handy little snapshot of the state of the Union…
As the GOP declines in popularity, Fox News gains audience. Or in other words, as reality presses closer in, that subset of the American population who never saw a fact they couldn’t look right in the face and deny, is cocooning. Surprise, surprise.
What was once a cultural divide has become a chasm, bigger, and vastly more dangerous then anything the "generation gap" of the 1960s could have produced. Again, from Sullivan…
A reader writes:
I just want to share a sad story with you. Tonight I was at my regular Friday night AA meeting in LA that I have been attending for 18 years – I am a 48 year old woman. One of my oldest friends, a male with 30 years sobriety, is a Republican. I am a Democrat. Every week he talks politics with another like-minded friend. Tonight he arrived a bit later than usual, so as I gave him a hug, I said, "Thank goodness you arrived because I am sure Betty* (name changed) did not want to discuss politics with me!"
He then turned around and started screaming at me. I was so taken aback, I didn’t even know what he was screaming about at first. When I finally tuned in, he was yelling that Obama "sent the SEIU thugs to beat up the senior citizens" protesting at the health-care town hall meetings and that Obama had instructed the SEIU "if they come at you, you go at them twice as hard."
When I tried to reasonably protest this statement, he just spewed forth a tirade of vile invectives.
We were outside and there were about 30 people milling about. I was shocked, embarrassed and literally frozen in place. I managed to turn and walk away. This is a man I have known and respected for the entire length of my sobriety. I am fairly certain this friendship is over. Reasonable discourse is over. The lies and hate spread by the right-wing have won. As a side note, his wife, who is one of my best friends would not talk to me for over a month after the election in November. I am just heartbroken. Sorry, I know this is not the most well-written account, but I am so shaken, I can barely wrap my head around it.
I have an acquaintance…someone I used to call "friend" but simply cannot anymore…who nonetheless calls periodically. I wrote of my frustrations about that Here. Last time he called I ended the conversation when he started going on about how the new supreme court justice Sotomayor was a racist. Next time he calls I’ll have a simple question ready for him…
Do you think President Obama was born here in the United States?
End of story. Life is short. The American Dream is still beautiful and I believe in it and you don’t anymore. There is are lot of things Americans need to discuss with one another and hash out together and the politics of life in a democracy is you have to have those discussions and maybe even a few major arguments and in the end you compromise and you hold a vote and you get on with it. But you’re not there anymore. You’re somewhere on the dark side of the moon where not even light can penetrate. We can’t talk anymore, and to have an America Americans need to be able to talk with each other and you want to shut down the talking so everyone can listen to you scream about nothing for as long as you have the breath to scream about it. Fine. The conversation is shut down…with you. I’ll talk it out with anyone who has a gripe about what I think or what I believe, no matter how angry they are…but not with a Fox News crack addict. You drag yourself out of that gutter and maybe I will. But not before.
Via Sullivan…this little nugget from the front lines from Daily KOS…
It is, in short, a movement made up of the enfranchised and enabled; people who have gained every benefit from the politics of America and yet who feel in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones, the ones who have nothing left to lose, so rapidly is America falling away from them. It is rare to run across any movement so deeply angry — or more to the point, a movement which explicitly celebrates anger as the primary mission of their activism. They are not willing to listen to any factual evidence that contradicts their own beliefs in whatever dark conspiracies have been peddled to them; they have in fact made it their publicly proclaimed mission to block any such explanations from even being attempted.
This could be a description of the anti-gay movement in America ever since Anita Bryant. Enfranchised and enabled? Check. They have every right that their gay neighbors are fighting for. Every. Right. Feeling in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones? Check. It’s a constant refrain. Militant homosexuals are oppressing them. Somehow. But don’t ask how exactly because all you’ll get are either vague claims that their "deeply held religious beliefs" are being trampled on every time they’re told to leave gay people alone, or if not that, then outright lies. Remember this?
Another "Yes on 8" canard is that the continuation of same-sex marriage will force churches and other religious groups to perform such marriages or face losing their tax-exempt status. Proponents point to a case in New Jersey, where a Methodist-based nonprofit owned seaside land that included a boardwalk pavilion. It obtained an exemption from state property tax for the land on the grounds that it was open for public use and access. Events such as weddings — of any religion — could be held in the pavilion by reservation. But when a lesbian couple sought to book the pavilion for a commitment ceremony, the nonprofit balked, saying this went against its religious beliefs.
The court ruled against the nonprofit, not because gay rights trump religious rights but because public land has to be open to everyone or it’s not public. The ruling does not affect churches’ religious tax exemptions or their freedom to marry whom they please on their private property, just as Catholic priests do not have to perform marriages for divorced people and Orthodox synagogues can refuse to provide space for the weddings of interfaith couples. And Proposition 8 has no bearing on the issue; note that the New Jersey case wasn’t about a wedding ceremony.
We’re being oppressed…by having to live by the same rules everyone else does…
Not willing to listen to any factual evidence that contradicts their own beliefs? Check. Not only are they not willing to listen to the facts, they’ve built a multi-million dollar industry with dozens of front groups whose only job is to churn out one lie after another about gay people which they insist everyone else accept as holy writ, whereas any actual science is regarded as pro-homo propaganda. Publicly proclaimed their mission to block any actual facts from coming to light? Check. From keeping honest, factual information about sexual orientation out of schools, to keeping it out of public libraries, to keeping it off of television, there is no public space that the facts about homosexuality and sexual orientation can appear that they have not vigorously…and I mean vigorously…worked to shut it down.
This Daily KOS post could have been written years ago, decades even, about about the anti-gay culture warriors. But it isn’t about the fight over gay rights. It’s about the struggle for America…
There seems little question that something odd is going on with the healthcare debate. Foremost is the ridiculous extent to which the debate has been entirely commandeered by flagrant, outright lies — things about euthanasia, and death panels, and the like, abject propaganda peddled directly from House and Senate offices. We have had lying in our discourse since the beginning of that discourse, but it has been a long while since the fabrications have been so blatant, so absolutely without even the smallest grain of truth. To take a Republican-sponsored healthcare provision that rather innocently and uncontroversially extends insurance coverage to those that want to create their own living wills and turn it into a declaration that the government will decide every five years whether or not you should be euthanized is something out of the Protocols, or out of Saddam’s Iraq, or a mimicry of the worst and most stupid and most absurd of North Korean propaganda towards their own citizens.
Likewise, the explicit instruction to protestors not to debate, but to aggressively attempt to shut down the meetings entirely — not normal. It is perhaps the best possible approach for insurance lobbyists to take, if their goal is to protect the profits of their industry — but it is still not normal. We have always had the fringes of such speech, but I cannot recall a time it has been so celebrated as the formal solution to political debate. Certainly not by a major political party, coupled with the majority of their most popular pundits and talking heads, coupled again to lobbyist groups with long histories of corporate astroturfing. And the proud shuffling just-up-to-the-line-of-violence, right in the very faces of their own representatives of Congress, requiring police protection in order to escort those elected representatives safely from the meetings — that part is new. That part is not normal.
It’s been normal in the battle for gay rights for decades now…you’re only just now noticing it, because they’ve moved beyond us. But you have to understand this: you’ve always been the target too. A free, just, and proud America has always been their target. The America of liberty and justice for all has always been their target. Because in that America, they’re then just a bunch of ignorant runts, resentful that the universe doesn’t revolve around them, resentful of everything fine and noble human beings can be, they they never will because it’s too much work.
You haven’t seen the hate like your gay neighbors have seen it. Now you are. Surprised? Shocked? Just wait until you realize, really realize, that there is no bottom there.
One thing to keep in mind is that race, and racism, have rarely ever acted alone. One of the best points that Phillip Dray makes in his classic history of lynching is that epidemics of lynching often coincided, not just with an expansion of black rights, but with increased labor mobility among white women. So fear of white women, and their independence, as well as fear of sexual competition, all worked in concert. It wasn’t simply "I hate niggers" — it never is. It was "I don’t much like black people, and prices are going up, and I have to let my wife work, so I can survive, and I’m scared she won’t stay with me if she’s not dependent on me and I’d die if she left me for a black guy." Or some such.
Ditto for the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t just racism — it was class also. In the South you had this black middle class that always had to be deferential to the most poorest white person in the world. The prospect of losing that deference, of already being lower than the white aristocracy and now also being lower than a class of blacks too, wreaked havoc.
…
We’ve got governors yelling about secession, and major politicians peddling stories of imminent threats to your family and your children by the very government they are supposedly a part of, and every day the town hall footage just seems to look more and more like a modernized version of the mob attacks against citizens and legislators during old anti-desegregation rallies, and we don’t need to say "sooner or later someone will be shot" because it has already happened, and multiple times, and in truth it never really left us, these last fifty years.
It wasn’t about desegregation. It wasn’t about feminism. It wasn’t about gay rights. Those were just the flashpoints…the excuses. It wasn’t about any of those things. Not ever. Think about the other major event of the last half of the 20th century…the cold war. Think about the Iron Curtain. Think about the Berlin Wall. Think about all those people who were shot, trying to get over it to freedom. Think about what was going through the minds of the people who gave the order to shoot and kill those wall climbers. What this has always been about: The Gutter…resentful, hating everyone who ever managed to rise above them, fearful of being left alone in the gutter, afraid of the day when the walls all fall down and everyone who can leaves them behind and all they’ll have is each other to look at, and to blame.
You Can Fool Some Of The People Some Of The Time, And All Of The People Some Of The Time, But You Can Fool Yourself All Of The Time
If the anti-gay petition drive in Washington State fails due to too many invalid signatures, the sweet justice of it might be that their own anti-gay base believed the same signature gathering lies they were telling everyone else. This from The Seattle PI blog:
The numbers for Thursday’s count showed 6,483 checked and 935 rejected, for a cumulative daily error rate of 14.42 percent, said secretary of state spokesman Dave Ammons.
…and this from the comments:
I think the lying on the part of supporters may have hurt them with the error rate.
Imagine someone in Kent waddling up to the Walmart and encountering someone with a petition to "repeal domestic partnerships for gays." They sign it and go in for a triple pounder with cheese before buying lead-filled Chinese crap for their kids.
Then 5 weeks later, they role out of their SUV at the Olive Garden and see someone with a petition to "ban same sex marriage." They go ahead and sign it, not realizing that it’s the same one they signed 5 weeks ago because the paid petition gatherer lied to them.
I Don’t Understand Why They’re Calling Us Bigots Simply For Opposing The Gay Agenda
From our Department of Clueless Nitwits…
Via SLOG, The Seattle Times ran an article yesterday about how fragmented the Religious Right has become lately, and in particular over the fight against gay equality. The general complaint among the local culture warriors, if not the big generals, is that the fight has become too negative. Oh really?
Fuiten, senior pastor at Cedar Park Assembly of God Church in Bothell, long has been a staunch, articulate voice for conservative Christian values.
But his position on what role the church should play on gay rights is shifting, and he’s struggling to understand what God wants him to do next.
He remains against gay marriage, still sees same-sex relations as sinful, and also was against a measure passed by the Legislature this spring that expanded domestic-partnership benefits for same-sex couples.
But he has publicly opposed — and won’t sign — Referendum 71, the effort to repeal that measure, saying people are preoccupied with the economy and there’s not enough support.
More important, he said, Ref. 71 "drags us backward into a negative fight we’re not going to win."
"I don’t want the church to be viewed as oppressive, [and] as opposed to people living their lives and eking out whatever happiness they can."
Well if he’s willing to concede that gay folk are "people" now, instead of a cancer on society, God cursed abominations that want to destroy marriage and families and the very moral fabric of western civilization, I guess that’s progress. But when you’re more concerned about how you are viewed, then the person you really are, you are going to keep missing the point of their anger.
Senior Pastor Emeritus Jan Hettinga, 64, of Northshore Baptist Church, and an organizer of 2004’s Mayday for Marriage rally, said many at his church feel they’ve "been there and done that" on political issues, and "all we got was really, really bad press and a bad image."
The problem isn’t that you have a bad image. Here’s the problem:
Branding the disagreement over same-sex marriage as hatred and bigotry was a smart strategy by gay-rights supporters, Hettinga said. "No Christians I know want to be considered haters.
And here’s where I just want to scream in his face. Strategy. Strategy. Strategy. You stick a knife into people’s hearts, tell them, no, scream in their faces day in and day out that they are condemned by god, call them abominations, threats to families, menaces to children, cancers on society, defilers of the sanctity of marriage, you barge into the gardens of their hopes and dreams and trash everything you can lay your hands on and when they call you haters and bigots you think that’s a fucking strategy??? No asshole, it’s called getting angry with morons who are laying waste to your inner life as if they don’t think you have one. Still can’t see the people for the homosexuals can you? Well…that’s how bigots are.
You don’t see people. You see bogeymen. You see scarecrows. They don’t have human hearts, they have an agenda. They don’t feel pain, they plot strategies. They don’t love, they just have sex. And you are not a bigot, just someone who can’t see the people for the homosexuals. An image makeover isn’t going to solve your problem Jan.
Heroes Of The Culture War #721…Collect The Entire Series!
As Jim Burroway remarked last night on Facebook, I had no idea "Hiking the Appalachian Trail" meant that…
Mark Sanford. Republican. Conservative. Sexual moralist. Fierce defender of Traditional Marriage. Protecting innocent children from the homosexual agenda. Upholding his state’s reputation as a place decent normal families can come visit…
When South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford learned that his state was being advertised as a gay tourism destination, he ordered a Cabinet-level department head “to do the right thing personnel-wise or process-wise to ensure this does not happen again,” Sanford’s spokesman Joel Sawyer told Q-Notes.
Sanford was reacting to U.S. media reports that a subway poster mounted in London, England, during Gay Pride week was announcing, “South Carolina is so gay.”
A state employee who approved the ads was called to a meeting with management and resigned, according to Marion Edmonds, spokesman for the state’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism (PRT).
If the employee broke any rule in the conduct of her job, it was apparently an unwritten one.
…
Governor Sanford mandated that PRT director Chad Prosser will from now on have to personally sign off on all advertising campaigns, Sawyer said.
S.C. Governor Mark Sanford has admitted to being unfaithful to his wife, and stated in his press conference at 2:30 p.m. that this was the reason he was in Argentina for Father’s Day instead of at home with his family.
I don’t want to hear one more word about how horrible it is that teh gays hold their parades every year on Father’s Day. Oh…and his mistress is also married…
Seemingly fighting tears at times, he said the situation holds a certain irony. He said his mistress is also married and has two children.
Good thing we have people like you keeping children safe from all those same-sex households, so they won’t grow up with a twisted set of values.
Another day…another anti-gay culture warrior pops out of the philanderer closet. So…"I believe in traditional marriage" is a euphemism for "I’m cheating on my spouse" is it?
At a hearing earlier this year on one of the stalled bills to allow same-sex marriage, Mark S. Goldberg told a Senate committee about his months-long battle last fall to persuade state authorities to release to him the body of his partner of 17 years, Ron Hanby, so he could grant Hanby’s wish for cremation — only to have that request rejected too because “we were not legally married or blood relatives.”
After struggling for years with depression, he said, Hanby took his own life.
Try to picture Goldberg’s state of mind right then. The death of the one you love is hard enough, but this was a suicide. He must have been absolutely devastated. But then, homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. So now is just the right time to twist the knife in his heart…to make sure he knows how much he is hated.
Goldberg said he tried to show the police and the state medical examiner’s office “our wills, living wills, power of attorney and marriage certificate” from Connecticut, but “no one was willing to see these documents.”
He said he was told the medical examiner’s office was required to conduct a two-week search for next of kin, but the medical examiner’s office waited a full week before placing the required ad in a newspaper. And then when no one responded, he said, they “waited another week” to notify another state agency of an unclaimed body.
After four weeks, he said, a Department of Human Services employee “took pity on me and my plight … reviewed our documentation and was able to get all parties concerned to release Ron’s body to me,” but then the cremation society refused to cremate Ron’s body.
“On the same day, I contacted the Massachusetts Cremation Society and they were more than willing to work with me and cremate Ron’s body,” and so, “on November 6, 2008, I was able to finally pick up Ron’s remains and put this tragedy to rest.”
They treated this man, this grieving lover, like so much human garbage. And without a doubt they all did it, every single mother fucking one of them in this chain of events, with a sense of moral righteousness.
The right to bury the one you loved, and shared a life together with, is just one out of the great plenty of rights heterosexual couples take for granted every single day. It is a safe bet, none safer, that a lot of folks in Rhode Island think extending even that one to gay people is far too much. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…
WICHITA, Kan. – Dr. George Tiller, who remained one of the nation’s few providers of late-term abortions through decades of protests and attacks, was shot and killed Sunday in a church where he was serving as an usher and his wife was in the choir.
The gunman fled, but a 51-year-old suspect was arrested some 170 miles away in suburban Kansas City three hours after the shooting, Wichita Deputy Police Chief Tom Stolz said.
Andrew Sullivan writes that Bill O’Reilly painted a bull’s eye on the doctor during one of his shows. John Aravosis reminds us that President Obama caved recently to right wing demands to bottle up or tone down a report on domestic terrorism. At some point, this naton is going to have to confront its right wing hate mongers and their willing tools. Either that, or let them cow us all into the facist theocracy of their dreams. In the meantime, I am on vacation and I have a new mantra…
…I will not become a misanthrope…I will not become a misanthrope…I will not become a misanthrope…
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
