No…Actually The Grass Isn’t Any Greener Over There Either…
Whenever someone starts preaching to me about how the sex lives of gay people are sad and broken I just cheerfully point them to the tons, literally tons, of articles out there written by heterosexuals, for heterosexuals on how to fix their own broken sex lives. If the grass is any greener on their side of the fence I’ve yet to see it. Other then the fact that their marriages are given some security in the rule of law that ours are not, their intimate sex lives don’t seem any less difficult to manage then our own.
And believe it or not, single though I’ve been most of my life, and gay ever since…well, puberty…I read those articles now and then, mostly for clues as to what pitfalls to avoid in the event that my own sex life happens to improve. Even though they’re written with a basic premise of gender difference in the relationship, a lot of it can I think, apply to same sex couples too. Conversely, I think opposite sex couples could learn a thing or two from our households too. How gender equality works in practice being one of them, but also how it is to keep things together in a hostile world. When all you have is literally each other, and you have to find a way to make it work without the support of the world around you, then you really know what your union is made of. The same sex couples who have made it in this world, under that kind of relentless emotional stress, are my heroes.
He’s a 38-year-old executive. She’s a 34-year-old homemaker. He says they never fight, and in many ways they’re compatible — but not when it comes to sex.
"It’s almost like a checklist," says Jon (who asked that his real name not be used) of their once-a-month lovemaking. The problem, he believes, is a lack of desire.
Sexually unfulfilling marriages aren’t limited to new parents or aging baby boomers with hormone imbalances. They can ensnare even the relatively young and the recently married. When they are unable to blame kids, stress or physical issues, many couples struggle unhappily to identify — and resolve — the problems behind their lackluster sex life.
Couples end up in sexually unfulfilling marriages for a variety of reasons, says Marty Klein, a licensed marriage counselor and certified sex therapist in Palo Alto, California. One reason, he says, is America’s obsession with marriage.
Laura Berman, a Chicago sex therapist and relationship expert, agrees. "We put the blinders on when we’re dating," she says. "We focus so much on the wedding, we don’t notice the warning signs."
That obsession with marriage being fueled in part, by the fundamentalist kook pews here. Not everyone is temperamentally suited for marriage, and in any case, after you’re married is the wrong time to find out you’re not sexually compatible. Having sex while dating and before marriage, or for that matter when marriage isn’t even a goal, isn’t unhealthy unless it’s unloving. Much as the right hates the sex drive, it’s an important part of our being. Just ask your gay and lesbian neighbors: It does us great harm to put sex in the closet.
In more ways then one. As I was scanning down that CNN article, I saw this on the page…
When your spouse announces he’s gay… Which, wasn’t one of those Surprising reasons you’re not having sex either as it turned out. A lot of right wing pulpit thumpers say that sex before marriage is responsible for weakening the institution of marriage, but it isn’t. It’s the padded cell they’ve put marriage into on the one hand, and sex on the other, that’s weakened it. There is nothing wrong with sex that is truly loving and joyful. The more gay people know that and accept that there is nothing wrong with them and that their sex drives are as legitimate and as beautiful as those of heterosexuals, the fewer surprised spouses there’ll be. And the more intimately couples know each other before they tie the knot, the more likely they’ll go into it with that beautiful body and soul union that can make a marriage endure anything.
I’ve seen it happen. Maybe someday it’ll happen to me. If the pulpit thumpers would just get the fuck off our backs and out of our beds, it might happen to more of us.
Travel experts at the Gay & Lesbian Travel Pavilion at the world’s largest tourism fair have said the a new niche market for heterosexuals has emerged.
"Apart from gay and lesbian cruises, we have noticed a clear rise in hotels and resorts that are not only gay-friendly but targeted mainly towards gay men.
"Straight people are, in most cases, allowed to stay, too. The magic word is straight-friendly," said Robert Kastl, Managing Director of Publicom GmbH, the organisers of the Pavilion.
ITB Berlin, the world’s largest tourism fair, is being held in Berlin from March 5th to 9th.
He claims that destinations that have already established a gay-friendly image are increasingly putting their bets on explicitly gay and lesbian events, which are open to heterosexuals too.
"The range of special travel products has increased and even within the gay and lesbian travel market we are noticing more and more diverse sub-niches," says Kastl.
The reason I prefer to go to gay friendly places while on vacation is because it’s nice to be able to actually relax and let my hair down and enjoy myself and not have to worry that some asswipe is going to bash my skull in to prove how manly he is and/or much he loves god. But what I would really like is to be able to enjoy a mixed and diverse crowd of folks who all get along and just want to have a good time wherever we all happen to be.
You have to figure that a heterosexual who goes to a gay friendly resort goes knowing that they’re going to be in the company of gay people and will likely find themselves witnessing PDAs between same sex couples, if not being the recipient of a cruising glance or two themselves. If they’re the sort that doesn’t faze then far as I’m concerned I’d love to share a vacation space with them. Be really nice to, at least for a few brief vacation days, imagine you’re living in a world where being gay (and for that matter, the color of your skin, or the country you’re from or the specifics of your religion) is no more an issue then the color of your eyes or your hair. It’s hard to believe in that world if everyone around you is the same…even if that sameness is something you need to make you more comfortable. Especially if, actually.
I’ve never been so busy in my life over a weekend, which is why I haven’t been posting. But it’s been exhilarating. And these people, these decent, good-hearted courageous people, have provided a much needed tonic to my chronic anger. To witness so much pain and emotional anguish, so many raw wounds, and still see such essential human decency shining though it all, is astonishing at times. I could never loose my belief in the human status after this weekend.
John Holm, Jacob Wilson, Peterson Toscano, Daniel Gonzales and Brandon Tidwell,
before entering the Love Won Out Conference. All five are survivors of various
forms of ex-gay therapy. John, Peterson, Daniel and Brandon are holding collages that
depict their individual journeys through the ex-gay movement, which they presented
to Exodus conference organizers. They were able to talk briefly with some of them,
before being ejected from the conference building.
Peterson, Branden, Jacob and John on their way back from presenting their
collages to the Exodus conference organizers. No…Daniel didn’t get eaten…he
just walked quickly ahead of the others so he could get back to his video camera
to record the others walking back.
I feel so privileged to have been allowed, encouraged even, to photographically document the weekend events. Yesterday, after the action at the Love Won Out conference, there was a gathering of ex-gay survivors at the Memphis gay community center. My cameras were only conditionally allowed inside, as there was a real need to create a safe space there for people to basically spill their guts about what had happened to them. (This is why I never made it as a newspaper photographer…I always ask permission first…) But I was allowed to witness the event and I’m here to tell you what I saw and heard would make a brick cry, if not a fundamentalist.
One wall inside the center was covered with paper, for the survivors to write little notes on, in an exercise called a "chalk talk". It was a way of helping them get their feelings out into the open and to acknowledge them…something that is excruciatingly difficult for people who have been emotionally battered to do. I was not allowed to photograph the process, for I think obvious reasons, but afterwards I was asked to record the little writings on the wall. I actually had to get up and leave the room twice as, one after the other, the survivors stepped up to the wall and started writing, and I began to see it all coming out, so overwhelming was it. If I can get permission to put some of what they wrote on that wall here I will.
This is tough to watch, and all the more if you’ve ever met Peterson and know what a good heart he has and how much he loves his parents. Never in his life would he have ever wanted to hurt them. What happened wasn’t his fault. But all of that…what happened to Peterson and what happened to his parents…all of that is part of the horrible trail of scar tissue these ex-gay outfits leave behind. There is little enough love in this poor world. To leave the world poorer for it is crime enough. To leave people so wounded inside they have trouble for the rest of their lives finding love and intimacy, to then also drive a stake between them and their parents and family…it is a crime against humanity.
These outfits would largely whither and die almost overnight from lack of money, were they not being bankrolled by the religious right for purely political ends. The ex-gay movement gives them rhetorical ammunition for the Kulturkrieg, and it gives their politicians political cover to oppose basic civil rights for gay people. The war on gay people drives voters to the polls. And…it brings in money. That is why Peterson Toscano, and his parents, and many many others like them over the years, had to bleed. And that is why people are gathering this weekend in Memphis, to shout love into this heart of darkness. Enough is enough. No more wounded people. No more wounded families. No more bleeding hearts. Enough.
I’ll be leaving for Memphis early tomorrow. The last weather forecast I read for Memphis is calling for possible freezing rain around midnight, so I want to be in my hotel well before then. They’ll probably be no blogging tomorrow. But I’ll be posting updates on the events over the weekend as much as possible.
Wilson, then 19, was a part of Love In Action’s adult program, housed in a former Episcopal church in Raleigh, at the same time that a Bartlett teen was forced into since-closed LIA’s youth program, Refuge.
LIA catapulted itself into the national spotlight two years ago when the Bartlett teen wrote about his angst on his MySpace page.
…
The gay community’s outrage was instantaneous, as the saga of the then 16-year-old, whose first name is Zach, spread across the blogosphere.
Zach’s supporters protested outside of LIA, but Wilson says the men and women inside were told not to make eye contact with the protesters and not to read their signs.
After Wilson left LIA, he found out what the protesters had wanted him to know.
"These people weren’t doing it to be activists, they were doing it to show that we weren’t alone, that we were loved … It crushes me that that message was cut from us."
Crushing you was the point. Separating you from the love of your neighbors in this life is how they do it.
His parents promised they’d pay for his stay at LIA, but reneged when Wilson decided he would live as God made him.
…
For Wilson, the cost has been strained family relationships, mountains of credit card debt to pay off LIA’s charges and emotional damage from which he’s still healing…
I see John Smid still isn’t giving out any money-back guarantees.
Here, from Beyond Ex-Gay, is a list of scheduled events this weekend in Memphis. If you can make it, I urge you to come and stand with the survivors. Let them see the love they weren’t allowed to while inside. Show them what Love In Action looks like…
NEW! Friday 2/22 noon Press Conference (Press only) at the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center MGLCC (892 S. Cooper). Ex-gay survivors, local leaders and experts release statements about the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered community in response to Focus on the Family and Exodus promoting an inaccurate picture about LGBT people.
Reverend Ken Hutcherson, founder and senior pastor of the Antioch Bible Church near Seattle Washington, and one of the three leaders of the hate group, Watchmen on the Walls, is on the warpath over the Gay-Straight Alliance in his daughter’s school…
This poster is hanging in the window of a classrom at Mt. Si High School!
It’s time we wake up and realize we are in a culture WAR!
When teachers are allowed to hang posters like this in our local school, we’ve got a big problem. It’s time to take back our schools.
Pastor Hutch
Timothy Kincaid, over at Box Turtle Bulletin, has more. Apparently Hutcherson is upset that his daughter is being called a stressful presence while "monitoring" those GSA meetings. I can’t imagine why, other then that those kids probably know full well that everyone who attends those meetings, and everything that is said, is being reported right back to Hutcherson, and for all anybody knows, other members of The Watchmen on the Walls. They might as well be holding their meetings in Hutcherson’s church.
The Goths in their black T-shirts were there. So were the punks with fluorescent hair and multiple piercings.
There were even a few adolescent boys carrying skateboards among the nearly 1,000 Oxnard youth and other supporters who turned out Saturday for a hastily organized peace march to pay tribute to Lawrence King, 15, the Oxnard student shot to death in a classroom last week.
"Larry, Larry, Larry!" the crowd chanted before marchers clasped hands in a moment of silence for the fallen student.
There were no bullhorns, no speeches and no politicians. Just a mass of mostly adolescents wearing bright clothing, carrying signs and singing John Lennon’s "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance."
The size of the turnout surprised police, school officials and even the two Hueneme High School sophomores who put the event together just three days ago, spreading the word with fliers, cellphone calls and MySpace bulletins.
"We were expecting maybe 100 or 200 people," said Courtney LaForest, 16, as she gazed at a broad "peace circle" formed by march participants at Plaza Park in downtown Oxnard. "This is incredible."
Courtney said the turnout reflected a community’s anguish over a senseless shooting that has destroyed the lives of two young men. It was also a public plea for tolerance on school campuses for those who are different, she said.
However, "Pastor Hutch" and his friends think it’s time people realize they’re fighting a WAR! And The enemy…? Right here…
And…here…
And…here…
Children are being shot by children. Parents are burying their children. Their friends are being torn apart by shock and loss and grief. And Hutcherson says we’re in a WAR! No shit Sherlock. Two bullets to the head killed a sixteen year old boy and took away from this poor world everything he might have given to it, every moment of friendship and joy and love, every laugh, every smile. Gone. All gone. In an instant. And Ken Hutcherson’s words, and those of his fellow KulturKriegen, were the gunpowder.
(AP) Denmark’s leading newspapers on Wednesday reprinted a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked deadly rioting in Muslim countries two years ago.
The papers said they wanted to show their firm commitment to freedom of speech after Tuesday’s arrest in western Denmark of three people accused of plotting to kill the man who drew the cartoon, which shows Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse.
The drawing by Kurt Westergaard and 11 other cartoons depicting Muhammad enraged Muslims two years ago when they appeared in a range of Western newspapers.
It’s worth remembering that the cartoons in question barely got noticed until a Lebanese-born Muslim living in Denmark, Ahmad Akkari, began waving them around the middle east, in a dossier into which he’d inserted a number of cartoons that the Danes didn’t print, including one that portrayed Muhammad as a pedophile, and a photograph of a Danish man wearing a pig mask, taken during a Danish pig calling contest, that Akkari had re-captioned as being a photo taken of a Dane mocking Muhammad as a pig.
Akkari’s activities in the middle east arguably helped get the Danish embassy in Lebanon burned down. When Israel later began attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon Akkari decided the Danes weren’t such bad folks after all and he hot-footed it back to the nation he helped rouse passions against, via his Danish residency and passport. Nice guy.
The sweet irony of angry mobs rioting and burning down embassies over a bunch of cartoons depicting Islam as a violent fanatical religion was, of course, lost on the protesters. That kind of thing will reliably go past zealots of any faith, or none.
Come To Memphis This February, for “Deconstructing The Ex-Gay Myth”
My friends Peterson Toscano and Morgan Jon Fox are helping to organize an event in Memphis, coinciding with yet another Focus On The Family/Exodus “Love (sic) Won Out” conference they’re holding there on On Saturday February 23rd 2008. The events will be held under the banner, Deconstructing the Ex-Gay Myth—A Weekend of Action Art, and will be held from February 22 to the 24th, and will include Peterson, giving a farewell performance of Doin’ Time In The Homo No-Mo Halfway House and the premiere of his new play Transfigurations–Transgressing Gender in the Bible, as well as an exhibit of art by survivors of ex-gay therapy, which promises to be a very moving experience in and of itself. And Morgan’s documentary on the events of the summer of 2005, when a gay teen was dragged into ex-gay therapy against his will, and the world responded with outrage and action, will finally have it’s premiere. This Is What Love In Action Looks Like.
Here’s a short promotional video for the weekend events…
I plan to go, and I urge everyone who can to come to Memphis and participate. The ex-gay movement, funded and operated by right wing theocratic radicals for purely anti-gay political ends has done enormous damage over the years, to many innocent hearts, young and old. In his blog, Peterson writes…
As a Christian and lover of God, I know this to be true–God desires truth in the inmost part. We need each other. We need deep and meaningful relationships and that human touch—emotionally and physically. We need to depend on friends and lovers and loved one and have them depend on us to supply each other with the things only humans can give to each other.
As a Christian I recognize that this is how God set it up. Sure ultimately I know that God supplies all my needs, but just like God supplies my nutritional need through healthy veggies, legumes, fruits and grains, I receive God’s love through other people. God provides me so much of what I need from the emotional and physical intimacy I share with others.
In fact, in regards to these teachings, I see the ex-gay movement as an Ex-Human Movement. In some ways it mirrors what the modern world pushes on us, that we can make it all on our own, except instead of God, the modern world provides us with materialism.
No, we need each other, and when we don’t have our emotional and physical needs met, we mourn, we feel the loss and the pain of detachment, of emotional solitude.
I know that pain of loss and detachment intimately…for a somewhat different reason then the survivors, but nonetheless as part of the experience of gay people in America. It is hard in the best of worlds to find your other half, and make a life together. And in large measure my anger toward those who preach fear and self loathing to gay people, and unforgivably to our families, comes from knowing full well that I might have had a better chance to find my other half in this life, were it not for them. I might have been able to talk to my own parents when I was a teenager, struggling as teenagers do, with first love, and first heartbreak. I might have had a much closer relationship with them then I was allowed to have, because they just didn’t want to know, and the thought of telling them simply terrified me. I had to bottle up so much inside myself back then, and it damaged my relationship with them, and in particular with my mom. We have to bleed…gay children and parents alike…so the haters of humanity can be righteous.
If there is such a thing as Sin, capital ‘S’, in this world, then suffocating the ability to love, and trust in another, must surely be a big one. Our hearts are not blackboards that anyone can scribble their will upon. Our hopes and dreams of love are not their stepping stones to heaven. Please, if you can, come to Memphis and raise a voice for love. Show them what love in action looks like.
On her way to buy some orange juice, 26-year-old Pamela Brown, who started living as a woman three years ago, said she was viciously attacked because she is transgendered.
"I saw five guys blocking the storeway. They called me a [expletive deleted] and then I was hit. Then I was attacked by two more guys from the back and my fiance ran over," she said. "I probably could have been killed if I was by myself."
Brown is now recovering while in protective police custody.
Meanwhile, two young men have been arrested near the Old Town Mall in Baltimore where the beating occurred.
Police commented on the attack last week.
"More than likely it will be upgraded to a hate crime, simply because of the things that were being said," said Troy Harris, Baltimore City Police spokesperson.
But now the city state’s attorney’s office is not pursuing hate crime charges. Why?
A spokesperson says while there was provocative language, it is free speech and there’s no evidence of premeditation.
Dig it. If you’re gay or transgendered here in Baltimore, and someone walks up and beats the crap out of you while calling you a fucking faggot, that’s not a hate crime here in Baltimore, because the fact that they used sexual slurs while they were beating the crap out of you isn’t evidence of either hate or premeditation, merely one citizen’s opinion of another.
This actually isn’t the only kind of crime Baltimore city chronically under reports. And Baltimore probably isn’t alone in that regard either. But check out the link I have on the right to the Baltimore Crime blog every now and then to see just how infrequently the violent criminals around here actually get the attention they need. Between our police department, which as been known to threaten victims for reporting crimes, and Patricia Jessamy, our pathetic state’s attorney who drops charges more frequently then a blizzard drops snowflakes, a lot of stuff around just gets swept under the rug, or dropped somewhere they hope nobody will notice. Which is all to say that it isn’t necessarily prejudice that’s motivating Patricia to under report hate crimes against sexual minorities here in Baltimore. More likely then not it’s just standard operating procedure.
But now some of Baltimore’s black ministers are gearing up to wage Kultur Krieg on Maryland’s gay community over same sex marriage…so expect Patricia to be classifying more violent crimes against gay and transgendered people as freedom of speech in the coming months. Hopefully my family and friends won’t be seeing my name in that roll call.
So I resigned shortly after I wrote the post below about why I’d prefer a non-geek boyfriend, from Chemistry.Com. That’s the dating service that had that cute little commercial jabbing eHarmony for discriminating against gay folks. Their personality profile test seemed promising and I hoped I would get matches that I might actually be compatible with for a change this time. So I bought a six month subscription several months ago. Just last week they stopped sending me new matches. None of the guys I pinged, about a dozen or so over a period of several months, even bothered sending me back a "not interested". I can’t even be sure if they were even active members or not. Nine-tenths of the guys they matched me up with…weren’t even close. That’s pretty much been my experience with dating services…both online and off.
I don’t think I’m that picky. There’s a scene at the beginning of the movie Animal House, where the new freshmen Kroger and Dorfman make the rounds of fraternities during pledge week. First they go to Omega house where they’re greeted with a lot of paper thin smiles and repeatedly ushered into a small room with all the other pledge week rejects. And it’s not like they see anyone else sitting in there that they have anything in common with either. They’re all just the random flotsam of pledge week all thrown together in the category of Other…Not Suitable, all staring uncomfortably at each other. That’s how dating services make me feel.
Peterson Toscano has written about all the tens of thousands of dollars he once spent trying to cure himself of his homosexuality. Well I haven’t spent quite that much trying to find a boyfriend over the years, but it’s been in the thousands. I got pushed an ad the other day as I logged out of my MySpace account, for a new gay dating service called MyPartner. Supposedly it’s only for folks who are interested in long term relationships. Which makes them similar to…oh…nearly all the other dating services I’ve bought into over the years that promised me they were different from the others, and really, really, honestly were only for people who were really, really, honestly looking for relationships, as opposed to quick hooking up. The MyPartner basic service, they claim, is free. But if you are really, really serious about finding romance you can buy into one of their optional packages promising a higher level of service. The ad I saw flashed in my face recommended the five-thousand dollar "Executive Level" package. But for a whole ten grand I can get a program customized specifically for my particular needs.
So…dig it…today’s struggling awkward confused lonely homosexual can spend thousands of dollars in various ex-gay programs over a period of many years to no effect, or they can spend thousands of dollars in various gay dating services over a period of many years to no effect. Let it be said, The Gay Lifestyle™ gives you options. This is why all those surveys of gay people keep finding that we all have so much disposable income. You just can’t afford to be gay if you don’t.
Same-sex couples are just as committed in their romantic relationships as heterosexual couples, according to a report.
The finding disputes the stereotype that couples in same-sex relationships are not as committed as their heterosexual counterparts and therefore not as psychologically healthy.
The study examined whether committed same-sex couples differed from engaged and married opposite-sex couples in how well they interacted and how satisfied they were with their partners.
Researchers from the University of Illinois compared 30 committed gay male and 30 committed lesbian couples with 50 engaged heterosexual couples and 40 older married heterosexual couples, as well as with dating heterosexual couples.
Results of a questionnaire and a laboratory task showed that same-sex relationships were similar to those of opposite-sex couples in many ways.
All had positive views of their relationships but those in the more committed relationships (gay and straight) resolved conflict better than the heterosexual dating couples.
The notion that committed same-sex relationships are "atypical, psychologically immature, or malevolent contexts of development was not supported by our findings," said lead author Glenn I. Roisman.
"Compared with married individuals, committed gay males and lesbians were not less satisfied with their relationships."
And he added: "Gay males and lesbians in this study were generally not different from their committed heterosexual counterparts on how well they interacted with one another, although some evidence emerged the lesbian couples were especially effective at resolving conflict."
Yeah…male ego… But still. It’s possible. It can happen. To us too. That’s what they never wanted us to know…
The study features in the January issue of Developmental Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association.
MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — For many who lived through Vermont’s not-so-civil debate over civil unions, the memories remain painfully fresh: hate mail, threatening telephone messages, tense public meetings.
This time around, as the state weighs whether to legalize gay marriage, the debate is noticeably tamer with little of the vitriol and recrimination that surrounded its groundbreaking 2000 decision to legally recognize gay and lesbian couples.
…
Although that absence of an impending vote may be what’s keeping things civil, people involved in the debate have noticed a change in atmosphere.
"It’s a very different tenor," said Beth Robinson, chairwoman of the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force, which supports gay marriage. "People have had an opportunity to come to terms. Vermonters have had eight years to see the two guys next door, or the two women down the street who have a legally recognized relationship under the civil unions law."
Ah yes… Now that they’ve had a chance to see how it works for themselves, and that the sky didn’t fall when same sex couples were allowed to have the same rights as opposite sex couples…tensions have eased, and people are more use to the idea….
"It was a time unlike anything since the Vietnam War era, when you had the sense that the whole world around you was divided," said David Moats, author of "Civil Wars: A Battle For Gay Marriage," a book about Vermont’s civil unions controversy.
…
Last summer, the Legislature appointed an 11-member Vermont Commission on Family Recognition and Protection to explore the idea of gay marriage and hear how Vermonters feel about it. The panel, which opponents say is stacked with gay marriage supporters and have boycotted, has held seven hearings and has three more scheduled.
The hearings have generated plenty of input, but no name-calling or personal attacks.
James LaPierre, who has a civil union partner and two children, saw the contrast firsthand. He went to a 2000 meeting on civil unions intending to get up and speak, but he was intimidated by the atmosphere and kept quiet.
"People would stand up and go to the microphone and there was jeering and catcalling," said LaPierre, 43, a nurse from Burlington. "It was hateful, and scary."
Last month, LaPierre went to a hearing by the Commission on Family Recognition. This time, the gathering was "supportive" and he got up and spoke. But it had fewer people — about 100, by his count, compared with about 500 at the 2000 event.
"Instead of a hateful, unruly, mob-like meeting, it was civil and organized. There was representation of the other side, but only two or three people," he said.
Now…you see how that works? When people can see for themselves that gay folks aren’t monsters out to destroy America and Family Life and Moral Values things get a lot calmer.
Oh…wait…
Opponents believe the change in tone may have more to do with their boycott — and the lack of impending action — than acceptance of gay marriage.
There’s the reason things are more civil today in Vermont then they were in 2000. It’s the boycott. The bigots figured they were going to loose…probably even worse this time then in 2000 because their vitriolic hate looks so ugly in retrospect…and so they called a boycott of the town meetings. And so…surprise, surprise…things are a lot calmer now.
This isn’t so much an indication of progress, as a reminder that things would have been a lot calmer back then too, were it not for the hate mongers. Nobody’s really moved on this issue; the majority of Vermonters didn’t object to same sex marriage or they’d have thrown out of office all the politicians who supported it and that wasn’t what happened. Only the bigots care, and of course they still care as much now as they ever did. If you could teach a bigot something they wouldn’t be bigots. The only thing that’s changed in Vermont is that this time the bigots aren’t going to those town meetings to whip everyone into a frenzy of hate. So things are calmer. How…unsurprising.
In commemoration of the Black Cat raid of 1966, celebrate this New Year’s Eve with a radical act. Kiss him "on the mouth for three to five seconds."
You should immediately go read his entire post about a page of gay history I hadn’t known about…
It all began exactly forty years ago this New Year’s Eve, on Sunset Blvd., in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, in a small bar called the Black Cat. There were some sixty or seventy patrons gathered during those final moments of 1966, counting down the last few seconds to midnight. Couples gathered and stood next to each other, and as the countdown approached zero, they leaned into one other, and, amid the shouts of “Happy New Year!” and the opening strands of Auld Lang Syne, they did something all couples do all around the world.
They kissed.
And immediately at least six plainclothes officers who had infiltrated the gay bar began viciously beating and arresting the kissing offenders. As the melee widened, several people tried to escape to the nearby New Faces bar. Undercover officers followed and raided that bar as well. One of the New Faces workers was beaten so badly by police that they cracked a rib, fractured his skull and ruptured his spleen.
Six Black Cat kissers were tried and convicted of “lewd or dissolute conduct” in a public place, conduct that consisted of male couples hugging and kissing. According to one police report, one couple had “kissed on the mouth for three to five seconds.” Apparently, three to five seconds are what constituted “lewd or dissolute conduct” among the LAPD.
If I’ve heard bigots say once that they don’t care what we do "in our bedrooms" just don’t "flaunt it" in front of them, I’ve heard it a thousand times. And what is this "it" they’re so afraid of seeing? It isn’t that we’ll suddenly start having sex on the sidewalk in front of them. They’d care a lot less about us doing that even, then doing the one thing they simply don’t want to see, don’t want to know: that the objects of their hate are human after all. That we don’t simply rut, that homosexuality isn’t a lower form of lust, but that we are whole people, who not only desire, but love, and are loved.
If there is anything the bigots hate seeing us do more then holding the hand of the one we love, it’s kissing them affectionately, simply, lovingly. They’d hate us a lot less if all they ever saw in us was desire, because that would validate their ignorant barstool conceits that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. You want to really get them pissed off, make them see red, make the veins in their pasty foreheads start throbbing, let them see the slightest hint, the smallest sign, that you actually love your intimate other. Because that makes you fully human and that’s the last thing they want to know. What was the first thing the bigots started babbling about after the supreme court overturned the sodomy laws? Not that suddenly a lot of homosexuals would start having sex, but that acknowledging that we had a right to sexual intimacy, might lead to giving us the right to marriage too. Marriage was the First thing they started yapping about.
That says it all. That really nailed down what this fight is really about, what it was always about right from the beginning. It isn’t about sex. It has nothing to do with sex. It has everything to do with our human spirit. Homosexuals cannot have love, we must be denied it at every turn, every door to it must be slammed shut in our faces, it must be beaten out of us if necessary, because to allow us love, is to acknowledge that we are human beings, with human souls. And so long as we must play the roll of scapegoats for the moral failings of heterosexuals, that cannot be.
Burroway concludes with this, and I couldn’t agree more…
Forty years after the Black Cat raid, men still cannot be seen kissing each other, unless ratings are tanking during the final season or one of them dies.
And yet, what are two lovers supposed to do?
And when two lovers woo
They still say, “I love you.”
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by.
Go read the whole thing. And when the New Year rings in, if you’re lucky enough to have found your other half, or even just a happy partner for the moment, take them into your arms and kiss them…
Kiss him for all of those who were not allowed to kiss. Kiss him for those who were beaten and arrested for kissing, and for those who fought back to defend that kiss. Kiss him for those heroes who declared an end to the shame of kissing. Kiss him because now you can; because today your greatest freedom is in that kiss. Kiss him on the mouth. And for good measure, kiss him for much, much longer than three to five seconds. Kiss him hard and long, with a kiss of forty years and still counting.
From our Department Of Unsurprising Things… The judge who issued a restraining order preventing Oregon’s Civil Unions law from taking effect, was a Bush appointee whose nomination had stirred up some controversy due to his views on the status of gay people. Emphasis below are mine…
WASHINGTON—What once seemed like a slam-dunk nomination for the federal judiciary in Oregon could turn into a test of political wills for Oregon’s two senators, Republican Gordon Smith and Democrat Ron Wyden.
Michael Mosman, the U.S. attorney in Portland, is Smith’s choice for a vacant district judgeship and is still regarded as a favorite of the Bush White House. But recent revelations of Mosman’s views on gay rights, first expressed in 1986, have delayed his selection and what otherwise would likely be easy Senate confirmation.
…
Mosman, 46, emerged as the top candidate in January after Ray Baum, a lawyer for Smith’s family business, withdrew. But controversy erupted in March, when Basic Rights disclosed Mosman’s role in a pivotal 1986 case, Bowers V. Hardwick.
The group uncovered and presented to Smith two “bench memos” that Mosman had written as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. Mosman urged Powell to uphold Georgia’s anti-sodomy law against a claim that police invaded a man’s privacy by arresting him in his home.
Memos to court’s tie-breaker
Mosman prepared the memos in March and June 1986, as it became clear Powell would be the court’s tie-breaking vote. He wrote that striking down the Georgia law would lead to an unwarranted expansion of privacy rights under due process.
Such a ruling would leave “no limiting principle” against prosecution of other sex crimes such as prostitution, Mosman wrote. It also would jeopardize rights that society previously had reserved to heterosexuals.
“Without belaboring the point, I am convinced that the right of privacy as it relates to this case has been limited thus far to marriage and other family relationships,” Mosman wrote to Powell. “So limited, the right of privacy does not extend to protect ‘sexual freedom’ in the absence of fundamental values of family and procreation.”
Mosman has declined requests by The Oregonian to discuss the memos. But in a recent book about gay rights and the Supreme Court, Mosman is quoted as saying that his feelings about homosexuality were secondary to his concerns about the law.
“The battle was really about . . . what direction the court was taking on due process,” Mosman said in “Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court.
Mosman added: “The (sodomy) issue could have come to the court as an equal protection case and would have had a better hearing. I would have been more receptive to it.”
…which is not to say he’d have been in favor of overturning the sodomy laws anyway. After all…having sex is a right that society had reserved to heterosexuals.
For Smith, the nomination could become a test of his credibility as an advocate for gay rights within the Republican Party. Smith won an important endorsement from Human Rights Campaign after supporting hate-crimes legislation, helping his re-election last year.
In a recent interview, Smith downplayed the significance of the Powell memos and suggested that given the opportunity, Mosman could explain himself to the satisfaction of critics.
“This is a decision that was rendered in 1986,” Smith said. “Isn’t it possible that Mike Mosman could also have an evolving view on these issues? I think Mosman is an outstanding legal scholar and an extraordinary U.S. attorney for Oregon.”
But let’s not lay this debacle entirely at the feet of the ersatz "gay friendly" republican. I think we all know by now that there is no such animal. But wait…there was a democrat involved in this too…
The stakes could be higher for Wyden. Although his party controls neither the White House nor the Senate, Democrats are regarded as the chief defenders of gay rights. If Wyden endorses Mosman, his decision could be second-guessed by colleagues, including a handful of Democratic senators running for president in 2004.
Democrats have threatened to filibuster high-profile nominees, and they might be emboldened to take on others if they succeed, said Moore, the analyst. In that case, Mosman’s nomination also could be held hostage to political concerns.
“It depends on what happens with the other filibusters going on,” he said.
Wyden hopes to avoid a national controversy over the nomination, said Josh Kardon, his chief of staff. But first, the senator plans to meet with Mosman to discuss the concerns raised by Basic Rights and decide whether to support him.
“Mike Mosman is someone Senator Wyden has supported in the past and someone he would like to support for the federal bench,” Kardon said. “But legitimate questions have been raised that require thorough consideration.”
"President Bush made an excellent choice when he nominated Mike, and the Senate confirmed that decision with its unanimous vote," Smith said. "He has long served Oregon and the nation with distinction, and I have the utmost confidence that he will continue to do so on the District Court."
"I am honored to have this chance to serve," Mosman said. "I have been impressed throughout this whole process with the fair-mindedness of everyone involved. I am grateful to the president for nominating me, and to Senators Smith and Wyden for their confidence and support."
"Mike has worked hard to show his commitment to equal rights for all Americans," Wyden said. "I believe his sense of fairness and his long and outstanding experience as a prosecutor in our state will serve the District Court and Oregon well."
I’m leaving soon for a holiday road trip to warmer climes, and I have one last huge post to make before I go. Consider it my end of year sermon. It’s about morality and what got me wanting to write about it was a post I saw the other day on Jim Burroway’s Box Turtle Bulletin about John Corvino’s new DVD recording of his “What’s Morally Wrong With Homosexuality?”, lecture. I’ve seen an excerpt of that lecture before it was yanked from YouTube and it looks to be a good one. But there is more to the moral question then the one he’s asking.
There are three writers whose ideas influenced me greatly in my younger days. One respectable, and the other two not so much. The respectable one is Jacob Bronowski, a man whose work I still treasure. The two not so respectable are Robert Audrey and Ayn Rand, whose work I am sometimes embarrassed to admit reading. But I have to give them credit all the same for lighting a spark of understanding in me about human nature, society and morality at a point in my life when I needed it really badly.
I found Audrey’s book, African Genesis in a corner of a warehouse I once worked in, wrinkled and discarded, and reading the first page of it…
Not in innocence, and not in Asia was mankind born…
…I had to take the thing home where I promptly devoured it. From Audry I gleaned the idea that the forces that move within our consciousness are understandable, and manageable, but only if we seriously study our evolutionary past, the better to understand the bedrock upon which the human identity was formed over vast, almost unthinkable time. Not to do so would be akin to trying to build a bridge with no understanding of the nature of the materials you’re constructing it from. Likewise, to construct workable human societies, and moral codes that actually and really benefit us, we need to undertake an almost brutal, unromantic, understanding of ourselves and that means looking also, to the past which brought us forth…
We are not so unique as we would like to believe. And if man in a time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march.
At about the same time, from Rand I got the another completely radical notion: that morality is the one thing you absolutely have to question. I had heard all my life that the force, the authority, of a moral code comes from its absoluteness, and that to question traditional morality was to destroy it, leaving humanity with no guide, no moral compass, nothing to judge right from wrong. Rand, for all her faults, and she had many profound ones, showed me that in fact the exact opposite was true. If morality is a code of conduct we accept in order to guide us toward that which is good for us, and away from that which is not, then it must be, it has to be, constantly questioned and evaluated…judged…against that purpose.
Are we better off for abiding by this or that moral code…or are we worse off? Does a society that embraces this or that moral code prosper and thrive…do its people live in peace with one another…is their society stable…prosperous…peaceful…productive…? At best a morality that does none of this is irrelevant, at worst it actively diminishes our lives, degrades our existence. It is like teaching us to put poison in our food, and then telling us that our sickness is the result of not putting in enough poison. Our moral codes must be, have to be right, or they will destroy us. So as it turns out, morality is the one thing you absolutely positively cannot hold to be above questioning. It must withstand critical examination.
Ask the children of Marx and Lenin what happens to a society whose model of human nature, and the moral code flowing from it, is flawed. Ask the shades that walk nights at Gettysburg. Collectivism? White Supremacy? What is a human being? What is human nature? What is good for us? What is harmful? You have to get those questions right….or you could find yourself living in a nightmare. A nightmare made all the worse for your not really understanding why it’s happening to you.
Moral issues have preoccupied me for much of my life. I was raised in a very conservative Baptist household, with a strict sense of right and wrong always in the air. But there was serious conflict between the two sides of my family tree, and mom’s side, the Baptist side, was always telling me about how wicked dad’s side was, and warning me that I was likely to turn out just as badly as he did unless I embraced their teachings of biblical righteousness completely. I worried constantly over it when I was young. But I grew up to be a nature lover and science geek, and gradually felt myself pulled away from my church over its conception of God verses mine. I’d always loved the God I saw in nature, and never really felt comfortable with the God I read about in the bible, even while I was being constantly reassured that if I didn’t live by the bible I was doomed. By the time I entered my late teens, I’d left my church and had come finally to an honest understanding of my sexual orientation, and it seemed for a while that I was completely adrift in a world that science revealed to be so wonderful, so absolutely beautiful at a physical level, but which I could make almost no sense of at all at a moral one. Bronowski, Audrey and Rand gave me permission in those days to think about moral ideas objectively, in the same sense that I pondered the physical world around me as revealed by science, at a time in my life when I was beginning to despair that such a thing was even possible.
So…by the time I got my first computer back in the mid-1980s, and started debating gay rights issues online, I had already been giving the moral side of the issue a lot of thought. By the time I got my first Internet account, and was able to access the free-for-all then known as Usenet, I’d already been handing out a lot of fire and brimstone about morality, and gay rights…
Me, March 27, 1999, in yet another argument with a bigot, this one named Russ, on alt.politics.homosexuality…
R> My original statement, at which you took such great umbrage, was to
R> suggest that we ought not to have two different sets of moral standards.
R> It is apparent to me that if we say it is wrong for a person to have
R> sexual relations with another person of the same sex — *except* if they
R> are attracted to each other — then we are not saying anything very
R> rigorous at all, are we?
What’s not exactly rigorous here Russ is your attaching moral significance to gender in the first place. It’s a lot like your insistence
that marriage is between opposite genders…well…because it is. Real deep thinking there guy.
A homosexual relationship can be loving and devoted, or it can be greedy and manipulative…just as any heterosexual relationship can be. The moral question isn’t in the gender of the individuals, but the nature of their relationship to one another. Are they loving, kind, sympathetic? Do they trust, and are they trustworthy? Are they honest with each other, or is one partner, or both, deceptive and manipulative? There are your moral questions. The rest is detail
What’s morally wrong, is to lie to people, to use them selfishly for your own gratification and then discard them when you are through. That’s not only an attack on the person, but an attack on trust and honor…things we are all arguably put at risk, for their demise. Even worse, is to lie to someone who is in love with you. If there is a reason that the marriage vows mean something, it is because the breaking of them takes away from us all, things that societies can little do without. Love and devotion, trust and honor, compassion and sympathy.
The heterosexual who might have situational sex with a member of their own sex…simply for the sake of having a good time with another person who may actually be Gay and strongly drawn to them…is taking advantage of the Gay person’s nature, and their feelings. The word for that isn’t love, it’s greed. But the Gay couple that both desires and cherishes one another, is committing no crime, no sin. They are in fact cherishing the good within each other. It Is moral for two Gay, or bisexual people of the same sex, to have a sexual relationship, in a way it wouldn’t be if one or both parties were heterosexual. A same sex relationship between Gay or bisexual people, is inherently more honest, then one that is not between two Gay, or bisexual people.
Here’s the sick joke Russ: by pressuring Gay people into sexual relationships that are against their nature, you and your kind are encouraging deceptive, dishonest, sexual relationships…and you’re doing that in the name of morality. If anyone is taking the moral standards of the community into the gutter Russ, it’s you.
…one of many such confrontations I enjoyed from 1993 to about 2002 when the quality of the bigotry began to go way down, and I began to get tired of hearing the same goddamned crap rhetoric over and over and over again. But I can’t tell you how many times over a period of almost a decade, I would start arguing from a moral standpoint with a bigot who would smirkingly assure me that "you don’t want to go there"…that is, since obviously homosexuality is by definition immoral, I, a gay man, didn’t want to be dragging questions of morality into the argument. To which my reply was usually along the lines of "Oh yes I do." And when I did, I was never one for mincing words about it.
Because for all the bigots’ chanting about how they’re only acting out of the purest and most righteous of moral intentions, the fact is they are the ones who get cut up the most in a real argument over moral conduct…
October 24, 1998…
MJ> I wrote that people who saw that float, according to the network
MJ> report, were put in mind of the Shepherd murder. That’s what I wrote.
MJ> You might want to actually read it.
So might ‘others who judge’. Let’s let them. Here is just what you wrote, cut and pasted from
Message-ID: <36284435.14253044@news.pacbell.net>
"There was a parade nearby, about the time young Shepherd was being murdered, which featured a float on which a scarecrow was placed, with the placard or something which said – I’m gay. People didn’t appreciate it, in the parade. And it later suggested to them, in hindsight, the way in which Shepherd was left, by his killers."
"about the time young Shepherd was being murdered" "it later suggested to them, in hindsight" You were saying that the float could not have been a deliberate and obscene joke made at the expense of a brutal murder, because it happened While he was being killed, not after his body was discovered and the likeness seen by the two bikers who found him to a scarecrow was reported in the news. You said it was only in Hindsight that the people who saw the float made the connection. That could only have been categorically true if his body hadn’t yet been discovered. But the facts were that it had been discovered days before the parade. Like a holocaust revisionist, you rewrote the order of events, so you could make the following claim:
"In fact, what was done in that parade had nothing whatsoever to do with what some killers did, elsewhere."
According to local news reports people who saw it were shocked by it, knowing full well what it referred to. That didn’t happen ‘in hindsight’. What you did there, in plain sight of everyone here, was rewrite the chronology of events, in order to claim that no association with Matthew Shepard’s murder Could have been intended by the frat. And you did it so you could claim the fuss about it was all about ‘PC’, not the shocking obsenity of a college homecoming parade float that mocked the vicious kidnapping and torture of a Gay man only days previously.
Why do you bother? Because your reflex is to excuse hate, that’s why you bother. To cover it up. To deny it exists. The belly laugh here is that you’re accusing Us of not having self control, but the one thoroughly out of control and in the grip of a self destructive vice here is you, and here we can all see it clearly and sickeningly. Even when it’s obvious to everyone that you’re lying, you can’t stop yourself, you can’t help yourself. Your mortal enemy is that scarecrow of your own invention, ‘The Gay Activist’ and nothing can prevent you from striking at it…not Truth, not Decency, not Morality and Virtue, not Your Church, not any thought or impulse to preserve your honor and your name. If you have to ruin everything in you that makes you human, to get hand on the collar of ‘The Gay Activist’, and put your thumb in it’s eye, so be it.
But do we have to watch?
MJ> Gimme Catholicism . . any day.
Bless me Father for I have sinned…and sinned…and sinned…and sinned…and sinned…and sinned…and sinned…
It’s a great topic and one that’s rarely explored, which is a shame since the discussion of homosexuality as a moral mode of existence is every bit as vital today as it was when he started fifteen years ago…
Yes. It is. But there’s another side to this coin, and it’s one that needs tackling just as much. Here Burroway gives it a glancing blow…
But as Dr. Corvino points out, the Bible holds a lot of things to be immoral that we no longer condemn with such fervor (for example, divorce, or women speaking in churches or wearing slacks), and the Bible gives explicit approval — and even instruction — on some things that we today consider to be immorally outrageous. The best example of the latter comes from an equally unmistakable passage of Leviticus. This time it’s Leviticus 25:44-46:
Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.
The passage is as unmistakably clear as the first one. And if one were to take everything from the Bible in a consistently literal light, then there’s just no way around it: the buying and selling and inheriting of people as chattel slaves is not immoral; it is instead expressly permitted — with rules laid down for its proper execution. But there are very few Christians who are so consistent in their literalism that they would always “approve what the Bible approves and condemn what the Bible condemns” when it comes to slavery. Only Christian Reconstructionists and a few other theonomists are able to sustain this kind of consistency.
So why is it that some people are consistent with literalist interpretations of Scripture where homosexuality is concerned, but when the subject of slavery comes up it’s suddenly all about context, original language and cultural norms? Corvino suggests that we either have to commit ourselves to the idea the authors’s concerns and ours might be very different, and understanding that difference is vital to understanding the text.
Er…no. Let’s why don’t we, stare that inconsistency in the face and call it for what it is. And no…it’s not hypocrisy, any more then Paul Cameron’s using his data one way when it suits him, and another when it doesn’t is hypocrisy. The word we’re looking for here is Mendacity. How often, how many times, do we have to see this out of both sides of their mouths behavior in anti-gay demagogues before we’re allowed to call it what it is? They’re not citing the bible, they’re using it like a condom. Jesus isn’t their lord and savior, he’s their excuse, their scapegoat, nailed to a cross, dying every hour of every day for their cheapshit sins, so they won’t have to look them in the face, and from there to the horrific landscape of human suffering all around them, that has their name written on every heartbroken acre of it.
And never mind the two-faced way they proof text the bible. A walk through the open sewer most of them call a conscience ought to be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion that moral righteousness has anything whatsoever to do with the anti-gay agenda. Here’s the current darling of the religious right, Huckabee on homosexuality, from a 1992 questionnaire…
“I believe to try to legitimize that which is inherently illegitimate would be a disgraceful act of government…I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle.”
One issue likely to get attention is his handling of a sensitive family matter: allegations that one of his sons was involved in the hanging of a stray dog at a Boy Scout camp in 1998. The incident led to the dismissal of David Huckabee, then 17, from his job as a counselor at Camp Pioneer in Hatfield, Ark. It also prompted the local prosecuting attorney— bombarded with complaints generated by a national animal-rights group—to write a letter to the Arkansas state police seeking help investigating whether David and another teenager had violated state animal-cruelty laws. The state police never granted the request, and no charges were ever filed. But John Bailey, then the director of Arkansas’s state police, tells NEWSWEEK that Governor Huckabee’s chief of staff and personal lawyer both leaned on him to write a letter officially denying the local prosecutor’s request. Bailey, a career officer who had been appointed chief by Huckabee’s Democratic predecessor, said he viewed the lawyer’s intervention as improper and terminated the conversation. Seven months later, he was called into Huckabee’s office and fired. "I’ve lost confidence in your ability to do your job," Bailey says Huckabee told him. One reason Huckabee cited was "I couldn’t get you to help me with my son when I had that problem," according to Bailey. "Without question, [Huckabee] was making a conscious attempt to keep the state police from investigating his son," says I. C. Smith, the former FBI chief in Little Rock, who worked closely with Bailey and called him a "courageous" and "very solid" professional.
And then there’s Huckabee’s pardoning of convicted serial rapist and murderer Wayne Dumond, after the republican noise machine spun the tale that since one of his victims was a distant relative of Bill Clinton,
Dumond had been falsely accused. Gene Lyons has the rest of the squalid story of Huckabee’s moral righteousness…
Dumond became a right-wing cause celebre. Guy Reel wrote a book entitled “Unequal Justice,” parroting the same bogus claims. Most significantly, Jay Cole, a Fayetteville, Ark., Baptist pastor and pal of Huckabee’s bought into the delusion.
No sooner had Huckabee become governor after Kenneth Starr’s conviction of his Democratic predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, than he began talking about commuting the presumptively innocent Dumond’s sentence. He clearly expected to be congratulated. Instead, prosecutor Fletcher Long erupted. How could the governor even think of doing that without reading the trial transcript?
Abandoning her anonymity, Ashley Stevens invaded Huckabee’s personal space: “This is how close I was to Wayne Dumond,” she said. “I will never forget his face. And now I don’t want you ever to forget my face.” Previous victims wrote agonized letters begging Huckabee to desist.
Today, Huckabee alibis that nobody could have predicted Dumond’s Missouri crimes. Many people did. Even this column warned that: “Rape’s not a crime of passion; it’s a crime of rage. Violent sex offenders, innumerable case studies show, keep at it until something stops them. If Huckabee doesn’t understand that, he’s got no business getting involved.”
Instead of backing off, Huckabee got tricky. He held an improper closed-door meeting with the parole board, several of whom say they’d felt pressured. Last week, Huckabee’s then-chief counsel, Olan “Butch” Reeves, basically seconded their claims. After the board voted to parole Dumond to Missouri, Huckabee wrote a “Dear Wayne” letter stressing “my desire … that you be released from prison” — the proverbial smoking gun he can’t now rationalize or whine away.
Angry Missouri cops say Dumond’s victims’ severed bra straps were like a calling card. They found his DNA under their fingernails. Huckabee’s latest book claims that Dumond died in prison before coming to trial. In fact, he was convicted of murdering Carol Sue Shields on Nov. 12, 2003.
It should make anyone with a shred of decency left alive within them want to vomit every time one of these gutter crawling creeps starts mouthing off about morality. Over and over again you see it…the rote declarations of faith, followed by the cheapshit lying, the bellicose digging in of heels rather when their own pathetic failures of moral character are pointed out, and more and more lately, the squalid details of their own personal lives rushing out like an overflowing sewer. Why do they single out homosexuals? Because they need someone to point their fingers at, someone to take the spotlight away from their own failed inner character, someone to distract everyone else from the stench of their own rotten conscience, someone to die for their sins, so they won’t have to take responsibility for the mess they’ve made of their own lives, and everyone else’s within arm’s reach. We have to bleed, so they can be righteous.
It’s good to see attention being given to the moral issue at the heart of the gay rights struggle. But the morality of homosexuality is only one part of that. The morality of those who would keep us second class citizens, outcast and vulnerable, is another. They are taking what should be one of this life’s most perfect joys, that of finding that intimate other, falling in love, body and soul with them, and making a life together, and they are twisting a knife in it, so that they can feel righteous. There is nothing moral about that. If that’s not sin, then the word has no meaning.
The argument I frequently hear is that, well, hurtful as their behavior is toward us, they do it in good faith. No. The ones who cut us through simple, mistaken ignorance don’t make a big issue out of it. They’re not on a crusade. Maybe they don’t have a gay family member, or at any rate one that’s out to them. Maybe they haven’t had the opportunity for their comfortable moral stereotypes about homosexuality to be challenged. We all have some crap in our heads, some ignorant or foolish beliefs that in retrospect make you wonder what you were ever thinking to believe such a thing. The honest person, the moral person, when confronted by a falsehood, by something patently wrong, accepts that they were wrong and acts accordingly. It’s not about being an uptight self righteous prick either. As H.L. Mencken once said, "The most expensive thing on this earth is to believe in something that is palpably not true." You don’t embrace reality to put yourself up on a pedestal, you do it because you don’t want reality to smack you upside the head. But that’s what morality is for!
No. The crusaders are Not acting in good faith, and their crusade is as immoral as they come, and it’s long since time that they got that fact pointed out to them by people who are willing to stand up to their plastic self-serving self righteousness and call it for what it is. A lie. A cheat. A fraud. They deliberately, willfully, hurt innocent people not out of any sense of doing good, but in order to polish their own shit stained vanity. It is obscene, positively obscene, how long decent, good-hearted gay and lesbian people have been cowed by moral runts who have been doing nothing more righteous then putting a knife into their hearts as a way of buying their own self-respect. We are not the ones who have to be afraid of arguments over the morality of our conduct. They are.
Morality, the hard work of learning the difference between right and wrong across the ages, is a powerful force in the human story. It is a tool that guides us to the good, and away from the bad. It is a tool that our enemies renounced long ago because it does not validate their conceits, their evasions, their bigotries. And every time they open their mouths with lies about us that they know damn well are lies, they tell us so. It is long past time to look that fact squarely in the face and acknowledge it. At some point in their lives, reality collided with their prejudices and instead of doing the moral thing, they sold out. And now morality turns on them, like one of those weapons in fantasy novels, possessed by the spirits of the old warriors who once bore it. Mike Huckabee. Larry Craig. Ted Haggard. David Vitter. And all the other right wing moralists who have been caught frolicking in the gutter recently. The more they yap, yap, yap about morality, the more you see how far away from it they’re running.
We don’t have to run from it. There is nothing wrong with us. There was never anything wrong with us. We have been taught for so long, for so very, very long, to hate ourselves, to be ashamed, so that a bunch of moral runts would have someone else to point their fingers at, someone else to bear the burden of shame that they’ve been evading all their lives. You can’t buy a decent, honest, moral life second hand. You can’t beg, borrow or steal it from your neighbor. Our hearts are not their stepping stones to heaven. Our enemies threw morality away, because they couldn’t get it cheap. Pick it up. You can afford it more then you know. The love of same sex lovers, our moments spent in simple straightforward, honest human desire and affection, are genuine and real and righteous and noble and beautiful, and that is why they hate us. Every time you take your lover’s hand and offer them nothing more or less then what you have, what you are, the best within you, what our enemies see in that is everything they could have had in their own lives, and every noble thing they could have become, that they are not, and that is why they hate us. Every time you smile into your lover’s eyes, rather then turn away in shame, you win the moral argument.
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