"I think what — what I’m saying is — and I had not gotten into the equal protection argument, Texas has the right to set moral standards and can set bright line moral standards for its people. And in the setting of those moral standards, I believe that they can say that certain kinds of activity can exist and certain kinds of activity cannot exist." -Charles A. Rosenthal.
I hadn’t known the details of how Rosenthal’s incriminating emails were discovered…only that they’d seen the light of day via some sort of legal proceedings against him. Apparently it began with a Houston drug raid. Some neighbors took photos of the raid and were later harassed and arrested by the police for it. At trial they were exonerated, and they sued. During discovery proceedings, they subpoenaed Rosenthal’s emails and that’s when the whole shit pile that is Rosenthal’s inner nature came tumbling out…the racist jokes, the pornography, the love notes to his secretary… But wait…it gets Even Better…
But the thing that took Rosenthal down was not his adulterous affair. Nor was it his racism.
Rosenthal scorned the judge’s orders and did not turn over all of his email. Instead, he deleted over 2,500 email just days after being ordered to remit it. This got him in a heap of trouble.
A grand jury indicted a Texas Supreme Court justice Thursday [January 17, 2008] on arson-related charges. But on Friday the district attorney’s office that brought the case to the grand jury in the first place dropped the charges, angering members of the panel and drawing allegations of political backscratching.
Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal, who is himself embroiled in a scandal involving inappropriate e-mails found on his office computer, said there was insufficient evidence to support the charges against Justice David Medina, a fellow Republican.
Rosenthal by all appearances, was trying hard to scuttle the case developing against Texas Supreme Court justice David Medina, a fellow republican (surprise, surprise) for torching his own house due to financial troubles. Here’s how the Dallas Morning News reported it…
AUSTIN – A Harris County grand jury indicted Texas Supreme Court Justice David Medina and his wife Thursday in connection with a June fire at their home in Spring, north of Houston.
But within hours of the indictments – Francisca Medina on an arson accusation, Mr. Medina on an evidence-tampering charge – Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal said his office didn’t think there was enough proof to charge either of them with a crime.
"We don’t feel like there’s sufficient evidence to proceed," Mr. Rosenthal said. "We will be asking the court to dismiss those [indictments] so we can proceed with further investigations."
The district attorney’s decision not to prosecute was the only good news of the day for Mr. Medina, a 49-year-old former district judge who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Gov. Rick Perry in 2004, and for his wife, defense attorney Terry Yates said.
They’ve "done nothing wrong," Mr. Yates said, "and will continue to fight this thing vigorously."
But legal experts say Mr. Rosenthal’s announcement – and in particular, its timing – are unusual.
…
Harris County fire officials believe the June blaze, which destroyed the Medina home and a neighbor’s house and did nearly $1 million in damage, was intentionally set. Their initial investigation focused on six people close to the justice, and was fueled by a trail of financial troubles for Mr. Medina’s family.
In 2004, the Medinas failed to pay nearly $10,000 in county and school district taxes, resulting in a lien on their home. A year later, a mortgage company attempted to seize the couple’s home, claiming they had not made a payment in four months. The suit was resolved out of court.
The Medinas’ home insurance policy had lapsed because of unpaid premiums.
Mr. Medina, a former general counsel to Mr. Perry who makes $150,000 a year as a state Supreme Court justice, has called the financial problems "miscommunications with the bank."
The June fire wasn’t the Medinas’ first. A decade ago, the family’s garage went up in flames.
When Mr. Medina was called before a grand jury last fall, he told reporters he was sure he wasn’t suspected in the fire. He said he had some ideas about who might have started it, and said Mr. Rosenthal had assured him he was only a witness.
On Thursday, Mr. Rosenthal acknowledged that’s what he told Mr. Medina – "at the time."
"Whether anything else came up that would make him a target, I don’t know I can say that," Mr. Rosenthal said.
In an interview with the Quorum Report, Jeffrey Dorrell, the assistant foreman of the grand jury, accused Mr. Rosenthal of playing politics to protect Mr. Medina.
"Rosenthal resisted these indictments with a vigor I have never seen or heard before," Mr. Dorrell told the online newsletter. "The [district attorney’s] office called my office last week and said we should not meet, the case was not viable and we should not indict. Obviously, that came from the top."
Now…consider this: Rosenthal was the second state attorney to argue in defense of the sodomy laws before the U.S. Supreme Court since the Stonewall Riots announced the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. The other guy? Michael Bowers. And Bowers, you may recall, later endured his own episodes of political scandal and cheating on his wife.
It may seem odd…surreal even…that these self appointed moral authorities on the right would keep turning out, time and time again, to have the inner moral character of a gang of crooks. But that’s only if you look no further then the surface fealty to the moral code they claim to embrace. Look deeper. Look at the moral code itself. Where does it come from?
The Bible? No. They pick and choose from the bible like customers in a cafeteria, sliding their trays down the rails…now and then finding a tasty treat to their liking, ignoring the rest. These people, for all their bellyaching about their deeply held religious values, have religious values that are skin deep and no more.
The flag? No. For all their super duper true red white and blue American super patriotism, these people have utterly no commitment at all to the basic values of liberty and justice for all. None. If anything, they find it anathema. Their vision of the American Dream, is one that enriches their own lives, only and to the degree that it kicks into the gutter everyone they personally despise. The American Dream is money in their pocket, so long as it came out of yours. Freedom isn’t a rising tide that lifts all boats, but a ladder with them at the top and the rest of us down at the bottom, holding them up. The American Way, is their way.
Look at the values these people hold, not the ones they profess. Really look at them. All their moral values, all their deeply held religious beliefs, all their breathless reverence for America, amount to one thing only: themselves. They are worshiping a mirror, and calling it Jesus. They are saluting a flag with their face on it, and stripes made of line items in their personal prosperity check list, and calling it America. And that is how the man, the lawyer, could stand before the U.S. Supreme Court and argue that the only justification the sodomy laws needed was that they reflected the moral values of the people. Whether or not they embodied or conflicted with the values this nation was founded upon were irrelevant. If the people believe it is moral to imprison homosexuals said Rosenthal, then that makes it right. It was a statement of his innermost moral character: if he believes it is moral, then it is moral. Or more specifically, if he does it, it must be moral because he did it.
And that is why the man, the lawyer, who stood before the U.S. Supreme Court and said that Texas could draw a bright line of morality for its citizens, could cheat on his wife, use his office to protect a fellow republican from criminal prosecution, and destroy incriminating evidence against himself. Never doubt that in each and every step of the way down that path, in each and every moment of the walking of it, Rosenthal knew beyond any doubt or misgiving, that he was acting morally. It isn’t that he wouldn’t have done it if he didn’t think it was immoral by his standards. He was the standard. His life, his needs, his desires, his behavior. Because he did it, it Was moral.
That’s how these people think. It’s how they measure right from wrong. Jesus is the image in the mirror that nods approvingly back at them. The American way is the shape of their daily lives. Family values, is whatever goes on under their own roofs. Morality, is the stamp of approval they give to their own behavior from one moment to the next. That his how both Rosenthal and Bowers could condemn gay rights as a threat to marriage and family life, and cheat on their wives and still tell the world that they were moral men. Yes, they really believed it.
Via Atrios… From Bill Bennett’s Book Of Virtue…Chapter 88, How Do We Protect Multi-Billion Dollar Oil Companies From Responsibility For Their Own Jackass Behavior…?
Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on how much money ExxonMobil should be forced to pay as damages for its Exxon Valdez oil spill 19 years ago. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank notes that Chief Justice John Roberts appeared “bothered” that Exxon might have to pay for its destruction:
What bothered the chief justice was that Exxon was being ordered to pay $2.5 billion — roughly three weeks’ worth of profits — for destroying a long swath of the Alaska coastline in the largest oil spill in American history.
“So what can a corporation do to protect itself against punitive-damages awards such as this?” Roberts asked in court.
The lawyer arguing for the Alaska fishermen affected by the spill, Jeffrey Fisher, had an idea. “Well,” he said, “it can hire fit and competent people.”
The rare sound of laughter rippled through the august chamber. The chief justice did not look amused.
As Atrios said…"The real question is "how can coastal Alaska protect itself from being covered in oil by companies like Exxon." Apparently they shouldn’t be able to. I imagine if, say, a tractor-trailer careens into Justice Roberts’ home, his first thought won’t be about how to protect the company from punitive damages."
Three weeks worth of profits. Exxon just posted something like 40 billion dollars in profits for the last fiscal year. And Roberts thinks that they need to be protected from a 2.5 billion dollar judgment that holds them accountable for what they did to Alaska. Those coastlines Still aren’t restored. When republicans talk about the liberal nanny state, verses self reliance and personal responsibility, they’re talking about us peons. If you’re a multi-billion dollar a year corporation, you’re entitled to all the government largess you want.
"While your blogger has nothing personally against gays…"
Deux…
"…and does not care what they do as consenting adults…"
Trois…
"…she does care about Equality NC’s attempts to tie homosexual desires onto the civil rights causes hard fought by black Americans. This is just wrong!"
Quatre…
"These gay militants want to be able to be married, just as heterosexuals are, and that personally offends this blogger."
An evangelical chaplain who leads Bible studies for California lawmakers says God is disgusted with a rival fellowship group that includes people of all faiths.
"Although they are pleasant men in their personal demeanor, their group is more than disgusting to our Lord and Savior," Drollinger wrote on the Capitol Ministries’ Web site.
The comments drew immediate fire from others in the capital, including the Republican lawmaker who sponsors Drollinger’s Bible study group.
Drollinger said "progressive religious tolerance" is an offense against God and causes harm to its practitioners.
He said the other Bible study group was perpetrating a "deadly lie" by presenting Jesus as "a good moral teacher who loves everyone without distinction."
Assembly Republican leader Mike Villines, who sponsors Drollinger’s Bible study group, said the differing approach between the two groups should not be a cause of conflict between them.
Capitol Ministries aims to "reach every elected official in every nation of the world at every level of government with the uncompromised, saving message of Jesus Christ," according to its website. So far, the California-based group has, again according to its website, "singularly focused on establishing biblical ministries in State Capitols throughout our nation … in order to make disciples of Jesus Christ within the political arena, at every level."
…
The growing roster of states is worth noting because of Capitol Ministries’ extremism.
The group’s leader, Ralph Drollinger, is so extreme that the Los Angeles Daily News reported this month without qualification that he "has a long record of bashing Catholics, gays and mothers of young children who serve in the state Legislature."
…
In his keynote address to the May 8th Harrisburg "Commonwealth Prayer Breakfast," Drollinger said it was important to challenge legislators to make decisions to "submit to Christ as Lord," according to Rabbi Paula Reimers of Congregation Beth Israel in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, who attended.
She also noted Drollinger’s remark that it isn’t necessary "to coerce one who has come to Christ as to how to vote."
…
In 2004 he [Drollinger] offended many in the California legislature when he called Catholicism "the world’s largest false religion."
According to a 2005 report in the Sacramento News & Review, the previous year Drollinger "had to move the Bible study from the governor’s suites after he labeled Catholicism, the religion of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a ‘false religion.’" Thanks to the sponsorship of three Republican legislators, Drollinger moved the study to a legislative suite, according to the paper, where its attendance was around a dozen Republican lawmakers. There is a separate study group for staffers.
In 2004 Drollinger wrote a Bible study stating that women legislators were sinning by leaving their children to go to Sacramento. "It is one thing for a mother to work out of her home while her children are in school," he wrote. "It is quite another matter to have children in the home and live away in Sacramento for four days a week. Whereas the former could be in keeping with the spirit of Proverbs 31, the latter is sinful."
Drollinger amplified with a patriarchal assertion about the roles of men and women. "Man’s is, primarily, to be a breadwinner, and women’s is to be at home nurturing their children," according to contemporaneous news reports.
Some members of the state Senate responded by wearing aprons to a legislative session.
In the interview with the Sacramento News & Review, Drollinger differentiated his operation from religious right organizations. They, he said, lobby on bills, whereas Capitol Ministries works to win souls (the same distinction he made at the Harrisburg breakfast)..
He also insisted that he supports the separation of church and state, because the two insititutions are biblically ordained to serve different purposes, according to the SNR.
The group’s own descriptions of its activities suggests quite the opposite. A 2002 "Bible study lesson series" aimed at Tennessee government workers was titled "Decision-Making and God’s Will," according to the Nashville Business Journal.
…
In 2005, in a retort to the speaker of the California Assembly’s statement that all are "children of God," Capitol Ministries’ national "expansion" director, Sean Wallentine, said: "While it is nice to believe that God is everyone’s Father, it is not true." Only those who are "born again" become God’s "adopted children," Wallentine said in a written statement quoted by the California Observer blog.
The Daily News report on the prayer breakfast in Santa Clarita quoted Wallentine disparaging an alternative Interfaith event. "I would just say they’re allowed to have their meeting," he said, "but we wouldn’t be supportive of a meeting that taught that there are many ways to heaven. There are not."
Freedom of religion? You’re very much mistaken citizen…sin has no rights that men of god are bound to respect…
Heroes Of The War Against Homosexuality…(collect the entire series!)
Card #12: Houston District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal:
“I think that this Court having determined that there are certain kinds of conduct that it will accept and certain kinds of conduct it will not accept may draw the line at the bedroom door of the heterosexual married couple because of the interest that this Court has that this Nation has and certainly that the State of Texas has for the preservation of marriage, families and the procreation of children. “Even if you infer that various States acting through their legislative process have repealed sodomy laws, there is no protected right to engage in extrasexual – extramarital sexual relations, again, that can trace their roots to history or the traditions of this nation.” -Chuck, arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas
Rosenthal is back in the headlines again. Last December, as part of a federal civil rights lawsuit into how justice is meted out in the county, he turned over the (partial) contents of his government e-mail account. And what a batch of e-mails it was. Black ministers called for the Republican to resign because of racist material, including a cartoon depicting an African-American suffering from a "fatal overdose" of watermelon and fried chicken. There were adult video clips and love notes from Rosenthal to his secretary, his mistress during a previous marriage. "I love you so much," Rosenthal says in one. "I want to kiss you behind your right ear," he says in another. "Go spend time with your family," she admonishes him back.
Extrasexual extramarital sexual relations. Extrasexual extramarital sexual relations. Extrasexual extramarital sexual relations. What the fuck? There something in the water down there?
Via Andrew Sullivan’s blog… From the National Review’s blog, ring wing crank John Derbyshire actually gets a few things right about Intelligent Design proponents…
I’ve said before here, and repeated as politely as I could in panel discussions with creationists: they’re not just wrong, they’re shifty. In my opinion, they wandered off the straight and narrow when they started pushing this "intelligent design" stuff. My advice to them — frequently offered but, for reasons that are baffling to me, never taken up — is to drop the i-d b-s and go back to good old Biblical creationism. At least that’s an honest point of view founded in Scripture. I understand why the move to i-d was made: to try to get out from under current church-state jurisprudence (not all of which I agree with). However, the constant strain of keeping a straight face while insisting that theirs is not — no way! absolutely not!! — a religious campaign, and talking about the mysterious-but-definitely-not-supernatural "Designer," has corrupted them irredeemably.
No. What corrupted them irredeemably was idolatry. These people worship the bible, not God. And it’s forced them to turn away from everything God actually created, and treat Gods own handwriting in the matter that makes up the water in the sea, the sand on the shore, and the beautiful whirls and colors of sea shells as evil, whenever it contradicts what the idol says. The first thing you give up when you turn away from the world as it really is, is your integrity. After that, comes you honor, your self respect, and eventually everything you could have been. Yes they’re shifty. That’s what you become when you turn away from the world. That’s what you have to become.
When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird. When reality slaps you upside the head, say "thank you". Don’t tuck your tail between your legs and run away toward the comforting embrace of an idol, because you’ll never stop running until there is nothing left of you but the idol. The empty, soulless idol.
If you were wondering why the Archbishop of Canterbury has a sudden fondness for Muslim sharia law, maybe this can help explain it to you…
I have no problem with the argument that liberal, secular law should not be seen as universal. However, Williams is saying something else. He does not want the "conscientious disagreement" that a faith community has with state law to be "overruled by a monopolistic understanding of jurisdiction". What this means is that faith communities should be allowed to opt out of laws that go against their teachings. This, I would suggest, is a recipe for compromising notions of equality and equal treatment before state law.
A telling example shows where all this is leading. Roman Catholic adoption agencies, the archbishop suggests, should have the right to reject gay men and lesbians as adoptive parents. The corollary is that the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches should have the right to stop gays from taking senior positions in church ranks. Ditto for women. The archbishop’s attempt to redefine the relationship between religious conscience and law turns out to be about Christian churches and their position on such issues as gay rights and abortion. The sharia is a distraction.
I am all for enlarging the religious space in a secular state. However, it seems to me that on the issue of equality it is not just the sharia that needs reform, but all monotheistic faiths.
I have a hunch we’re going to be seeing a lot of new found respect for sharia law being declared from ersatz Christian pulpits in the coming years…
Last week, in the Jamaican town of Mandeville, three gay men were attacked in their home by an angry mob of approximately 20 people who had threatened them with violence days before if they did not leave the community.
After the incident, two of the attacked men were hospitalized, one with serious injuries including a severed ear, an arm broken in two places and a damaged spine, while another man is still missing and feared dead. This is only the latest in a wave of attacks on gay men in notoriously homophobic Jamaica.
According to a Human Rights Watch press release, the attack on these men echoes another incident in the same town on Easter Sunday, April 8, 2007 when approximately 100 men gathered outside a church where 150 people were attending the funeral of a gay man.
According to mourners, the crowd broke the windows with bottles and shouted, “We want no battyman [gay] funeral here. Leave or else we’re going to kill you. We don’t want no battyman buried here in Mandeville.”
Several mourners inside the church called the police to request protection. After half an hour, three police officers arrived but did little to calm situation, opting instead to commiserate and laugh with the menacing mob until several gay men among the mourners took knives from their cars for self-defense.
This seems to be causing a bit of a drop off in tourism in that lovely country. The solution?
Jamaica plans to tap into the thriving market for religious-oriented tourism to invigorate the island’s sagging economy, government officials and business leaders said.
A new convention center, to be built by 2009, will attract some of the millions of travelers who attend religious conferences outside of their home countries, said Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett. The global religious tourism market is an $18 billion-a-year industry with some 300 million travelers, according to the Colorado-based World Religious Travel Association.
Hey mon…I have a plan…you know…let’s go after the hate market…
Of course, the flaw in this grand plan is that the hate market, at least here in America, doesn’t much like darkies either. But if you shine their shoes and call them "Massa" they’ll at least tip decently.
On the February 3 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday, panelist and New York Times columnist Bill Kristol said the only people supporting Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-NY) presidential campaign "are the Democratic establishment and white women." Kristol then asserted that "it would be crazy for the Democratic Party to follow an establishment that’s led it to defeat year after year," and added, "White women are a problem, that’s, you know — we all live with that." After fellow panelist Brit Hume responded, "Bill, for the record, I like white women," Kristol said, "I know, I shouldn’t have said that."
That would be Bruce Bower I’m referring too, not yours truly. Bower, who wrote in Stealing Jesus how Christian fundamentalists have turned Jesus’ message of love and forgiveness into a religion utterly devoid of love let alone forgiveness, is loosing his mind. And the first hint you get of that in his latest essay, First They Came For The Gays, is that he’s writing now for the 101st Fighting Keyboarders over at Pajamas Media.
Reading Sebastian Haffner’s disturbing memoir, Defying Hitler, I learned two facts that were surprising to me. First, that the German people were delivered into the tender mercies of the Nazis, not by a bunch of weak kneed decadent liberal appeasers, but with the systematic destruction of the Weimar constitution by a series of right wing governments, each of which had declared that harsh measures had to be taken to protect Germany from extremists. And secondly, that the Communist menace was, by the time the Reichstag was burning down, almost completely toothless. It’s leaders and followers had been decimated by a series of anti-labor pogroms in the previous decade.
As it turned out, the communist menace was a convenient scarecrow various right wing governments waved in people’s faces, so it could do away with those constitutional rights and guarantees it found inconvenient. Not that people weren’t seriously afraid of the Communists…they were. But the actual menace to Germany, the domestic one, the Nazis, had much more in common with the rightist governments then people cared to notice. The argument was always that stern measures were needed to quell domestic unrest. But by 1932 that unrest was almost exclusively the work of the Nazis, not the Communists. The grim irony I discovered in Haffner’s book, was that if there was any appeasement going on back then in Germany, it was at the hands of the right who kept trying to appease the fanatics on Their right with the piecemeal dismantling of the democracy the Nazis detested, in order to save Germany from fanatics like…well…the Nazis. But they didn’t save it from extremism, so much as grease the skids for it. Here’s a clue for you Bruce: You don’t defend democracy, by abolishing it piecemeal.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Bower, an American of my own generation who has since migrated to Norway, a gay conservative who just co-incidentally has a new book out titled, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within, plays his part:
The reason for the rise in gay bashings in Europe is clear – and it’s the same reason for the rise in rape. As the number of Muslims in Europe grows, and as the proportion of those Muslims who were born and bred in Europe also grows, many Muslim men are more inclined to see Europe as a part of the umma (or Muslim world), to believe that they have the right and duty to enforce sharia law in the cities where they live, and to recognize that any aggression on their part will likely go unpunished. Such men need not be actively religious in order to feel that they have carte blanche to assault openly gay men and non-submissive women, whose freedom to live their lives as they wish is among the most conspicuous symbols of the West’s defiance of holy law.
Multiculturalists can’t face all this. So it is that even when there are brutal gay-bashings, few journalists write about them; of those who do, few mention that the perpetrators are Muslims; and those who do mention it take the line that these perpetrators are lashing out in desperate response to their own oppression.
The "Multiculturalists" Bower refers to here, and throughout, are strawmen. But more to the point, they are a standard right wing strawman. And that strawman is intended not so much to discredit multiculturalism, as democracy, and its bedrock of liberty and justice for all. In the name of sounding the alarm over the rise of anti-gay violence in Europe, Bower attaches that violence indiscriminately to a people, and to an entire religion. And in doing so he smears, backhandedly, cowardly, in the very manner of the anti-democratic subversive he claims to be standing proudly against, the central idea of democracy itself: that all citizens are equals under the law.
To claim that multiculturalism means tolerating honor rape equally with women’s freedom is pathetic bar stool sophistry, on the order of arguing that anti-lynching laws are just as much the product of bigotry as the lynchings themselves. This boilerplate right wing bar stool doggerel not only cheapens the political conversation, it means to actively shut it down. It’s Orwell’s black is white, up is down, doublespeak. And the idea here isn’t to discredit tolerance, but democracy. Where the promise of democracy belongs only to some, it belongs to no one. Except, perhaps, the ones who decide who is in, and who isn’t. The Europeans are painfully aware of exactly where that leads.
And that’s probably the brick wall that Bower, an American of my own generation, keeps hitting when he babbles on and on about how the Europeans need to wake up to the Islamist Menace, like he thinks he’s Paul Revere and not Father Coughlin. The events leading up to World War II in Europe are not so distant that the people over there have forgotten what happens when you start stigmatizing minorities, and Bower isn’t warning about a rise in intolerance and violence toward minorities: he’s warning them about the Muslims. He’s blaming it all on them. He’s telling Europe that it has a Muslim Problem. That’s probably scaring his audience the hell away. If he’d taken some time to try to understand the people he’s living among now, he might have expected that. But then if he could open his eyes a tad to the world around him, he might not be such a brick brained conservative now either. It’s really sad to watch a keen mind suffocate itself.
The problem facing gay people in Europe, as well as the rest of the world, isn’t radical Islamic fundamentalism, it’s radical fundamentalism period. And that rising, anti-modernist, anti-humanist, fundamentalism isn’t just threatening gay people, and it isn’t just threatening Europe. It’s a threat to democracy everywhere, to gay people, to women, to anyone who won’t bow down to its law. And it wears its Jesus mask as easily as it wears its Mohamed mask. In the end it isn’t about God or piety, it’s about obedience. In Stealing Jesus, Bower almost seemed to grasp that. Now he’s just letting his cheapshit xenophobia do his thinking for him. If I could stop being tired of seeing this kind of crap I might be sad for him.
He need only look to the scorched earth war between the gay haters and everyone else in his own church, the Anglicans, to see that isn’t true. There, the leader of the movement to chuck gay people out of the communion of Christ like so much human garbage, Bishop Peter Akinola, who once said he once literally jumped backward after realizing he’d shaken hands with a gay man, heartily endorse a proposed Nigerian law which would not only have outlawed same sex marriage, but prohibit any association of gays and lesbians, restrict their freedom of speech and movement, even to the point of making meeting in a restaurant or together in their own homes an illegal act. Here’s what Akinola, an ersatz Christian, had to say about the law…
"The Church commends the law-makers for their prompt reaction to outlaw same-sex relationships in Nigeria and calls for the bill to be passed since the idea expressed in the bill is the moral position of Nigerians regarding human sexuality."
And if that wasn’t enough…
"The Church affirms our commitment to the total rejection of the evil of homosexuality which is a perversion of human dignity and encourages the National Assembly to ratify the Bill prohibiting the legality of homosexuality since it is incongruent with the teachings of the Bible, Quran and the basic African traditional values."
So here’s Akinola embracing his Christian, Muslim and African brothers in the war on homosexuality. Multiculturalism anyone? And surely Bowers knows by now that the upcoming schism in his church is being funded in large measure by American right wingers, and in particular Howard Ahmanson, the former Christian Reconstructionist who now claims he no longer considers it essential to stone homosexuals to death, although "It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral…" You can just hear him handing Akinola and his brethren the stones there. Shara law anyone?
In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.
The trio leading the Watchmen are Alexey Ledyaev, leader of the New Generation Church, an evangelical Christian megachurch in Riga, Latvia, Ken Hutcherson, leader of the Antioch Bible meagchurch near Seattle Washington, and Scott Lively, a holocaust denier who wrote The Pink Triangle, in which he claims that Nazism itself is a form of homosexuality, and that the Nazis didn’t so much persecute homosexuals, as were themselves homosexual. This claim he is currently busy spreading far and wide throughout Eastern Europe, a land whose people suffered a cataclysm at the hands of the Nazis during the second world war. That propaganda has done its work on some younger Slavs…
On the first day of July, Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death. The 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age. Singh was delicate and dateless — two facts that did not go unnoticed by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.
According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them "7-Eleven workers" and "Sodomites." The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a "good church" like theirs. According to Singh’s friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh’s party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.
The pregnant woman said she didn’t want to fight them.
"We don’t want to fight you either," one of them replied in English. "We just want your faggot friend."
One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh’s friends to prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial life support July 5.
Outside Singh’s hospital room, more than 100 people held a vigil. Many were Sacramento gay activists who didn’t know Singh personally, but who saw his death as the tragic but inevitable result of what they describe as the growing threat of large numbers of Slavic anti-gay extremists, most of them first- or second-generation immigrants from Russia, the Ukraine and other countries of the former Soviet Union, in their city and others in the western United States.
In recent months, as energetic Russian-speaking "Russian Baptists" and Pentecostals in these states have organized to bring thousands to anti-gay protests, gay rights activists in Sacramento have picketed Slavic anti-gay churches, requested more police patrols in gay neighborhoods and distributed information cards warning gays and lesbians about the hostile Slavic evangelicals who they say have roughed up participants at gay pride events. Singh’s death was the realization of their worst fears.
"After a couple years of fundamentalist and Slavic Christian virulent anti-gay protests at almost every Sacramento gay event in the region," said local gay rights activist Michael Gorman, "what the gay community has feared for some time has finally happened."
Now Bower again…
Not very long ago, Oslo was an icy Shangri-la of Scandinavian self-discipline, governability, and respect for the law. But in recent years, there have been grim changes, including a rise in gay-bashings. The summer of 2006 saw an unprecedented wave of them. The culprits, very disproportionately, are young Muslim men.
Well I guess it was a good thing for Satender Singh that his attackers weren’t Muslims then. Except, he’s just as dead isn’t he? And that didn’t happen in Europe…it happened right here in America. Gay bashings, even killings, at the hands of young men who later claim a divine purpose to their bloodshed are hardly uncommon here. Meanwhile, in pulpits all across America, the religious right is hyping up the Homosexual Menace. We’re destroyers of marriage, and the family, and for good measure, civilization itself. And when the rhetoric from the pulpits is transmuted into blood, the religious right looses no time in declaring itself innocent, and in fact itself a victim of oppression by radical homosexuals.
No, assaults by Muslims always have to be construed as defensive – as expressions not of power but of weakness, not of aggression but of helplessness. To suggest that the culprits, far from being fragile, sensitive flowers who’ve been pushed over the line by something we did, are in fact bullies driven by an overweening sense of superiority and a deep-seated malice – both of which they’ve been carefully taught at home, at school, and, yes, in the mosque – is verboten.
Boy doesn’t that sound familiar. When was the last time you saw the American news media pointing a finger at the hate coming from the pulpits? Can’t remember? Neither can I. And I know I’d have heard about it because the religious right would have been screaming about the liberal news media and it’s anti-Christian pro-homosexual agenda so loud you could hear it on the moon.
By framing this as an exclusively Muslim problem, Bower plays right into the hands of those who raise the race card whenever Islamic extremism is called out for what it is. But worse then that, he’s wrong. Spectacularly wrong. Horribly wrong. Damnably wrong. Shara law, when and if it delivers Europe back into the dark ages, will be wearing a Jesus mask, not a Mohamed mask. In the Arab world it is the Mohammad mask. Maybe elsewhere it will look something like this…
A Jewish invocation will be used by ultra Orthodox rabbis in Jerusalem to curse the organizers of the Gay Pride March and the police who protect them, said a spokesman for the Edah Haredit Monday.
In a ceremony known as “Pulsa D’nura” (blows of fire), rabbis of the anti-Zionist Edah Haredit rabbinic court will convene sometime before the march, which is scheduled for Friday, to conduct the kabbalistic ceremony which is believed to unleash unearthly powers against specified sinners.
According to Shmuel Poppenheim, a spokesman for the Edah Haredit, Rabbi Moshe Sternbach, head of the Edah Haredit’s rabbinic court proposed conducting the ceremony during a meeting of rabbinic judges Monday morning.
“All the rabbis were together at the rabbinic court to proceed over a chalitza (part of a levirate ceremony),” said Poppenheim. “After the chalitza, Rabbi Sternbach recommended doing the Pulsa D’nura.”
Pulsa D’nura is mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud (Baba Metzia 47a) and in the Zohar.
“If done by a competent, God-fearing rabbinic court like the Edah Haredit, the people who are cursed do not live out the year,” said a Jerusalem-based rabbi who preferred to remain anonymous.
In 2005 a young ultra orthodox Jew, Yishai Schlissel, stabbed three gay Israelis during a Pride march. During his interrogation he said,
“I came to murder on behalf of God. We can’t have such abomination in the country.”
What you need to understand is that this violent hatred of the secular world, and all the freedom it brings, and human potential it unleashes, is not a Muslim phenomena, nor is it particular or even necessary to any one religion or faith. And in a deeper sense, it’s not even about homosexuality. It’s about modernism. It’s about freedom, about the awesome human potential that modern democracy has unleashed. It’s fundamentally about the ones who can’t cope with it…the ones who are Left Behind.
In his time, Haffner saw it…
Money came into the country, the currency maintained its value, and business was good. The older generation began to retrieve its store of experience from the attic, burnish it bright, and show it off, as if it had never been invalidated. The last ten years were forgotten like a bad dream. The Day of Judgment was remote again, and there was no demand for saviors or revolutionaries. The pubic sector required only competent officials, and the private sector only hard working businessmen. There was an ample measure of freedom, peace, and order, everywhere the most well-meaning liberal-mindedness, good wages, good food, and a little political boredom. Everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their own personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own tastes, and to find their own paths to happiness.
Now something strange happened – and with this I believe I am about to reveal one of the most fundamental political events of our rime, something that was not reported in any newspaper; by and large that invitation was declined. It was not what was wanted. A whole generation was, it seemed, at a loss as to how to cope with the offer of an unfettered private life.
There’s the root of it. The threat to democracy now, and eternally, is not Islam, but the Left Behind, and their sullen, resentful, hatred of everything a human being can be, of everything humanity can become, that they cannot. Or at any rate could, if only they weren’t so afraid of existence. This isn’t a Muslim thing. It’s a human thing. The Left Behind are everywhere, in every nation, of every race, in every culture. To embrace their cheapshit paranoias about Otherness, is to let them win the only battle that matters…the one for your soul. You embrace their fear and hatred of The Other, and the next thing you know you will be taking the ax to your precious democracy just as cheerfully as they are. Side by side you’ll both systematically destroy it. And then the next thing to get the ax, will be you. Because a race to the bottom is always won by the one that’s already there.
It is not radical Islam that threatens to destroy the West from within Bowers, it is the likes of you and your fellow fighting 101st Keyboarders over at Pajamas. ‘Multiculturalism’ is just one of this period’s trite little buzz-words that simply acknowledges the fact that in a free country your neighbor has the right to dress funny, and worship in a funny looking church if they want to. And maybe, just maybe, there might be something of value in their lives for the rest of us to take note of. Or not. But that’s how melting pots work after all you drooling moron. And as Jefferson said, it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Multiculturalism is no more about giving Muslim men the right to rape women any more then the American civil rights movement was about giving black men the right to rape women, although a lot of white conservatives back then seemed to think it was. Grow up. You’re fighting the wrong enemy, and in the process you are loosing the war.
The Muslim man who looks you in the face hails from a culture that gave humanity the modern decimal system, and which preserved much of what the ancients knew through the dark ages. You know…that period of time in Europe where the Christian church burned faggots and heretics at the stake. And if you think that’s all in your culture’s past, and that the primative, fanatical haters of his kind don’t also have their precise counterparts among yours too, or that yours are at least no great threat to your peace and freedom, you are sadly, horribly, fatally mistaken.
The enemy within, the one you need to fear the most, is the one that wears a face much like yours, and gives you a sincere smile and a hearty handshake, and whispers in your ear that this world would be So much nicer without all those horrible other people in it…
Kwame Kilpatrick was a guest on Real Time with Bill Mayer on Friday, Feb. 27 [2004]. On the show, which is broadcast live on the cable television network HBO, Kilpatrick adamantly opposed marriage for gays.
"I think that where this doesn’t belong is in a political discussion and I think that that’s where we’re starting off on the wrong foot," Kilpatrick said. "I personally do not support gay marriage. No, I don’t support gay marriage."
"Is that a political opinion?" Mayer asked.
"I think that marriage is between a woman and a man," answered Kilpatrick. "That is not a political opinion. If I was not in politics I’d say the same thing."
"Based on what?"
"Based on who I am, whose I am and where I come from," Kilpatrick continued.
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is hanging on for his political life after the revelation that, among 14,000 text messages between him and his chief of staff Christine Beatty, there was evidence of an extramarital affair between the pair — evidence that contradicts his sworn statements in a whistleblower case brought by former police officers that ended in $9 million in damages against the city.
City Councilman Kwame Kenyatta this afternoon began the process to initiate a full audit of the finances of the mayor’s office — including travel and legal charges — since Kwame Kilpatrick took office in 2002.
A full council vote is expected next week.
Kenyatta also wants the city’s Auditor General to investigate the law department and what type of legal representation it has provided Kilpatrick.
Last week it was confirmed that a secret deal was hatched to help settle an $8 million whistle-blower’s lawsuit filed by two ex-police officers. The deal prevented the disclosure of text messages embarrassing to the mayor. The messages confirmed an affair between Kilpatrick and his now-ex chief of staff Christine Beatty, contrary to their testimony during the whistle-blower’s trial.
No doubt the fact that Michigan allows same sex marriage is responsible for Mr. Kilpatrick’s cheating on his wife. Oh…wait…
MICHIGAN
Current law: DOMA written into state constitution and state law
Legislation: State constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage placed on the Nov. 2 [2004] ballot by citizen initiative groups and approved by 59 percent of voters.
What They Thought Of Us Then. What They Think Of Us Now.
Some random thoughts on homosexuals and homosexuality from back when I was a struggling gay teen…
I think homosexuals cursed, and I am afraid I mean this quite literally, in the medieval sense of having been struck by an unexplained injury, an extreme piece of evil luck whose origin is so unclear as to be, finally, a mystery.
If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth. I would do so because I think that it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure who are forced to live it; because I think there is no resolution for this pain in our lifetime, only, for the overwhelming majority of homosexuals, more pain and various degrees of exacerbating adjustment; and because, wholly selfishly, I find myself completely incapable of coming to terms with it.
They are different from the rest of us. Homosexuals are different, moreover, in a way that cuts deeper than other kinds of human differences — religious, class, racial — in a way that is, somehow, more fundamental. Cursed without clear cause, afflicted without apparent cure, they are an affront to our rationality.
…
I do think homosexuality an anathema, and hence homosexuals cursed, and thus the importance, for me if for no one else, of my defining a homosexual as someone who has physical relations, for it leaves room for my admiration for the man who is pulled toward homosexuality and resists, at what psychic price I cannot hope even to begin to imagine.
…
I was stunned, then angry. I was angry, first, at my own lack of judgment and subtlety in not deducing that Richard was a homosexual; and, second, more intensely, at being victimized by his duplicity. We were not close friends, but I liked him, and not it seemed that every moment we had spent together was a huge sham, an elaborate piece of deception to hide the essential, the number one, fact in his life.
…
I have four sons, and while I do not walk the streets thinking constantly about their sexual development, worrying right on through the night about their turning out homosexual, I have very little idea, apart from supplying them with ample security and affection, about how to prevent it. Uptight? You’re damn right. Given any choice in the matter, I should prefer sons who are heterosexual. My ignorance makes me frightened.
-Joseph Epstein, "Homo/Hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity," Harper’s, September 1970
…and then, from back when I was a struggling gay young adult…
In the case of the husbands at Fire Island Pines, the homosexuals were right about one thing. Their uneasiness did contain a large component of fear. The fear of straight men in the face of the homosexual community, however, is not that they will be tempted to join in but that they are being diminished by it, diminished in their persons and diminished in their lives. As women in a full company of homosexual men feel devalued and sexually rejected – that is the very reason certain women, they used to be called "fag hags", choose to spend their lives in such company – heterosexual men feel themselves mocked. They feel mocked in their unending thralldom to the female body and thus their unending dependence on those who possess it. They feel mocked by the longing for and vulnerability to and even humiliation from women they have since boyhood permitted themselves to endure, while others apparently just like themselves, slowly assert their escape from these things
They feel mocked most of all for having become, in style as well as substance, fmaily men, caught up in getting and begetting, thinking of mortgages, schools, and the affordable, marking the passage of years in obedience to all the grubby imperatives that heterosexual manhood seems to impose. In assuming such burdens they believe themselves entitled to respect, but homosexuality paints them with the color of sheer entrapment.
In Fire Island Pines they were in fact being mocked explicitly, not so much by individual homosexuals as the reigning homosexual fashion. The essence of that fashion was the worship of youth – youth not even understood as young manhood but rather boyhood (and indeed, the straight women among themselves always referred to the homosexuals as "the boys"). On the beach particularly, this worship became all powerful and inescapable to the eye. It was a constant source of wonder among us, and remains so to me to this day, that by far the largest number of homosexuals had hairless bodies. Chests, backs, arms, even legs, were smooth and silky, an impression strengthened by the fact that they were in addition frequently and scrupulously unguented to catch the full advantage of the sun’s ultra violet. We were never able to determine just why there should be so definite a connection between what is nowadays called their sexual “preference” and their smooth feminine skin. Was it a matter of hormones, or was there some constant special process of depilation? But smooth-skinned they were, and, like the most narcissistic of pretty young girls and women, made an absolute fetish of the dark and uniform suntan, devoting hours, days, weeks, to turning themselves carefully to the sun. Nor was this tanning flesh ever permitted to betray any of the ordinary signs of encroaching mortality, such as excess fat or flabbiness or on the other hand the kind of muscularity that suggests some activity whose end is not beauty. In short, year by year homosexuals of all ages presented a never-ending spectacle, zealously and ruthlessly monitored, of tender adolescence.
…
One thing is certain. To become homosexual is a weighty act. Taking oneself out of the tides of ordinary mortal existence is not something one does from any longing to think oneself ordinary (but only following a different “lifestyle”). Gay Lib has been an effort to set the weight of that act at naught, to define homosexuality as nothing more than a casual option among options. In accepting the movement’s terms, heterosexuals have only raised to a nearly intolerable height the costs of the homosexual’s flight from normality. Faced with the accelerating round of drugs, S-M, and suicide, can either the movement or its heterosexual sympathizers imagine that they have done anyone a kindness?
-Midge Decter, "The Boys On The Beach," Commentary, September 1980
Read a good take down on Epstein over at David Ehrenstein’s site…Here. Ehrenstein was one of the gay activists who stormed the offices of Harper’s Magazine after Harper’s doggedly refused to air any rebuttals to Epstein’s public wish to see homosexuals removed from the face of the earth.
Decter’s theses, if you will, in The Boys On The Beach, is that only a conservative and officially anti-gay culture keeps the innately self destructive impulses of gay men in check, whereas liberalism allows those impulses to become fully realized. Thus, according to Decter, persecuting homosexuals is actually a kindness. Anti-gay persecution is necessary in order to save homosexuals from themselves. This is the position that the American movement conservatives have taken ever since, and Decter’s 1980 essay in Commentary is still regarded warmly in winger circles, as an important work. You see echos of The Boys On The Beach in every opinion piece on homosexuals and homosexuality from the movement conservatives, even now. The premise, often unspoken but there between the lines, that culture and the law must be stacked against gay people, for their own good of course, because of the innately self destructive nature of homosexuality, is so ingrained in their rhetoric now that it’s central premise is taken as a given. It is homosexuality, not the persecution of homosexuals, that is destructive. Therefore, the solution is, surprise, surprise, More persecution.
But the Epstein essay gets to the heart of it: Homosexuals are cursed…they are anathema…they are different from us…they frighten us…if we could, we’d remove them from the face of the earth…because we are incapable of coming to terms with them. Yes we’re cursed alright. Not by our nature, but by their hate. Their calm, cool, thoroughly intellectual hate. There is the bedrock of The Boys On The Beach. There is the stinking rotten core of the secular right’s view of gay people. See how it is not all that different from that of the fundamentalists. Just add God, and you have a James Dobson speaking there. Anyone who thinks there is enough difference between the religious right and the secular right when it comes to gay people, that at least the secularists can be talked to, is just not paying attention.
Via Elizabeth Warren: William F. Buckley discovers the virtues of regulation and calls for government intervention to help fix the mortgage crisis.
If conservative principles are abandoned so easily in the face of a bad economic situation, what was the whole thing about in the first place?
Oh. You thought they really believed all that crap did you? (Well..of course Krugman doesn’t…) This from Warren:
I’m willing to go with Big Bill on his basic idea. Let’s all admit that consumer credit markets need basic safety regulations in place all the time. Without those regulations, we are ALL put at risk, the reckless and the prudent alike. If this economy melts down, it will take us all, and that means we have a collective interest in sensible credit regulation.
Just so. This is the problem with deregulation theology. The titans of business aren’t any less likely to get suckered into some stupid get rich quick scheme then you or I. The problem is when they do it they’re playing with other people’s money…their investors. And more then likely, their investors are also playing with other people’s money. And where does all that money ultimately come from? Banks…bonds…securities…pension and retirement funds…municipal funds… You and I, in other words.
And…hahahaha…weren’t they talking about opening up the social security trust fund to the Wall Street boys just a few years ago…as a way to save it from bankruptcy…?
Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.
The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer’s assessment of their physiological state.
Technology allowing constant monitoring of workers was previously limited to pilots, firefighters and Nasa astronauts. This is believed to be the first time a company has proposed developing such software for mainstream workplaces.
Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure”, the application states.
The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker’s weight, age and health. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help.
Can’t you just see how Microsoft is going to market this? Oh…we’re just trying to Help make your office experience more enjoyable…
The saving grace of it is that any technology capable of producing tiny devices to monitor your every breath with is also capable of producing tiny devices to fuck with the monitoring devices. But still…this is beyond sad. It’s disgusting. Next time Bill, or anyone in the Microsoft boardroom is testifying before congress about something, someone should ask them if they plan to sell this technology to totalitarian states. Because of course, if a U.S. company doesn’t sell police state technology to police states, someone else will and that’s money out of our pockets isn’t it?
I sure hope nobody asks me to work on the software for crap like this. I’ll work on it alright…
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