A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.
"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.
However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.
"Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says.
If you’re surprised about this then you haven’t traveled much in the bible belt. I see more highway billboards advertising strip shows and adult entertainment dives when I take a road trip through the Fundamentalist States of America then anywhere else, except maybe Nevada. But at least there they aren’t hypocritical about it. Oh…and guess who is the biggest consumer of online porn in the nation.
The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.
Utah. Where marriage is so sacred they pour millions into California last year to prevent loving same sex couples from being allowed to marry. Nice. The magic underwear isn’t working so well I take it. Or perhaps too well. Perhaps it was all part of a plan on the part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to drain money out of the faithful’s porn budgets.
Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code’s religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.
I keep thumping my pulpit on this but it keeps being relevant. They need their scapegoats. Gay people are their handy punching bags for all their own private secret shame, their own pathetic failures of moral character. They hate us, because we learned to live with our sexual nature and they, locking it in the closet, never learned how to control themselves.
Denial isn’t a plan for life. The human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will upon. Least of all religions founded by con artists. No river rises higher then its source.
Consider this a follow-up post to my They’d Be Crazy To Start A Second American Civil War post below. From Pam’s House Blend…a first hand account of how they love the sinner but hate the sin in the Aloha State…
…You know, it gets really tiresome to be called diseased and a pedophile and a rapist and an abomination and a threat to America three dozen times in one day. It infuriates me to hear that yes, heterosexuals have special rights (at least they admitted it finally!) and that is how it should be because The Big Book of Bronze Age Fairy Tales says so. To hear little old ladies screaming that they would rather see their grandchildren commit suicide than "be part of that disgusting, filthy, evil lifestyle", isn’t even remotely amusing anymore.
Even better is to, due to the concussion headache beginning to blind me, forget to take off my little green and gold "equality" sticker on the way out of the building, and be followed to the bus stop by a bunch of red shirts with signs. Three 6’5", 200 pound Islander guys with signs saying "Gay marriage is wrong" and "John 3:16" followed the lone little white girl with her laptop case across the street, yelling at me, "Repent!", calling me a bitch and a whore, telling me, "You just need a real man to fuck you straight." Nothing I haven’t heard before.
Then one of them said, "We know who you are now, and what you drive. We saw you last Thursday. You better watch yourself, fucking haole bitch." Not one of the 20 people standing around the bus stop said anything to them.
I got on the first bus that came along, got off three stops down the street, and caught my right bus a few minutes later. I rode home all alone, with my headphones on, praying no one bothered me.
I don’t actually believe there is going to be anything like a second American civil war coming out of cowardly louts like these. But the republican noise machine is deliberately egging them on and it’s an open question as to whether or not they understand the forces they’re witlessly playing with. What I expect is to see more Timothy McVeighs and Eric Rudolphs…more godly men like this one…
Progressives around the country can breathe a little easier today: James Adkisson has been sentenced to life behind bars for the deaths of Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger, the Unitarian Universalist martyrs who died during his assault on their church in Knoxville, TN last July.
Many of us intuited at the time that Adkisson’s rampage was exactly the kind of rancid fruit that would inevitably take root in an American countryside thickly composted with two decades of hate radio bullshit, freshly turned and watered with growing middle-class frustration over the failing economy. That suspicion that was verified in the days that followed, when police searched Adkisson’s apartment and found it filled with books and newsletters penned by Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and other right-wing hate talkers.
But Monday, Adkisson told us himself — in his own words — just how central right-wing eliminationism was in driving him to his shooting spree. Shortly after he was sentenced Monday, he released a four-page handwritten "manifesto" — which he’d intended to be his suicide note — to the Knoxville News (the full .pdf can be downloaded here). In it, he unleashes the full measure of his hatred for liberals — and encourages other would-be right-wing warriors to take up arms and follow him into battle.
Some choice excerpts:
"Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them….
"This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book. I’d like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn’t get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It’s the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence."
"I thought I’d do something good for this Country Kill Democrats til the cops kill me….Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is to kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I’d like to encourage other like minded people to do what I’ve done. If life aint worth living anymore don’t just kill yourself. do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.
No doubt this manifesto is being blogged, mailed, twittered, and otherwise littered across the far-right infosphere today, and Adkisson will likely emerge from this as a new hero of the extreme right wing. (He’s obviously articulate and literate, which means we may expect more of these bilious rants coming out of his cell in the years ahead.) It also seems likely that, probably sooner rather than later, other victims of our curdled economy will accept his charge, pick up their guns, and attempt to follow him into battle.
I have a feeling I know who is going to play the role that Jews played once upon a time when Germany was having its own little bout with economic chaos, and vitriolic class hatreds…
…After first establishing that God created Eve to be Adam’s “helper,” [Colorado State Senator] Renfroe explained why he opposed extending health care benefits to gay and lesbian partners of state employees:
Homosexuality is seen as a violation of this natural, created order and it is an offense to God, the Creator, who created men and women, male and female, for procreation.
Then came some passages from the Bible:
Leviticus 18:22 says, “You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a female, it is an abomination.”
and
Leviticus 20:13 says, “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act and they shall surely be put to death. Their blood guiltiness is upon them.”
You just need a real man to fuck you straight. We know who you are now, and what you drive.
If I had my way, that would be his name, as far as any rational person was concerned. (As in: “I was in my car listening to Crazy Glenn Beck …”) Because Crazy Glenn Beck has carved out his own niche in the talk radio/Fox News spectrum, and it is the Crazy niche. And these aren’t exactly venues known for their non-craziness to begin with.
Glenn Greenwald has a rundown of Crazy Glenn Beck’s latest lunacy — “war gaming” the, uh, coming civil war.
Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air blog links to Crazy Glenn Beck’s discussion of the coming civil war, but even there, the writer feels compelled to note:
There’s something “off” about Beck in a way that’s not true of other chat-show hosts, although that’s not necessarily a criticism: O’Reilly and Hannity can be tiresome in more than small doses but this guy I find watchable even at a stretch. Partly it’s the sheer bravado of the performance, partly it’s the challenge of trying to figure out what’s going on in his head to make him the way he is.
When a right winger is so crazy that one of Michelle Malkin’s bloggers finds it necessary to post a disclaimer, however mild — that’s some serious crazy!
Crazy Glenn Beck had a health incident a couple of Christmasses ago — somehow things went awry with his health care provider and he had at least one incredibly rough night, which he later described to his listeners as consisting of terrible visions, such as — I’m not making this up but I am paraphrasing from memory — children’s faces being chewed off by dogs.
I was listening that morning and I remember thinking, “Wow! Discussing visions of children’s faces being chewed off by dogs on a nationally syndicated morning radio program? That’s crazy, even for Crazy Glenn Beck!”
So to answer the Hot Air blogger’s question, I’ll tell you what’s going on in Crazy Glenn Beck’s head: he’s trying not to react to the invisible people shouting at him, the ones that only he can see and hear, because he knows he’s on camera and he has to hold it together. He’s trying not to let the demons crawl right out of his skin while he’s in front of the microphone, because his livelihood depends on walking up to the crazy line but not crossing over, and mostly he succeeds, but clearly the strain is taking its toll. Bill O’Reilly used to be my leading candidate for right wing blowhard most likely to have an on air meltdown, but since Fox gave him a live tv show, Crazy Glenn Beck has pulled way into the lead.
(Crazy Glenn Beck’s bizarre post-surgery YouTube video is here. And here — at about the fifty second mark — Crazy Glenn Beck “jokes” about specific and graphic ways he would like to kill Michael Moore. Ha ha ha.)
Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 gave rise to the American "militia movement": hordes of overwhelmingly white, middle-aged men from suburban and rural areas who convinced themselves they were defending the American way of life from the "liberals" and "leftists" running the country by dressing up in military costumes on weekends, wobbling around together with guns, and play-acting the role of patriot-warriors. Those theater groups — the cultural precursor to George Bush’s prancing 2003 performance dressed in a fighter pilot outfit on Mission Accomplished Day — spawned the decade of the so-called "Angry White Male," the movement behind the 1994 takeover of the U.S. Congress by Newt Gingrich and his band of federal-government-cursing, pseudo-revolutionary, play-acting tough guys.
What was most remarkable about this allegedly "anti-government" movement was that — with some isolated and principled exceptions — it completely vanished upon the election of Republican George Bush, and it stayed invisible even as Bush presided over the most extreme and invasive expansion of federal government power in memory. Even as Bush seized and used all of the powers which that movement claimed in the 1990s to find so tyrannical and unconstitutional — limitless, unchecked surveillance activities, detention powers with no oversight, expanding federal police powers, secret prison camps, even massively exploding and debt-financed domestic spending — they meekly submitted to all of it, even enthusiastically cheered it all on.
They’re the same people who embraced and justified full-scale, impenetrable federal government secrecy and comprehensive domestic spying databases conducted in the dark and against the law when perpetrated by a Republican President — but have spent the last week flamboyantly pretending to be scandalized and outraged by the snooping which Bill Moyers did 45 years ago (literally) as part of a Democratic administration. They’re the people who relentlessly opposed and impugned Clinton’s military deployments and then turned around and insisted that only those who are anti-American would question or oppose Bush’s decision to start wars.
They’re the same people who believed that Bill Clinton’s use of the FISA court to obtain warrants to eavesdrop on Americans was a grave threat to liberty, but believed that George Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the law was a profound defense of freedom. In sum, they dressed up in warrior clothing to fight against Bill Clinton’s supposed tyranny, and then underwent a major costume change on January 20, 2001, thereafter dressing up in cheerleader costumes to glorify George Bush’s far more extreme acquisitions of federal power.
In doing so, they revealed themselves as motivated by no ideological principles or political values of any kind. It was a purely tribalistic movement motivated by fear of losing its cultural and demographic supremacy. In that sense — the only sense that mattered — George Bush was one of them, even though, with his actions, he did everything they long claimed to fear and despise. Nonetheless, his mere occupancy of the White House was sufficient to pacify them and convert them almost overnight from limited-government militants into foot soldiers supporting the endless expansion of federal government power.
But now, only four weeks into the presidency of Barack Obama, they are back — angrier and more chest-beating than ever. Actually, the mere threat of an Obama presidency was enough to revitalize them from their eight-year slumber, awaken them from their camouflaged, well-armed suburban caves. The disturbingly ugly atmosphere that marked virtually every Sarah Palin rally had its roots in this cultural resentment, which is why her fear-mongering cultural warnings about Obama’s exotic, threatening otherness — he’s a Muslim-loving, Terrorist-embracing, Rev.-Wright-following Marxist: who is the real Barack Obama? — resonated so stingingly with the rabid lynch mobs that cheered her on.
With Obama now actually in the Oval Office — and a financial crisis in full force that is generating the exact type of widespread, intense anxiety that typically inflames these cultural resentments — their mask is dropping, has dropped, and they’ve suddenly re-discovered their righteous "principles." The week-long CNBC Revolt of the Traders led by McCain voter Rick Santelli and the fledgling little Tea Party movement promoted by the Michelle Malkins of the world are obvious outgrowths of this 1990s mentality, now fortified by the most powerful fuel: deep economic fear. But as feisty and fire-breathing as those outbursts are, nothing can match — for pure, illustrative derangement — the discussion below from Glenn Beck’s new Fox show this week, in which he and an array of ex-military and CIA guests ponder (and plot and plan) "war games" for the coming Civil War against Obama-led tyranny. It really has to be seen to be believed.
…
That’s the context for this Glenn Beck "War Games" show on Fox News this week — one promoted, with some mild and obligatory caveats, by Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air. In the segment below, he convened a panel that includes former CIA officer Michael Scheuer and Ret. U.S. Army Sgt. Major Tim Strong. They discuss a coming "civil war" led by American "Bubba" militias — Beck says he "believes we’re on this road" — and they contemplate whether the U.S. military would follow the President’s orders to subdue civil unrest or would instead join with "the people" in defense of their Constitutional rights against the Government (they agree that the U.S. military would be with "the people")…
He called the gay-rights movement "probably the greatest threat to America," likened gay activists to Muslim radicals and dubbed same-sex relationships "abominations."
…
Buttars’ latest remarks come from an interview with documentary filmmaker Reed Cowan that aired on ABC 4 this week. Buttars told Cowan the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community doesn’t want "equality, they want superiority."
"It’s the beginning of the end," the West Jordan Republican said. "Oh, it’s worse than that. Sure. Sodom and Gomorrah was localized. This is worldwide
The state Senate passed SB 88 — sponsored by the Legislature’s two openly gay members, Sen. Jennifer Veiga and Rep. Mark Ferrandino, both Denver Democrats — on a voice vote after Renfroe spoke, and then gave final approval to the bill Tuesday morning by a margin of 22-12, with Republican Sens. Ken Kester and Al White joining Democrats voting in favor. The bill moves on to the House for consideration.
The bill, which also came under fire from Focus on the Family in an advertising campaign last week, roused Renfroe to pull out a Bible and thump it during debate Monday. After first establishing that God created Eve to be Adam’s “helper,” Renfroe explained why he opposed extending health care benefits to gay and lesbian partners of state employees:
Homosexuality is seen as a violation of this natural, created order and it is an offense to God, the Creator, who created men and women, male and female, for procreation.
Then came some passages from the Bible:
Leviticus 18:22 says, “You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a female, it is an abomination.”
and
Leviticus 20:13 says, “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act and they shall surely be put to death. Their blood guiltiness is upon them.”
And I still can’t get this dream out of my head…
In this dream I’m driving to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to visit some gay friends.
From Baltimore, Gettysburg is not all that far away. This is a day trip I’m taking, and I have three gay friends with me…a full car. We chat easily as I drive with the windows down and the moon roof open through some very lovely Maryland, and then Pennsylvania countryside. It is a beautiful day. Perfect actually. Not too hot, not too cold. The air smells sweet and crisp and clear. The sky is a perfect blue, with just a few fluffy clouds in it here and there…just enough to make it beautiful, but not so many as to block the sun. A perfect day. My companions and I are feeling as sunny and cheerful as the weather. Peace and contentment and companionship. A perfect day.
Eventually we get to a small and cozy old cottage house in Gettysburg. Somehow I know it is not far from the battlefield nearby…somewhere over the rolling hills of grass and trees. But the sight of such a charming little house puts all thoughts of that terrible war out of my mind. It is so cozy and peaceful to look at. Like something out of a Currier and Ives print. There is a large plot of land around it, with a very nice stone walled garden on one side of the house. Inside we meet more friends, There is a table of lovely snacks and wine. Delicious. I chat with a few of the folks inside, get a few snacks from the table and a small crystal glass of wine, and walk out into the garden…back out into the perfect day.
I don’t recognize any of these people. But somehow in my dream I know that they are all gay friends of mine. We chat about this and that in the beautiful garden. The couple who owns the house has clearly done years of careful loving work on both house and garden. The garden is surrounded by a low stone walls that I think must date back hundreds of years. Inside the wall are so many beautiful bushes and flowers it just takes your breath away. A little paradise.
It is a very peaceful, tranquil setting, and I feel a warm, serene ease being there, and being in the company of these other gay folks. I don’t know any of them, yet I feel that we are all compatriots…comrades somehow. Kindred. I am sitting on one of the low stone walls. A guy about my age is sitting beside me on my right. Several other guys are standing in front of me. We are chatting easily about this and that.
As we chat, about a dozen bright yellow birds, American Goldfinches, land on the wall near us. We watch as they fly a short distance to one of the garden’s Azalea bushes, now in full rosy bloom. Yellow birds hopping around in a rose red bush, looking for some food I suppose. The sight is lovely. One of my companions remarks on how colorful they are, and I agree.
The goldfinches fly off, and almost immediately about a dozen or so starlings land on the stone wall a short distance away from us. My companions ignore them. Some people don’t like starlings, they’re not very pretty birds, but I like and even admire them in some ways. They can find homes in the most amazing of places in and around humankind’s structures. Their flocks make these spectacular air formations, that weave and turn and undulate in the sky as if the entire flock had a single mind. I’m told it’s behavior they evolved over time in their European homelands, to confuse and evade hawks and other air predators. And starlings make this cheerful, goofy song that sounds to my ear like the squeaky wheel noise of the old fax signals I used to hear on my shortwave radio when I was a kid. No other bird makes a song quite like a starling’s. It’s bizarre and goofy and cheerful and just brings a smile to my face whenever I hear it. But starlings are not welcome in most places because their flocks can get Huge and they make a lot of mess.
My companions ignore the small flock of starlings. As I watch it, one of the birds starts walking awkwardly over to me.
As it gets closer, I can see its feathers are unkempt…ruffled…disordered. Some look broken. It’s little pointy yellow beak is broken and bent in the middle. It comes closer, awkwardly waddling on little stubby bird legs. I can see eyes are just two black holes in its head…empty sockets in its little bird skull.
It walks over the stones to me, then it stops, fixes those empty socket eyes on mine, and in a little dry, gravelly voice, begins singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic to me.
Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage
where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning
of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.
The anti-gay American Family Association is calling now, for a boycott of Pepsi. Seems they’re none too happy that Pepsi treats its gay customers like something other then human garbage. Here’s their email alert to the faithful…
Dear ****,
Pepsi has produced another TV ad not only promoting Pepsi but also promoting the gay lifestyle. Click here to see the ad.
Pepsi had released a similar ad before. The ads serve two purposes for Pepsi: to sell Pepsi and to promote the homosexual lifestyle. AFA asked Pepsi to remain neutral in the culture war, but the company refused – choosing to support the homosexual activists.
Pepsi has made no effort to hide their support for the homosexual agenda:
Pepsi gave a total of $1,000,000 to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) to promote the homosexual lifestyle in the workplace.
Both HRC and PFLAG supported efforts in California to defeat Proposition 8 which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. HRC, which received $500,000 from Pepsi, gave $2.3 million to defeat Proposition 8.
Pepsi forces employees to attend sexual orientation and gender diversity training where the employees are taught to accept homosexuality.
Pepsi is a member of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce.
Take Action!
So you folks in the kook pews are going to drink…what…from now on? Coke? Coca Cola company gets a 100 Percent rating from the Human Rights Campaign. Hmmm. Well…you Could do 7-Up, which is owned by Dr Pepper/Snapple…but only here in the U.S. Elsewhere it’s owned by…Pepsi.
Jonathan Rauch, who writes from time to time like he has common sense, joins hands with a bigot to announce they two have found common ground. Wow…common ground…
In politics, as in marriage, moments come along when sensitive compromise can avert a major conflict down the road. The two of us believe that the issue of same-sex marriage has reached such a point now.
It would work like this: Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon them most or all of the federal benefits and rights of marriage. But there would be a condition: Washington would recognize only those unions licensed in states with robust religious-conscience exceptions, which provide that religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions against their will. The federal government would also enact religious-conscience protections of its own. All of these changes would be enacted in the same bill.
I see. Well that sounds like a plan all right. And it would work too…right up to the point that something like this happens…
One moment everything was fine. You were in your stateroom on the cruise ship — it was to be an anniversary cruise — unpacking your things. The kids were in the adjoining stateroom playing with your wife. Suddenly, they banged on the door crying that mom was hurt.
So now you’re in the hospital — Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami — waiting for word, and it’s not coming. They tell you, Joe (we’ll call you Joe) you can’t be with her. You plead with them, to no avail. No, Joe, sorry, Joe, we can’t tell you anything.
One hour turns to two, two to four, four to six. Your wife is dying and no one she loves is there.
Finally, in the eighth hour, you reach her bedside. You are just in time to stand beside the priest as he administers last rites.
Your wife is dead. Her name was Lisa Marie Pond. She was 39.
It happened, Feb. 18-19, 2007, except that Pond’s spouse was not a man named Joe, but a woman named Janice. And there’s one other detail. Janice Langbehn who, as it happens, is an emergency room social worker from Lacey, Wash., says the first hospital employee she spoke with was an emergency room social worker. She thought, given their professional connection, they might speak a common language.
Instead, she says, he told her, "I need you to know you are in an anti-gay city and state and you won’t get to know about Lisa’s condition or see her" — then turned and walked away.
Now consider what the legal status of that couple would be in a hospital run by a "religious organization", as many increasingly are, within the scope of your…compromise. Oh…I know…just tell the ambulance driver not to take your dying spouse to the closest available emergency room if it’s owned by a church.
Right. Something like this happens and that artifice of civility you’re trying to prop up comes crashing right back down in flames again Jonathan. And what we see in the wreckage, once again, sickeningly but clearly…very clearly…is how much your new found friends hate us, how bottomless that hate is. And…oh by the way…they hate you too. You knew that, right?
I have a question Jonathan. Who do you think you are talking to? Someone who can see a human being when they look at homosexuals? Someone who wants the same decency and common civility to flourish in society, and nurture the best within its citizens? Are you smoking crack? Are you drunk? Did banging your head against that impenetrable wall that is Blankenhorn’s cheapshit bar stool prejudices for years make you simple? Read your own goddamned newsprint jackass. The open sewer that is your pal’s conscience is right here, laughing in your face:
Whatever our disagreements on the merits of gay marriage, we agree on two facts. First, most gay and lesbian Americans feel they need and deserve the perquisites and protections that accompany legal marriage. Second, many Americans of faith and many religious organizations have strong objections to same-sex unions. Neither of those realities is likely to change any time soon.
I’m sorry…you’ve been "discussing" this issue with Blankenhorn for…how long now…? And finally…Finally…you get him to agree with you that "gay and lesbian Americans feel they need and deserve the perquisites and protections that accompany legal marriage"…? Well that’s a giant step forward all right. Look at that goddamn it! Just look at it! He isn’t agreeing that we need anything whatsoever, let alone the perquisites and protections of marriage, but only, and grudgingly, that we Feel like we do. I suppose Janice Langbehn was only pretending to be in anguish while her spouse was dying. But then don’t we all. Someday Jonathan, if either you or your husband find yourselves in that same situation, you’ll pretend to feel anguish too. It takes a lot of practice to mimic how attached heterosexuals are to their spouses and their families, doesn’t it Jonathan?
You’d think a civilized, let alone civil society would recognize such a basic human need. Certainly your pal Blankenhorn believes it does. But there’s the rub. Homosexuals aren’t human. They don’t need marriage, they only feel like they do. I guess because we’re jealous of how heterosexuals have real human needs and we don’t, or something. And you think that this is an improvement over whatever it was that he was thinking about gay people before you started having your discussions with him? What could that have possibly been? That we were only making noises about marriage to hear ourselves talk? Either you’ve never really looked down into that Pit that is the human capacity to hate, or you’ve been staring into it for too long. Either way, you just don’t seem to appreciate, or care, how much damage your bigot pal and his fellows in the kook pews have done to American society, let alone to civility.
A compromise…you say? I have a compromise for you. It’s called the constitution of the United States. That first amendment thing? What it doesn’t give your pal is the right to drop his church onto my back, or yours, or anyone else’s. He can build his church. He can worship in it. He can live his life as he sees fit. And all that America ever asked of him in return, is that he give his neighbor the same right. The compromise used to be this: in the public square, we were all equal, if not in the eyes of God, then at least in the eyes of the law.
Your pal and his neighbors in the kook pews absolutely despise that idea. And they have been waging a relentless scortched earth war against that American compromise for generations. How do you agree to compromise for the sake of preserving civil society with people who think being civil to heathens amounts to condoning sin? How do you agree to compromise for the sake of preserving civil society with people who believe that the basic premise of America is itself evil? They don’t call it a nation where Christians have freedom to worship…they call it a Christian nation. What is the compromise between those two things? I’ll tell you what it isn’t: The United States of America. Liberty and justice for all? Yes. So long as "all" means just the folks in the pews of Blankenhorn’s church. Civility doesn’t mean you have to allow your neighbor to sin. Why…that’s just the opposite of civility…
Meanwhile, back in Utah…another doomed search for common ground goes on…
A legislative committee defeated the last in a group of gay-rights bills presented to Utah lawmakers this year. As was the case with the others, committee members said the bill was not necessary and voiced concern about the law opening the door to gay marriage.
The bottom line is most conservative lawmakers just don’t believe any of these bills just address civil rights. Instead, the Common Ground bills were viewed as a "threat" to traditional marriage.
The last Common Ground bill would have affected medical visitation and inheritance. Changing the law could affect people outside the gay community as well. But the focus—and concern—was predominantly centered on gay rights.
They can’t even let same sex couples visit their spouses in the hospital. Civility anyone? Common ground? Here’s your common ground…
Today, the Utah state legislature “dealt a final blow” to the last of five gay rights bills taken up under the Common Ground Initiative, when it defeated a bill that would have granted gay couples rights of inheritance and medical decision-making. Yesterday, the state House rejected bills that would have allowed gay adoption and protected gays from housing and employment discrimination.
Last night, Utah’s local ABC station received leaked portions of an interview with state senator Chris Buttars (R), which will be highlighted in an upcoming documentary on Proposition 8. Buttars is an outspoken opponent of gay rights; in the latest interview, he compares gays to alcoholics and Muslim terrorists, and warns that gay people are “probably the greatest threat to America.” Some excerpts from the interview:
– To me, homosexuality will always be a sexual perversion. And you say that around here now and everybody goes nuts! But I don’t care.
– They say, I’m born that way. There’s some truth to that, in that some people are born with an attraction to alcohol.
– They’re mean! They want to talk about being nice — they’re the meanest buggers I ever seen. It’s just like the Moslems. Moslems are good people and their religion is anti-war. But it’s been taken over by the radical side. And the gays are totally taken over by the radical side.
– I believe that you will destroy the foundation of American society, because I believe the cornerstone of it is a man and a woman, the family. … And I believe that they’re, internally, they’re probably the greatest threat to America going down I know of. Yep, the radical gay movement.
He also said that gay people have no morals…that "It’s the beginning of the end. Oh, it’s worse than that. Sure. Sodom and Gomorrah was localized. This is worldwide." Oh…and bragged that he’d killed every bill in his judiciary committee that so much as smelled of gay rights. When this blew up in the media, the Utah Senate took swift action. They removed Buttars from his chairmanship. Oh…but not because they disagreed with him mind you…
"I want the citizens of Utah to know that the Utah Senate stands behind Senator Buttars’ right to speak, we stand behind him as one of our colleagues and his right to serve this state," [Senate President Michael] Waddoups said. "He is a senator who represents the point of view of many of his constituents and many of ours. We agree with many of the things he said. …We stand four square behind his right [to say what he wants]."
Waddoups refused repeatedly to clarify which of Buttars’ opinions are shared by himself or Senate leaders.
Emphasis mine. And to further clarify…
He said the decision to remove Buttars from the committees was ultimately his own as president, a move he made so the Senate could function smoothly. The judiciary committee, in recent years, has heard most of the bills dealing with gay and lesbian rights, and removing Buttars from his position would remove the "personalities" and focus on the issues, Waddoups said.
This was a PR move. They weren’t disgusted with the man…they just wanted him to stop saying to publically what they all believe. That homosexuals are not human beings. That homosexuals are destroying the world.
Civility. Common Ground. So you got Blankenhorn to agree that homosexuals Feel as though they need the protections of marriage did you Jonathan? Wow. Peace in our time. Do let us know when you’ve got him to the point where he agrees that we Feel a human heart beating in our chests. That would be…awesome.
Jim Burroway makes a good catch I’d missed when looking at the new anti-gay ad campaign created by Campaign Secrets…the one that shows an unseen gay sniper putting a family and more specifically their little children in the crosshairs. This one is good…it really says it all…
By the way, we also learn that public schools no longer celebrate Father’s Day. Wait a minute. That couldn’t be because it’s celebrated on the third Sunday in June while school’s out, could it? Naah, it’s a much better story when it’s all the gays’ fault.
Dig it. Never mind that Father’s Day happens after the school year ends…just remember that the homosexuals have forced schools to stop celebrating Father’s Day.
Now…this kind of crap may actually fool a lot of people, not all of whom necessarily want someone to feed them pre-fabricated lies about gays they can pass around without taking responsibility for it. Some people will actually hear this and think…Wow…the gays took Father’s Day out of the schools… But you know goddamned well the people who made that ad knew that it was horseshit, and almost certainly so did the folks who bought it. And it’s a safe bet that its target audience doesn’t care if it’s truthful or not.
There’s your moral crusade right there. There’s your righteousness.
The Fine Art Of Inflaming Violent Passions Toward Homosexuals
Via Pam’s House Blend…and as of now racing across the net like a fire. West Virginia Christianists are gearing up for a push to enact an anti same-sex marriage amendment in their state. As always, it isn’t enough to simply make a case for heterosexual supremacy. They have to demonize gay people too. Their latest ad starts out with the image of a gay sniper putting a heterosexual family, and more specifically their little children, in the cross hairs. They are being targeted, to be gunned down, by some the homosexuals. Here’s a screen shot:
Bear in mind that this ad is running in a state that’s maybe only a tad less armed to the teeth then Texas. And the message of this particular sequence is crystal clear: The homosexuals are going to kill your family, starting with your children. Of course they’ll insist its only a metaphor. They don’t mean that homosexuals are Literally going to kill your family. Naturally all the West Virginians who see this ad will understand that.
This is what gets gay people killed in this country every year. And make no mistake, the people creating and the people running these ads are well aware of that fact. But we are not so much human beings as cockroaches to them. They want us gone. They want us eliminated. If the state won’t do what Leviticus commands, then maybe Bubba will…
The video is below. The sniper shot comes in at about .53 seconds. Then it’s another four minutes plus warning everyone about the threat the homosexuals pose to families and children. In 1977 Jerry Falwell stood beside Anita Bryant, who was then fighting to have Dade County’s anti-discrimination ordinance repealed by popular vote, and told a room full of reporters that “A homosexual will kill you as soon as look at you.” Now they are, almost literally, telling people in West Virginia that we do in fact intend to kill them, and kill their children. Gay people are going to die because of this ad.
Pam over at the Blend notes this same group who made the ad…Campaign Secrets…also created an attack ad against the AARP back in 2005. AARP’s crime back then was opposing Bush’s plan to let the stock market play with your social security pension money. To discredit AARP, Campaign Secrets cooked up this little gem:
Dig it. The AARP is wrong about social security, because it hates our men in uniform and loves faggots. That, literally, was the message.
A classroom dispute at Los Angeles City College in the emotional aftermath of Proposition 8 has given rise to a lawsuit testing the balance between 1st Amendment rights and school codes on offensive speech.
Student Jonathan Lopez says his professor called him a "fascist bastard" and refused to let him finish his speech against same-sex marriage during a public speaking class last November, weeks after California voters approved the ban on such unions.
When Lopez tried to find out his mark for the speech, the professor, John Matteson, allegedly told him to "ask God what your grade is," the suit says.
Whenever I see a story like this one pop up I scan down the article for the words "Alliance Defense Fund" and I am seldom dissapointed. That’s Pat Robertson’s ACLU evil mirror and it exists, not so much to defend the rights of Christians as to inflame religious passions in the mob toward secular government. Whenever you see the Alliance Defense Fund in a news story, the first thing you have to assume is that most of what you are reading is Alliance Defense Fund spin, because they’re very good at finding reporters who are too lazy to fact check them.
This story is a case in point. Your first reaction may be to question the wisdom of calling a student a fascist bastard in class. Certainly telling a student to ask God what their grade is was way out of line. Perhaps you didn’t notice this little tidbit in the L.A. Times story…
The Los Angeles Community College District’s offices were closed Friday for the Presidents Day holiday, and the general counsel, Camille A. Goulet, could not be reached. But in a letter to Alliance, the district said it deemed Lopez’s complaint "extremely serious in nature" and had launched a private disciplinary process.
The Alliance Defense Fund is a master at this. They tossed this story out on a weekend, when nobody from the school district would be available for immediate comment. That way, they get to spin the story the entire weekend and through Monday, the holiday, without fear of anyone hearing both sides of the story.
But in a letter to Alliance, the district said it deemed Lopez’s complaint "extremely serious in nature" and had launched a private disciplinary process.
In the letter, Dean Allison Jones also said that two students had been "deeply offended" by Lopez’s address, one of whom stated that "this student should have to pay some price for preaching hate in the classroom."
We are only getting the ADL’s spin on this story…but even in that spin there is a germ of something not-quite-right. It wasn’t just the professor, but at least two students in the class who were offended enough by the speech to register complaints.
But, you say, even so, the ADL’s side of it is serious enough. Professors shouldn’t be calling students fascists. In class. Other students should be told to respect the sincerely held religious beliefs of their peers, no matter how offensive those beliefs may seem to them. But notice the one thing you aren’t hearing from the ADL, or in fact, any of the other news sources: the speech the student gave.
It isn’t there. Not in the L.A. Times. Not in the San Jose Mercury News. Not in the ADL press release. Not even in the right wing loony bin that is Town Hall even, where you would expect to find nothing but hosannas for outright Christainist Fascism. The closest you get to the actual content of the speech in Town Hall, is this:
In November, Jonathan Lopez attempted to give his informative speech on God and the ways he has seen God act miraculously in his life and in the lives of others. In the middle of that speech, Lopez spoke of God and morality and read the dictionary definition of marriage. He also read two verses from the Bible.
But before Lopez was finished with his speech, Professor Matteson interrupted him. After calling Lopez a “fascist bastard” in front of other students, Matteson invited students to leave the class if they had been offended. When no one left, the professor dismissed the entire class.
But in fact even the ADL conceeds that two students were offended enough to register their complaints. But look at that carefully. In the middle of that speech, Lopez spoke of God and morality and read the dictionary definition of marriage. He also read two verses from the Bible. Would one of those verses have been this one…perchance…?
If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.
We don’t know. All we know at this point, is that something was said during that class that shocked and outraged enough of the people who heard it that…well…what exactly? The suit doesn’t accuse the school of actually penalizing Lopez in any way, other then having his speech cut short and being ridiculed in front of the class. Which I’m sure has never happened to any other college student in a public speaking class. Oh yes, it accuses the the professor of making threats of retaliation…but no actual retaliation is in the ADL’s accusations. When you look at this one critically, there doesn’t seem to be much of anything at all other then…well…a lot of empty speechifying.
So what is this all about? Simple. It’s about generating a news story about Christians being persecuted to inflame the mob…to keep it fired up for the ongoing culture war. I strongly suspect that when we eventually find out what it was this lout actually said to his classmates it won’t seem such a clear cut act of religious persecution after all.
Of course…the reporters on the story could simply have done their damn jobs. The obvious thing here is to dig up what Lopez actually said. Nobody seems to have bothered doing that. And the ADL and Town Hall would have their reasons one strongly suspects, for not telling. Where are the goddamned journalists in this country? They all retire or something?
You knew the culture warriors were a bitter lot, didn’t you? This came across one of the gay news lists I subscribe to this morning…
20 Oklahoma legislators vote against recording gay pastor’s prayer in House Journal
Scott Jones, pastor of the Cathedral of Hope-Oklahoma City, delivered the opening prayer Monday in the Oklahoma House of Representatives, according to this report on Jones’ blog, MyQuest. The Cathedral of Hope-OKC is a congregation of the United Church of Christ that spun off from Dallas’ Cathedral of Hope, known as the world’s largest gay church.
The Rev. Scott Jones thanked his legislator, Rep. Al McAffrey, who asked him to pray to open Wednesday’s House session and acknowledged several in the gallery – "dear friends, my wonderful parents, and my loving partner and fiance, Michael.”
Jones is the pastor of the Cathedral of Hope — Oklahoma City.
When McAffrey, D-Oklahoma City, asked in the session’s closing minutes that Jones’ prayer be made part of the House journal, the chamber’s official record, Rep. John Wright objected
20 upstanding Oklahoma legislators objected to including Jones’ prayer in the record…a thing that is so routine nobody can remember when anyone ever objected to a prayer being included in the record. More Here. Note that the the Oklahoman (The State’s Most Trusted Newspaper) account of the incident characterizes the objectors as being merely "annoyed", and that their annoyance was over Jones’ opening remarks. But the prayer, which even "the state’s most trusted newspaper" characterized as a "generic prayer", was what they voted to remove from the record. You can almost hear Wright gritting his teeth when he tells "the state’s most trusted newspaper" that his motion was "not meant to be derogatory nor divisive nor in any way trying to cause diminishment of someone’s sense of self-worth."
Contacted later, Wright, R-Broken Arrow, said the practice of including a minister’s prayer in the House journal usually is reserved for Thursdays, the last workday for legislators.
That’s one side of his mouth. And here’s the other…spoken in practically the same breath…
"My actions were motivated by the faith, so now if you want to take it and cause the public to be inflamed about it, well, that’s at your feet,” Wright said.
Which brings me to This Post over at Pam’s House Blend. It’s about a book written by a researcher whose primary focus has been the authoritarian mindset.
Yesterday I came across a most interesting book, available on-line at The Authoritarians, which provides a significant body of scientific research that goes a long way to explaining why religious followers (and leaders) have such a hard time with us GLBT folk. The author [Robert Altemeyer] is a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba and has been studying authoritarian people for decades as a psychological researcher.
Altermeyer is offering his book as a free download, or for $9.74 plus shipping for a bound edition. Here’s a few excepts pinched off Pam’s…
p. 139-140: This chapter has presented my main research findings on religious fundamentalists. The first thing I want to emphasize, in light of the rest of this book, is that they are highly likely to be authoritarian followers. They are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority, and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason, and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times, and are often hypocrites.
But they are also Teflon-coated when it comes to guilt. They are blind to themselves, ethnocentric and prejudiced, and as closed-minded as they are narrowminded. They can be woefully uninformed about things they oppose, but they prefer ignorance and want to make others become as ignorant as they. They are also surprisingly uninformed about the things they say they believe in, and deep, deep, deep down inside many of them have secret doubts about their core belief. But they are very happy, highly giving, and quite zealous. In fact, they are about the only zealous people around nowadays in North America, which explains a lot of their success in their endless (and necessary) pursuit of converts.
Emphasis mine. Sound familiar? The motion was not meant to be derogatory nor divisive nor in any way trying to cause diminishment of someone’s sense of self-worth…the practice of including a minister’s prayer in the House journal usually is reserved for Thursdays, the last workday for legislators…my actions were motivated by the faith, so now if you want to take it and cause the public to be inflamed about it, well, that’s at your feet… Well that certainly explains that, doesn’t it senator?
I try, when I rail against this sort of thing here, to distinguish between fundamentalists and evangelicals, because the mindset between the two is categorically different. Fundamentalists have certainty. Evangelicals have faith. They could not be more different things. The fundamentalists’ certainty is hollow. It is brittle. It is delicate. We are not gods after all, that we can have perfect understanding. Uncertainty is the human condition, which is why we need faith. But faith is also the companion to humility. We are not gods. We are human beings and we screw it up sometimes. We need to keep that in mind from time to time, to insure we don’t screw it up even more. But the fundamentalist is loath to admit their weaknesses other then to say by rote that they are sinners like everyone else…only forgiven. This they know for a fact. They are forgiven…and you are not. Certainty. But certainty collapses like a soap bubble at the slightest touch of reality. So reality becomes the enemy. So ‘truth’ becomes whatever keeps the bubble safe.
Faith is not certainty. Faith is trust, in the face of doubt. Sometimes, terrible doubt. Here is Fred Clark at his dazzling best, discussing the difference between the religious certitude of the authors of the Left Behind books, and faith…
The New Hope Village Church is being run by a post-rapture skeleton crew consisting of the apostate Rev. Bruce Barnes and get-back Loretta. Most of the following chapter consists of the long, sad saga of Barnes’ former sham-faith.
Before we dive into that extended monologue, a brief aside on the Rev. Barnes’ former vocation. He (re-)introduced himself to Rayford Steele as New Hope’s "visitation pastor," and repeatedly makes clear that his was a lesser, subordinate role to that of the senior pastor — the Rev. Vernon Billings. This is typical of the hierarchical structure among the staff at many nondenominational churches. This ranges from the senior pastor at the top (i.e., the pope) down through the various "associate" pastors, followed by "assistant" pastors — including visitation staff, like Bruce — on down to the youth pastor, who is just out of Bible College, wears jeans, and ranks somewhere just below the worship leader and just above the head usher.
"I was good at it," Bruce Barnes says of his role as visitation pastor.
This is not true. This cannot be true. All of Bruce Barnes’ extended testimony to Rayford and Chloe is premised on the idea that his getting left behind produced an epiphany of self-knowledge, but this newfound self-knowledge does not extend to the recognition that he cannot have been very comforting in his role as a half-assed poser of a visitation pastor.
Part of the problem here, I think, is that Tim LaHaye is, himself, was a senior pastor during his days at Scott Memorial Baptist Church in San Diego. I doubt he understands the nature of "visitation" ministry any better than Bruce Barnes does. Here’s how Barnes described that work:
"My job was to visit people in their homes and nursing homes and hospitals every day. I was good at it. I encouraged them, smiled at them, talked with them, prayed with them, even read Scripture to them."
Isn’t that nice? He smiled at them. But what Barnes/LaHaye don’t explain or seem to understand is why these people are stuck in nursing homes and hospitals. One gets the sense that an amiable visit from Barnes might have been welcomed by a parishioner who was, say, laid up for six weeks with a broken leg that would soon heal as good as new. But for a parishioner undergoing long-shot cancer treatments — adding the pain of chemotherapy to the already crippling pain of their disease in the hopes that maybe, maybe it would help them live long enough to see their youngest child graduate fifth grade — I can’t imagine that a visit from Guy Smiley would have been much help.
It’s not unusual for seminary students to experience a crisis of faith — and not every student’s faith survives this crisis. The common misperception is that this is due to all that book-larnin’ — that reading Bultmann or the latest from the Jesus Seminar is inherently dangerous to one’s faith. (Far safer to maintain a pose of anti-intellectual piety — which is, again, why many evangelicals prefer the safety of "Bible college" to the academic perils of seminary.) I suppose it’s theoretically possible that some suggestible seminarian might be overwhelmed by such exposure to liberal scholarship, but I’ve never met such a person. No, the real reason that seminary is a crucible for faith has nothing to do with intellectual study. It has to do with CPE.
CPE stands for "clinical pastoral education" — better known as the front lines. CPE has nothing to do with Vernon Billings’ job. It doesn’t involve preaching from a pulpit. It involves, rather, visitation — ministering to people in "nursing homes and hospitals."
Gordon Atkinson, the Real Live Preacher, refers to CPE as "Tear the Young Minister a New One" and describes how his own CPE experience led to a dark night of the soul:
… people facing death don’t give a fuck about your interpretation of II Timothy. Some take the “bloodied, but unbowed” road, but most dying people want to pray with the chaplain. And they don’t want weak-ass prayers either. They don’t want you to pray that God’s will be done. …
I threw myself into it. I prayed holding hands and cradling heads. I prayed with children and old men. I prayed with a man who lost his tongue to cancer. I lent him mine. I prayed my ass off. I had 50 variations of every prayer you could imagine, one hell of a repertoire.
I started noticing something. When the doctors said someone was going to die, they did. When they said 10 percent chance of survival, about 9 out of 10 died. The odds ran pretty much as predicted by the doctors. I mean, is this praying doing ANYTHING?
Compare that with Barnes’ facile summary of his role as a "visitation pastor." If Barnes ever met with someone who was dying, he doesn’t seem to have noticed. The RLP goes on to describe the final, fatal blow that CPE dealt to his young faith. Her name was Jenny:
Thirtysomething. Cute. New mother with two little kids. Breast cancer. Found it too late. Spread all over. Absolutely going to die.
Jenny had only one request. “I know I’m going to die, chaplain. I need time to finish this. It’s for my kids. Pray with me that God will give me the strength to finish it.”
She showed me the needlepoint pillow she was making for her children. It was an “alphabet blocks and apples” kind of thing. She knew she would not be there for them. Would not drop them off at kindergarten, would not see baseball games, would not help her daughter pick out her first bra. No weddings, no grandkids. Nothing.
She had this fantasy that her children would cherish this thing — sleep with it, snuggle it. Someday it might be lovingly put on display at her daughter’s wedding. Perhaps there would be a moment of silence. Some part of her would be there.
I was totally hooked. We prayed. We believed. Jesus, this was the kind of prayer you could believe in. We were like idiots and fools.
A couple of days later I went to see her only to find the room filled with doctors and nurses. She was having violent convulsions and terrible pain. I watched while she died hard. Real hard.
As the door shut, the last thing I saw was the unfinished needlepoint lying on the floor.
A faith that matters, a faith that is worth anything real, or anything at all, has to be able to account for Jenny’s story. Her story, after all, is everyone’s story — the details of time and place may differ somewhat, but not the ending. You and me, and everyone we know, we’re all going to die. Hard. A faith that cannot account for this must give way either to despair or denial.
The faith described in Left Behind cannot account for this. It’s all about denial. Proudly so. "Can you imagine," Irene Steele gushes, "Jesus coming back to get us before we die?"
Can you imagine a visitation pastor bringing such a message to hospitals and nursing homes and people like Jenny?
This is what is missing from the megamall cathedrals of the heartland. They have plenty of religion, but no faith. Because faith takes a degree of courage. They are in love with the bible, for its physicality. It can give them any answer they want to hear. But it takes a bit of nerve to look God in the face, and ask a question. Because you might get an answer. Why no Pope Urban…actually the earth isn’t at the center of the universe…and oh, by the way…neither are you…
This is why they hate gay folk. Because we are people of faith. I’m not talking about religious faith particularly. But…faith. It’s why the sincere prayers of a gay pastor had to be stricken from the record in Oklahoma. Not because he was a gay man, not because his church practiced heresy, but because he kept his faith despite the multitude of pulpits thundering at him their certainty that he was an abomination in the eyes of god. And so they hate us all…not because we are homosexuals, but because no matter how many times the likes of Sally Kern say we are a bigger danger to America then terrorists, no matter how many times they spit in our faces in the halls of government, or on TV, no matter how many anti-gay amendments they pass, no matter how many anti-gay conferences they organize, no matter how many millions of anti-gay pamphlets they print and wave in our faces, and in our neighbors faces, we still rise every morning, and go on about our lives, hoping for a better world then the gutter they live in, and want us to live in too…working for it in whatever small way we can, with whatever small things we have within us to give to it, despite the horrific torrent of hatred that surrounds us…knowing, somehow, deep down in our hearts, that the better world is out there somewhere.
Zombie Rhetoric That You Just Can’t Kill No Matter How Hard You Try…
Over at Pam’s House Blend, the Homophobia Is A Made-Up Word argument rises grimly once more from its grave, and starts eating brains…
Words have meaning. Henceforth, I shall make a reasonable effort to eliminate "homophobia" and "homophobic" from my vocabulary.
The word "homophobia" suggests that the intolerant are afflicted; It follows that a treatable pathology can be associated with the condition. Moreover, the implication is that this condition represents an irrational fear like "acrophobia," a fear of heights or "zoophobia," a fear of animals. How about "pogonophobia" which is a fear of beards?
Hey…how about lexophobia, which is fear of dictionaries? Okay…I just made that one up. But a lot of people suffer from it.
Yeah words have meaning. And homophobia is a perfectly useful word that takes its meaning from another word, xenophobia, and applies it to homosexuals rather then foreigners or strangers. Here is xenophobia:
xenophobia
noun
Etymology:
New Latin
Date:
1903
Fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.
The word homophobia simply replaces strangers or foreigners with homosexuals in the definition. The meaning is the same, it just refers to a different class or category of people who are the object of the fear and/or hatred. Simple, no?
Apparently not. This isn’t complicated. Yes, the words phobic and phobia do not have that meaning, but the motherfucking suffixes can! Learn to read a dictionary and look up the goddamned suffix! There is nothing wrong with the usage of the suffix in the word homophobia.
This argument makes me want to scream whenever I hear it. How about hydrophobic? That’s a molecule that does not bind with water. How can a molecule have an irrational fear of water? Tell a chemist that they should eliminate that word from their vocabulary because a molecule cannot have fear, irrational or otherwise. Or hydrophobia…which is another term for rabies. There’s thermophobic, which is intolerance for high temperatures by either inorganic material or organisms. Or photophobia…which is hypersensitivity to light? There are a lot of words like these, that do not refer exclusively or even partially to irrational fear.
The argument that homophobia just means an irrational fear of homosexuals is another one of those cute little rhetorical ploys that bigots throw out there to confuse people. They do that. They will always do that. Accepting their definitions for words and terms and employing others you only think makes the concept more clear doesn’t buy you anything because they will simply redefine those new words and terms too. And they’ll keep on doing that.
How…just how…do you spend Any time in this fight without knowing that, as a matter of fact no, the other side actually does Not want to make the meaning of things clear? Do you just sleepwalk through the culture war? Look at how they redefine the word homosexual for chrissake. On the one hand, there is no such thing as a homosexual because it is a leaned behavior we could all stop engaging in if we wanted to. There are no homosexuals, there is only homosexuality. On the other hand, the homosexual agenda threatens the very fabric of western civilization, and militant homosexuals want to destroy the nuclear family. Yes words have meaning. And to the culture warriors that meaning is whatever they need it to be at any given moment. They don’t want to make anything clear. They don’t want you to understand their point of view. They aren’t arguing in good faith. They never argue in good faith. They want to win.
We don’t have to help them by letting them turn every converstation about gay people into a game of Calvinball. Homophobia is a perfectly legitimate word that describes a particular kind of bigotry. When one of those bigots starts yap, yap, yapping that they’re not a homophobe because they aren’t afraid of homosexuals, smack them upside the head with a dictionary and show them their photograph next to the word Bigot.
Just a glimpse into the far-right psyche. The two biggest ticket items that have leaped into public consciousness discrediting parts of the stimulus package have been family planning and STD prevention. Both have been blaring Drudge headlines. Now, this is technical stuff and I don’t doubt that there’s merit to the case against portraying these as in some way necessary counter-cyclical emergency funding.
But why is it the GOP is so easily galvanized by sexual panic? Weird, if you ask me. This is the budget we’re talking about here. Even there, they reach, like the exhausted tacticians they are, for the culture war. And it isn’t reaching back.
The republicans became the party of culture war when they gave the nomination to Nixon. This is what people continue not to get about them…even now, amidst the horrific train wreckage of the "free market economy" republican domination of the federal government was supposed to usher in. Oh…they betrayed their principles, did you say? No. Absolutely no. They did nothing of the kind. All that small government free market stuff was just the window dressing, over a core that was entirely, completely, absolutely about culture war. When they finally got the power they craved, they set to work implementing their vision. Yes, it is an unmitigated disaster. But you have to understand that it was always going to be that.
They didn’t care about the economy…they cared about elbowing science out of the classroom and out of government in favor of their nutty religion in which Jesus says to hate the stranger, obey the authorities, and that the rich will inherent the earth. They didn’t care about the deficit…they cared about keeping women, people of color and homosexuals in their place. They didn’t care about national security…they cared about rolling back decades of constitutional law that said all Americans were entitled to equal justice, equal rights, to life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness. They didn’t care about fighting terrorism…they cared about fighting the 60s all over again, and winning this time.
In Goldwater they had their last honest small government candidate. Nixon gave them culture war, which they embraced with gusto. Why? The darkies weren’t drinking from the fountain marked ‘coloreds’ anymore. The kids weren’t passively going off to die in a war nobody understood, and what was worse, they weren’t cutting their hair. And more horrifying then all of that, the women were going off the Miltown pill and going on the birth control one instead and asserting their sexual equality. Suddenly you couldn’t make jokes about women drivers anymore. And then the faggots started marching.
Something had to be done. Nixon was the one. That he turned out to be a crook, should have been a warning. But the first thing you have to understand about culture warriors, is they have no inner sense of morality, of right and wrong. That is why they fight tooth and nail to keep their world from changing around them. They have no brakes, so they need fences and guardrails. That, and the privilege that comes with being on top of the cultural ladder, even if you’re at the bottom of the economic one. White. Male. Protestant. Heterosexual. You got it made pal…drink up. In a world where people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, or the shape of their own genitals or that of their lovers’, then what becomes of the privileged?
The joke after the last Republican convention was that you didn’t see any black or brown faces in the crowd until it was all over, and the cleaning crews came out. So what about all that Big Tent talk? What about all that reaching out to minorities and stuff? For real? Why…the same Goddamned thing that happened to all that small government stuff. It wasn’t important. It wasn’t what the party is about. The party is about the culture war. Of course the first thing they had fits about in the stimulus plan was the family planning items. Do you still think, after the last eight years of it, that they even saw the rest of it? I sure hope you don’t think that since Bush went down in flames they went down with him. They sure didn’t go down with Nixon.
Timothy Kincaid over at Box Turtle Bulletin, has the party line vote on the first of the so-called "common ground" bills put forward in Utah. These bills actually do very little to insure equal rights for gay and lesbian citizens…almost the bare minimum you could imagine. The first of these to come to a vote, simply made it possible for financial dependents, other then legally married spouses, parents and children, to sue if their breadwinner suffers wrongful death. Keep in mind that these so-called "common ground" bills were introduced after the passage of Proposition 8, when the Mormon church’s staggering level of involvement became widely known, and the Mormon leadership, while in the glare of the public eye, averred they had no problem with extending gay people many of the rights of marriage…just not marriage itself.
Many of us found that statement interesting, since nothing was stopping them from giving gay Americans in Utah those rights and gay Americans in Utah have damn few if any. The only places as bad to be gay are the deep south
The bill failed along party lines. Republican verses democrat? Oh my, no…
Let me be clear. There is no legitimate reason to exclude those who rely on someone for their livelihood from suing should that livelihood be taken away due to the wrongful actions of another. If a woman is killed directly due to the reckless or wrongful actions of another, why should her partner who stays home and raises the kids not be able to sue?
Chris Buttars, Mormon
Lyle Hillyard, Mormon
Mark Madsen, Mormon
Michael Waddoups, Mormon
The three non-Mormons either voted Yes or were absent.
As Kincaid notes, this fits pretty well with recent polls showing that Utah Mormons are hugely against granting their gay neighbors any rights whatsoever, other then maybe, possibly, the right to breath. So long as they don’t flaunt it.
Expect the Mormon church to claim it has no influence over the state legislature. They’ve shown repeatedly that they can look you right in the eye, smile, and lie through their teeth. Your hopes, your dreams, every smile you ever gave the one you love, and every smile you ever received in love, and placed somewhere deep within your heart: these things are their stepping stones to Godhood. Nothing else matters to them. Nothing. They will walk over your every hope and dream, and grind them into dirt, for that promise of Godhood at the end of the road.
I know…I know… But there are Mormons who don’t hate their gay neighbor… Yes. And they are either silent or they are on the road to excommunication. We, that is America, saw it all during the battle over Proposition 8. There are no Mormons who are not on board for the war on gay Americans…only Mormons who are about to leave, or be shown the door.
Via Pam’s House Blend… The next time you hear someone in the Catholic Church complaining that proposition 8 supporters are being targeted, laugh in their face…
Father Geoffrey Farrow, the Fresno priest who came out against Prop 8 during Mass and was suspended for following his conscience by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles is still being hounded by the church.
Since he was out of a job, you’d think the church would be satisfied that Farrow would seek employment elsewhere and fade from its PR radar. Think again. Father Geoff applied for a position with the Los Angeles branch of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE) and look at the thuggery of the Church in action. Father Tony at The Bilerico Project and at his pad:
CLUE derives a significant part of its funding from the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles.
Today I spoke with a member of CLUE’s board of directors, Rev. James Conn, a Methodist minister and Director of New Ministries for the California-Pacific Conference of the United Methodist Church. Reverend Conn had been directly involved in the recruitment and interview process involving Father Geoff.
I asked him if CLUE had denied Father Geoff a second interview specifically because the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles threatened to cut off all its significant funding for CLUE should Father Geoff ever be offered the position in question.
As incredible as it may seem, Reverend Conn confirmed the truth of this and expressed his heartfelt disappointment over the fact that CLUE had to choose between continuing the interview process with an extremely promising and qualified candidate or risk losing the financial support of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles that is critical to CLUE’s work.
…I am writing this because I’ve learned over the years that the Roman Catholic Church gets away with this kind of despicable and inhumane treatment of men who choose to follow their conscience only when its bad deeds are not held up to a strong light. Father Geoff does not wish CLUE to lose its funding and therefore has remained silent about this, but his friends have brought this situation to my attention, and I want Catholics in California and beyond to understand clearly the level of unchristian behavior and deliberate malice of which their bishops and cardinals are capable.
More from the Bilerico Project blog…
It is important to note that at the age of 51, after having devoted 23 years of his life to the Roman Catholic Church plus an earlier 7 years in the seminary, Father Geoff has had his medical benefits discontinued and is without income and assistance from his bishop. While it is disgusting that his bishop has turned his back on Father Geoff, it is infuriating to think that his bishop would conspire with the Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles to block gainful and appropriate employment.
I am well familiar with the jargon of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. They will say that they feel compassion for Father Geoff and that they pray for him, but their actions speak too strongly and demonstrate deliberate malice. They do not wish him well. And, God forbid that they should have ever proactively attempted some sort of out-placement effort on his behalf. Some bishops privately do that on behalf of priests who leave, but not the hard-hearted bishop who cut off Father Geoffrey Farrow nor the malicious Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles.
I am writing this because I’ve learned over the years that the Roman Catholic Church gets away with this kind of despicable and inhumane treatment of men who choose to follow their conscience only when its bad deeds are not held up to a strong light. Father Geoff does not wish CLUE to lose its funding and therefore has remained silent about this, but his friends have brought this situation to my attention, and I want Catholics in California and beyond to understand clearly the level of unchristian behavior and deliberate malice of which their bishops and cardinals are capable.
I hope you will consider going to CLUE’s website and leaving them a message about your feelings (please keep in mind that CLUE wanted to continue its interview with Father Geoff so don’t paint them as the "bad guy". If you want to leave a message for the real "bad guy", you may contact the office of Cardinal Roger Mahony.
Archdiocese of Los Angeles
3424 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90010-2202
213 637 7000
info@la-archdiocese.org
Ask them why they hate Father Geoff. When they assure you that they do not hate him, ask them to prove it and soon. Right now, more than their insincere prayers, he needs a job.
I hope nobody is surprised. When you hear the Proposition 8 supporters talk of civility and mutual respect, laugh in their face.
I’ve never bought the idea that opposition to abortion is solely about controlling women’s bodies. I’ve just known too many people who were genuinely sincere in their religious beliefs that abortion is wrong. But I’ve seen little evidence that conservatives’ hostility to contraception, to methods that prevent unwanted pregnancies and therefore abortions, from taking place, could be anything else. Steve Benenwrites, via Elana Schor, that Republicans are opposed to money in the stimulus bill that would help state governments assist low-income women in getting contraception coverage:
…
Beyond the fact that this policy would save the government money in the long run (a finding from the same office that didn’t produce that report on the stimulus), are Republicans really arguing that unwanted pregnancies don’t result in a significant financial burden for families that are already struggling in an economy that’s likely to get worse? What’s the moral justification for denying them the choice of preventing pregnancies they don’t want? That having sex should be predicated on yearly income?
Yes.
This has been another edition of Simple Answers, To Simple Questions…
Did HBO cave in the face of conservative outcries over Rev. Robinson’s selection for this event? Did the Inaugural committee rush Rev. Robinson onstage and off before the broadcast was slated to begin? Whatever the case may be, this is a cold slap. HBO has some serious explaining to do, as does the Inaugural committee.
Harvey Milk is screaming in his metaphorical grave right now.
It’s a good question, and this scenario fits nicely with the alleged technical difficulties I keep hearing about, that prevented Robinson’s words from even being clearly heard by the crowd that was there: I have friends who work as sound engineers, I’ve been with them as they did their work in various settings, and I’m here to tell you that they work hard at choreographing each and every microphone and pickup’s settings for each and every element of an event. I have no idea how the video side of it works but I’d be surprised if it was any less intricate. If Robinson was rushed out before the stage crew and the technical engineers were ready for him that would explain the fumbling around, and possibly even the video black-out. The only problem with this scenerio of course, is it still doesn’t explain why the Gay Men’s Chorus was closeted.
One fuckup I can accept. It’s still unacceptable, amateurish, unprofessional behavior that gay Americans have every right to be pissed off about and demand an apology for, but I can be convinced that one was a fuckup. Two of them that Just Happen to target the gay presence at this event and only the gay presence at this event and it’s staringly obvious that it was deliberate. The only question now is who engineered it?
I’m reading elsewhere that Dianne Feinstein heads the inagural committee. Well, there’s a good place to start. People just assume that since she was Mayor of San Francisco after Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assasinated that she’s a friend of the gay community. Nothing could be further from the truth…
After the 1978 death of Harvey Milk in San Francisco, gay rights activist Tom Brougham came up with a definition of domestic partnership that is now universally used, and was designed to include everything about marriage except sexual orientation. According to Brougham, the definition was that the couple must be more than 18 years old and mentally competent to make a contract. Furthermore, his position was that domestic partners must publicly declare the partnership and pledge to be responsible for each other.
In 1982, Brougham’s definition was modified by Supervisor Harry Britt (a gay man appointed to replace Harvey Milk). Britt’s version was adopted and passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but Dianne Feinstein, mayor of San Francisco at the time, came under intense pressure from the Catholic Church and subsequently vetoed the bill. Not until 1989 was a domestic partnership law adopted in the city of San Francisco…
Note that we have been fighting for marriage rights since the 1970s. Next time some ignorant jackass asks you why same-sex marriage has suddenly become such a big deal with teh gays, slap them upside the head with the biggest, thickest history book you can find.
A recall attempt was made after Feinstein vetoed Britt’s bill, to get her booted out of office. The gay community was massively pissed off. But Feinstein calculated that there weren’t enough gay people in San Francisco who cared enough about domestic partnership in the disco 70s to sign enough recall petitions to get it to the point of their actually being a vote. But another group of pissed off San Franciscans, gun owners, were already circulating a recall petition on her after she signed some new gun control measure or another. Many gay folk simply started adding their names to that one. That gave it enough signatures that a vote was actually held, much to her shock.
She survived it. Ever since when asked about it she has not only never apologized, she has insisted vetoing the bill was the right thing to do. Feinstein is that sort of democrat that blocks progress on equality far more then outright bigots manage, because they keep conning people into believing they’ll do the right thing once in office and then when it actually comes time to do the right thing, they don’t.
I wonder if another Catholic Bishop whispered into Feinstein’s ear again, that she’d better not be seen giving anything to the gays…
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