In the wake of three Surgeon Generals testifying on Capital Hill about Bush administration political interference in medical science, raising once again the issue of how the Bush administration has been relentlessly attacking any science that doesn’t agree with their agenda, Andrew Sullivan thinks Virginia Postrel is making sense…
"Scientists have gotten way too fond of invoking their authority to claim that "science" dictates their preferred policy solutions and claiming that any disagreement constitutes an attack on science. But, even assuming that scientists agree on the facts, science can only tell us something about the state of the world. It cannot tell us what policy is the best to adopt. Scientists’ preferences are not "science." You cannot go from an "is" (science) to an "ought" (policy). Social science, particularly economics, can tell you something about the likely tradeoffs (hence some of my frustrations at Aspen). But it can’t tell you which tradeoffs to make,"
– Virginia Postrel, making sense as usual.
Postrel is referring to an op-ed defending Governor Girly Man’s sacking of Robert Sawyer, chair of California’s chair Air Resources Board. Schwarzenegger had appointed him in December of 2005, calling him "an exceptionally accomplished scientist, teacher and environmental policy expert who has devoted his career to using science and technology to improve air quality not only in California, but across our country and the world."
The grim irony in Postrel’s blog post is that what the Schwarzenegger camp would have you believe is that Sawyer was fired for doing exactly what Postrel said needs to be done: weighing the science against the public interest. Against the wishes of environmentalists, the state air board led by Sawyer voted by a 7-1 margin to let San Joaquin Valley polluters have until 2024 to come into compliance with the Federal Clean Air Act. The San Joaquin Valley is California’s, and by extension much of this nation’s, food basket. But it wasn’t this decision, so much as Sawyer’s insistence that the State Air Board remain politically independent, that got Sawyer his pink slip. That is what Postrel is defending here; not the idea that public policy often has to be a compromise between various necessities, but that science must serve politics.
Postrel’s post is dishonest claptrap of the sort that homophobes use when they bellyache that they’re being called bigots merely for "disagreeing with the gay agenda". It isn’t disagreement the scientists are calling attacks, it’s when politicians censor them, and then rewrite their science outright to fit a specific political agenda, that’s the attack on science. It’s one thing for politicians to say that they have to weigh the science against what they see as the public interest, and another for them to force science to tell the public things that are not true. But this has been Bush administration policy from day one, and republican party policy now for decades. Intelligent Design anyone?
I keep turning to Jacob Bronowski on this, but he said it absolutely right…
Picture the state of German thought when Wener Heisenberg was criticized by the S.S., and had to ask Himmler to support his scientific standing. Heisenberg had won the Nobel prize at the age of thirty; his principle of uncertainty is one of the two or three deep concepts which science has found in this century; and he was trying to warn Germans that they must not dismiss such discoveries as Relativity because they disliked the author. Yet Himmler, who had been a schoolmaster, took months of petty inquiery (someone in his family knew Heisenberg) before he authorized of all people, Heydrich to protect Heisenberg. His letter to Heydrich is a paper monument to what happens to the creative mind in a society without truth. For Himmler writes that he has heard that Heisenberg is good enough to be earmarked later for his own Academy for Welteislehre. This was an Academy which Himmler proposed to devote to the conviction which he either shared with or imposed on his scientific yes-men, that the stars are made of ice.
-Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values.
For years after reading that I wondered why the hell anyone would want to force scientists to say that stars are made of ice. Then I came across this web site run by a group of people who still believe in the Ptolemaic earth centric model of the universe and then it made sense. There are still some nutty fundamentalists out there who insist that the earth must be the center of the universe, because they bible says so. But in that case the stars simply cannot be suns like our own, and light years away from us, because then the outer edges of the universe would be whipping around the earth once each day at speeds even a fundamentalist could not accept. So the stars must be a lot closer to the earth and the universe must be a lot smaller. But if the stars are a lot closer to the earth then they can’t be objects like our sun. So they must be made of ice instead, and are merely reflecting the light from our own sun back at us.
It’s crazy. But that’s apparently what Himmler believed, because his screwball religion told him it had to be so. And never mind what the evidence says. Contrary opinions are not merely wrong, they’re heresy, and even worse, they’re rebellion against authority. This is why theocrats and totalitarians hate the practice of science. The only authority science accepts is the evidence. At the end of the day nature speaks for itself. This is why science is always going to have a tense relationship with politics. But it’s not a hopeless one, so long as everyone is willing to tell the truth.
It’s one thing to say that we have to weigh the costs and benefits, and make hard decisions sometimes that maybe nobody really likes, and another to try to make scientists say things that aren’t so. No, science can’t tell us what policy is the best to adopt. But it can sure as hell narrow it down. You can’t even begin to guess what the best policy is, if you don’t know what the goddamned facts are.
While you all claim in websites, protests, in organizations, or coalitions, to want to help people who are “trapped in homosexuality,” you seem to be more concerned with sticking your nose in my business, and telling me the way you think I should live, along with who I am.
Whoops! Sorry. What this guy actually wrote was…
While you all claim in websites, protests, in organizations, or coalitions, to want to help people who are “trapped in the ex-gay movement,” you seem to be more concerned with sticking your nose in my business, and telling me the way you think I should live, along with who I am.
Sorry about that. Really. Meanwhile (again via Ex-Gay Watch…), PFOX is still battling the Montgomery County Maryland Board Of Education to insure that the only things taught in sex education classes about homosexuals and homosexuality are what the ex-gay movement wants taught. Not that they want to be telling anyone how they think they should live mind you…
So the San Diego Padres, in a gesture of good will to the gay community, hosted a pride night at yesterday’s game. Given that many gay couples go to the games are families with kids, the Padres cheerfully offered to give their kids 14 and younger free Padres floppy hats. Of course you just know this made the kook pews go nuclear…
What began as a few angry parents in San Diego, has now turned into a major blunder on the part of the political powerbrokers within the Padres administrative offices. However, the Padres are not backing down. They are choosing the side of homosexuality over the protection of kids, as well as the rights of parents to choose when they teach their kids about sexuality. Parents at the July 8th game will be forced to explain homosexuality, lesbianism and transsexuality to their little boys and little girls because of the celebration of gay pride during the Braves-Padres game.
Rally organizer James Hartline hopes that educational flyers being distributed to families coming to the ballpark will discourage parents from bringing their children inside of the stadium where they will be exposed to radical elements of the homosexual movement. Rally sponsor Scott Lively, President of Defend the Family International, hopes that the Christian response to the gay pride celebration at Petco Park will serve as a catalyst for awakening parental responsibility in a very sexualized culture.
…"We will not abandon these kids to the destruction of homosexuality," says Dennis Martinez, a former national skateboard champion. A committed Christian and well-respected minister among America’s troubled youth, Martinez decided that he could not allow his ministry or its employees to compromise their commitment to Christ.
As boycotts go, yesterday’s protest at Petco Park flopped – like the hats.
Objecting to the confluence of two promotions at last night’s Padres game – “Pride Night,” a group event for local gays and lesbians, and a team giveaway of floppy hats to children 14 and younger – several Christian and conservative groups called for a public protest and boycott of the game.
Roughly 75 protesters showed up outside Petco Park’s front gate dressed in red T-shirts emblazoned with the message “Save Our Kids.” They handed out fliers. A few attempted to talk with Padre fans as they arrived for the 5:05 p.m. game that was nationally televised on ESPN.
“We’re here to inform parents, to warn them about what’s happening inside (the ballpark),” said James Hartline, a self-described Christian activist who directed the protest. “Bringing together homosexuals with baseball and kids is beyond bounds. We’re trying to get people to turn around, not go to the game, and we’re succeeding.”
If so, it wasn’t readily apparent. Official attendance for the game was 41,026, just short of a capacity crowd for the 42,685-seat ballpark.
And…oh look James…it wasn’t just the gay fans who were ignoring you…
“Values start and are taught in the home. Just because you see a bum on the street doesn’t turn you into a bum,” said Robert Davila of El Cajon before walking through the gates with his wife and two young children.
Not that gay people are bums…but you get the idea. Gay isn’t something you catch like a cold. But the subtext here, as always, isn’t that simply seeing gay people would turn the kids gay, but that gay people are predators that children should be taught to be afraid of. The better to make them fear and loath their gay classmates as they get older. The better to make them fear and loath themselves if they are gay. That’s what the Save Our Children slogan has always been about, ever since Antia Bryant used it back in 1977.
You can see why the bigots were bursting a vein over this. If gay and straight can sit down together with their families and enjoy a baseball game together, what next?
(London) A senior Church of England bishop says floods that have caused widespread damage in the UK are the result of God’s wrath on a permissive society that endorses gay rights.
"We are in serious moral trouble because every type of lifestyle is now regarded as legitimate," the Rt Rev Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle, told the Sunday Telegraph.
"In the Bible, institutional power is referred to as ‘the beast’, which sets itself up to control people and their morals. Our government has been playing the role of God in saying that people are free to act as they want," he told the paper, adding that the introduction of recent pro-gay laws undermines marriage.
"The sexual orientation regulations [which give greater rights to gays] are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God’s judgment, which is intended to call us to repentance."
Dow is a leading church conservative.
"Conservative" being a euphemism for "Witch Doctor"…
It’s Good To Be King. It’s Even Better To Be Vice President…
A politician’s candor always increases in direct proportion to proximity to retirement. That must be why Dick Armey, the departing house majority leader, so openly discussed his party’s version of pork-barrel politics with the A.P. "There is an old adage. To the victor goes the spoils," he said, explaining why Republican districts have received an average of $600 million more annually than Democratic districts since the Republican takeover. (By the way, that is nearly 18 times the partisan disparity that existed — in the opposite direction — when Democrats last ran the House.) It was good of Professor Armey to share his governing philosophy with us now, even if he and his pals Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay forgot to mention their partisan budgetary objectives when they were promoting the Contract With America in 1994. But their libertarian admirers may be disappointed to learn that these great statesmen were more focused on redistributing wealth upward than in reducing the size of government.
To the victor belong the spoils. Those of you who seriously thought that the republicans were fighting for smaller, less intrusive government, more personal freedom from the nanny state, and for fiscal responsibility, are now feel free to feel like they’ve been had. What they wanted, simply, were the spoils. Nothing more. I’m sure historians will debate for generations how the train wreak that was the Bush presidency happened, and why it seemed that they always governed more like a gang of thugs then like the ideologues they presented themselves as being. But it’s simple. They’re governing like a gang of thugs, because that’s what they are.
The following story about our imperial vice president may seem trivial compared to Cheney’s unilaterally engineering the withdrawal of the Unites States of America from the Geneva Convention, but it’s everything that is cheap and squalid about the Bush Administration, and by extension the modern republican party, in a nutshell.
Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her.
"This is Dick Cheney," said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. "I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at — hmm, I guess I don’t know my own number. I’m over at the White House."
Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on Wooldridge’s desk.
In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.
Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.
With predictable results…
First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.
Because of Cheney’s intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.
Characteristically, Cheney left no tracks.
Other then the wreckage you mean. Those of you who seriously thought that the republicans were fighting for smaller, less intrusive government, more personal freedom from the nanny state, and for fiscal responsibility, are now feel free to feel like they’ve been had. Except you were warned. Over and over again you were warned. And the warning sign was this: instead of appealing to American’s hopes and dreams, they kept appealing to our fears, to our resentments, to our hatreds…
That should have told you everything. These thugs, who live in a gutter of fears and resentments and cheap bar stool hatreds, if they know nothing else they know the language of fear, and resentment, and hate. It’s their point of repose, their magnetic north, their absolute bedrock. Fear, and resentment, and hate. And you let them manipulate yours. And you got what you voted for. What do tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, liberated now from life itself, hundreds of dead Americans, mostly poor and black, floating in the waters of New Orleans, and the largest fish kill the American west has ever seen have in common?
Next time, vote your hopes instead of your fears, or it’s your fears you’ll be living with after the election.
The Pentagon, in a policy obtained by The Advocate, has indicated that lesbian and gay military personnel who are discharged under the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law are qualified to continue to serve the nation. A copy of the Pentagon policy, included in a statement released by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, now states, "These separated members have the opportunity to continue to serve their nation and national security by putting their abilities to use by way of civilian employment with other Federal agencies, the Department of Defense, or in the private sector, such as with a government contractor."
We can do the work, we just can’t have the dignity and the honor of bearing arms in our nation’s defense. And it’s not because these braying jackasses are uncomfortable working side-by-side with homosexuals. That’s bullshit. It’s because they just can’t bear to see the stigma removed from people they personally loath, yet know godammned well their country needs too.
For sure the Pentagon’s Jack D. Ripper’s are all feeling very evolved now that they’re willing to let us do the work of keeping America secure, so long as we don’t actually get the recognition for it. Some of them might even think they’re doing us a favor, since life as a highly paid DOD contractor is probably a higher calling in George Bush’s America then being in uniform anyway.
People don’t always appreciate how the fascist right often cloaks its war against political opponents in terms of fighting indecency. The Bush Administration crack down a couple years ago on broadcast indecency was usually taken to be a bone tossed at it’s fundamentalist base. But it was of a piece with the right’s long war on dissent…
You might react by saying that the FCC fines only for exposure of certain portions of skin or particular diction, and it would never punish anyone for expressing a political view. I would respond with three facts.
First, in the 1950s FCC Chairman Doerfer started investigations against TV stations for showing reports done by Edward R. Murrow that were allegedly not sympathetic to famous republican anticommunist Senator Joe McCarthy.
Doerfer was a McCarthy man. McCarthy was such an important figure in the Republican party, similar to Representative Tom Delay today, that his behavior was tolerated by the Republican White House. Indeed, President Eisenhower put two McCarthy people on the commission, among one the Chairman.
Second, while the Washington Post was starting in on the Watergate story, President Nixon’s staff, perhaps at his request, apparently caused his appointed Chairman at the FCC to begin investigations into the Washington Post’s television stations in Florida. The idea, according to then Post publisher Katherine Graham, was to have the investigations cast a cloud on the Post’s continued ownership of the stations, so as to undercut the business model that was supposed to further her initial public offering. Of course, the Post saw this as punishment for its pursuit of the story of the Watergate break-ins.
The political cartoonist Herblock used to draw Nixon’s FCC chairman and cronies with a big sign behind them that said "Fairness Doctrine: If It’s Not Pro-Administration, It’s Not Fair" Even back then attacks on the media by the right wing were fierce and unrelenting. Anytime a story that was critical of Nixon appeared in the press or on TV there were howls from the right about bias. But back then the news outlets had a little backbone. It wasn’t until the right managed to rewrite FCC rules on radio and TV station ownership, rules which once had bipartisan support on the theory that neither party should be allowed to dominate the public airwaves, that the right was able finally to shut progressive viewpoints out of the public debate.
The Center for American Progress and Free Press today released the first-of-its-kind statistical analysis of the political make-up of talk radio in the United States. It confirms that talk radio, one of the most widely used media formats in America, is dominated almost exclusively by conservatives.
The new report — entitled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio” — raises serious questions about whether the companies licensed to broadcast over the public radio airwaves are serving the listening needs of all Americans.
While progressive talk is making inroads on commercial stations, right-wing talk reigns supreme on America’s airwaves. Some key findings:
– In the spring of 2007, of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners, 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming was conservative, and only 9 percent was progressive.
– Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast on these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk — 10 times as much conservative talk as progressive talk.
– 76 percent of the news/talk programming in the top 10 radio markets is conservative, while 24 percent is progressive.
Note that those top ten markets are either in solidly blue states, or in blue areas of blue states. The exception being Texas.
Two common myths are frequently offered to explain the imbalance of talk radio: 1) the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine (which required broadcasters to devote airtime to contrasting views), and 2) simple consumer demand. Each of these fails to adequately explain the root cause of the problem. The report explains:
Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management. […]
Ultimately, these results suggest that increasing ownership diversity, both in terms of the race/ethnicity and gender of owners, as well as the number of independent local owners, will lead to more diverse programming, more choices for listeners, and more owners who are responsive to their local communities and serve the public interest.
Along with other ideas, the report recommends that national radio ownership not be allowed to exceed 5 percent of the total number of AM and FM broadcast stations, and local ownership should not exceed more than 10 percent of the total commercial radio stations in a given market.
I bought a satellite radio receiver for my car mostly so I didn’t have to listen to hate radio whenever I took my yearly road trips out west. Anyone who really thought back when the rules were being changed that letting big business rule the airwaves would result in a more consumer choice and more responsiveness to what consumers want to hear either knows now that they were sadly mistaken, or they never listed to radio in the first place and aren’t now. Of course, anyone who’s paid a utility bill recently in a deregulated market knows exactly how much consumer choice big business wants to let us have.
(Albany, New York) The Assembly passed same-sex marriage legislation Tuesday night, but the state’s highest ranking Republican vowed not to allow it to come to a vote in the Senate.
And what’s hilarious about all this is that a lot of these so-called gay conservatives think all the sexual hedonism of the liberal "gay lifestyle" is wicked and we should all be about settling down and getting married and moving to the suburbs and getting rich. The way they tell it, it’s the socialist-communist urban liberal left that’s anti same-sex marriage. So you’d think it would be democrats who are adamantly against it. But no…
Just remember folks, while you’re busy kissing up to the republican establishment, that Truman Capote once said a faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room.
Republicans have long tried to exploit masculinity images and depict Democrats and liberals as effeminate and therefore weak. That is not new. But what is new is how explicit and upfront and unabashed this all is now. And what is most striking about it is that — literally in almost every case — the most vocal crusaders for Hard-Core Traditional Masculinity, the Virtues of Machismo, are the ones who so plainly lack those qualities on every level.
There are few things more disorienting than listening to Rush Limbaugh declare himself the icon of machismo and masculinity and mock others as "wimps." And if you look at those who have this obsession — the Chris Matthews and Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldbergs and Victor Davis Hansons — what one finds in almost every case is that those who want to convert our political process and especially our national policies into a means of proving one’s "traditional masculine virtues" — the physically courageous warriors unbound by effete conventions — themselves could not be further removed from those attributes, and have lives which are entirely devoid of such "virtues."
Not that I’m saying homosexuality is incompatible with masculinity, of course. Consenting biweekly to having one’s duodenum battered with the manic hydraulic fury of a tricked-out V-12 jackhammer manned by an epileptic Con-Ed worker with an ancestral oath of vengeance against asphalt would, I think, tend to butch one up, at least as regards one’s pain threshold.
The post Yglesias links to also has this little gem…
Is Instapundit A Homo? Well, I think I met him three times or something, and he never tried to pork me. Given the fact I’m 180 pounds of rompin’-stompin’ Clydesdale-clompin’ 180 proof sex, I’d say he successfully passed that test.
Or maybe Reynolds isn’t into drunken horse asses. Three times or something. Good thing he didn’t have to use two hands to count them on or he’d probably still be trying to write that post. There’s an old joke about how God gave men brains and dicks and not enough blood to operate them both at the same time. Somehow I don’t think this guy has that problem.
Have you ever wondered how men who feel such a profound contempt for anyone who would allow themselves to be fucked, treat their women during sex? The Ex-Gay barkers generally link male homosexuality to a broken sense of one’s own masculinity. But isn’t it staringly obvious that a broken sense of masculinity is what’s behind male homophobia, and misogyny?
Oh…and this…
Pam at Pam’s House Blend riffs on a column in the right wing World Net Daily from Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, who according to his Wikipedia entry is the founder of a group called The Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny, a group which is dedicated to promoting responsible fatherhood amongst African Americans. His column is a pathetic diatribe against the opposite sex…
Many women I counsel with and have interviewed on my radio and TV shows are quick to point out everything their man is doing wrong, but it’s rare to find one who will honestly admit that she’s screwed up the kids or that she’s driving her mate crazy.
It’s time that we look at the role women play in driving men out of the home and separating them from their children. That’s not to say that men don’t bear the brunt of the responsibility for their weakness. Men need to learn how to deal with women with strength and patience – this is love.
…
Most women themselves don’t understand why they provoke and agitate their spouse to lash out or run away. They don’t understand the subtle control they have over weak men.
Men typically marry for love and to raise children. The mistake they make is that they’re looking for love from the wrong source. Men shouldn’t look for love from women. Rather they should find God’s love and pass that love down to the wife and children.
WTF?? As a gay man, this contempt for the opposite sex you regularly see from the ersatz "manly man" crowd is really striking. The shibboleth is that they’re thumping their manly chests to prove they’re not homosexuals. I think they’re thumping their chests because it’s the only way they know how to prove they’re somebody. Because they’ve lost the person within. There is no there inside them anymore. That’s probably why they don’t know how to love anyone outside of themselves. Sex is a reflex, and they still understand it when it tugs at them. But love is utterly beyond this kind of guy. You need a heart for that, and all he’s got is his…masculinity.
There’s an order to life: God in Christ, Christ in man, man over woman, and woman over children. When this order is broken or violated you have "hell" on earth.
…
There’s been a deliberate plan to wipe out masculinity in society. When you wipe out the man you wipe out God, because the man represents God on earth. Then there’s no truth – no light – and no hope for the family.
The man represents God on earth… Well there’s a little Christian modesty for you. None of this meek shall inherit the earth claptrap for this guy. No, no. All you need to do to be the very embodiment of God on earth in his good book, is to be born with that there ‘Y’ chromosome and you’re set. And…to attack masculinity is to attack on God.
And I could almost buy that, in the sense that to demean and degrade anything that is a part of this wonderful universe is an attack on its creator, on existence. To attack femininity is to attack God. To attack sexuality is to attack God. To attack any part of our shared humanity is an attack on God. But I don’t think that’s what this creep has in mind. He thinks his ‘Y’ makes him something. But all it makes him is male. Now to this gay boy, and I’m sure most heterosexual women will agree, that is no trivial thing. But you need to be more then simply male to be attractive. You need to be decent. And the ‘Y’ won’t make you that. You have to make yourself that. That’s the part people like Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson miss.
I would ask the Reverend what the difference is, between holding yourself above women simply because you’re a man, and holding yourself above others simply because of the color of your skin. You can make a case for the proposition that the genders view the world around them in their own way, but that’s not to say that one gender is better then another, let alone that being male makes you God on earth. This is the cop out people take, when the struggle for character becomes too much. Instead of reaching beyond themselves, for that better person they could become, they buy the cheap seat to self esteem. Why bother making yourself a better person, when you’re already the embodiment of God on earth?
And the problem with that is that it leaves an empty spot, a barren patch deep down inside, where a conscience is supposed to develop. The Reverend may think he’s preaching a message of strength to his male flock, but he’s just making them weak. "…what one finds in almost every case is that those who want to convert our political process and especially our national policies into a means of proving one’s "traditional masculine virtues" — the physically courageous warriors unbound by effete conventions — themselves could not be further removed from those attributes, and have lives which are entirely devoid of such "virtues."
As Frank Lloyd Wright said, "No stream rises higher then its source" The cult of masculinity, is more of a dildo. A grandiose substitute for something that’s all well and good just for what it is, but that shouldn’t be made into any more then what it is. A masculinity that feels itself threatened by gay men, let alone the opposite sex, is one that’s probably broken to start with. Your own maleness is a good thing to understand if you’re a guy. But it isn’t what matters. It’s what you make of yourself that matters. The higher ground, the exalted status, is possible to all of us, regardless of our gender, or our sexuality. But so is this:
You need a really good set of brakes to avoid finding yourself in this place. The ancient passions of our tribal past, of the long march of life on earth from the sea to our human existence, can sweep us off our feet in an instant, and deliver us into unmitigated evil before we even know where we’re going. The flesh of our existence is an amazing, wonderful, glorious thing. But to see your personal salvation in it is to walk away from everything fine and noble a human being can be, and bellyflop into the jungle of our past. Real men, like real women, have brains, and hearts, and a conscience that knows where the lines are you cannot cross, without renouncing your humanity.
The whole point of Holsinger’s paper is to draw a sharp contrast between gay relationships and heterosexual relationships. But to do so, he he culls his evidence largely from papers which describe injuries from nonconsensual intercourse to denigrate consensual relationships, he describes odd sexual practices that are enjoyed by heterosexual couples to denigrate the minority of gay couples who indulge in those same practices, and he misleads his readers by padding his bibliography with more references to papers explicitly describing injuries experienced by heterosexual men and women to imply that they describe gay men instead.
In other words, to describe gay sexual acts, more often than not he turned to papers which describe injuries sustained through heterosexual activity. And then he used this evidence from heterosexual activity to say that “when the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur as noted above.” But what does this evidence suggest about “complementarity” in heterosexual relationships? Holsinger doesn’t answer.
Burroway, as he has done previously with other religious right bigots, most notibly Paul Cameron, illuminates again and again the casual and deliberate deception in Holsinger’s anti-gay tract. For example, how Holsinger used a study of 365 male patients of a single urban STD clinic in Copenhagan so prove that homosexual sex is more likely to result in disease. As Burroway dryly notes…
This of course means that if you study people with STDs, whether they are gay or straight, you will find people with STDs. Holsinger uses the behavior of one particular sample of men who expose themselves to the risk of STDs to denigrate all gay men (and lesbians!). This study says nothing of those whose “lifestyle” choices do not lead to contracting STDs. And of course, Holsinger’s arguments don’t address whatever responsibility heterosexuals overall have for the 64% of this particular Copenhagen sample who were exclusively straight and were treated for STDs.
This was what Evelyn Hooker understood back in the 1950s when she did her landmark study of the psychological adjustment of gay men. If all you study are sick homosexuals, then all you’re going to see in homosexuality is sickness. But that’s all that some people want to see. Holsinger uses data on injuries to the rectum gleaned from emergency room treatment of people who had been raped, to smear the sex loving same sex couples have as physically damaging. Perhaps in his own mind, Holsinger really cannot see the difference between love and rape when it involves homosexuals. Or perhaps he’s just trying to make sure that nobody else can. Either way, it speaks volumes about that open sewer he calls a conscience.
And here, Burroway nails it:
But worse, Holsinger made the fatal error of ignoring the bonds of affection and devotion that arise in gay and lesbian couples. He reduced the rich complexity of their relationships to pipe fittings and how they interlock with each other. But the interlocking parts that fit together in relationships are those parts that fit sublimely. They have absolutely nothing to do with pipes or connectors or any other analogies drawn from the local Ace Hardware store.
But the interlocking parts that fit together in relationships are those parts that fit sublimely. Yes. Just so. But that is the part of an intimate romantic relationship, that the right reliably fails to grok. I think the reason why is obvious.
We have needed a Jim Burroway in this movement for a long, long time. Someone to actually take the time and effort to rigorously dig below the surface of these religious right anti-gay tracts and show, point by point, how they are looking you in the face and lying through their teeth, confidant that their ostentatious religiosity will keep you from questioning their facts. Surely men of God wouldn’t deliberately lie to us. They may be uptight moral prudes and cranks, but at least they believe in and live by their own moral values and we can trust in that. They are merely zealots, blinded by their prejudices, not conniving con artists. No. There is no mistaking this kind of thing for what it is. You cannot pick and choose your data to suit your purposes, without knowing that you are picking and choosing your data to suit your purposes. It is calculated, it is deliberate, and it is to virtue and morality as Al Capone was to law and order.
Over at This Modern World, Jonathan Schwarz takes a look from James Holsinger over to another corner of the open sewer that is the Bush administration, from whence the Project For A New American Century came from. Hold your nose, and hold on to your stomach…
As you may have already seen, Dr. James Holsinger, Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General, is very concerned about gay men and their “anal eroticism.” Indeed, like most extremely manly men, he spends a lot of time thinking about this. I’m guessing that, at least when he was younger, he thought about it four or five times a day.
So everyone’s getting a good laugh about this. But Bush & co. work out their peculiar psycho-sexual obsessions in ways far more serious than this.
Take Eliot Cohen, for instance. Cohen wrote the Air Force’s study of the effects of air power during the Gulf War. Later he was a founding member of Project for a New American Century. And now he works for Condoleezza Rice in one of the State Department’s most prominent positions.
And this is what Eliot Cohen wrote about bombing other countries in 1994:
Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment.
Ha ha ha! Yes, killing thousands of people with high explosives is sort of like sex out of wedlock! What a witty, apt comparison!
These people are the world’s most genuine perverts.
Yup. That would be about right. This is all of a piece. A sickening, stench filled piece. A movement so utterly willing to brutalize lovers is sick to it’s core. Gratification. Gratification. Do you understand now why so much of the torture inflicted on people who were essentially prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib was sexual in nature?
Lovers…and especially same sex lovers…when one of these jackasses calls you a pervert, laugh in their face. You are beautiful. They are the perverts.
I haven’t sat down for the entire movie, but there’s a scene from Kinsey that keeps popping into my head as I consider the paper Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General, John Holsinger, wrote for the United Methodist Church’s Committee to Study Homosexuality back in 1991. Bear in mind that Holsinger wrote that paper, not as a fellow believer, but as a doctor of medicine.
The scene is a doctor’s office. Kinsey and his wife are trying, uncomfortably, to discuss their unsatisfactory sex with him. The couple is having trouble achieving sexual intimacy. Kinsey’s wife Clara endures great pain whenever he tries to have sex with her. The doctor holds up a ruler and asks Clara to indicate how big her husband’s erect penis is on it. She seems befuddled. But it’s more then simple embarrassment at discussing such an intimate detail. The doctor moves his fingers along the ruler. This big? No? This big? No? Eventually Clara works up a little nerve, reaches over, and moves the doctors finger to a point somewhere Past the end of the ruler. The doctor nods. No wonder you were experiencing pain, he tells her, and he suggests they take a somewhat different approach to intercourse.
The scene is intended as a bit of humor, but it has a point. Clara thought that the problem was with her. She had no way of knowing that it wasn’t. Back before Kinsey began his famous studies of human sexuality, people lived in almost perfect ignorance of how humans actually have sex. Oh most people thought they knew, certainly. But what they knew, as the shock and outrage clearly revealed when Kinsey finally published, was mostly a collection of handed down folk tales and dirty jokes. Real facts about human sexuality were few and far between because no one had actually rigorously and dispassionately studied it. Before they visited their doctor, neither one of the Kinseys understood how physically mismatched they were, and that it meant they had to be a tad creative in their approach to sexual intimacy.
Which leads to this other thing that leaped out at me.
A penis wasn’t designed for an anus. The parts don’t fit. Heterosexual intercourse is complementary…homosexual intercourse is physically damaging… Gay men have had this thrown in our faces for decades now. Never mind that many of us know from first hand experience that it isn’t true…the hate machine doesn’t want to actually hear from the people it’s talking about. On and on and on like a broken record, they keep insisting that male homosexual intercourse is well nigh physically impossible, in contrast to heterosexual intercourse in which tab ‘A’ just naturally slides into slot ‘B’. But that’s not true. Male same sex couples have thrilling and blissfully contented sex every day and the only thing damaged by it are the lies bigots have been pounding into their heads for ages. And even opposite sex couples sometimes just aren’t physically well matched for each other.
I don’t like discussing my sex life in public. That’s not because I’m ashamed of it, or of anything I’ve ever done with another guy in my arms. But those moments are precious to me. And it’s not only my privacy that I have to consider. But I’m living in a time when the sex lives of gay men are a cultural battle ground and our enemies shrink from no filthy lie about us they think they can get away with, so long as it incites fear and loathing and hatred. If we don’t talk about our sex lives, the only people who will are the ones who hate our guts and want everyone else to hate us too.
So let me say that I can relate to poor Clara in some ways. One guy I dated once upon a time, was just simply too damn big for me to comfortably have sex with him. And I’m not just talking anal sex either. But I was in love, so I tried this and I tried that, because I wanted to make him happy, and let’s face it, I wanted to enjoy having sex with him too. But it was a struggle. And to this day I wonder how much that played a part in our breaking up. Thing is, he had tried the ex-gay thing previously, and had been married, and he’d told me that his former wife had the same problem having sex with him. I wasn’t at all surprised to hear it.
A penis is designed for a vagina. No…It isn’t that simple. The fact is, depending on any number of factors, intercourse can be physically very painful, even damaging, to a woman. It can be a struggle for some opposite sex couples to achieve sexual gratification during intercourse. Over the course of my many road trips I’ve probably stopped at hundreds of truck stops, probably beheld hundreds of those ubiquitous condom vending machines…
The anus and rectum, unlike the vagina contain no natural lubricating function…
…each one advertising pre lubricated condoms…
The rectum is incapable of mechanical protection against abrasion and severe damage to the colonic mucosa can result if objects that are large, sharp, or pointed are inserted into the rectum…
…and an assortment of “french ticklers”. Holsinger goes on a tear in his paper about gay men inserting things into the anus of their partners as though it’s someone everyone does, and conversely something opposite sex couples do not do to a vagina. It’s a fact the sex toy industry would be greatly surprised to hear. In the comments section of Atrios post on Holsinger’s paper, one commenter tells of a woman who went to the ER to have rocks removed…
I had to get an ER doc to remove my diaphram once. The damn thing was just stuck. I told the doc that I felt like an idiot and she said, "Oh no way. I take a lot more stuff out of there that shouldn’t be there." So of course I had to ask, "Like what?" And she told me that a few nights earlier she had taken a bunch of rocks out of some woman’s vagina. The woman and her partner apparently experimented with all kinds of objects to "enhance" intercourse.
Notice that the poster had to go herself, to get a perfectly common form of female birth control removed from Her vagina. Now…the very thought of inserting a foreign object into my body, let alone the body of a lover, just completely disgusts me. But that’s my own particular sexual temperament. Don’t fucking tell me that opposite sex couples aren’t doing that to each other every night all around the world. And don’t…don’t even think of trying to tell me that a motherfucking doctor doesn’t know this.
Which brings me to my point. But first…let us pause for a moment and think of poor Clara Kinsey. She’s in the doctor’s office with her husband, and the doctor is holding out a ruler for her to indicate the size of Mr. Kinsey’s erect penis, and she is confused. The doctor is telling her with that ruler, that you can measure the size of most men with a ruler. If you think it’s laughable nowadays that anyone wouldn’t know that men come in all sizes and shapes, let alone that most men don’t actually have foot long dicks, much as some of them seem to wish, strangely, that they do, thank the Supreme Court of the hated Earl Warren, which struck down all those obscenity and censorship laws back in the 1950s, to the absolute horror of American right wingers and fundamentalist kooks. Probably the first male penis poor Clara ever saw, was that of her husband’s on their first honeymoon night. That’s why she thought there was something wrong with her when sex became painful.
She didn’t know. Her husband didn’t either. It would be years later that he undertook to study human sexuality. But their doctor knew. Good thing for that couple. But he had to know.
And so does Holsinger.
When the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur as noted above. Therefore, based on the simplest known anatomy and physiology, when dealing with the complementarity of the human sexes, one can simply say, Res ipsa loquitur – the thing speaks for itself!
What speaks for itself clearly, loudly, sickeningly, are this man’s words. When he sat down to write that penises and vaginas are perfectly mated to each other, he knew, he had to know, that it isn’t always so. He knew…he had to know…that sex with the wrong partner, let alone with an uncaring, aggressive one, can be damaging to a woman’s body. He knew…he had to know…that opposite sex couples resort all the time to lubricants, and sex toys inserted into the vagina to enhance sexual pleasure. He knew…He Damn Well Had To Know…that sexually transmitted disease is easily spread during penile/vaginal intercourse, and that before the advent of antibiotics, it was often as incurable and lethal as AIDS was in 1991
But he also knew this: that he was writing for a bunch of sexually ignorant rubes who would believe it if he told them otherwise, so he could make the sex that gay men have look ugly and unnatural.
He used his degree to give his lies authority. And he did it in the name of God, and in the name of morality. And that is why he’s George Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General. His moral values, his instinctive sense of right and wrong, are those of the religious right, and the republican party. Let’s hear it for virtuous men.
My gay friends are also friends with my family. And they’re glad that we have a healthy heterosexual relationship and a healthy relationship with our kids. But they want to be respected too—their rights, their relationships—and not be scapegoated for things that have nothing to do with them.
I had this conversation with Focus on the Family, and I said I agree with you that family breakdown is a huge crisis, a serious crisis. And I don’t think the Left talks about that enough. My neighborhood is eighty percent single parent families. You can’t overcome poverty with that, with eighty percent single parent families. But how do we reweave the bonds of marriage, family, extended family, and community, to put our arms around the kids? And it’s not just in poor neighborhoods. Kids are falling through the cracks of fractured family in all classes and neighborhoods. So I said to them, I want to rebuild family life and relationships, but explain to me how gay and lesbian people are the ones responsible for all that? which is what their fund-raising strategy suggests. And after about an hour and a half they conceded the point. They said, Okay Jim, we concede that family breakdown is caused much more by heterosexual dysfunction than by homosexuals. But then they said, We can’t vouch for our fundraising department, which says a lot, I think.
Yes, it’s bullshit. But it brings in the bucks. Gay rights wasn’t even a blip on the radar of the religious right until Anita Bryant showed them that it made the fundies come out to the polls in droves, and open their wallets wide to anyone who said they would smite the queers for Jesus. And as long as it keeps making them money, they’ll keep right on waving the gay bogeyman, no matter how obvious it is to everyone that even they aren’t swallowing the bullshit they’re spreading about homosexuals. The fundies have no conscience, and the con artists who are praying on them have no shame.
‘Twas ever thus in the business of hate mongering. I could feel sorry for the little old granny ladies who throw their social security checks at these con men…except for this knife in my heart, and in so many others’, with their names on it. Kinda like those little brass name plates you sometimes see on the backs of pews. Remember, every small tithe of $500, allows us to buy enough stones to properly execute one homosexual in accordance with biblical teachings. These stones are hand polished in our Christian owned and operated factory in Ecuador, and every one has a copy of The Lord’s Prayer hand engraved on it. For an extra $500, we’ll add the personal dedication of your choice (30 characters or less…remember spaces count the same as letters). Give one as a gift. Use it to remember a dearly departed loved one…
Oh…You Noticed That You’re Being Used Now Did You…?
Comes the dawn…
IT’S ALRIGHT MR. KENNEDY, MY UTERUS IS ONLY BLEEDING . Marty Lederman points us to an interesting WaPo article, in which a few members of America’s tiny minority of serious, principled "pro-lifers" have come to see that "Partial Birth" bans are silly, irrational laws whose primary purpose is to separate money from their wallets and funnel it to the Republican Party. Focus on the Family, however, maintains that the bans do have an upside: the law does increase the "danger of internal bleeding from a perforated uterus." If you don’t believe me that most of the American forced pregnancy lobby cares a great deal more about punishing women for sexual choices they don’t approve of than protecting fetal life, well, I say we take their word for it.
And, again, this explains the sexism in Kennedy‘s opinion; you take it away, and the legislation has no connection with a legitimate state interest at all. As you can see, most anti-choicers (despite the bad-faith congressional findings that 2+2=171) don’t really think that these bans on a safer procedure protect women’s physical health. They simply believe that women can’t be trusted to make judgments about their own lives, and if this causes some women to be seriously injured that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s almost impossible to overstate how disgusting this legislation is, and how deeply entwined outright misogyny is with the American "pro-life" movement.
In a highly visible rift in the anti-abortion movement, a coalition of evangelical Protestant and Roman Catholic groups is attacking a longtime ally, Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson.
Using rhetoric that they have reserved in the past for abortion clinics, some of the coalition’s leaders accuse Dobson and other national antiabortion leaders of building an "industry" around relentless fundraising and misleading information.
Misleading? Dobson and company? Oh good heavens no…
In an open letter to Dobson that was published as a full-page ad May 23 in the Colorado Springs Gazette, Focus on the Family’s hometown newspaper, and May 30 in the Washington Times, the heads of five small but vocal groups called the Carhart decision "wicked," and accused Dobson of misleading Christians by applauding it.
Carhart is even "more wicked than Roe" because it is "not a ban, but a partial-birth abortion manual" that affirms the legality of late-term abortions "as long as you follow its guidelines," the ads said. "Yet, for many years you have misled the Body of Christ about the ban, and now about the ruling itself."
…
Another signer, the Rev. Bob Enyart, a Christian talk radio host and pastor of the Denver Bible Church, said the real issue is fundraising.
"Over the past seven years, the partial-birth abortion ban as a fundraising technique has brought in over a quarter of a billion dollars" for major antiabortion groups, "but the ban has no authority to prevent a single abortion, and pro-life donors were never told that," he said. "That’s why we call it the pro-life industry."
In Rohrbough’s view, partisan politics is also involved.
"What happened in the abortion world is that groups like National Right to Life, they’re really a wing of the Republican Party, and they’re not geared to push for personhood for an unborn child — they’re geared to getting Republicans elected," he said. "So we’re seeing these ridiculous laws like the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban put forward, and then we’re deceived about what they really do."
No shit Sherlock. That gang has been manipulating your hatred of women and homosexual people to rise money for fucking decades. Welcome to the real world asshole. Your cheapshit knee jerk prejudices are like keys on a piano to them. And as long as you allow your hatreds to lead you around by the nose, they’ll keep playing you for all the money you’re worth.
When you signed on to a movement to grind hopes and dreams of women, of gay and lesbian people for love and happiness and and that intimate peaceful contentment in the arms of someone they loved into the dirt, I guess it didn’t occur to you that perhaps the people running it might be a bunch of soulless conniving thugs. But think for a moment, if you have a single functioning synapse left in that thing you call a brain…what else could they have been? What kind of person does that to innocent people, jackass? You thought the sort of person who incites fear and loathing and hate toward lovers was trustworthy? Trustworthy? I’m laughing in your face. If you had a shred of conscience you’d have seen him for the predator he is the moment he approached you with his little sales pitch. Give me your money, and I will wage holy war on the sex lives of the heathen… But you couldn’t. You couldn’t do anything but fall for it, because your hate, your contempt, and your cheapshit conceits made you weak. So you got taken advantage of. And if I’m sorry for you about anything, it’s that all you lost was your money. Look into the face of someone who lost the possibility of love sometime asshole. You’re both predators. The only difference between Dobson and you is that he wants to enrich himself. You just want to see hope die, so you can feel righteous.
They say you can’t cheat an honest man. But I’ll tell you something: it’s real easy to cheat a bigot. All you gotta do, is wave that scarecrow in his face, and he’ll dance for you. Like you danced for Dobson.
Quick! Send Money! Now! Before the homos take over!!!
If you’re feeling brave today, perhaps you’d like to take a walk up to the edge of the Pit and peer in. I promise you’ll see something worth knowing.
Hate. Ever wonder what it’s like, to look it right in the face and behold? Hate. Hate. Not to ask it why, or wherefore, but just to look and observe and then walk back away from it…always, always, walk away from it…and remember. Remember what you saw. Remember. I’m not talking Fred Phelps’ circus o’ hate. Fred’s been in it for the shock value longer then he can remember why he hates. He just wants to be the center of attention now. Same with all those poor weak little white power Nazi wannabes you see, gamely giving the stiff arm salute for the cameras, while surrounded by a ring of police protection. Himmler would have considered them little more then useful idiots. No…I’m talking the good stuff. Pure. Uncut. Hate. Hate. I have a hit of it right here for you.
Just be careful. Remember what Nietzsche said…repeat it like a prayer before you look… If you gaze long into the Abyss, the Abyss gazes also into you… When you are done looking, you are going to walk away. You must. It will be hard.
Here, via a Latvian group calling itself Defend The Family, is Scott Lively. He’s delivering a lecture to this group on the dangers of the homosexual menace. Lively may already be known to some of you, as the holocaust-revisionist author of The Pink Swastika. As Jim Burroway says…
Lively goes beyond the small cadre of anti-gay extremists who deny that gays were victims of the holocaust. He claims that ‘homosexualism’ itself was responsible for the rise of the Nazi party and led directly to the Holocaust. He writes that “homosexuality is primarily a predatory addiction striving to take the weak and unsuspecting down with it.”
Despite the crackpot theories manufactured largely from rumor, conjecture and the recycling of popular myths, Lively’s book has become something of a best seller. It’s now in its fourth edition. While it has been dismissed by historians, it has gained a significant following among anti-gay activists, particularly among European neo-Nazi groups who have been responsible for several anti-gay assaults in recent years.
Lively has been active in Latvia recently. On March 21st, he was invited to speak at a Kaunas Police Academy about “the effects of sexual ‘freedom’ that is promoted by the homosexual movement.”
Here is a video of Lively giving his talk during a workshop at the New Generations church in Riga, Latvia last March. This isn’t the Fred Phelps family chanting their obscene slogans, waving their signs at hundreds of angry protesters. This isn’t a group of faux Nazi milk babies strutting around in uniforms they think make them somebody. This is an intelligent man calmly, and methodically demonizing one group of people to another group of people who he knows are ready to accept anything he says to them, and have utterly no way of measuring the truth of anything he’s telling them.
They are people who have been taught since childhood to believe whatever the authorities tell them to believe. Once it was their Soviet masters. Now it’s their church leaders. Those leaders have told them that Lively is a great American author who traveled around the world just to speak to them, to warn them of a danger to everything they have ever known. Watch now, as Lively, calmly, deliberately, methodically, teaches them to hate and fear and loath their homosexual neighbors more then they ever, ever hated the Soviets. Watch his face.
As a compromise, Riga Pride organisers held a private indoor rally at the Berg hotel, following an Anglican church service. The church was surrounded by a group of religious extremists, old women and skinheads. "We tried to leave by the back door but they had put guards there. We tried to move through them but groups of people started to run at us shouting, ‘You deserve to die,’ and ‘Leave our land.’ They were carrying bags, which could have had anything in them," remembers Jolanta Chianovica, a half-French, half-Latvian activist.
The bags were full of human excrement, which was hurled at the mostly female congregation. Meanwhile, more counterdemonstrators had swarmed to the Berg hotel, where they were refusing to let Pride supporters in or out. "I saw two girls trying to leave and people spat in their faces directly in front of the police but they did nothing. When they saw the police weren’t interfering to stop the violence, they felt they could do whatever they liked. That was really frightening," says Chianovica.
This is the situation Lively walked into, this is the situation he knew he was walking into, as he told his audience that the gay rights movement has "destroyed the family structure in a large part of the United States", when he said of homosexuals that "they have no place in a society that protects marriage and family."
Now…walk away. Go find a friend and make them smile. Find a small uncared for corner of your world and make it beautiful. Go. Leave this place. Later, you can remember what you saw…
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