Atrios (Duncan Black), pouts…

And, uh, New Yorker? How about some credit for the "Friedman Unit." It’s mine, damnit, mine!

It is.  And hilarious it was too…in a laugh to keep yourself from crying kind-of way…

Duncan Black (Atrios) remarks ironically...

Nobody Could’ve Predicted

That if you put someone on the teevee who reflected the views of the sizable chunk of the country they would have a big audience.

Brian Williams couldn’t do it. Neither could Joe Scarborough, Rita Cosby, Dan Abrams, Ashleigh Banfield, Deborah Norville or Alan Keyes.

But MSNBC’s new 9pmET show did. The Rachel Maddow show topped CNN’s Larry King Live in the ad-friendly A25-54 demo during the month of October. King still wins the Total Viewer crown and FNC’s Hannity & Colmes is #1 in both measurements.

All that ad money lost because you didn’t listen to my advice to provide companion programming for K.O.

And you bet your ass that if NBC was just a television network they’d have rushed to where the viewers were faster then the speed of light.  But NBC isn’t just a television network.  It’s a subsidiary of The General Electric Corporation.  In addition to all those household appliances they make, GE also happens to be a major Defense Department contractor…one of those pieces of the military industrial complex president Eisenhower once warned the nation about.  So what if nobody but other right wingers watch their extremist pundits?  They get the message out, and NBC can make up the loss with their other programming.

Once upon a time, the major TV networks viewed their news divisions as something of a loss, or at best a break-even part of the whole.  But they let them have a degree of independence because the airwaves were seen as a public trust, even by corporations like RCA.  They still mostly skewed to the Establishment line, but there was enough respect for the place actual journalism has in a democracy, that reporting the facts usually won out over sticking to the party line.  No more.  The minute Rachel Maddow looks like she’s having a measurable impact on the Narrative the show will be pulled, just like they pulled Donahue and Moyers.

Via Kos…  Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been watching this for decades…

The failure of the character assassination attempt, part II

I wrote earlier that Obama’s favorabilities have surprisingly survived this election intact, given the amount of shit that has been flung in his direction. Part of the reason is that the GOP overreached in their attacks. While arguing that he was inexperienced could’ve gained traction pre-Palin, the stuff about being a Muslim Marxist Manchurian candidate was simply, well, ludicrous.

In this narrative, Obama is “a Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists,.” Once elected, presumably, will reveal himself to be the monster that he is, in the manner of Kang and Kodos in that classic 1996 Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons.

If you want to take a look at their reasoning, I recommend the work of Stanley Kurtz over at the National Review…

Stanley Kurtz being the guy who doctored up marriage statistics from Scandiavian countries so he could claim that legal same-sex marriage resulted in the decline of heterosexual marriages and that children were being raised mostly by unmarried parents now.  Over at Slate, associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and research director of the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, M. V. Lee Badgett shows how Kurtz did it…

Despite what Kurtz might say, the apocalypse has not yet arrived. In fact, the numbers show that heterosexual marriage looks pretty healthy in Scandinavia, where same-sex couples have had rights the longest. In Denmark, for example, the marriage rate had been declining for a half-century but turned around in the early 1980s. After the 1989 passage of the registered-partner law, the marriage rate continued to climb; Danish heterosexual marriage rates are now the highest they’ve been since the early 1970’s. And the most recent marriage rates in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland are all higher than the rates for the years before the partner laws were passed. Furthermore, in the 1990s, divorce rates in Scandinavia remained basically unchanged.

Of course, the good news about marriage rates is bad news for Kurtz’s sky-is-falling argument. So, Kurtz instead focuses on the increasing tendency in Europe for couples to have children out of wedlock. Gay marriage, he argues, is a wedge that is prying marriage and parenthood apart.

The main evidence Kurtz points to is the increase in cohabitation rates among unmarried heterosexual couples and the increase in births to unmarried mothers. Roughly half of all children in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are now born to unmarried parents. In Denmark, the number of cohabiting couples with children rose by 25 percent in the 1990s. From these statistics Kurtz concludes that " … married parenthood has become a minority phenomenon," and—surprise—he blames gay marriage.

But Kurtz’s interpretation of the statistics is incorrect. Parenthood within marriage is still the norm—most cohabitating couples marry after they start having children. In Sweden, for instance, 70 percent of cohabiters wed after their first child is born. Indeed, in Scandinavia the majority of families with children are headed by married parents. In Denmark and Norway, roughly four out of five couples with children were married in 2003. In the Netherlands, a bit south of Scandinavia, 90 percent of heterosexual couples with kids are married.

That’s a higher rate then some states here in America.  Mostly bible belt states.  But look at this.  First Kurtz gerrymanders the marriage statistics in Scandinavia by including time frames when it was declining Prior to the passage of same sex civil unions, to prove that those civil unions had an adverse affect on heterosexual marriage.  In fact, after civil unions passed heterosexual marriage rates Improved.  But that wasn’t enough.  Kurtz also pointed out the fact that many heterosexual couples have their first kid out of wedlock, deliberately omitting the fact that they almost always marry afterward, in order to lead people to believe that there was some sort of massive population of kids living with unmarried parents in Scandinavia now.  That this conclusion is absolutely false, that you can only arrive at it by concealing the fact that most parents do in fact marry after their child is born, mattered nothing to Kurtz.  He had something to prove, and damn the evidence.  This is what passes for virtue and morality among social conservatives.

Now he’s peddling the Obama is a marxist and/or muslim terrorist claptrap.  How…unsurprising…

Mark Weigel reads a note from the kook pews, and takes it apart…line by line…

Another question yet to be resolved is whether Mr. Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, a prerequisite pursuant to the U.S. Constitution. There is evidence Mr. Obama was born in Kenya rather than, as he claims, Hawaii.

What evidence? We have a newspaper announcement of Obama’s birth in Hawai’i from 1961, and we have a Hawai’ian certificate of live birth. Obama did have Kenyan citizenship until he turned 21; as the son of Barack Obama, Sr, it was automatic. And it did not negate his American citizenship.

There is also a registration document for a school in Indonesia where the would-be president studied for four years, on which he was identified not only as a Muslim but as an Indonesian.

Here’s the document. It does identify Obama as a Muslim and identifies Indonesia as his "nation of citizenship," but that’s what his parents wrote down on their seven-year old son’s school form. If Gaffney thinks this negates Obama’s American citizenship, he doesn’t understand the law.

If correct, the latter could give rise to another potential problem with respect to his eligibility to be president.

Completely false. The document lists Honolulu as Obama’s "place and date of birth."

Curiously, Mr. Obama has, to date, failed to provide an authentic birth certificate which could clear up the matter.

False. I’ll link it again. Unless Gaffney believes that the state of Hawai’i is forging documents for Obama, this is proof that he was born in Honolulu.

This is fever swamp, Vince Foster-was-murdered, Bush-blew-up-the-WTC stuff…

Yes…isn’t it.  Oh…but look…it isn’t some babbling nutcase churning this stuff out from his parent’s basement…

Neoconservative pundit Frank Gaffney, former deputy assistant secretary of Defense, has bid adieu to polite society with this column on "the Jihadist vote."

Let me repeat that: Former Deputy Assistant Secretary Of Defense.  These are the folks who have been running the country for the past, oh, Eight Years.  The debacles that are Iraq, Katrina and the national economy starting to make sense now?  Here…let me explain something to you…  No…Wait…  Let Them explain something to you…

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

-Ron Suskind, Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush

This isn’t just the heart of the Bush presidency…it’s the heart of the republican grassroots.  ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore”…  Actually…yes it is…

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.  They are not entitled to their own facts.  Lies have consequences.  The erosion of trust has consequences.  You can’t just keep on making things up and expect nothing to come of it…  When stocks become worthless, markets fail.  When the word of the people becomes worthless, democracy fails.

UPDATE: Later in the column Gaffney cites Pennsylvania attorney Philip Berg, who’s filed a frivolous lawsuit against Obama on this citizenship conspiracy theory. That would be this Philip Berg.

Now, it is time for world leaders to take the lesson learned from Iraq and issue a warrant for the arrest of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney; arrest them; take them to a neutral country; try them for the murder of over 2,800 people from more than 80 countries on 9/11/01 and, when found guilty, sentence them appropriately. Jurisdiction would be proper in any of the more than 80 countries whose citizens were murdered on 9/11.

I compared Gaffney’s nonsense to 9/11 trutherism for a reason.

UPDATE II: This is pathetic: a Toledo station runs a "local hero"-type story on Berg, which puts legal documents from Hawai’i on equal footing with his fact-free claims. It’s mind-boggling. On the one hand you have a government certificate that says Obama was born at 7:24 p.m. on 8/4/61 in Honolulu. On the other you have Berg’s claim, from his lawsuit:

Obama’s grandmother on his father’s side, his half-brother and half-sister all claim Obama was born not in Hawaii but in Kenya.  Reports reflect that Obama’s mother traveled to Kenya during her pregnancy; however, she was prevented from boarding a flight from Kenya to Hawaii at her late stage of pregnancy (which, apparently, was a normal restriction, to avoid births during a flight).

Notice the distinct lack of quotes and sources? It’s because the "Obama’s African family members claim he was born in Kenya" story is an internet myth. They have never claimed that. There is no such story. Go ahead and try to find it.

An internet myth.  Note that.  It’s what the grassroots are saying.  To each other.  Among other things.  Over and over.  Obama is a Muslim.  Obama has ties to al Qaeda.  Obama is a traitor.  Obama is a terrorist.  So it is, that the republican grassroots take their collective consciences around behind the barn and shoot it.  Anything to win, even if it means taking a running bellyflop into the gutter.  But it’s not just Obama they are hurling bullshit shit at.  They are taking a dump on the very flags that they are busy waving.

It’s one thing to oppose the other party’s candidate on the basis of their record.  It’s one thing to oppose them on the basis of their beliefs.  It’s one thing to oppose them just because you don’t like their looks, the cut of their clothes, or because the sky is blue.  Fine.  It’s your right.  But when you spread lies you are not opposing the man.  You are hating on democracy.  You are giving it the middle finger.  A democracy is the sum of its citizens.  Corrupt yourself, and you corrupt your country.  It’s one thing for the politican on your TV screen to do it, it’s one thing for the talk radio host you tune into every day to do it, but when You lie to your neighbor for political gain, you are shitting on America.

This precious democracy we all share, that was bestowed us with the blood and treasure of so many of our forebears, asks only that you treat its core value, the election, with care and attention, and give to it whatever honest consideration you can, to the best of your ability.  We all make mistakes sometimes in the ballot booth.  Some votes we cast we long live to regret.  But the important thing is we try and are honest.  With ourselves.  With our neighbors.  Disagree we may.  Vehemently.  Fine.  So long as it’s honest.  That is what so many good people in so many generations past have died for, so that we could do.  Speak freely and honestly to each other.  Persuasively.  Bluntly.  Calmly.  Angrily.  Whatever.  But honestly.  Because you can.  Because people died to give you that freedom.  That’s all American is obliging you to do every election year.  Instead, you are feeding it poison. 

America is dying from that poison.  I hear you speak of your patriotism, your love of flag and country.  Over and over again I hear it.  I see you wave the flag.  I see it on your front doors.  I see it on your bumpers.  I see you wearing it on your lapels.  Fine.  Swell.  Whatever.  You love America?  Then Stop Lying.  Stop.  Your motherfucking lies are killing it.

[Update…]  Here’s a link to Factcheck.org on Obama’s birth certificate, since the one Weigel linked to isn’t enough for the kook pews.  As if…anything could be…actually…  I’m sure they have a way of explaining away this too…

In fact, the conspiracy would need to be even deeper than our colleagues realized. In late July, a researcher looking to dig up dirt on Obama instead found a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961…

Dig it.  They went looking through the newspaper archives and found the birth announcement.  Of course…it’s all part of the consperacy you see…

Chutzpa: Conducting state business via your personal email account to get around state government email retention policies, then complaining that your privacy was violated when hackers uncover your little scheme.

Priceless: You support Bush’s warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.

President Palin.

The Holmes County School District, which was the site of a court battle over the right of students to declare their support for their gay and lesbian peers, has begun court ordered sensitivity training classes for it’s teachers and staff.

Can you spot the difference between these two news stories on this topic?

First, the local TV News station…

Fla. principal accused of gay ‘witch hunt’

Employees of 1 rural Florida school district are starting the new school year by attending sensitivity classes.

A federal judge’s ruling prompted the classes at the Holmes County School District. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the district when a principal banned students from wearing rainbow-colored clothing or other items that he said showed support for homosexuality.

Principal Davis enacted the ban, and suspended students who violated it, after one student told him she was taunted for being gay. Davis told the girl that it was wrong to be gay, order her to stay away from younger students and called her parents. The girl’s friends wore gay pride T-shirts and other clothing in support.

A federal judge ruled that Davis and the district violated the students’ free speech rights by banning the clothing.

Next…365Gay.Com…

Florida school at center of GSA battle begins sensitivity training

Teachers and staff in a Florida school district which was at the center of a long legal battle over gay/straight alliances are back in the classroom – this time as students in sensitivity classes.

The Holmes County School District set up the training sessions after losing a federal court battle in which the judge blasted the principal of Ponce de Leon High School principal David Davis for leading a “relentless crusade” against homosexuality.

U.S. District Judge Richard Smoak said in his ruling last month that principal David Davis “embarked on what can only be characterized as a witch hunt. The ruling also said that Davis led “morality assemblies” that ignored the First Amendment.

Davis has since been replaced as principal.

During the two-day trial in May, Davis testified that he believed clothing, buttons or stickers featuring rainbows would make students automatically picture gay people having sex.

He went on to admit that while censoring rainbows and gay pride messages, he allowed students to wear other symbols many find controversial, such as the Confederate flag.

Heather Gillman, a 16-year-old junior at the high school, sued the district with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union after she was told she could not wear buttons, stickers or clothing that supported LGBT civil rights.

After she received the warning, the ACLU last November sent a letter to the school board’s attorney on behalf of Gillman, asking for clarification as to whether a variety of symbols and slogans, such as the rainbow flag or “I support my gay friends,” would be allowed at the school.  

The school district replied that it would not allow any expressions of support for gay rights at all because such speech would “likely be disruptive.” 

The district then said that such symbols and slogans were signs that students were part of a “secret/illegal organization.” 

The problems began in September 2007 when a lesbian student tried to report to school officials that she was being harassed by other students because she is a lesbian.  Instead of addressing the harassment, students say the school responded with intimidation, censorship, and suspensions. 

Prior to the release of his written ruling, Smoak issued an order that forces the school to stop its censorship of students who want to express their support for gay people.  The judge also warned the district not to retaliate against students over the lawsuit.

The AP went one better too…running a story all about how the locals support the principle that started all this, headlined, FL. Town Backs Principle In Gay Student Case.  It mentions nothing about the morality assemblies, the fact that confederate flags were allowed to be worn but not t-shirts supporting the gay students, or that Davis said students wearing gay supportive messages would make people think of gay sex, or that the district declared gay supportive students to be part of an illegal secret organization.  It did say however, that the townsfolk were sincerely baffled about the judge’s "scathing rebuke", and why the principle had done anything wrong.

The AP also says that "Many in the community support Davis and feel outsiders are forcing their beliefs on them."  That would be as opposed to forcing dissenters to keep their mouths shut while they force their piss ignorant beliefs about homosexuality on gay people, their parents and their friends. 

What She Said…

When the kids were killed in the Columbine High School shooting, no one asked what they did to get themselves killed. Every moment of the press coverage was dedicated to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

What they wore, who they hung out with, how their parents were raising them – even the spots they parked their car in when they arrived at the school that horrible day.

Do we know what Brandon McInerney wore that day? Do we know how he got the gun into school? Do we know what created such rage in this boy of 14 to have him take a gun at point blank range and shoot? Do we know who his friends were, what pushed his buttons, what kind of movies he watched or internet sites he visited?

No. We know what that Larry King favored a pair of brown stilettos.

-Sarah Whitman, The Killer, Not The Killed

After all the stink the news media has been raising about the clothes Lawrence wore in school, you’d think he was dressed to go see Rocky Horror when McInerney walked up behind him and shot him in the head.  In fact, the day he was killed he was wearing tennis shoes, baggy pants and a loose sweater over a collared shirt. 

As a parent, I cannot understand the King’s lawsuit. They are blaming lipstick and glitter instead of the gun and the hand that held it. The message, loud and clear, is the dominant culture can wield a gun and shoot at will at anyone who doesn’t conform. And our Schools should enforce that conformity.

In doing so, they put my son, and anyone like him, at risk. And that really makes me want to scream: How can you miss the point?

It’s the killer, not the killed.

Emphasis mine.  And it’s not just King’s parents who are content to put other people’s kids at risk.  It’s McInerney’s lawyer, William Quest, who promised out of one side of his mouth, shortly after the first tendrils of his gay panic defense began to appear in the newspapers, that he wouldn’t put Lawrence on trial.  Hahahahahaha.  It’s a safe bet he’s been behind the media rush to portray 14 year old Lawrence King as a transvestite sexual predator, and taint the jury pool in McInerney’s favor.  Even if he doesn’t succeed, without a doubt there will be other dead gay kids because of it. 

And perhaps more dead gay adults too.  The bedrock of the gay panic defense is that homosexuality is so revulsive that acting violently toward homosexuals is a normal and reasonable reflex.  From there it is a simple step to conclude that homosexuals must assume responsibility for violence against them to the degree they are openly homosexual.  The gay panic defense is another way of saying Their blood is upon them…

From Forbes Magazine comes this account of Jerry Falwell’s money machine…

Biblical Bling

Hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the ministries of Bible Belt televangelists in the 1970s-80s. But these fortunes would never have materialized without a secular weapon from the North–a Massachusetts marketing outfit begun by a group of twenty-something Harvard business school grads called Epsilon Data Management. Falwell began using the company in 1976; he was the first televangelist to sign up. When his contributions exploded, other preachers like Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Oral Roberts and Rex Humbard contracted with Epsilon and made a pile, too.

Before Epsilon, Oral Roberts used punch tape-driven Friden Flexo-writers. Billy Graham handwrote every homespun fundraising appeal himself. "You could see the buckwheat flying off the paper," recalls Gaylord Briley, one of the top religious fundraisers of the era. In a few years Epsilon was doing work for 7 of the top 10 televangelists in America. 

Two threads joined together in the 1970s to produce the political machine we now know as the religious right.  In the early 1970s, the feds began challenging the tax exemption of many fundamentalist schools over their race segregation policies.  I’ve blogged about that previously Here…

But the spark that lit the roaring fire that eventually consumed the republican party wasn’t integration specifically…

In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right’s genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court’s ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.

While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. Their resentment was compounded in 1971 when the Internal Revenue Service attempted to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until that year.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."

Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His implorations initially fell on deaf ears.

"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

Dig it.  It wasn’t abortion.  It wasn’t militant homosexuality.  It wasn’t rampant sexual hedonism.  It wasn’t the secularization of America’s schools.  It wasn’t even racism, that lit the fire the brought the fundamentalist leadership charging into our political system in a blind destructive frenzy.  It was their tax exemption.  It was money.

The second thread is the advent of computerized direct marketing.  Richard Viguerie was a pioneer in its use for the republican party.  Viguerie had more then a mailing list.  His genius was in applying computerized database analysis techniques to it, tracking the giving patterns of the names in his database.  He paired that with a ruthless analysis of which marketing campaigns worked, and which did not.  Viguerie, a right wing extremist, wasn’t interested in informing the republican base so much as in pushing their buttons so they would open their wallets and go to the polls.  And he got results.  With his database and direct mailing technique, Viguerie almost single-handedly turned around the fortunes of the Republicans after Watergate. 

Remember, this was a time before the Internet, before the widespread use of cable TV and the appearance of 24 hour cable news, before even talk radio as we know it today, with its national audiences and personalities.  Viguerie showed the republicans how they could bypass the news media of that day, and not only get their their message out on their own terms, but do it below the radar of the popular culture.  His mail appeals were Targeted.  The message was tailored and precise, and didn’t have to appear in any newspaper or television ad where the rest of the country could see it too. 

Falwell saw the success of Viguerie’s technique, and revamped his own direct mailing effort…

Computerized database marketing turned the late 1970s into an era known as the golden age of direct mail prospecting. Direct mail was still an almost clandestine medium. The content of such correspondence was rarely exposed to media scrutiny. Falwell crafted his letters with theological abandon, hitting his mortal enemies with blunt force. Epsilon led Falwell to discover that the secret to steady income is consistency; getting lots of donors to give a little, but regularly. Epsilon also taught Falwell that most donor lists contain "compulsive contributors"–usually amounting to four percent of the list, says Briley. 

These twin threads of course, have a common root.  Money.  It was all about the money.  That is why there is a religious right today.  And that is why they’ve made common cause with the corporate world, the world of Caesar, the world of mammon, that they once disdained.  When Carter went after their tax exemptions, they found had a lot in common with those kings of business after all.

And how do you push the rube’s buttons enough so they’ll give you money, over and over and over again?   Well…here’s one way…

Besides Epsilon, Falwell had the formidable talent of Jerry Huntsinger. Then 45, he was a former minister who lived on a farm near Richmond who had been taking advertising concepts from the for-profit world and applying them to nonprofit religious ventures. Huntsinger brought a novelist’s touch to direct mail. He considered every fundraising letter a first cousin to the short story. "A short story has a problem that seems insurmountable, a sympathetic character that is a victim of the problem, complications and obstacles, but finally, a resolution." He advised his clients that emergency appeals work best because they give donors a feeling of "excitement at coming to the rescue."

Huntsinger was also a master at fine tuning the mechanics: the color of the envelope, the position of the address window, which paragraphs to indent, which sentences to underline. He knew how to lure a reader’s eye just to where he wanted.

Huntsinger encouraged Falwell to focus on wedge issues in his mailings, excoriating the feminist movement and attacking homosexual rights, often equating both with the dangers of communism. As one letter stated: "Dear Friend: Homosexuals are on the march in this country. Homosexuals do not reproduce, they recruit, and many of them are after my children and your children….This is one major reason why we must keep "The Old Time Gospel Hour" alive…So don’t delay. Let me hear from you immediately. I will be anxiously awaiting your reply."

The sense of impending doom the letter conveyed fit perfectly with Huntsinger’s operating credo. It turned a pitch into a storyline (gays on the the march) with sympathetic characters (children) under threat from sex offenders (gay pedophiles). It was an emergency appeal that sought to panic his audience into coming to the rescue.

The Forbes excerpt ends on the note that the gay bashing appeals actually raised very little money.  Given the history of the religious right’s move into politics, I don’t believe it.  Before Anita Bryant showed them that waving the gay menace at people could practically stampede them to the polls, the Falwells and the Robertsons actually did very little gay bashing.  But on the day Falwell stood by her side in front of reporters and declared that "a homosexual will kill you, soon as look at you", he knew she was on to something.

Falwell and his kind didn’t create the climate of fear and contempt toward gay people.  But in the 1970s they began to whip it into a frenzy.  For money.  Never mind all that love your neighbor as yourself crap.  The harder you push their buttons, the more they open their wallets.  And the best button of all was the Homosexuals Are On The March And They Want Your Children button.  It worked.  The money came rolling in.  For Falwell.  For Robertson.  For Dobson.  And for all the other crusaders for Christ.  The money came rolling in.

And here’s the color of money…

Every time someone mindlessly parrots the notion that gay people have shorter lifespans then heterosexuals, the religious right gives a nod of thanks to Paul Cameron.  Ever since the Reagan years, Cameron has been chugging out a torrent of bogus research aimed at demonizing gay people in the public mind.  Where Falwell, Dobson and Robertson waved the bible at gay people, and social conservatives waved family values, Cameron became a fountainhead, a one-stop shopping center for anti-gay junk science.  From his often used claim that gay people have shorter lifespans, to his claim that lesbians are more likely to be involved in car accidents, Cameron gave their cheapshit hatreds a gloss of dispassionate science. 

Cameron was eventually thrown out of the American Psychological Association for distorting the work of other legitimate researchers.  But to the anti-gay right, which builds museums to creationism and attacks the teaching of science in schools, real science was always the enemy.  Cameron is gold coin to them.  But in recent years, as more and more of mainstream America learns what a charlatan Cameron is, they’ve had to take more care not to put Cameron’s name in their pamphlets.  Some years ago, William Mr. Book Of Virtues Bennett got caught parroting Cameron’s lifespan claim he had to backtrack.  First he claimed someone else had said it too, but when it turned out that person had cited Cameron too, Bennett mumbled something about not trusting that figure anymore and went back to his favorite casino.  I’ve heard though, that lately Mr. Book Of Virtues has been citing it again.

But in the end, Cameron’s biggest contribution to the Kultur Krieg may well be not his bogus statistics, but his method.  Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin, has uncovered a new scam by the Family Research Council in their fight to repeal California’s same sex marriage law, that has the trademark Cameron technique but apparently was entirely a homegrown effort.

They cite the "Dutch Study" Stanley Kurtz bastardized some years ago for their claim that gay relationships don’t last very long and are never monogamous.  Burroway did a wonderful job some time back of debunking this, and all I’ll say about that now is that when you look at the data from a study that excludes monogamous couples, don’t be surprised when you don’t see any monogamy in the data.

But it’s the follow-up claim that’s interesting here.  FRC is claiming that same sex couples are inherently more violent, more prone to domestic abuse…

The third point the brochure is built on is this:

Intimate partner violence: homosexual and lesbian couples experience by far the highest levels of intimate partner violence compared with married couples as well as cohabiting heterosexual couples. Lesbians, for example, suffer a much higher level of violence than do married women

They base this claim on the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Violence Against Women Survey (PDF: 62 pages/1,475 KB) If you want to see how they construct this particular distortion, I encourage you to download the report yourself and we’ll go through it step by step. Believe me, it’s worth it because this is a classic example.

It is.  You should go read Jim’s entire debunking of it to get the whole stinking rotten smell of it.  But I’ll give you the executive summary here.  Basically, they took the data for individual victims of domestic violence who were in, or had ever been in, same sex relationships and compared that to the data for victims in opposite sex relationships. But much of the violence against people who were in same sex relationships was committed by an opposite sex partner.  In the case of the men who were or had been in a same sex relationship, almost half of the incidents were attacks on them by wives, former wives or girlfriends.  In the case of the women who had been or were in same sex relationships, as I read the figures, about three out of four incidents were attacks on them by husbands or boyfriends.

Dig it.  The FRC took incidents of straight on gay violence, and included them in its total figure for gay domestic violence.  In point of fact, if you look at the data for Couples, as opposed to individuals, what you find is that a gay man is statistically safer living with a male partner, then a heterosexual woman is living with a male partner. 

This is what passes for traditional values over at the Family Research Council.  If there is a devil in Hell below, then he is smiling proudly at the runt at FRC who came up with that one.  And Paul Cameron is probably smiling proudly too.  He taught them how.

Shorter Michael Medved:  Heterosexuals don’t need marriage, therefore homosexuals can’t have it.

No…seriously…that’s his argument in response to Jonathan Rauch’s column in the Wall Street Journal the other day…

It’s not “marriage” – some magical status granted by the government – that serves to make people “healthier, happier and wealthier.” It’s the behavior associated with the marital ideal that brings benefits to couples and their children. That behavior doesn’t require official sanction – any more than official sanction guarantees such behavior.

Medved goes on to make the standard anti-gay case that only opposite sex couples have that magic combination of male and female attributes that make a marriage both stable, and beneficial for children.  But then he goes on to take that to its logical conclusion…

Consider some of the high profile heterosexual couples who have refused to get married. I don’t endorse the politics of Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, but given their long-standing and apparently stable commitment, I don’t think their kids have suffered because they never legalized their relationship.

By the same token, I don’t believe that the children of Rosie O’Donnell and her partner will be able to make up for the lack of a father’s love through a change of bureaucratic policy in California or any other state.

Medved’s column is pretty much a simple rehashing of hoary anti-gay and more specifically, anti-male stereotypes.  Gay men can’t control their sex drives because they are men.  Well…yes…Lesbian couples are more stable because they’re both female, but children need both a mother and a father, so their unions are bad for children too.  Never mind that there is not one iota of science behind any of this, let alone tradition.  Consider for a moment, how big the straight jacket is that female sexuality is bound inside in male dominated societies.  It isn’t male sexuality that’s being kept under a tight lid in a culture where boys can sew their wild oats, but girls are sluts if they do the same.  Never mind all that.  Just look at where this delivers Medved.  He is now arguing, in all seriousness, that it is heterosexuality, not marriage, that provides for both stability and a better environment for children.  Heterosexuals are actually so good at it, that marriage is completely unnecessary for them.  This is seriously his argument.

We have been told, over and over again, that allowing homosexual couples to marry will make marriage itself worthless.  And now along comes Michael Medved to argue that it is in fact heterosexuality, by its very nature, that renders marriage worthless.  Sweet.  Can we stop blaming gay people for the horrible state of marriage in this country now?  Please?

Rick Santorum sounds the alarm about same sex marriage…

The Elephant in the Room: A wake-up call on gay marriage after ’03 alarm went unheeded

By Rick Santorum
Posted on Thu, May. 22, 2008

Bigot! Hate-monger! Homophobe!

Those were just a few of the terms hurled my way in 2003 when I said that the Supreme Court’s Texas sodomy decision opened the door to the redefinition of marriage.

When I wasn’t ducking the epithets, I was being laughed at, mocked, and given the crazy-uncle-at-the-holidays treatment by the media. Or I was being told I should resign from my leadership post by some Senate colleagues.

Five years later, do I regret sounding the alarm about marriage? No.

I’m just saddened that time has proved right those of us who worried about the future of marriage as the union of husband and wife, deeply rooted not only in our traditions, our faiths, but in the facts of human nature: as Pope Benedict said, "The cradle of life and love," connecting mothers and fathers to their children.

So sad…  So sad…  So tell us how were you proven right Rick…

The latest distressing news came last week in California. The state Supreme Court there ruled, 4-3, that same-sex couples can marry.

No kidding?  Wow… 

Look at Norway. It began allowing same-sex marriage in the 1990s. In just the last decade, its heterosexual-marriage rates have nose-dived and its out-of-wedlock birthrate skyrocketed to 80 percent for firstborn children. Too bad for those kids who probably won’t have a dad around, but we can’t let the welfare of children stand in the way of social affirmation, can we?

No Kidding?  Wow.  Wait…what…?

Majority in Norwegian parliament agrees on new law allowing gay weddings, adoptions

AP
2008-05-29 

OSLO, Norway (AP) – Two Norwegian opposition parties on Thursday backed the rights of gay couples to marry in church, adopt and have assisted pregnancies, effectively assuring the passage of a new equality law next month.

The ruling three-party government proposed a law in March giving gay couples equal rights to heterosexuals but disagreements within the coalition cast doubt on whether it would receive enough votes to pass.

But two opposition parties announced Thursday they were backing the proposals, a move welcomed by gay rights groups, which should ensure a parliamentary majority and allow the law to be passed.

Okay…in other words…  Norway suffered a staggering rise in out of wedlock births and an equally staggering decline in heterosexual marriages since it began allowing same-sex marriages in the 1990s, and just one week after your column warning us about that Norway’s parliament announces it is ready to give same sex the right to marry.  No you drooling sack of Santorum, Norway hasn’t had same-sex marriage since…it was 1993 since you couldn’t be bothered to check the actual date either.  It’s had a form of civil unions.

Okay…fine…so it was civil unions that caused the decline in Norway then…right?  Erm…no…  You’re waving Stanley Kurtz’ claptrap years after it was debunked you moron.  Here…let some fellow republicans slap some wake up upside your head…

Gay and Lesbian Families: Examining the International Picture

Some on the far right claim that the experiences with same-sex marriage in the international community prove that same-sex marriage destroys the institution of marriage.  This claim, however, is unsupported by the facts.  Stanley Kurtz, of the Hoover Institution, insists, in an article for The Weekly Standard, that same-sex marriage has undermined the institution of marriage in Scandinavia.  (Scandinavia includes the countries of Norway, Sweden and Denmark.  Much debate on this issue also has included the Netherlands.)  An examination of the facts severely undermines Kurtz’s assertion.  Professor M.V. Lee Badgett from the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently authored a study examining Kurtz’s conclusion.  Click here to read the entire study.  Among the report’s key findings:

• "There is no evidence that giving partnership rights to same-sex couples had any impact on heterosexual marriage in Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands. Marriage rates, divorce rates, and non-marital birth rates have been changing in Scandinavia, Europe and the United States for the past thirty years.  But those changes have occurred in all countries, regardless of whether or not they adopted same-sex partnership laws, and these trends were underway well before the passage of laws that gave same-sex couples rights."
• "Divorce rates (in Scandinavia) have not risen since the passage of partnership laws and marriage rates have remained stable or actually increased."
• "Non-marital birth rates have not risen faster in Scandinavia or the Netherlands since the passage of partnership laws.  Although there has been a long-term trend toward the separation of sex, reproduction, and marriage in the industrialized west, this trend is unrelated to the legal recognition of same-sex couples."
• "Non-marital birth rates changed just as much in countries without partnership laws as in countries that legally recognize same-sex couples’ partnerships."
• "The legal and cultural context in the United States gives many more incentives for heterosexual couples to marry than in Europe and those incentives will still exist even if same-sex couples can marry.  Giving same-sex couples marriage or marriage-like rights has not undermined heterosexual marriage in Europe, and it is not likely to do so in the United States."

Note that last bullet point because your answer’s right there idiot.  In most other western nations, single parents don’t suffer economic hardship like they do here in the Save Our Children USA.  And in point of fact, the usual pattern in Scandinavia is to marry After the first child is born…

The main evidence Kurtz points to is the increase in cohabitation rates among unmarried heterosexual couples and the increase in births to unmarried mothers. Roughly half of all children in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are now born to unmarried parents. In Denmark, the number of cohabiting couples with children rose by 25 percent in the 1990s. From these statistics Kurtz concludes that " … married parenthood has become a minority phenomenon," and—surprise—he blames gay marriage.

But Kurtz’s interpretation of the statistics is incorrect. Parenthood within marriage is still the norm—most cohabitating couples marry after they start having children. In Sweden, for instance, 70 percent of cohabiters wed after their first child is born. Indeed, in Scandinavia the majority of families with children are headed by married parents. In Denmark and Norway, roughly four out of five couples with children were married in 2003. In the Netherlands, a bit south of Scandinavia, 90 percent of heterosexual couples with kids are married.

Emphasis mine.   And you can be sure Kurtz knew that when he published his dire warnings about the effect of same-sex marriage in Scandinavia.  After all…he had to have poured over the data in his search for evidence damning gay people.  He’d have looked at the entire marriage rate data, never doubt it, and he had to have seen that part.  He withheld it because it effectively took away his ammunition.

Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin goes a step further, noting the Decline in the rate of out of wedlock births in Scandinavia…

But more specifically with respect to civil unions, look at what the data tells us:

1. Before 1993, the percentage of births outside of marriage grew steadily by an average of about 9% per year.
2. After civil unions were enacted in 1993, the growth of that birth rate slowed dramatically. The the growth rate fell from 9% per year to an average of less than 1.5% per year between 1993 and 2006.

Which means that if there were a cause and effect between Norway’s birth rate outside of marriage and providing civil unions for same-sex couples, the data suggests that civil unions actually had a dramatic affect in slowing the rate of births outside of marriage.

The chart Burroway provides shows the rate climbing since the mid-70s, and then suddenly tapering off after civil unions were enacted.  Of course, coincidence is not causality, and the plain fact is that civil unions were probably of utterly no consequence in any sense.  Since when did heterosexuals decide how to live their intimate lives based on what homosexuals do with theirs?  Is this rocket science? 

What happened to change how heterosexuals lived their lives in the 1970s wasn’t gay liberation, but women’s.  The pill happened.  Women became more independent of men.  They could have their own lives.  Marriage wasn’t a foregone conclusion for them, the home not the only life they were allowed to have anymore.  Given all that, of course the patterns of marriage would change.  Opposite sex couples still marry…they just go down a different road to it now…both of them, together, as equals.

And make no mistake…that’s what Santorum and his kind want to change.  This isn’t about same-sex marriage.  It’s about the prerogative of powerful males.  It’s about taking us all back to a day when certain males of a certain class had power and status simply by virtue of their being males of a certain class, and the rest of us, women, minorities, laborers, heathens, knew our place and our lives only had context in service to them.  It was once their world, and the rest of us just lived in it.  That’s why they fight.  Because in this world of ever expanding knowledge, freedom and justice, they are the biggest losers.  Where status doesn’t count, you actually have to be something, and all they know how to be, is 18th century privileged males.

Actually Rick, the voters of Pennsylvania gave you a wake-up call when they booted your ass out of office last election.  And you’re still walking though life half-asleep, half comatose, aren’t you?

Kagro X over at KOS catches David Brooks in usual form …babbling away about how democrats are elitists who know nothing about how the common folk live…unlike, well Brooks of course…

How big of a douchebag is David Brooks?

He’s such a big douchebag that he tries to criticize Barack Obama as not being an oh-so-regular guy (just like the tortoise shell spectacled and pink necktied drip Brooks is, of course) by saying:

[H]e doesn‘t seem like a guy who can go into an Applebee‘s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there.

Only problem? David Brooks has apparently never stepped out of the limo and actually gone into an Applebees. Because they don’t have salad bars.

Dumbass.

Brooks is an expert in how the middle America that exists only in the middle of that empty space between his two ears Really lives…

Brooks, an agile and engaging writer, was doing what he does best, bringing sweeping social movements to life by zeroing in on what Tom Wolfe called "status detail," those telling symbols — the Weber Grill, the open-toed sandals with advanced polymer soles — that immediately fix a person in place, time and class. Through his articles, a best-selling book, and now a twice-a-week column in what is arguably journalism’s most prized locale, the New York Times op-ed page, Brooks has become a must-read, charming us into seeing events in the news through his worldview.

There’s just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false…

… 

As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home. “On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—steak au jus, ‘slippery beef pot pie,’ or whatever—I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee’s,” he wrote. “I’d scan the menu and realize that I’d been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and ‘seafood delight’ trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it.”

Taking Brooks’s cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The “Steak and Lobster” combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75. “Most of our checks are over $20,” said Becka, my waitress. “There are a lot of ways to spend over $20.”

The easiest way to spend more than $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts “turn-of-the-century elegance.” I had a $50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entrée of veal medallions, served with a lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn’s proprietors, Walt and Sandy Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks’s article. They laughed.

I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. “I didn’t see it when I was there, but it’s true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn,” he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. “That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end?” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”

–Sasha Issenberg, Boo-Boos in Paradise

I’m pinching the caption on this Brooks photo from KOS because it’s so deadpan on…

Excuse me, you’re out of low fat ranch… Oh, I’m sorry,
I thought you worked here, Mr. Regular Fellow!

In the years that follow the Bush Administration, you’ll be seeing a lot of people pointing the finger at Bush and his cronies for all the lies that got us into, and have kept us in Iraq.  And a lot of that finger pointing will be done, never doubt it, by the people most responsible…

FAIR studied all on-camera sources on the nightly ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS newscasts: Less than 1 percent – 3 out of 393 sources – were antiwar. Only 6 percent were skeptical sources.

This at a time when 60 percent of Americans in polls wanted more time for diplomacy and inspections.

I worked 10-hour days inside MSNBC’s newsroom during this period as senior producer of Phil Donahue’s primetime show (cancelled three weeks before the war while the network’s most-watched program).

Trust me: too much skepticism over war claims was a punishable offense. I and all other Donahue producers were repeatedly ordered by top management to book panels that favored the pro-invasion side.

I watched a fellow producer get chewed out for booking a 50-50 show.

At MSNBC, I heard Scott Ritter smeared – on-air and off – as a paid mouthpiece of Saddam Hussein. After we had war skeptic and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark on the show, we learned he was on some sort of network blacklist.  

When MSNBC terminated Donahue, it was expected that we’d be replaced by a nightly show hosted by Jesse Ventura. But that show never really launched.

Ventura says it was because he, like Donahue, opposed the Iraq invasion; he was paid millions for not appearing.

Another MSNBC star, Ashleigh Banfield, was demoted and then lost her job after criticizing the first weeks of “very sanitized” war coverage. With every muzzling, self-censorship tended to proliferate. 

I’m no defender of Scott McClellan.  Some may say he has blood on his hands – and that he hasn’t earned any kind of redemption.

But as someone who still burns with anger over what I witnessed inside TV news during that crucial historical moment, I’m trying my best to enjoy this falling out among thieves and liars.

Thieves and liars.  Yes.  That about sums up the miserable lot of them.  I was walking through the concourse of Washington National Airport the other day and noticed a CNBC News Store in passing.  A Store, mind you…like a Disney store or a Nicktoons store, or one of those As Seen On TV stores.  You could buy a CNBC coffee mug, or a T-shirt, and books by various CNBC personalities.  I am living in a day and age when network news organizations have their own shopping boutiques.  You could get everything but the latest news there.

Via Atrios…  John from Drexel Dems, in his Review of Kathlen Parker’s Save The Males…

If there is one thing that a technical education helps you understand it is that the plural of anecdote is not data…

Recently a dear southern friend instructed me passionately in the theory of "equal but separate."   "It just happens," he said, "that in my town there are three new Negro schools not equal, but superior to the white schools.  Now wouldn’t you think they would be satisfied with that?  And in the bus station, the washrooms are exactly the same.  What’s your answer to that?"

I said, "Maybe it’s a matter of ignorance.  You could solve it and really put them in their places if you switched schools and toilets.  The moment they realized your schools weren’t as good as theirs, they would realize their error."

And do you know what he said?  He said, "You trouble-making son of a bitch."  But he said it smiling.
        -John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley (1962)

Shallow understanding from people of good will, is  more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
        -Martin Luther King Jr.

I have a proposition along the lines of Steinbeck’s.  If heterosexuals think civil unions really are equal to marriage, let them convert their marriages to civil unions.  Once we gay folk see how well civil unions work for heterosexual couples after all, it’ll really put us in our place won’t it?

I jest of course.  But I want you think about this.  If separate but equal really is equal, then why does it have to be separate?  The answer is, typically, that same-sex marriage is too controversial to be a realistic goal now.  I can appreciate a tactical decision to pursue equality in stages, but only so long as we’re all clear what the ultimate goal is, and why we have to do it that way.  But that’s not what I’m hearing in the wake of the California Supreme Court decision on marriage equality.  What I’m hearing from various quarters, not all of them heterosexual, is that we blew it in California by going for marriage, when we already had a perfectly acceptable compromise in separate but equal civil unions. 

It’s very frustrating to listen to the debate surrounding the California Supreme Court’s marriage decision to devolve into babbling talk radio crap about how foolish it is for gay people to fight this as though it’s all or nothing, and particularly in California where we already had perfectly good separate but equal civil unions.  If I hear one more time about how we’re only fighting over a word I am going to fucking explode.  Can anybody who says that just stop and think about what they’re saying for a moment? 

A word.  A word.  A motherfucking word.  Why does a motherfucking word matter?   Say, I have an idea, why not ask the heterosexuals who are fighting bitterly to keep a mere word all to themselves if that’s what they’re fighting for.   A word.  A word.  Ask them if it’s only a word.  Go ahead.  And when you ask them you need to listen to what they tell you.  You need to pay attention.  Especially when they explain to you why letting us have That Word devalues it for them. 

This is not over a word.  It’s not even over marriage as an institution.  It’s not about what marriage is to heterosexuals, but about what we are to heterosexuals.  When you understand why heterosexuals want to reserve the word ‘marriage’ for themselves, you understand why civil unions will never be equal to marriage.

After the California decision, USA Today posted an editorial that is eminently typical of the response from what King might have called the People Of Good Will.  As USA Today likes to posture as a civilized foe of bigotry, you would think they’d have warmly congratulated Californian gays on this milestone, and on their courage and fortitude the for the sake of their love.  You would think this…if you weren’t paying attention….

Last week, when California became the second state after Massachusetts to allow gay marriage, same-sex couples celebrated and began planning June weddings. Good for them. But the unfortunate and unnecessary impact of the California Supreme Court ruling might well have been to set back the cause of gay rights more broadly.

The judges ruled 4-3 that gays’ inability to get married amounts to discrimination under California’s constitution, even though the state’s domestic partnership laws give them the benefits and responsibilities of marriage.

In other words, pragmatic political compromise on the intensely controversial issue is not allowed in California. It’s all or nothing, and recent political history leaves little doubt about what will follow.

Never mind for a moment that it’s always easy to be pragmatic about someone else’s lives.  Pay attention to this.  The instinct in the "mainstream" "moderate" pews the moment, the instant, same-sex couples get a chance to marry isn’t to be happy for them, it isn’t even to raise a red flag of warning, though if you skim that editorial you might think that’s what they’re doing.  They’re not.  The point of the editorial isn’t to warn of a backlash, it assumes one.  The point is to blame the gay community for causing it.  We are always to blame for the hate leveled at us.  It is always our fault.  The distance between bigots who say the "gay lifestyle" is self destructive, and the People Of Good Will who say that we are needlessly provoking our enemies and whatever comes of that is Our Fault, is thinner then the paint on one of Fred Phelp’s God Hates Fags posters.  As far as they’re both concerned, we bring it on ourselves.

How?  The bigots say we bring it upon ourselves just by being homosexuals.  The People Of Good Will say we do it by provoking our enemies.  In other words, by defending ourselves from the bigots.  The bigots say we are unclean.  The People Of Good Will say that we should at least act like we are unclean for the sake of keeping the peace.  Besides they say, we already have all the legal protections we need.  To ask for more is just selfishly causing trouble.   We are always the trouble makers in this story.  And this story goes back a long, long way.

Once upon a time, before there was civil unions, let alone same sex marriage anywhere in the United States, the argument was that same-sex couples already had all the legal rights they need, because we could always avail ourselves of things like medical directives and powers of attorney.   The case of William Robert Flanigan Jr. and Robert Lee Daniel back in March of 2002 is instructive here.  For four hours, officials at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center barred Flanigan from his dying partner’s bedside, saying he was not "family", and that ‘partners’ did not qualify. Though Flanigan had legal power of attorney for his partner, Robert Lee Daniel, officials at the Shock Trauma Center kept him away from his partner’s bedside. Only when Daniel’s mother arrived from New Mexico, was Flanigan allowed into Daniel’s room. By that time, Daniel had lost consciousness. He would die two days later.

Because Flanigan was not present during Daniel’s final four hours of consciousness, Flanigan was unable to tell Shock Trauma that Daniel did not want breathing tubes or a respirator. When Daniel tried to rip the tubes out of his throat, staff members put his arms in restraints.

At first glance all this seems irrelevant to a discussion of civil unions.  Because Maryland at that time did not have a medical directives registry, and did not then and does not now recognize civil unions, they didn’t enter at all into the legal considerations of this case.  But look at it.  In the context of making health care decisions for his beloved,  Flanigan’s durable power of attorney gave him, in theory, for all practical purposes exactly the same rights as a spouse.  But in practice, in the moment of crisis, that durable power of attorney couldn’t have been more worthless.  United in a mere legal arrangement, as opposed to being Married, Daniel and Flanigan simply weren’t regarded as a family.  That was the immediate reflex of the hospital staff.  Their relationship wasn’t a marriage.  It was something else.  Something other then marriage.  And so Daniel died apart from his lover, with the tubes he was terrified of shoved down his throat, and his arms strapped to the bed.  There was no family there to say otherwise, as far as the hospital was concerned.  Something other then marriage, is inevitably something less then marriage. 

Flanigan later sued the hospital.  After trying different excuses, first saying they never got the paperwork on Flanigan;’s power of attorney, Maryland Shock Trauma decided to tell the jury that their emergency room was simply too busy to let him into where Daniel was being treated.  That he was allowed in when Daniel’s mother, the legitimate family, arrived, had to have been just sheer coincidence.  Ask yourself what jury would buy that if it were a heterosexual couple.  Yes…the jury bought it.  Maryland Shock Trauma was let off the hook.  Flanigan was left only with his memories of not being able to keep his beloved from the thing he feared most in his last hours on earth, and to be there with him.  The usual words of condolences, worth their weight in gold, were spoken all around.

Make no mistake, had Flanigan and Daniel been anything other then a gay couple that power of attorney would have allowed the one to make medical decisions for the other.  But what the hospital staff saw in that document wasn’t a power of attorney, but two homosexuals asking to be treated as if they were married, and that was an attack on their own marriages.  That is where the reflex came from.  When the staff told Flanigan he could not be with Daniel or have any say in how he was treated, because he was Not Family, they were not simply enforcing hospital rules, they were defending the sanctity of their own marriages.

Sanctity.  You hear the word a lot in this struggle.  Of all the careless brain dead claims being made here by People Of Good Will, the claim that gay activists have turned the fight over same-sex marriage into an all or nothing battle is the most nefarious.  In state after state, and even in California, the enemies of gay equality have either tried to, or enacted amendments that sweep away both same-sex marriage And civil unions, And anything and everything else that gives same sex couples even the passing rights that married couples enjoy, in the name of preserving the sanctity of marriage.   In the vast majority of states, this was long before same-sex marriage could even have been a possibility.  How close to same sex marriage was Virginia, when it passed its constitutional amendment barring it, as well as anything even remotely like it?  In fact, he entire history of the fight against gay equality has been waged as an all or nothing struggle by our enemies, and was long before the gay community began seeking marriage in earnest. 

Our enemies understand the logic of this fight a lot better then some of us seem to.  What’s confusing, or more likely what a lot of us are in denial about, is that the fight over same-sex marriage isn’t a fight over same-sex marriage specifically.  It’s a furious, bitter, scorched earth battle over the status of gay people.  That is the root of it, that is the thing we are all fighting over.  Are we your neighbors, or are we an abomination in the eyes of god?  Are we as human as anyone else, or are we the victims of a kind of sexual sickness?  Is the fact that we mate to our own sex just a simple and unremarkable variation like being left-handed or green-eyed, or is it a damaging distortion of natural sexuality?  If it’s the latter, it should be suppressed like any other illness afflicting humankind.  The kinder, gentler view is that we are merely some sort of unfortunate sexual cripples.  But in the eyes of the homophobes, we are a curse on humanity and you don’t grant rights to a curse on humanity. 

They have been waging this war against granting us human status for decades now.  It is not about marriage specifically, but marriage is both their trump card and the end of pretense.  Like raising the fear of homosexual child molesters, waving same-sex marriage in people’s faces frightens people into thinking gay rights is an attack on their families, on their most intimate sense of self, on that which is sacred to them.  If people who engage in unnatural, distorted sexual behavior can have their brokenness treated the same as the wholesome love of two normal heterosexuals, then that reduces the love and devotion of heterosexual couples to the level of pornography.  But the other edge to that sword is that letting same sex couples marry acknowledges their shared humanity with the heterosexual majority.  Same sex marriage is both the homophobe’s weapon, and their greatest fear, because then the battle is simply over.

I have watched this fight for decades.  Not the marriage fight.  The gay civil rights fight.  And I tell you, Every Step Of The Way, whether it was over the right to hold down a job, to the right to simply have sex with the one you love without being thrown in jail for sodomy, our enemies have turned every single solitary step we have taken, every meager right we have ever fought for, into a fight over same-sex marriage.  Oh, we can’t give them hospital visitation rights, it would lead to homosexual marriage!!!  Oh we can’t give them protection from discrimination in the workplace, that will lead to homosexual marriage!!!  What was the first thing they started screaming about after the U.S. Supreme Court voided the sodomy laws?  It wasn’t that the queers would start having sex now.  They know we’re having sex.  They immediately started babbling about same-sex marriage.  They don’t give a rat’s ass about our having sex.  Animals have sex too.  But only human beings marry.

So much, so obvious.  What should have been more illuminating then it seems to have been, was how after Lawrence v. Texas the mainstream news media and all the so-called liberal and moderate middle of the spectrum pundits started worrying about the possibility of same-sex marriage too.  Mostly to re-assure each other that Justice Kennedy had said their decision shouldn’t wouldn’t lead to that.  This was the reaction on the part of the self described sensible middle of the roaders, the People Of Good Will, to the fact that we were no longer presumptive criminals simply by virtue of being homosexual: Gosh…I hope this doesn’t lead to them getting married or anything.  But why shouldn’t it?  Why shouldn’t people who say they’re against ignorant bigotry towards their gay neighbors, want us to have the same status they do?

Because, they don’t really mean it.  For the People Of Good Will, we may not be a curse on all mankind, but we are still sexual cripples at best, if not disgusting perverts at worst.  They might agree that civil society should tolerate our existence the sake of the freedoms of all.  They may not go on crusades against homosexuality.  But you need to not mistake that for enlightenment or even tolerance.  It is disgust.  They just don’t want to deal with it.  They aren’t going on crusades because they find the entire subject distasteful.  And that distaste has consequences. 

When they say civil unions is a rational compromise between two extremes, look at that, really look at it.  It is the middle ground between your being wholly and completely human, and being cursed by God that they are saying is a rational compromise we should gratefully accept if we weren’t so stubborn.  In exchange for just shutting up so they don’t have to deal with our existence, we are being offered the compromise status of damaged goods.  But you don’t treat damaged goods as though they are anything but damaged. 

Here is how USA Today viewed the decision of the California Supreme Court:

…the domestic partnership laws in California are hardly equivalent to the egregious racial discrimination of the Jim Crow era. Far from denying rights, they guarantee gays equal treatment in such important areas as raising children, assigning responsibility for medical choices and settling financial matters.

By pushing the envelope, the California ruling will help those who want to deny gays such rights — blatant discrimination that reaches far beyond understandable differences rooted in the religious meaning of marriage. Even in California, an initiative is already underway to put a same-sex marriage ban into the state constitution. Similar bans are likely to be considered in Arizona and Florida. Failed attempts to amend the U.S. Constitution will revive.

The special status and sanctity of marriage is the ultimate blessing for couples who want to spend their lives together. Eventually, the nation might be ready to extend the institution to same-sex couples. But, as  New Jersey’s top judges wrote in a 2006 gay marriage decision, courts "cannot guarantee social acceptance, which must come through the evolving ethos of a maturing society."

It will be regrettable if the impact of the California decision is to slow or reverse that evolution.

Look at that first paragraph I quoted, where they offer the separate but (at least somewhat) equal defense of civil unions.  But just how egregeous could Jim Crow have been, if black people merely had to drink out of separate fountains.  After all…it was the same water…right…?

There is separate but equal.  But if all you see in that photograph is the black guy has equal access to water you are missing the egregious nature of Jim Crow, just as the editors of USA Today are missing the egregious nature of civil unions.  In point of fact, all it takes to see nothing wrong with what is happening in that photo, is to not see the humanity of the black man.  He has water…what’s the problem?

The special status and sanctity of marriage is the ultimate blessing for couples who want to spend their lives together. Eventually, the nation might be ready to extend the institution to same-sex couples.  Here the editors of USA Today admit out of the other side of their mouths, that this special status, that sanctity, that Ultimate Blessing, is precisely what civil unions are meant to exclude us from.  It does not, and you have to understand this, signify a legal status, so much as a social understanding.  And that social understanding is that our unions, that our love, does not rise to the sacred level of heterosexual love, and does not merit the same special status, the same blessing, that heterosexual love does.  This is the premise, spoken and unspoken, behind every appeal to the "special status of marriage".  It is not that marriage is so special after all, but that we are not worthy.

This is why giving same-sex couples access to marriage desecrates it.  That is why they use the language of desecration when we agitate for the right to marry.  By enacting the rites of marriage, we don’t celebrate it, we can only desecrate it.  That can only make sense if you regard gay people as incapable of experiencing love and intimacy as profoundly, as urgently, as heterosexuals do.  And that only make sense if you see gay people as irredeemably damaged goods.  And that is the thinking.  Same-sex marriage desecrates the Institution of marriage because homosexual love is only one step removed from pornography, if that.  That is why, exactly why, you hear them saying that same-sex marriage means "anything goes."  That simply does not follow absent the view that homosexuals don’t really love, they just have sterile, barren, pitiable sexual assignations, and pretend that it’s love. 

The People Of Good Will may be disgusted at the thought of gay sex, or they may feel pity for us and think themselves progressive because they would have us be treated with compassion and concern, just as you would treat anyone with a profound handicap.  But you don’t hang forgeries in an art museum, you don’t sell water as whiskey, you don’t treat someone who bought a degree over the Internet as though they’d actually been to college, and you don’t treat a same-sex couple as though they are married.  To do otherwise is to cheapen marriage into meaninglessness.   Same sex couples do not experience intimate romantic love as profoundly as heterosexuals do.  That Is the thinking. 

And that is why civil unions will never be equal to marriage.  The statutes defining them could read absolutely identically, word for word, comma for comma, period for period, and they will not be treated equally to marriages, because the basic premise defining them, the bedrock they rest upon, is that homosexual love is not the real thing, but a cheap, if not ugly mockery of the real thing.  No injury, no foul.  Civil unions, as a substitute for marriage, are not even a consolation prize.  They are a facade of respect, erected upon what heterosexuals consider to be a facade of love.

And that understanding of our love lives, of our humanity, has consequences.  Does anyone actually believe that most people voting against both same sex marriage and civil unions really don’t understand they are voting away both?  Do you really think that people who believe we desecrate the institution of marriage will respect our unions if they merely go by another name?  Wake up please.  Ask William Robert Flanigan Jr. how well a substitute for marriage works.  Ask the civil union’ed couples in New Jersey and Vermont who found out the difference between a marriage and a civil union that had all the same rights on paper, but not the same regard in the eyes of people who know that a civil union is a civil union precisely because it does not represent a sacred human bond like marriage does, but at best a pale imitation of one.  In the courts, in the public square, in the neighborhoods and villages, in the emergency rooms and in the funeral homes, absent the kind of recognition of our humanity that would make civil unions superfluous anyway, every civil union they encounter will be weighed by heterosexual people for what it is, not for what it isn’t, and what it isn’t is a marriage.

This is not a fight over a word.  It’s a fight for that acknowledgment of our humanity, and to have our human needs and our human dignity respected.  As long as heterosexuals view our relationships as being something fundamentally different from their own, they will treat them as something fundamentally less then their own.  And they will, never doubt it, apply the law as though they are something fundamentally less from their own.  Something other then marriage, is inevitably something less then marriage.  That has in fact, been the documented experience in at least one state, New Jersey.  Nothing should have been less surprising.  It is simply, it is inevitably, because applying two different labels, one to the union of opposite sex couples, and a different one to the union of same-sex couples, establishes that they are different things, and gives people permission to treat them as different things.  And as long as people believe they have that permission in the spirit of the law, they will use it regardless of the letter of the law.

There is no ‘but’ in equal.  We know who our friends are.  They are the ones who may worry about a backlash, may question tactics and means, but not that the fight is necessary and just.  They understand that love is something to be cherished and defended from hate, not compromised in the face of it.   They know how important it is to us to defend the honor and the dignity of our love, because they can look at us, and see people not unlike themselves and they would do the same in our shoes.  We are not damaged goods.  We are friends and neighbors.  Fellow citizens of the American Dream.  Shallow understanding, is no understanding at all.  It is the person that is shallow, not the understanding.  All it takes to understand why we fight, is to have ever loved someone.

To the folks who don’t want to fight this as an all or nothing battle: I’m sorry.  Nobody should have to grow up and go through life taking one wound to the heart after another.  This fight tears people apart.  I’ve seen it.  I hate it.  I don’t blame you for not wanting to deal with it.  But you need to understand this: you found yourself in an all or nothing battle with hate, the moment you first realized that you are gay.

[ Edited a tad…]