WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 — The Senate approved a resolution on Thursday denouncing the liberal antiwar group MoveOn.org over an advertisement that questioned the credibility of Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq.
MoveOn.org, with 3.2 million members, has become a powerful force in Democratic politics and the advertisement it paid for, which appeared in The New York Times, has come under sharp attack from Congressional Republicans and others as unpatriotic and impugning the integrity of General Petraeus.
Damn those dastardly democrats! Impugning the integrity of a war veteran! Is there no low they won’t sink too!!!
Like…oh…this for instance…?
At a White House news conference, President Bush called the advertisement disgusting and said it was an attack not only on General Petraeus but also on the entire American military.
I got your disgusting right here Junior…
You want a civil debate on the issues? Fuck Off! pls? kthxbye…
The “values voters” seem (so far) to be obsessed about homosexuality. And the candidates that showed up to pander are playing right along. They all weighed in on how to oppose “the homosexual agenda” with only Ron Paul hedging his anti-gay attitudes in terms of libertarianism.
Libertarianism…did you say…?
Every single candidate present would veto ENDA, would support a federal marriage amendment, and would support healthcare policies that would reward a “moral” lifestyle.
Emphasis mine. Ron is the kind of libertarian who would have (and probably did as far as I know) joined in the celebrations over the supreme court decision in Hardwick v. Bowers back in 1986, which upheld the sodomy laws. It was a "state’s rights" thing see. Now of course, it’s Let’s Let The Federal Government Define What Is And What Is Not A Family.
State’s Rights. Libertarianism.
[Update…] In the comments to that post, Ron Paul’s supporters note that Paul is apparently "on the record" as being against FMA. However, that seems not to have been a record Paul was willing to share with the Values Voters. Apparently he weaseled his way around the question.
See…this is the thing I noticed even back in the 1970s about many libertarians. You can appeal to a lot of people by saying the government should get the hell out of (insert what government does that you despise most here), so long as you mute the part about wanting to dismantle (insert what government does that you really like here). And almost without exception those libertarians who did that, turned out to be mostly right wing conservatives, wrapping themselves in libertarian language, trying to convince liberals that government is more a source of all our troubles, then a means to any good end. They’ve been singing that tune since…oh…back around when the feds started desegregating the public schools…
I won’t deny that there are libertarians who would be perfectly willing to get up on that Values Voter stage, look that audience right in the eye, and tell them if they want the government to leave them alone, it has to leave their neighbors alone too. They’d be tossing those votes away of course, but they’d say it. Paul apparently, couldn’t bring himself that day to stand on…you know…principle. There’s probably a reason for that.
One of the most influential business books ever written is a 1,200-page novel published 50 years ago, on Oct. 12, 1957. It is still drawing readers; it ranks 388th on Amazon.com’s best-seller list. (“Winning,” by John F. Welch Jr., at a breezy 384 pages, is No. 1,431.)
The 1957 novel was harshly reviewed and widely read.
The book is "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand’s glorification of the right of individuals to live entirely for their own interest.
For years, Rand’s message was attacked by intellectuals whom her circle labeled “do-gooders,” who argued that individuals should also work in the service of others. Her book was dismissed as an homage to greed. Gore Vidal described its philosophy as “nearly perfect in its immorality.”
But the book attracted a coterie of fans, some of them top corporate executives, who dared not speak of its impact except in private. When they read the book, often as college students, they now say, it gave form and substance to their inchoate thoughts, showing there is no conflict between private ambition and public benefit.
“I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don’t agree with all of Ayn Rand’s ideas,” said John A. Allison, the chief executive of BB&T, one of the largest banks in the United States.
“It offers something other books don’t: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete,” he said.
The roll call of the rich and powerful who became fans of Ayn Rand could be engraved on tablets of gold. They were her audience. The ones she would preach to, that theirs was both the power, and the glory. Amazingly enough, her work was also much beloved by many ordinary Americans who were drawn to her passionate defense of individual liberty, and her vision of a world where your right to live your life as you pleased, was held sacred. These were decidedly Not her audience. We were, to employ a phrase whose origins she would understand perfectly well, her useful idiots.
I was one of those college age kids who were bedazzled by Atlas Shrugged back in the mid-70s. I devoured the paperback, one of the thickest books I’d ever read (in more ways then one…), went out and immediately bought a hardback version, and for years carried in my heart her message that to live for the Self is a virtue. I was a believer. But like a many believers, I eventually came to a shame-faced understanding that what I thought the prophet meant, and what the prophet actually did mean, weren’t necessarily the same thing.
In some ways, Rand was my rebellion against my Baptist upbringing, which if it was anything, was more about pounding shame and self-denial into my heart then a love of God. But Rand also spoke more directly to my love of human beauty and achievement then any other writer I’d known up to then, and which was a thing I felt was being betrayed by the cultural climate of the times. I’d grown up during the space race, watched raptly as Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on another world. I was appalled afterward, to see so many in my generation, and so many of our intellectual elders, treat the space effort with contempt. In Rand I found what I thought was a champion of human achievement against both leftist nihilism and right wing fascism, along with the grotesque inhumanity of "original sin" that I’d had drilled into my head every Sunday since I could remember.
Her exaltation of technology as an extension of the human mind appealed to my budding techno geek side. Her insistence that sex for its own sake was a righteous thing, that a couple needed no external validation of their desire for each other, that in fact that to take pleasure in each other’s bodies is the right of two people who wholeheartedly desire one another, body and soul, appealed to my emerging gay awareness. I tended to overlook back then, that her sex scenes consisted mostly of rape fantasies. Later, I would dismiss her knee jerk homophobia as merely a product of her times. I should have taken more careful notice of all that. Fact was, the longer I kept Rand close to my heart, the more I had to forgive her for. Rand as it turned out, wasn’t so much a product of her times, as a product of her own imagination. And mine.
She had an afterward attached to her novels, which she said consisted of the words "And I mean it", saying that she’d always lived by the ideas she presented in her novels. But…she didn’t. Not always. Like many prophets, she practiced what she preached only so long as it wasn’t inconvenient. From her self serving denial of what her affair with Nathaniel Branden did to her own marriage, and to Branden’s, to her stubborn refusal to stop smoking and encourage her fans to quit too, even as she lay dying of it in her hospital bed, Rand never checked any premise that gave her conceits pleasure. Most tellingly, she said she was neither a supporter nor a detractor of the theory of evolution. It’s not hard to see why. Evolution was the monkey wrench in her philosophy, which was entirely driven by a model of human consciousness, that acknowledged only our capacity for rational thinking. Rand’s human being, was every bit the separate creation that Adam was in Genesis. And that is not what a human being is.
Rand said her morality was based on the primacy of human life. Actually, its based on the primacy of power, and of its principle expression: the acquisition of property. In order to sustain our lives Rand argues, we must acquire the necessities of life. But since, according to Rand, human beings are lacking instincts, have no automatic code of conduct by which we sustain ourselves, our entire means of survival depends on our ability to think, to make judgments, and to act on those judgments to our own benefit. Since the those things which we work to acquire to sustain our lives are the products of our capacity to think rationally, and are not provided for us in some automatic form such as by instinct or by some other gift of nature, they would not exist at all were it not for us. Therefore as our lives are our primary value, that which we create to sustain our lives, which would not exist without our intellect, must belong to us as both the creator of those things, and as the means of sustaining our lives. If we do not own the means of sustaining our own lives, those means, and therefore we, must belong to whoever does own them.
This is human existence reduced to the act of acquiring and disposing of property, and it’s true as far as it goes. Without some right of ownership of the fruits of our labors, we are merely slaves. But the problem with a property centric view of morality is that eventually it turns people into property, and all questions of right and wrong become merely issues of ownership. And there are some questions of right and wrong, that have nothing whatever to do with property.
As a matter of fact, some things necessary for human existence Are provided to us by nature. Which is really unsurprising considering the fact that human beings Evolved in the natural world we live on. We may have to think about how to go about getting the food and water we need, but nobody invented water, or meat, or apples. And we don’t even have to think about how to go about getting and using the air we breath. It comes to us as naturally as…well…breathing. How do you determine ownership of air? Well…we know how Rand felt about all those dirty hippies who were bellyaching about air pollution back in her day. In her book, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, Rand cites a series of statistics that show life expectancy in the U.S. was increasing, even as the environment was becoming more and more polluted, and said,
Anyone over 30 years of age today, give a silent “thank you” to the nearest, grimiest, sootiest, smokestacks you can find
Of course Rand was citing the life expectancy of the nation as a whole, not that subset of folks who, as a matter of fact, actually could take a short walk from their houses and lay hands on some grimiest sootiest smokestacks, not to mention living with ground water that was tainted with more dangerous chemicals then a nerve gas factory. She might have discovered that as it turned out, Their life expectancy wasn’t quite so much. But in Rand’s morality, since they choose to live in an ecological disaster zone, they deserved what they got.
Rand also had this to say about the nascent environmental movement of the 60s…
The immediate goal is obvious: the destruction of the remnants of capitalism in today’s mixed economy, and the establishment of a global dictatorship. This goal does not have to be inferred – many speeches and books on the subject state explicitly that the ecological crusade is a means to that end.
There are two significant aspects in this New Left switch of the collectivist’s line. One is the open break with the intellect, the dropping of the mask of intellectuality worn by the old left, the substitution of birds, bees and beauty – nature’s beauty – for the pseudoscientific, super-technological paraphernalia of Marx’s economic determinism. A more ludicrous shrinking of a movement’s stature or a more obvious confession of intellectual bankruptcy could not be invented in fiction.
The other significant aspect is the reason behind the switch: the switch represents an open admission – by Soviet Russia and its facsimiles around the world and its sympathizers of every political sort and shade – that collectivism is an industrial and technological failure; that collectivism cannot produce.
In other words…it’s all a communist plot, to seize our private property. Like they did her father’s pharmacy.
It was after seeing in the Reagan years what kind of government we were likely to end up with when money became synonymous with morality, and more to the point, the kind of people we were likely to be ruled by in that world, that I finally walked away from Rand, and from the bastard child she always hated, Libertarianism. It was years before I went back and read some of the books of hers that I once sat raptly with. It was…embarrassing. Her writing really is just awful. Horrible. Worse even, then LaHaye and Jenkins’ Left Behind books. And it’s interesting to note that Rand shares with LaHaye and Jenkens, more then merely an apocalyptic fervor. More fundamentally, she shares their utter obliviousness to actual human nature. Her characters aren’t even two-dimensional, particularly her villains. They’re not people, they don’t act like people, they don’t talk like people, they are merely scarecrows flap, flap, flapping in her long winded wind. And interestingly enough, just as in LaHaye and Jenkin’s book, there are no children. More specifically, just as in the world of Left Behind, in the world of Ayn Rand not only are the children not there, nobody seems to notice that the children aren’t there. There is a striking obliviousness to the vast landscape that is the human experience, which in novels of the size and scope of hers should be all around her characters, and it just isn’t there. And there’s a reason for that.
Until just recently, I put Rand’s babbling about things like environmentalism being a communist plot, along with her vitriolic hatred of the 60s counter culture, down to a bred to the bone hatred in someone who had every legitimate reason to detest communism. When it came to anything that even vaguely resembled communism, I figured she just had to be against it. That was why, in the face of any evidence that laissez faire capitalism might only end up destroying democracy, and any vestige of freedom for all but the very few, and very rich, she just had to stick with it, because to give an inch would mean the communists would win. She was, I figured in other words, a zealot. But that wasn’t it at all. The fact is, her celebration of the individual over the mob was rhetorical. She never really believed in it. As long as the mob was made up of John Galts, she was fine with whatever it wanted to do.
Scott was an enslaved man from Missouri who had lived for several years in Illinois and the Wisconsin territory, where slavery was prohibited by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In denying Scott the opportunity to sue for freedom, the Court also ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. In the notorious majority opinion, Chief Justice Roger Taney argued that blacks had never been intended to receive any federal rights “the white man was bound to respect,” and that it was inconceivable that blacks should ever have been intended by the Founders to enjoy equal citizenship.
Scott you see…wasn’t a man, he was property. You might suppose that the Randian position on that is that Scott’s primary ownership of himself, of his life and the means to sustain it, had been stolen from him, and that no one can rightfully receive stolen property. You would be wrong.
In an ideal world where the law really is an impartial referee, and justice is blind, a property centric rule of law might grant even the poorest of us rights that the rich and powerful would have to respect. I may only have the clothes on my back, and whatever skills I’ve learned to survive on, but those belong to me and I can freely barter my skills with others for goods I need. I may only be able to afford a run-down shack where nobody but the poor would want to live, but your multi-billion dollar factory right next door can’t pollute my ground water, and the food I grow, and the air I breath. But in a world where the rule of money is bigger then the rule of law, and morality is measured by a balance sheet, rights will reliably gravitate to the few and away from the many. What you have to understand, is that this is exactly the world Ayn Rand worked tirelessly for. Not the one where everyone is free, but the one where only money talks. A world where the marketplace bestows moral value, and might inevitably becomes right. If The Man wants your meager little portion of the American Dream, then it’s his right to take it…because he can.
And if you think this is Not what Rand meant, you are sadly mistaken:
On the 125th anniversary of the Dred Scott decision, Ayn Rand — who surely would have approved of its fearless pronouncements on inequality — died at the age of 77. The right-wing cult philosopher and high priestess of tedium somehow managed to sell millions of copies of her nearly unreadable novels from the 1950s onward, including paperweights such as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. On 6 March 1974, following a speech to the Army cadets at West Point, Rand was asked about the dispossession of American Indian land. In short, she approved of the idea.
They didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using . . . . What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.
I’d have to say that if working your land well enough that you are making an independent living off of it, which they were regardless of the degree of civilization the native peoples of America had, and they had a good goddamn more of it then Rand is giving them credit for there, if that gives you a moral claim to the land, then the Native Americans certainly had more then enough at the time of the European invasion…even on Rand’s stated terms. They were in fact, making productive use of their lands. Maybe not the productive use Rand would have cared for, but nonetheless they were earning a living off it, and had been for thousands of years. The native Americans of the time didn’t live in caves, and in fact knew enough about their environment to live well in it, that they had to teach the first settlers how too, otherwise a lot of those oh-so-civilized white folks would have starved to death. And if anyone was behaving like animals I’d suggest it was more the various civilized Americans during the 17 and 1800s, who decided that the natives needed to be eradicated, instead of traded with, which many of them were more then willing to do before being pushed off their lands.
See…Rand always claimed that the icon of civilized society is the trader, and that no value was ever gained with the force of guns. It seems grotesque then, to see her justifying the seizing of property in a way not at all dissimilar in kind, if not in the particular, from what had happened to her father back in communist Russia, so long as it was being done to people she was pleased to call savages. And…unwhite. Many of those savages starved to death after their means to earn a living was taken from them, like Rand’s family almost did. It all seems so staggeringly obscene…but that’s only if you take her postscript to her novels at its word. And I mean it… That’s the problem. She didn’t.
Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent. Or for that matter, take over a dark person. To…you know…civilize them. And perhaps "stick a knife into the body of a starved, toil-dazed, germ eaten creature, as a claim to a few grains of the creature’s rice…" Now you know how Rand could be utterly indifferent, contemptuous even, to the idea that capitalism could be just as dangerous to individual liberty as Marxist collectivism. She was never really against the use of force to steal value from others…only against it to the degree that the values came from the white landed gentry. What they did with the rest of us was merely the prerogative of the rich and powerful. And the white. That was her personal philosophy. The public one was merely the instrument by which the personal one could be achieved.
And as America has been learning ever since George Bush was elevated to the presidency by an ersatz states rights supreme court, this is the way it is with the right wing. Their values are mere window dressing. A facade meant to fool the rubes. The real value, the only value, is might makes right, and that was all that Rand’s philosophy was ever intended to do: give the powerful a moral sanction to rape the weak. Ayn Rand styled herself as a champion of the mind. She styled herself as a champion of freedom. She styled herself as a champion of the individual over the mob. It was all a fraud. She was none of that. She was a champion of the rich and powerful and never anything more.
Eight years to the day she gave her West Point speech, one-hundred and thirty-three years after Roger B. Taney declared from the bench of the United States Supreme Court that a black man had no rights a white man was bound to respect, Ayn Rand died. The author Mary Renault once said that a person’s politics, like their sex life, is merely a reflection of the person within. If you are mean and selfish and cruel it comes out in your sex life, and it comes out in your politics, when what really matters is that you aren’t the sort of person who behaves like that. Consider Rand’s politics then, as being merely a reflection of the sex scenes in her novels, which are almost without exception fantasies of rape. There’s the woman. There’s her philosophy.
Postscript:In re-reading that essay of hers in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution for this post, I had to laugh when I came across this:
But – the ecologists claim – men would not have to work or think, the computers would do everything. Try to project a row of computers programmed by a bunch of hippies.
Ex-Gay Watch follows up on a previous post that…er…Questions PFOX…
As a follow-up to our previous post on this matter, we have gathered more information in our investigation of claims made by Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX) here.
Yesterday, we spoke with Jackie Abrams, Vice Chair of the Arlington County Fair. According to Abrams, no physical altercation occurred, police were never called and no one was ejected from the fairgrounds – she was emphatic and certain. “I was in radio contact with the other board members during the Fair, and definitely would have known if the police had been summoned. It did not happen [her emphasis],” said Abrams. She added that her calls to PFOX, and specifically to PFOX president Regina Griggs, had gone unanswered.
They got it out there…why on earth would they want to help anyone prove that it was bullshit? The faithful now have something to bark about…that some wicked militant homosexual activist had attacked their peaceful respectful effort to educate people about the truth of homosexuality…and just you never mind that it never actually happened. Since when does an organization that was born on lies, built on a bedrock of lies, and does nothing but lie through its teeth about homosexuals and homosexuality constantly, meticulously, relentlessly, suddenly stop lying?
???
Of course they lie. Does a bear shit in the woods? Is the pope Catholic? Does PFOX lie? Yes…it’s good, it’s necessary, to expose their lies whenever, wherever they pop up. But on the other hand if by now it’s surprising you that someone from PFOX would make such brazenly false accusations about something involving homosexuals, then I guess it must also be a constant surprise to you that the sky is blue and water is wet.
Meanwhile…via Ex-Gay Watch, Truth Wins Out has some food for thought for all you parents out there, thinking about sending your gay kids off to ex-gay camp…
Truth Wins Out is reporting that Chris Austin, a longtime ex-gay counselor from Irving, Texas, was convicted today of sexually assaulting a client. Austin, a previous speaker for both Evergreen International and the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), has been accused of sexual assault on a client before. In 2001, Mark Hufford made similar accusations:
Hufford accused Austin of engaging in improper sexual behavior that included “oral copulation and fondling” during counseling sessions that spanned more than a year. The psychologist, who also teaches in the church’s Sunday School, had convinced Hufford to participate in “touch therapy.” The therapy gradually progressed to nude sessions and physical intimacy, he said.
I’m assuming the victims in both cases were legally adults, but it’s worth bearing in mind that outfits such as Evergreen and Exodus and Love In Action all claim to be ministries so they don’t have to submit to the licensing and oversight regulations that real hospitals and doctors must. Literally Anyone can claim to be a professional in the treatment of Same Sex Attraction Disorder. It’s like being a palm reader, only you get to make your customers tell you their sexual fantasies and participate in touch therapy…
The Fine Art Of Inciting Violence While Preaching Decency
Of course you knew that it isn’t only gay folk that the mayor of Fort Lauderdale is contemptuous of…
"Atheists and Criminal Lobbying Union" regarding the meaning of the acronym ACLU.
New Times, October 26, 2000
"I’m supposed to subsidize some schlock sitting on the sofa and drinking a beer, who won’t work more than 40 hours a week?" (On a proposed affordable housing ordinance)
Sun-Sentinel, May 20, 2006
Regarding a proposal to reduce greenhouse gases, calling it "hate-America stuff" concocted by "a bunch of scientists meeting in Paris who’ve had too much wine.”
Sun-Sentinel May 9, 2007
“The Scum-Sentinel is an advertising tabloid newsblog. They hire reporters and they make them churn out stories without making them get into anything in depth. They do that to feign a resemblance to a real newspaper so that they can sell advertising. And the Sentinel tries to lecture me about affordable housing? I tell people that the day I take advice from a company that has vagrants selling their products in the middle of the street, we’re all in trouble."
New Times, April 21, 2006
“I think a strong rope and a stiff tree would be better than wasting all that electricity.”
New Times (Broward Palm Beach Edition), October 26, 2000
As they say, scratch a homophobe and you find a rat’s nest of assorted other prejudices and cheap bar stool conceits. And given his steady and sure record of flipping the middle finger to his critics, I sorta figured he’d make some aggressive asshole comeback to the county commissioners act last week, of voting him off the tourism board. What I didn’t expect was that he’d surround himself with men dressed in paramilitary uniform, calling for a cleansing of sin from Fort Lauderdale…
Anti-gay Mayor Jim "250K robo-potty" Naugle has so polarized matters in Fort Lauderdale that press conferences and demonstrations are getting tense, according to Jeff Black of UNITE Fort Lauderdale, which is sponsoring a Faith Press Conference today, will feature speakers from many denominations and religions to discuss unity, inclusiveness, and acceptance.
Inclusiveness was not on the agenda on Tuesday as members of homophobic black churches, stood with Mayor Naugle at City Hall preaching they are going to take back the city, removing the sin and sinners. Religious men — in paramilitary gear — were also standing aside the mayor bleating that "the depth of sexual sin in Broward County necessitates an old-fashioned spiritual revival." From Jeff’s email to me:
They escorted me from the front door to the elevator when I entered the building today for this press conference, and stood ‘post’ at the elevator lobby. The video is frightening, worse was I was standing in the room with these people and worried what was going to happened next.
An initial check into who or what the Koinonia Worship Center is, turned up only a MySpace page…
I tried to find out information on the group but was only able to find a MySpace profile which included an audio track. The audio track is of a military leader talking to a subordinate and explaining how they are in the battle to take back what they have lost for the black man while in the background you hear gun fire and battle sounds.
What I’m hearing on this page is scary. "Special OPS (operations) Units" of the church. References to "Exercising Spiritual Authority"?
Nice. Until today I thought Naugle was just another homophobic barstool buffoon. But no…he’s a thug; a grown man with a schoolyard bully’s sense of justice and the moral scruples of your average drug syndicate gangster. Watching that video, there is no mistaking what he’s doing in it for what it is. Bracketed by men in paramilitary uniform calling for spiritual warfare, saying they will "take back the land" and that "God hates the act of homosexuality" and telling the mayor "we will fight with you", James Naugle stood in the mayor’s office and made a threat. He said to the Gay community, and to any heterosexuals who might be thinking of standing in solidarity with us, get off my back faggots…or you’ll be sorry.
Ninth Commandement? What Ninth Commandment…? (continued)
Oregon Magazine, they of such informative and thoughtful jourmalmalism like Hippies History Channel History is a Bad Trip ("They (the hippies) were all Leftists. Teenagers, young adults, old folks driving a spray-painted VW van — they were all the same."), the hard hitting online magazine bearing a picture of John Wayne standing in front of an American flag with the quote, "Now, just why in the HELL do I have to press ‘1’ for English?", brings us this alarming news about the Vast Homosexual Conspiracy…
Florida Mayor Jim Naugle has been under rapid fire assault from homosexual activists and liberal media for asking people simply to obey the law and to be responsible and respectful to families and children.
No shit…this crap showed up in Google News. And not just buried somewhere in the "all 3791 news articles" link, but right on the fucking news home page. I’ve noticed lately that whatever algorithm Google uses to determine what stories actually make the front page, it’s tracking a tad to the right…particularly when it comes to news regarding the gay community. Next thing I know I’ll be seeing press releases from PFOX. Oh…wait…I have. But more on that later…
Naugle, you may recall, is the prize jackass who in his last term as Mayor of Fort Lauderdale Florida, decided to go on an anti-gay jihad, accusing gay folks of making Broward County the nation’s AIDS capital and having public orgies in the beach toilets, despite being inconveniently contradicted on both counts by the Largest HIV/AIDS Healthcare Provider in the United States and his own police department. The Broward County Commissioners voted unanimously last week to remove the mayor from his seat on the tourism board for the damage he’s been doing to the attractiveness of the oceanside city to tourists, that they’ve worked so hard to cultivate since Naugle decided that Fort Lauderdale didn’t need to be a Spring Break destination anymore.
But the man has his defenders, at least in the "Now, just why in the HELL do I have to press ‘1’ for English" crowd, and Oregon Magazine would like us all to know that, in fact, having sex in public is just what the militant homosexual agenda is all about…
Members of the activist community in Fort Lauderdale and elsewhere are actually coming out in defense of public "gay"
sex. The homosexual legal group, LAMBDA Legal calls such public sex a civil right in their "little black book," and encourages such behavior.
The lousy formatting on that paragraph is theirs because I wouldn’t want to be accused of altering any of their breathless prose. And don’t bother clicking on the link they’ve provided because like the paragraph formatting and a lot of everything else that’s on the pages of Oregon Magazine, it’s a tad fucked up. But if you go to the Lamba Legal web site, and search for it, you can find the pamphlet they’re talking about, Here.
While Lambda Legal and other groups are fighting against the ways police target men who have sex with men, having sex where others might see you and take offense can subject you to arrest, publicity and other serious consequences. If you feel unsafe, you should leave.
Nowhere in that document is having sex in public called a civil right. The document is full of warnings about the risks involved, both legal and to your health, and the low probability of successfully fighting the charges.
Be aware that undercover cops may be “cruising” to arrest you. A cop doesn’t have to tell you he’s a cop, even if you ask. If you’re cruising for sex and an undercover cop hits on you, what you do can still be a crime. Don’t count on proving the cop “entrapped” you (which is difficult). Talk to your lawyer if you think you were set up.
How you can read the words "what you do can still be a crime" and think they say "public sex is a civil right", I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it has something to do with wondering why you have to press ‘1’ for English. And it doesn’t sound very encouraging to me either. On the other hand if you’re the kind that thinks that just telling the accused that they still have…you know…constitutional rights…amounts to encouraging crime then maybe your mileage varies. Or maybe you’re just a dickwad. Say…what was that you folks were saying about hippies ….? Oh…yeah…
Hey, hippie. You want to see an authoritarian style, regimented, intolerant government? They’re all over the place. One type is dedicated to the ideas of Marx. The other is dedicated to the ideas of Islamic extremism.
Oh heaven forfend America should become anything like a Marxist dictatorship where people don’t have…you know…the right to talk to an attorney or anything…
And speaking of lying conniving dickwads…over at Ex-Gay Watch, it looks like they’ve caught PFOX telling another whopper giving people the facts about militant homosexuality…
This past Tuesday, PFOX posted some disturbing news. While innocently offering “materials on same-sex attraction and tolerance for the ex-gay community to a hungry public” at the Arlington County Fair, Arlington Va (Aug 15-19), they claim their representatives were viciously attacked, both verbally and physically, by “gay activists” who had also set up a booth at the fair.
Wow…that’s just so…so Wrong! Damn those militant homosexuals!
Since PFOX stated that the police were “summoned” and that they “ejected the gay man off the fairgrounds” we decided to check with the Arlington County Police Department. Focus on the Family reports through CitizenLink that “Officers kicked the gay activists out of the fair and encouraged the PFOX volunteer to press charges, but he chose not to.” So depending on the account, we have one or more officers responding to a complaint of assault, recommending that the victim file charges, and then ejecting one or more “gay activists” from the fairgrounds. Surely the Arlington PD would know if one or more of their officers participated in such an action. What good would it do to eject them if others in charge were not also made aware so they could make sure they didn’t come back?
We contacted the Arlington PD and ended up speaking with John Lisle of the Media Relations/Legislative Affairs Office. He had no initial knowledge of such an incident. After checking briefly, he again said that no one was aware of such an incident. So we sent a copy of the PFOX statement to him at which time he agreed to check more thoroughly. After over two days of research, there was nothing he could add to his statement; no report exists and no one recalls such an incident.
Whoops!
Ex-Gay Watch was also rude enough to check with Denise Marshall Roller, the Event Manager for the fair, who said that their call was the first she had heard that there were any problems of that sort at the fair…and she was there. Most of the time she said, near the officer in charge. So it would appear that not only do militant homosexual activists go around attacking decent people who only want to expose the sordid truth about homosexuality, they can also warp the space time continuum to conveniently hide their evil deeds after the fact. Or maybe they have the power to cloud men’s minds…
You will remember nothing of this incident…there was no vicious attack…
the PFOX booth was not disturbed…no homosexuals were at
the PFOX booth…there is no such thing as a homosexual…
Next thing you know they’ll be bitching about Why The Hell Do I Have To Press ‘1’ For Heterosexual…?
Homosexual acts were punishable by death under Genghis Khan’s rule, according to researchers who spent more than a year compiling the legendary Mongolian conqueror’s code of laws, the official Xinhua News Agency said Thursday.
Article 48 of the code said men who "committed sodomy shall be put to death," according to experts at a research institute in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia.
We’re The Moral Values Party…The Party Is The Moral Value…
Glen Greenwald has a good post up about the somewhat different reactions from the kook pews to Larry Craig’s first outing, verses his second…
The reaction to the Larry Craig story provides one of the most vivid illustrations yet of how the right-wing movement works. Last October, just weeks before the midterm election, gay activist Mike Rogers reported that the married, GOP "family values" Senator repeatedly had sex with anonymous men in public bathrooms. His report was based on "extensive research," including interviews with several men whom Craig solicited for bathroom sex.
As Rogers argued at the time, the story was relevant — just as the Vitter prostitute story was — in light of Craig’s frequent political exploitation of issues of sexual morality and his opposition to virtually every gay rights bill. Rogers’ story, as a factual matter, seemed relatively credible, both because of his history of accurate outings and because there is no discernible reason why, if he were intent on fabricating, he would single out someone as obscure as Larry Craig, who was not even up for re-election.
Nonetheless, it is hard to overstate the intense fury that this pre-election report triggered from the Right — not at Senator Craig for engaging in this behavior, but at Rogers for reporting it.
The "Then" and "Now" examples Greenwald gives make it sickeningly clear that the problem for the Party Of Moral Values was the election, and not Craig’s behavior.
Last year, in excoriating Mike Rogers for reporting about Craig’s bathroom sex, Dean Barnett said:
I’m sorry if this topic causes embarrassment to Larry Craig and his family, but I assume by now they’ve figured out that politics in 2006 is a thoroughly rotten business. . . .
THE FIRST LEFT WING PATHOLOGY "OUTED" by the Craig story is the relentless meanness that characterizes modern day liberalism. . . .BUT MOST DAMNING OF THE LEFT is the casual assumption of group-think that this exercise demonstrates. The logic is that if you’re gay, you must therefore support gay marriage. What’s more, you must support everything that someone like Glenn Greenwald supports. To do otherwise evidences self-hatred and a betrayal of the cause.
But today, Barnett — based on reports of the exact same behavior from Craig — demanded that Craig resign from the Senate and said this:
AS TO THE SERIOUS QUESTION OF whether or not Senator Craig should resign, that one’s a no-brainer for someone like me who thought David Vitter should have stepped down. To lead millions of people, one needs at least a modicum of moral stature. Both politicians forfeited that stature when they engaged in their off-campus hijinks . . . .
Vitter falls into the same category. You can’t preen as a moralist and then seek out the services of a prostitute. If Vitter (or Craig or Clinton) had positioned themselves as libertarian libertines, then their private diddlings would have been none of our concern. But all three made a habit of saluting good old All-American family values. How a ranking public office-holder can be so thoroughly revealed as a hypocrite and still cling to his position is beyond me.
I would honestly pay money to watch someone try to reconcile those two positions. Last October, Barnett depicted Rogers as an "odious presence" for violating Craig’s privacy based on purely private behavior that was none of anyone’s business. Today, the same Barnett demands that Craig resign from the Senate, and invokes exactly the rationale which Rogers and other "outers" use to justify these disclosures ("How a ranking public office-holder can be so thoroughly revealed as a hypocrite and still cling to his position is beyond me").
Finally, and rather hilariously, Barnett defends Hewitt’s demand that Craig resign but Vitter need not as follows: "Where one draws the line on such matters is arbitrary, so I don’t think anyone’s being hypocritical if they say Vitter can stay and Craig must go."
Apparently, what matters is to have moral standards, even if they are completely incoherent, arbitrary and applied solely to suit one’s personal biases and political interests [Vitter’s resignation would be for heterosexual encounters and would lead to appointment of a Democratic replacement (hence Hewitt opposes it), while Craig’s resignation would be for gay sex and would lead to a GOP replacement (hence Hewitt favors it)]. It might be totally "arbitrary," says Barnett, but at least it is a moral standard.
Right. As Garrison Keillor said after the 2000 "election" of President Nice Job Brownie, they’re republicans first, and Americans second. What benefits The Party is morally right, because it benefits The Party. That’s the standard. Everything else from God to Abortion to Same Sex Marriage is just a hook to get the rubes into the voting booths. They don’t give a good goddamn about any of that. They just want power.
The Idaho Values Alliance–"Making Idaho the Friendliest Place in the World to Raise a Family"–is going to have a hard time swallowing the latest news about its beloved Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), who pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct for lewd conduct in an airport restroom.
Here’s one page of the group’s site, a news update where it praises Craig for his "pro-life" vote on stem cell research, followed by a "Bonus Byte" on the perils of homosexuality and airport restrooms:
One of the tragic characteristics of the homosexual lifestyle is its emphasis on anonymous sex and multiple sexual partners. It is a little-acknowledged secret that many active homosexuals will have more than 1,000 sex partners over the course of a lifetime…
Figure at age 53 I should have had at least 6 or 7 hundred of those by now. I’ve laid down with exactly six guys in my entire lifetime. That’s one less then these kooks claim is the average for heterosexuals, and I figure one of those times really shouldn’t count because nothing really happened. So somebody, some royal son of a bitch, took my share of all that fabulous gay sex I keep hearing about…and when I get my hands on him I’m going to throttle him…
This sordid fact of homosexual life surfaced yesterday in an AP article yesterday that reports on the number of arrests police have made for indecent exposure and public sex acts in the restrooms at Atlanta’s airport, the busiest in the world. The increased restroom patrols, begun to apprehend luggage thieves, instead uncovered a rash of sex crimes. Airport restrooms have become so popular that men looking for anonymous sexual trysts with other men have advertised their airport availability on Craigslist. One such ad was from a man saying he was stuck at the airport for three hours and was looking for “discreet, quick action.”
He wouldn’t have been from Boise…by any chance…?
This Idaho Values Alliance was (until lately one would have to suppose) a big supporter of Larry Craig’s. Point of fact, according to Marshall…
What are the odds of a piece on airport restroom trysts appearing below a picture of Larry Craig in a conservative group’s newsletter, not to mention the reference to Craigslist?
See…this is what I meant in that last post, when I said that Craig was only behaving the way the right wing culture he was swimming in told him homosexuals behave. I won’t deny that there are gay people who are into the quick anonymous hooking up sex scene…but that’s no more the whole of gay life then Baltimore’s Block amounts to the whole of heterosexual life. Don’t tell me that there aren’t a lot of heterosexuals who get into all that crap too. Back in the 70s the only places where I could find copies of the local Washington gay paper (The Blade) and The Advocate, were seedy adult bookstores. I got an eyeful in those days of what heterosexuals were up to.
But crackpots like The Idaho Values Alliance aren’t saying merely that having sex in toilets is something most homosexuals do…they’re saying that To Be Homosexual, Is To Have Sex In Bathrooms. Or in other words, Homosexuals Don’t Love, They Just Have Sex. And tragically, a lot of gay people grow up believing that of themselves. Homosexuality doesn’t drag people into the gutter. Homosexuals are pushed into it. By…you know…decent god fearing people. Morally righteous people who have no trouble whatsoever teaching gay kids that homosexuality is nothing but cheap random empty sex in toilets, and then congratulating themselves on their heterosexuality when those kids grow up acting like they were taught to act.
Senators aren’t the only folks these days with their reputations in the toilet. American journalism is also looking pretty squalid. The chatter around the net, after Senator Larry Craig’s arrest and guilty plea for lewd conduct, was that reporter Dan Popkey of The Idaho Statesman had been working on a pretty explosive investigation into Craig’s past sexual conduct, and uncovered the arrest and guilty plea for lewd behavior last June, and that Popkey’s story got trashcanned after Craig’s lawyers sat down and had a little chat with the editor and the publisher of his home state newspaper.
Well…I guess on the principle that there’s no point in sitting on the story now, The Idaho Statesman has finally gone ahead and published what looks like a slightly updated version of Popkey’s story. Here it is:
Idaho senator pleads guilty to disorderly conduct after incident at Minnesota airport that echoes previous allegation of homosexual conduct.
…
In an interview on May 14, Craig told the Idaho Statesman he’d never engaged in sex with a man or solicited sex with a man. The Craig interview was the culmination of a Statesman investigation that began after a blogger accused Craig of homosexual sex in October. Over five months, the Statesman examined rumors about Craig dating to his college days and his 1982 pre-emptive denial that he had sex with underage congressional pages.
The most serious finding by the Statesman was the report by a professional man with close ties to Republican officials. The 40-year-old man reported having oral sex with Craig at Washington’s Union Station, probably in 2004. The Statesman also spoke with a man who said Craig made a sexual advance toward him at the University of Idaho in 1967 and a man who said Craig "cruised" him for sex in 1994 at the REI store in Boise. The Statesman also explored dozens of allegations that proved untrue, unclear or unverifiable.
Craig, 62, was elected to Congress in 1980. Should he win re-election in 2008 and complete his term, he would be the longest-serving Idahoan ever in Congress. His record includes a series of votes against gay rights and his support of a 2006 amendment to the Idaho Constitution that bars gay marriage and civil unions.
The article is lengthy and pretty detailed and reading it you get a better grasp of the rest of the iceburg that was lurking under the news reports of Craig’s airport men’s room arrest. It starts with his sudden and head turning pre-emptive denial back in 1982 that he’d ever had sex with a congressional page, and flits from one men’s room to another…with a brief detour back to his college fraternity days.
Craig told the Statesman he was unaware of rumors about him being gay going back to his college days. Craig had about 150 fraternity brothers at Delta Chi during his U of I years.
The Statesman interviewed 41 of them. Of those 41, three said there were jokes about him being effeminate and possibly gay. Most said that had Craig been thought to be gay, he would have never become a leader in the fraternity and the student body.
As president of Delta Chi, Craig secured a $100,000 loan to remodel the fraternity house, instituted study hours, and blackballed members for drug use. They called him "Mother Craig" for his officiousness.
…
Most of Craig’s college friends say he was disciplined, studious and serious, even if he was awkward with women.
One woman who dated him off and on for a year asked not to be named, but said, "I don’t imagine that he ever held my hand. He was into the gotta-hold-the-door-for-the-woman sort of thing. But I always felt like I was an accessory. I might as well have been his briefcase."
Lady…the word is ‘beard’. One student who had been considering pledging with Craig’s fraternity told the reporter that Craig had taken him back to his room and made a pass at him. Craig denied it, as he denied the story of the man who said he cruised him at the REI store in Boise, and the man who said he’d had sex with Craig in the men’s room at Union Station in Washington D.C.
I want to feel some sympathy for Craig…the religious right’s long war on human sexuality has left a lot of Americans with twisted up sex lives…but I can’t. He made himself as much a part of the right wing machine as any Dobson or Falwell and whether that was his way of transferring his own self loathing onto everyone else, or he really does hate humanity as much as his neighbors in the kook pews, it doesn’t matter. While he was cruising the toilets for sex, he was busy bashing gay people who were trying to make something fine and decent and whole out of their lives. He tried to cut off our wedding rings, at the same time his own was peeping out from under toilet stall walls. It’s unforgivable.
But Craig is what you get when you apply the religious right’s teachings on homosexuality. He was everything the religious right said a homosexual should be. Self-loathing and dedicated to maintaining a heterosexual pretense regardless of the cost to himself, or to others.
In the May 14 interview, Craig and his wife listened to a four-minute excerpt of the Statesman’s interview with the 40-year-old man who first spoke to Rogers. At first, Craig objected to the man’s anonymity, but agreed to listen. The man’s voice was disguised.
Craig said the man is an activist. "The gay movement, we know it for what it is. It’s now aggressive and it’s liberal and it’s naming people to try to put them in compromising, difficult situations."
Suzanne Craig’s eyes reddened and filled with tears as she listened. After her husband’s denial, she said, "I’m incensed that you would even consider such a piece of trash as a credible source."
To which Craig added, "Jiminy God!"
I hope she saves a bit of the blame for all of this, for all the fundamentalist pulpit thumpers that keep screaming at Americans that sex is a shameful and dirty thing, and that there is nothing more shameful and dirty and perverted, then to be a homosexual. Craig was only doing that day in that men’s room, what they’d told him all his life that homosexuals do.
Roll Call is reporting that Sen. Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, was arrested earlier this summer in a men’s room at the Minneapolis airport by an undercover officer investigating complaints about sexual activity. The Capitol Hill newspaper says it obtained the arrest report.
…
According to the incident report, Sgt. Dave Karsnia was working as a plainclothes officer on June 11 investigating civilian complaints regarding sexual activity in the men’s public restroom in which Craig was arrested.
Airport police previously had made numerous arrests in the men’s restroom of the Northstar Crossing in the Lindbergh Terminal in connection with sexual activity.
Karsnia entered the bathroom at noon that day and about 13 minutes after taking a seat in a stall, he stated he could see “an older white male with grey hair standing outside my stall.”
The man, who lingered in front of the stall for two minutes, was later identified as Craig.
“I could see Craig look through the crack in the door from his position. Craig would look down at his hands, ‘fidget’ with his fingers, and then look through the crack into my stall again. Craig would repeat this cycle for about two minutes,” the report states.
Craig then entered the stall next to Karsnia’s and placed his roller bag against the front of the stall door.
“My experience has shown that individuals engaging in lewd conduct use their bags to block the view from the front of their stall,” Karsnia stated in his report. “From my seated position, I could observe the shoes and ankles of Craig seated to the left of me.”
Craig was wearing dress pants with black dress shoes.
“At 1216 hours, Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot.
I moved my foot up and down slowly. While this was occurring, the male in the stall to my right was still present. I could hear several unknown persons in the restroom that appeared to use the restroom for its intended use. The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area,” the report states.
Craig then proceeded to swipe his hand under the stall divider several times, and Karsnia noted in his report that “I could … see Craig had a gold ring on his ring finger as his hand was on my side of the stall divider.”
Karsnia then held his police identification down by the floor so that Craig could see it. “With my left hand near the floor, I pointed towards the exit. Craig responded, ‘No!’ I again pointed towards the exit. Craig exited the stall with his roller bags without flushing the toilet. … Craig said he would not go. I told Craig that he was under arrest, he had to go, and that I didn’t want to make a scene. Craig then left the restroom.”
In a recorded interview after his arrest, Craig “either disagreed with me or ‘didn’t recall’ the events as they happened,” the report states.
Craig stated “that he has a wide stance when going to the bathroom and that his foot may have touched mine,” the report states. Craig also told the arresting officer that he reached down with his right hand to pick up a piece of paper that was on the floor.
“It should be noted that there was not a piece of paper on the bathroom floor, nor did Craig pick up a piece of paper,” the arresting officer said in the report.
* Voted YES on constitutional ban of same-sex marriage. (Jun 2006)
* Voted NO on adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes. (Jun 2002)
* Voted NO on expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation. (Jun 2000)
* Voted YES on prohibiting same-sex marriage. (Sep 1996)
* Voted NO on prohibiting job discrimination by sexual orientation. (Sep 1996)
I could … see Craig had a gold ring on his ring finger as his hand was on my side of the stall divider.” If there’s one image you can take away from the George Bush years, one defining moment that sums up perfectly the condition of the right wing gutter, the moral compass of the William Bennett’s, James Dobsons, Jerry Falwells and Charles Krauthammers of the American right…here it is: the hand of a senator who voted for the federal marriage amendment, furtively moving under a toilet stall wall, the gold wedding band on his ring finger glinting in the pale florescent light as he tries to proposition the vice cop in the stall next to his. You could write volumes about the degeneracy of the American right wing, and not capture it as utterly, as elegantly, as that one profoundly sickening image does. It is perfect.
Marriage is a sacred thing the right insists…and so it is. For couples in love the wedding band is a symbol of one of this life’s most perfect joys. But to the right it is no more then a cheap status symbol…like owning a Bentley, or having white skin. Something to denote privilege, status, rank. Certainly nothing to do with love and desire, trust and devotion. Whether Larry Craig is a homosexual, or a heterosexual man with some pretty major sexual issues, it makes no difference. When he consigned the sex lives of his gay neighbors to the toilet, he consigned his own sex life there too. Love keeps no balance sheet, acknowledges no rank, bows to no prejudice. The one who doesn’t know this, has either never loved, or never loved anyone more then they loved rank and status. The ring knew where it belonged.
Tales From The Best Health Care System In The World…(continued)
Funny how the same people pushing "free market" solutions to the health care crisis in the U.S. are also the same ones pushing these Religious Exemption laws that allow individuals to refuse to give health care regardless of what their employer’s policies are…
A federal judge’s ruling this week upholds the right of Illinois pharmacists to refuse to dispense emergency contraception.
…
Several pharmacists employed by Wal-Mart and Walgreen Co. have been disciplined for either refusing to dispense Plan B or for refusing to promise that they would dispense emergency contraception if asked.
U.S. District Judge Jeanne Scott denied a request Tuesday by Wal-Mart to throw out a lawsuit filed by pharmacist Ethan Vandersand. Scott sided with Vandersand, who had claimed he was legally protected from discipline by the Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act when he declined to dispense Plan B.
Vandersand, who lives in Bluffs, formerly worked at the pharmacy in Beardstown’s Wal-Mart. He was put on unpaid leave after he refused to fill a Plan B prescription requested by a nurse practitioner at Springfield’s Planned Parenthood on behalf of a female patient in February 2006.
Wal-Mart had contended the state’s right-of-conscience law doesn’t cover pharmacists. Walgreen Co. has made the same argument in other Illinois lawsuits filed by fired pharmacists.
But Scott wrote in her ruling, "The statute prohibits discrimination against any person for refusing to provide health care because of his conscience."
Emphasis mine. Note that the law doesn’t limit a person’s right to refuse to give health care to contraception. It can be health care for Anything, according to this judge. Picture someone who has AIDS and needs their medication to keep their viral count low. Picture some religious right bigot behind the counter turning them away because those medications enable homosexuals to escape the consequences of their sin.
Picture that happening to…hell…just about anyone who isn’t living their lives according to the god of the fundamentalists: who isn’t one of their tribe.
You need to keep something in focus here. Take a look back on the history of the rise of the religious right. Abortion was one of their hooks to get votes and money, when school desegregation wasn’t cutting it anymore. Then Anita Bryant showed them how much more effective the homosexual boogyman was, and they’ve been running with it ever since. But this fight has been going on for decades now, and the religious right got involved in politics along with the secular right over school desegregation…and more specifically, loosing their tax exemptions for their segregated private schools. That’s the mindset here. You have to keep that in focus. Abortion…The Homosexual Menace…these are just tools to keep the voters angry. The real agenda, is dividing America into haves, and have-nots. Guess which side of that fence you’re on.
These conscientious objector laws are ultimately about building that fence of have, verses have-not. It isn’t just contraception, and it isn’t just health care. It’s about building that fence. Everything is about building that fence.
Because we don’t deserve the American Dream. This is not our country. It’s theirs. We just work here.
We’re Not A Political Organization…We Just Lobby Against Any And All Gay Rights Legislation…
Some weeks ago, Timothy Kincaid over at Box Turtle Bulletin noted this comment from Exodus’ Mike Ensley on Warren Throckmorton’s website…
Mary, honestly I don’t think you understand Exodus’ political involvement at all. Do you think all (or even most) pro-homosexual activist groups are adopting a “live and let live” policy toward people with different beliefs? Hardly.
My focus is entirely on youth and education, and believe me, the lobbying in that field is nothing like “live and let live.” In California, for instance, pro-gay advocates have exclusive rights to what children are taught in public schools regarding these issues. Parents are explicitly kept out of the loop–and if they somehow get in the loop, they have no right to opt their children out of instruction that undermines their values.
As for “ending people’s rights,” I would just like to know what rights Exodus is helping to end, and for whom?
Your comment about a “you must live our way” stand really doesn’t have any basis, either. Opposing thought-crimes legislation and education law that excludes every view except a gay-centric one is hardly forcing others to live the way we do.
…which was in response to this one, directed at Randy Thomas:
Randy,
I can say that Exodus’ “policy” or “position” has not helped. Had they taken a live and let live stand rather than a you must live our way stand then perhaps this would not be happening?? Politicking against a group has certianly thrown smoke into a hornet’s nest. We should not be trying to end anyone’s rights and instead be working towards an agreement that respects both sides. Even when threatened now, I can say – I understand how gays have become so angry, defensive, and strong. I don’t like the idea that my rights are threatened – but that does not mean I would agrue to destroy the rights of others with whom I disagree.
Well…no. I mean…yes Exodus’ political activism probably factors into it…but that’s not where this is coming from. Where it came from was all the attention the ex-gay movement got after a gay teenager who was content just the way he is was seen being dragged into a horrific reparative therapy program by the entire fucking world. That one incident got the attention of a lot of people, and without a doubt it radicalized many against the ex-gay movement. The increased scrutiny that reparative therapy suddenly came under was eminently predictable. That’s what has brought this all on.
Throckmorton in his post raises the specter of reparative therapy doctors quacks being tossed into the slammer after the gay militants who dominate the APA have reparative therapy banned…
AOL’s GLBT community blog Queersighted has an article by Richard Rothstein this morning that marks tomorrow’s first meeting of the APA Sexual Orientation Task as an important date in gay history. Why? Because he hopes the task force will suggest to the APA that all reparative/conversion therapy should be banned. And what if the APA bans reparative therapy (never defined in this piece)? Well, round up the posse, boys, Mr. Rothstein has the answer:
If the APA does in fact ban reparative or conversion therapy, we will at long last have a solid legal argument for shutting down such groups as Exodus International and Homosexuals Anonymous. This will also mean that under standard and existing malpractice laws, psychologists and therapists who continue to advocate and practice such therapy would be subject to license revocation, hefty fines and even imprisonment.
So if Mr. Rothstein’s vision is realized, reparative therapists and maybe the Exodus crew will be answering questions like: “Hey, doc, what are you in for?”
And maybe the other guy is in jail for selling capsules full of dry cleaning fluid to people as a cure for insomnia. Or maybe he was selling crack cocaine to teenagers. As a matter of fact, doc, people who harm others for money really do need to be held accountable for that. People who sell cures that don’t really do anything at best, and do terrible harm to the patents at worst, really do need to be held accountable for that. It’s not religious persecution to hold people accountable for the harm they do to others.
To his everlasting credit, Throckmorton condemned the practice of giving ex-gay therapy to unwilling teens when the protests at Love In Action broke out a couple summers ago. And there were others like him in the ex-gay movement who were absolutely appalled at what they saw being done to kids in these so-called ministries. But there were many others who doggedly defended the practice and you best believe that I’d like to see every one of those mother fucking bastards that pushed sexual self loathing and fear of intimacy into a gay teenager’s heart locked up for a long, long time, with all the other sex offenders. Because that’s exactly what it is…child sexual abuse.
Now, as predictably as the rising sun in the east, the priests of the ex-gay movement are bellyaching that their sincere religious beliefs are under attack. The problem is, it’s hard to reach a place of mutual respect with people who constantly lie through their teeth. The leaders of Exodus may claim their actions are only motivated by their sincerely held religious beliefs, but their word on just about anything isn’t worth spit. They lie about homosexuals. They lie about homosexuality. And they lie…brazenly…about themselves.
Banks described the process they go through in deciding which political issues to get involved in. The chief consideration was “policy proposals that would infringe on the ministry that we do.” And in deciding whether to get involved, she said they ask themselves two questions: 1) Does the issue affect our ministries or members, and 2) Do we have an opportunity to offer a unique perspective and opportunity to influence? And on this second point, the role of Exodus’s “door to our stories” becomes very clear: if “change is possible” then laws granting equality and protections for gays and lesbians are unnecessary.
Banks also talked about the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which she falsely claims would require religious organizations to hire people who would threaten their mission. In fact, section six of the bill specifically exempts religious organizations from the act.
You need to read Burroway’s post to grasp the scope of Exodus’ interest and involvement in anti-gay politics. I’ve been saying for years now that these groups, and Exodus in particular, are only ex-gay as a facade. They are, in fact, Anti-Gay political groups, nothing more, nothing less, that only exploit ex-gays and reparative therapy in order to score political points and provide the religious right with moral cover for gay bashing. Gays choose to be gay…therefore they also choose to be discriminated against… We are not discriminating against homosexuals…it is the homosexuals who choose to be discriminated against, because they could always choose not to be homosexuals if they wanted to… In fact…there is No Such Thing as a homosexual…so how could we be discriminating against them…
You have to understand the agenda here is anti-gay political action, not saving souls for Christ, not freeing people from the chains of homosexuality, not curing people of their homosexual addictions, not healing people of their same sex attractions. Exodus, and other ex-gay ministries like them, are about one thing and one thing only: waging the political war against gay people. That’s why there is no follow-up when people leave counseling and therapy. That’s why they keep no statistics on success and failure rates, do no quality assurance activity, don’t…let’s be honest here…give a rat’s ass about whether they’re doing their clients any goddamned good at all. That’s not what they are about. The clients are the window dressing. The real work is the anti-gay political activity.
How About We Discuss Our Differences Over A Nice Glass Of Get The Fuck Off My Back?
I have this love/hate relationship to the books of Robert Heinlein. When he’s good he’s pure gold. But there are times he makes me want to hit the roof. And I suppose he’d be delighted to hear this. He always said he wanted first to make a living as a writer, second to be entertaining, and third, to make you think.
Anyway…there’s this passage in Stranger In A Strange Land which I could forgive Heinlein anything for writing. It’s the scene where Jubal Harshaw introduces a friend to Anne, who is a "fair witness". I’m doing this from memory here, but as I recall it, Jubal and his friend are by the pool with some others, and the friend remarks that he’d never met a fair witness before and Jubal says of course you have, Anne is one. Oh really, asks the friend. And Jubal calls over the Anne "Anne, what color is that house on the hill over there?" And Anne takes a look and immediately replies, "The side that’s facing me is white."
That’s not only a beautiful illustration of what it means to tell the truth, but also how telling the truth has to work in the human context. We are not gods. We do not have the god’s eye view of reality. So we have to be careful to understand, really understand, what it is that we know, and what it is that we don’t.
I’ve heard religious fundamentalists say that the most important question facing us is where will we spend eternity. No. There is another question that is more important then that one, more important then any other question you can ask. Because it’s the question you have to know the answer to, before you can answer any other question: What do I know, and how do I know it?
I suppose a fundamentalist would reply with some form of "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it." But that’s still not answering the question. How do we know that the Bible is an authoritative source? How do we know what the Bible says? At some point, we all have to make judgments, and those judgments are always personal. It helps to make them honestly and sincerely. But it also helps to do that with a little humility. You only know the side that’s facing you. And it goes without saying, that its helpful not to misrepresent the facts that we do know, to kind of…nudge people…in the right direction. For their own good.
We should always behave such that what is true, can be verified to be so. -Jacob Bronowski.
But that’s been something of a problem for the ex-gay world, hasn’t it?
So I’m reading the back and forth between the ex-gay blogs and the survivor’s blogs in the wake of the Survivor’s Conference. Seems the very word ‘Survivor’ is controversial. One writer in the comments on Peterson’s blog says that using the term survivor is provocative. As provocative as a million dollar billboard campaign designed to make people think that their homosexual neighbors’ most intimate sense of self is something akin to a blackboard that they could just wipe clean and redo for the pleasure of their heterosexual neighbors whenever they wanted to, if they weren’t so selfish, or so…trapped…in homosexuality…I’m not so sure. How would a heterosexual be expected to feel upon laying eyes on a billboard that featured a handsome, happy gay man asking them to "Question Heterosexuality"? Ah…but it’s not provocative to assert that there is no such thing as a homosexual…only people trapped in homosexuality.
An anonymous ex-gay blogger asks if the ex-ex-gays are survivors, does that mean she’s a mortally wounded victim, or a corpse, or a zombie. Well let me just answer as a gay man, who keeps hearing homophobic jackasses bellyaching about how we stole the word ‘gay’ away from decent society, that what other people call themselves doesn’t make you anything. As a gay man who has heard himself labeled a symptom of social decay, if not a walking signpost of impending Armageddon, ever since he was a teenager, let me say that how other people live their lives doesn’t make You anything. As a gay man who has walked among my fellow gay folk in many places and many scenes, from the sublime to the ridiculous, let me say that even when other people assert their identity with you, in ways you may find completely nonsensical if not utterly bewildering, That does not make you anything. It’s your own experience in this life that makes you something. It’s the fact that you lived it, or are still living it, that gives you the right to name it.
But of course, this isn’t about what people call themselves, it’s about what they call others. And I can appreciate how the ex-gay movement can take the use of the word ‘survivor’ in this context as an attack, considering that the religious right has made an art out of applying labels to themselves, as a way of back handedly pasting labels onto others. So they say they’re pro-life, as a way of saying the other side is pro-death. So they say they’re pro-family, as a way of saying the other side is anti-family. So they say many thousands have found freedom from homosexuality, as a way of saying that homosexuality is a prison, or an addiction. But that’s not what’s going on here, and if the word ‘survivor’ has any meaning, then just reading the stories on Beyond Ex-Gay is all that’s necessary to see how the word applies to these people.
Of course, those stories are pretty damming, whether the survivors intend that or not. Mortally wounded? How about, Part Of The Problem. A name on the knife in someone’s heart? Someone you may have never even laid eyes on. Perhaps some helpless teenager. Delivered with love. Yes, it would be nice if we could all just get along, regardless of what we call ourselves. Yes, it would be wonderful, peaceful, happy tranquility if we could all just live our fucking lives, find our happiness in this life, make our way for ourselves in this world, reach for the dream within our hearts, to the best of our ability, to the best within us. But that’s, let’s face it, just not in the cards. Righteousness forbids it.
The answer to how we all manage to get along despite our differences, is simple, in the way all impossible answers are simple. You let leave us alone and let us live our lives, and we leave you alone and let you live yours. But that is just not to be. You are called to save us from ourselves, because you have the ultimate truth, and we are all merely trapped in sin, and never mind that you only see the side of the house that’s facing you. Salvation has given you the God’s eye view. So you’ll keep twisting that knife marked Salvation into people’s hearts and those of us trying to find and have and hold that someone to love in this poor, angry world, that intimate other, that soul mate, or as you might say, Trapped In Homosexuality will keep trying to get you The Fuck Off Our Backs, even if that means we have to be rude about it. Because, you are taking what should be one of our life’s most perfect joys, and making it your offering to God and our hearts are not yours to offer.
I was content to ignore the ex-gay movement until the day I watched it try to drive a knife into the heart of a gay teenager who was perfectly content with who he was. And then I took a closer look at what was being done to many other innocent hearts in the name of God, and even more obscenely…in the name of Love. Most of them adults, some of them just kids. I listened to one gay teenager talk about being forced through Love In Action against his will, and then how his own mother beat the living crap out of him because he was still as gay when he came out as when he went in, because the religious right had taught her to loath her own flesh and blood, and the ex-gay movement taught her that he didn’t have to be gay if he didn’t want to be, that his sexuality was an addiction, a false image, a renunciation of manhood, proof that she was not a good mother, and I don’t think the day will ever come when remembering his words and the look on his face as he told the story of the day his own mother started pounding her fists into him won’t make me want to put my fist through a wall. It could make a stone cry. But not the righteous.
So…I’m all about dialogue. Considerate and transparent dialogue is a Good Thing. But it’s a bit like dialogue between Israel and the Arab states surrounding it: A prerequisite to talks is that you recognize my right to exist. And see…that’s the problem. Because there is just no way I can ask you to do that, ask you to get off our backs, ask you let us live in our communities, in our country, as full and equal citizens, no way I can even suggest it, that you will not hear me demanding of you that you renounce your faith. We have to bleed, so you can be righteous.
So…maybe instead of calling ourselves gay, or ex-ex-gay, we all should just cut to the bottom line, and call ourselves Scapegoats.
Christian denominations outside Roman Catholicism are either defective or are not full churches of Jesus Christ, the Vatican has reaffirmed.
A 16-page document released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which Pope Benedict XVI once headed, described Orthodox churches as true churches, but said they are suffering from a "wound" since they do not recognise the primacy of the Pope.
The document, approved by Pope Benedict, went on to say the "wound is still more profound" in Protestant denominations.
Just so all you American fundamentalists who’ve been getting all gushy about yours, and Ratzinger’s, mutual hostility toward gay people know where you fit in. But hey…look at it this way…you both agree that everyone else but you isn’t a true Christian. Common Ground.
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