Massachusetts lawmakers on Thursday took less than a half hour to kill bid to amend constitution to ban gay marriage.
Because the marriage amendment was citizen-based it required only 50 votes. The final vote was 151 – 45. That means the issue cannot be put to voters in 2008, and will force supporters of the measure to begin collecting signatures all over again.
If proponents of the amendment do gain the signatures needed the measure would again have to go to two consecutive sessions of the legislature.
The earliest it could be put to voters would be 2012. With public opinion polls showing Massachusetts voters becoming increasingly comfortable with same-sex marriage it is considered unlikely any amendment would be approved.
Going into today’s joint session of the legislature it was anyone’s guess how the vote would go…
I was so deathly worried about this. They only needed 50 votes to get it out there. And I could easily see it passing with a simple majority vote, even if a majority of voters weren’t in favor of turning back the clock. The haters are enthusiastic in their hate. Support for our rights is often in word only. It could have happened. Massachusetts could have cut off our ring fingers, even if a majority of its people weren’t really all that interested in cutting off our ring fingers. All they needed was fifty votes out of two-hundred. But in the end, they could not manage even that.
It was because they’d had a chance to see people, to see loving, devoted couples, apart from the scarecrows that the haters have been waving at them for decades now, that this happened. Because of that, I think many of them simply could not in good conscience remove the rings from our fingers after all, despite what the haters were screaming at them. Thank the courts for that. Somewhere, whether it was in Massachusetts or another state, same sex marriage had to be ushered in by the courts. Because until people could see for themselves the substance of our lives and our hearts, and our devotion to our mates, all they would know about us, was what the haters keep on screaming at them. The wall of prejudice had to be broken by the courts somewhere, because the statehouses simply do not stray very far from the prejudices of their voters.
But now that it’s been broken, and especially now that same sex marriage has been defended by such a significant majority in one American statehouse, I would expect to see other statehouses follow. Perhaps not this year or the next. But soon. We are finally on the threshold of our dream of equality. In one birthplace of the American revolution, the revolution still lives after all.
I feel so good right now. Better then I thought I’d ever feel about my country again after six years of George Bush. Man…I am gonna have me some fireworks for This 4th…
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.
This is one of his essays, reposted in the comments section on Kos. Here he is on what looks like a riff about the meaning of liberalism, but it’s really about swinging back when the gutter takes a swing at you. Steve had no patients for liberals and democrats who wouldn’t stand up proudly for themselves and their political and moral values, and who by default, allowed the right wing smears against their party and its history to go unchallenged in the name of not sinking down to their level. Steve understood that you just can’t allow a single solitary right wing lie to go unchallenged because before you know it, that lie will take on a life of its own. As many have.
This is so typical of him, and why he will be much missed.
You know, I’ve studied history, I’ve read about America and you know something, if it weren’t for liberals, we’d be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren’t fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.
What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn’t given us anything we didn’t have and it wants to take away our freedoms.
The Founding Fathers, as flawed as they were, slaveowners and pornographers, smugglers and terrorists, understood one thing, a man’s path to God needed no help from the state. Is the religion of these conservatives so fragile that they need the state to prop it up, to tell us how to pray and think? Is that what they stand for? Is that their America?
Conservatism plays on fear and thrives on lies and dishonesty. I grew up with honest, decent conservatives and those people have been replaced by the party of greed. It is one thing to want less government interference and smaller, fiscally responsible government. It is another thing entirely to be a corporate whore, selling out to the highest bidder because the CEO fattens your campaign chest. They are building an America which cannot be sustained. One based on the benefit of the few at the cost of the many. The indifferent boss who hires too few people and works them to death or until they break down sick. Cheap labor capitalism has replaced common sense. "Globalism" which is really guise for exploitation, replaced fair trade, which is nothing like fair for the trapped semi-slaves of the maquliadoras. In the Texas border towns, hundreds of these women have been used as sex slaves and then apparently killed,the FBI powerless to do anything as the criminals sit in Mexico untouched by law.
For the better part of a decade, the conservatives made liberal a dirty word. Well, it isn’t. It represents the best and most noble nature of what America stands for: equitable government services, old age pensions, health care, education, fair trials and humane imprisonment. It is the heart and soul of what made American different and better than other countries. Not only an escape from oppression, but the opportunity to thrive in land free of tradition and the repression that can bring. We offered a democracy which didn’t enshrine the rich and made them feel they had an obligation to their workers.
Bush and the people around him disdain that. They think, by accident of birth and circumstance, they were meant to rule the world and those who did not agree would suffer.
Liberal does not and has not meant weak until the conservatives said it did. Was Martin Luther King weak? Bobby Kennedy? Gene McCarthy? It was the liberals who remade this country and ended legal segregation and legal sexism. Not the conservatives, who wanted to hold on to the old ways.
It’s time to regain the sprit of FDR and Truman and the people around them. People who believed in the public good over private gain. It is time to stop apologizing for being a liberal and be proud to fight for your beliefs. No more shying away or being defined by other people. Liberals believe in a strong defense and punishment for crime. But not preemption and pointless jail sentences. We believe no American should be turned away from a hospital because they are too poor or lack a proper legal defense. We believe that people should make enough from one job to live on, to spend time on raising their family. We believe that individuals and not the state should dictate who gets married and why. The best way to defend marriage is to expand, not restrict it.
It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.
Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi sattlelite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America’s defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.
It is time to stop looking for an accomodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?
We’ve lost a fighter. Steve Gilliard was someone I admired immensely and read daily, and when he fell ill this time, and I read about the difficulty he was having in the hospital, I was afraid it would come to this. I am going to miss his passionate, angry, righteous voice more then I want to think about right now.
He began as a frequent commenter on Daily Kos…
When reporters ask me when I first started thinking Daily Kos would become something more important, I tell them about the Dean campaign, or about the traffic explosion during the run-up and start of the Iraq War.
But that’s pretty much bullshit. Because the reality is much more mundane, much less sexy —
It was the arrival on the site’s comment boards of two people — Meteor Blades and Steve Gilliard.
They were a real revelation to me — I couldn’t believe that people like them, so brilliant, so insightful, so talented, would spend time at my little corner of the world. They inspired me to keep writing, keep building this place. Because if nothing else, I needed to make sure they had a platform upon which to speak.
So they ended up being two of the first contributing editors on Daily Kos. Steve, in fact, was the first person I ever approached with the "guest blogger" offer. And he didn’t waste time getting started, drawing on history of the region and the British occupation of Iraq in the late 1910s to set the stage for what the US would soon face in Iraq. He was frighteningly prescient on Iraq, and it wasn’t the only topic he would consistently nail. He was a credit to the progressive blogosphere.
Steve was a big personality, and it was clear he needed his own stage. And he got it with the News Blog, which he soon built into a full-time gig, still a rarity among bloggers. It was one of three sites I religiously checked more than three times a day.
If you knew Steve only from his blog, you’d think he was a pit bull. He was blunt, loud, aggressive, unafraid, and took no prisoners.
But you’d meet him in life, and he was the exact opposite. He was soft-spoken, shy, modest, calm, friendly, and — this was the most surprising to me — gentle.
I never would’ve gotten that from his writings. But that’s what he was.
I’d known Steve five years — just about my entire blogging existence. I don’t know of a blogging life without him. He has been a friend, a confidant, a sounding board, a reality check, a loyal ally, a mentor. He was family.
And while that all came to an end Saturday morning, I’m still not ready to let it go.
We were blessed to have Steve as long we did. But I’m selfish. I wanted much, much more.
I went a couple of rounds with Steve a few years back, mostly ribbing during one of the earlier rounds of blogger wars (the "pie fight" drama). More often than not though, over the last two years, we agreed on quite a bit, including our disdain for the religious right and the outlandish transparent efforts by the GOP to promote the candidacies of sell-out, fundie kissing house negroes like Ken Blackwell as proof of the party’s "outreach" to the black community.
We corresponded every once in a while, mostly of the "can you believe this sh*t?" nature regarding the above. Steve enthusiastically came to my defense back in February when The Peter and CWA launched their email disinformation campaign to discredit me (and attempt jeopardize my day job) by calling me "anti-Christian." Steve emailed and said:
You need to call these people out as racists and homophobes.
They think you’re going to care what they think. Tell them that you don’t need a bunch of racists lecturing you on the black church or anything else. That their rampant homophobia also disqualifies them. And then add in that they have no respect for lesbians or blacks anyway, besides hiring tokens.
As far as anti-Christian, unless you grew up in a far different family than mine, you know about the church and the one you grew up in was not filled with hateful screeds like this.
Steve was a fighter. He knew that when the gutter takes a swing at you, you have to swing back, and hard and keep on swinging until they crawl back to wherever they came from. None of this, faux civility crap when it came to dealing with the gutter. Steve told it like it was, said it like it needed to be said, and never, Never conceded so much as an inch of the moral high ground to posturing republican thugs. He knew his history…God how he knew his history…and he could relate the past to the present with breathtaking precision and insight. Kos is right about how prescient he was on Iraq. He saw with clarity how the imperialist impulse, and that relentless blindness to the lives and humanity of non-westerners, the arrogance and conceit of white superiority, still lives on and moves the hard right. He understood it. He understood how it informs the history we are living today. And he never shrank from calling it for what it was, just as he never thought twice about calling out democratic party sell-outs, or those black leaders and ministers who think they can make a deal with the right for their own personal glory. He always called it for what it was, no matter how impolitic.
We need more like him nowadays, not less. And now he’s gone. Damn. Damn!
You were an honest, righteous, decent voice. You fought the good fight. You’re going to be missed. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to bear taking your link down.
Sometimes, It’s The Things That Surprise Them That Are The Most Telling
Andrew Sullivan apparently missed out on a wee little bit of gay American history, as he had to go look it up…
The same people who have been telling me for years that Jerry Falwell is an anachronistic irrelevance are now singing his praises as a pivotal figure in American politics and culture. Presumably that’s why all the Republican candidates had to bow the knee at the moment of his passing. Dean Barnett recommends this reminiscence by Al Mohler. Money quote:
As a 16-year-old boy, I was in the crowd at the convention center in Miami Beach when Dr. Falwell joined singer Anita Bryant in holding a rally to involve Christians in the struggle against a gay rights ordinance adopted by Dade County. I had never heard of Jerry Falwell until that night – and after that experience I would never forget him.
Er…Wiki?? I don’t think there’s a gay American who was past puberty and self aware at the time who would fucking need to look thAT one up. Yes, Andrew, that was the Dade County non-discrimination ordinance she waged an all-out war on. Yes, all it did was protect us from being fired, simply for being gay. And yes, she based a large portion of her campaign on calling gay people pedophiles. She fucking named her campaign Save Our Children after all, didn’t she.
And that rally that Albert "Let’s Exterminate Homosexuality In The Womb" Mohler says he’ll never forget? I suppose there are a lot of people who won’t forget it. I saw some of the news footage of Falwell and Bryant standing together at the podium. I remember vividly Falwell looking solemnly at the gathered reporters and saying "A homosexual will kill you, as soon as look at you."
Just a few years after Falwell and Bryant were standing together at the podium with Falwell telling everyone what a bunch of blood thirsty killers gay people are, Ronald Reagan was courting him in his presidential campaign. The elephant has made gay bashing one of its primary vote getting tools ever since. I guess if you’d actually lived through that part of our history Andrew, you’d know why so many of us feel nothing but contempt for the republican party. Lame and cowardly as the democrats often are, they’re haven’t been busily inciting fear and hate toward us for the past few decades, simply to win elections. How many gay people have died Andrew, because of the climate of hate the republicans have actively stoked in this country? How many gay kids sent off to ex-gay camps? How many kids growing being hated by their peers, growing up hating themselves?
Yes…it’s the party of torture now, isn’t it? But you had to know this day was coming Andrew, when they threw innocent lovers to the wolves back in the 1980s, because it won them elections. Lovers, Andrew. Not terrorists. Not murderers. Not jihadists. Lovers. Because it won them elections. A race to the bottom is always won by the people who are already there.
I’ve told this story before, but those of you who’ve heard it will just have to bear up. In the 1992 election when I was making volunteer calls for Clinton, Mary Matalin made a major gaffe she had to apologize for quite publicly. (Doesn’t matter what it was.) I was riding down in the elevator with a high level political consultant (who didn’t know me from Adam, of course) and I smugly mentioned that Matalin had really stepped in it. He looked at me like I was a moron and said, "she got it out there, didn’t she?"
There is a naucent movement happening out in the gay blog world, to hold anti-gay groups like Focus On The Family and their Ex-Gay puppet organizations like Exodus and Love In Action accountable for the use of hate propaganda in their materials, and in their rhetoric. Specifically, their use and promulgation of the anti-gay junk science of Paul Cameron.
Cameron’s bogus factoids, like the greatly shortened life span of gay males, have become so thoroughly embedded in the political discourse that you almost cannot have a discussion about homosexuality in America, without that discussion stumbling over one of his filthy lies about homosexuals and homosexuality. But if Paul Cameron is the source of the lies, it’s been people like James Dobson, William Bennett, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other right wing luminaries who have worked diligently to give them life.
As Cameron has gained greater notoriety, and his deceptive practices given more exposure, the routine for anti-gay groups now is to either use his data second-hand, or without direct attribution. When confronted with unmistakable evidence that they’re citing something of his, the pattern is to first say that Cameron isn’t the only person saying it. When backed into a corner with proof that, in fact, Cameron is the one and only source of the data, they sometimes simply take down the cite, and claim it was just an honest mistake. But They Got It Out There.
It’s time we get something of our own out there…something that, unlike Paul Cameron’s junk science, is actually true. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified Paul Cameron’s group as an active hate group, ranking it right up there with the Ku Klux Klan and various white supremacy groups that actively spread fear and hate toward minorities. They based their findings on a careful study of the whole of his work and career and it is not hyperbole to compare his attitude toward homosexuals with that of the Nazis (Mike Godwin take note), because, as Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin shows us, that comparison actually comes from Cameron himself…
In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report saying, “[Paul] Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany in that these disparaging descriptions of homosexuals are reminiscent of themes found in the ugly history of anti-Semitism…” It turns out that the SPLC didn’t know half the story.
You need to go read Burroway’s article, Paul Cameron’s World. It is a careful gathering together of Cameron’s pronouncements on homosexuality, and his March 1999 report, Gays In Nazi Germany, into one very dark and grim whole, where his thinking, and his approval of the Nazi solution to homosexuality, becomes clear and unmistakable for what it is.
Burroway begins by underlining, using Cameron’s own papers and statements, just what it is he believes about homosexuals, and homosexuality. Unlike even many anti gay groups nowadays, Cameron categorically rejects the idea that there is any biological component to homosexuality at all. It is a choice, he insists, and a corrupting one both to the individual and to society. Therefore, it must be contained. And to do that, it must be not only criminalized, homosexuals must be driven from public life, and kept under quarantine. Homosexuals operate in secret societies, according to Cameron, surreptitiously placing themselves in positions of power or areas where they can recruit new homosexuals to their ranks. Homosexuals according to Cameron, are parasites on society, draining it of resources, and contributing nothing in return.
And it doesn’t necessarily end with quarantining homosexuals. In Cameron’s world, extermination is worth considering too. Yes…you read that right…
And how can we forget this, which Mark Peitrzyk reported in 1995?:
At the 1985 Conservative Political Action Conference, Cameron announced to the attendees, “Unless we get medically lucky, in three or four years, one of the options discussed will be the extermination of homosexuals.” According to an interview with former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, Cameron was recommending the extermination option as early as 1983.
A year later, when Paul Harkavy asked Cameron whether he endorsed extermination, Cameron replied, “That’s not true. All I said was a plausible idea would be extermination. Other cultures have done it. That’s hardly an endorsement, per se.”
But where on earth does he get the idea that extermination would ever be “a plausible idea”? In all of Anglo-American history, I can find no precedent whatsoever for extermination for medical reasons. He says “other cultures have done it,” but we know there is only one other western culture to have sunk to such depths of criminal depravity. Nazi Germany provides the only precedent for such an idea in all of Western Civilization — the very same example that Cameron upheld in 1999 to lend credence to his theories.
Emphasis mine. Burroway makes a clear and utterly matter-of-fact connection between Cameron’s beliefs regarding homosexuality, and his 1999 article where he cites the Nazi persecution of homosexuals as evidence that he is correct.
And remember too, that Cameron proposed that everyone who was HIV-positive should be tattooed — just as everyone who entered Höss’ concentration camps were made to bear the indelible marks of their “undesirable” status.
But now it all seems to come together, doesn’t it? Cameron’s description of Höss’ accounts casts a dark shadow on his own fascination with exterminations, quarantines, tattoos and capital punishment. And yes, while his recommendation for recriminalizing sodomy omitted capital punishment (just as Germany’s Paragraph 175 did), he nevertheless invokes it twice in his manifesto alone. First, there’s this:
An excellent — but by no means isolated — example of the long-term decline is provided by the District of Columbia. When the District was established in 1790, sodomy was a capital crime. Today, homosexuals have more legal rights in D.C. than non-homosexuals.
And again later:
It took 300 years for the Christian paradigm to triumph and express itself in social policy. A law punishing homosexual activity with death appeared in A.D. 342. About 50 years later, the emperors Valentinian II, Theodosious, and Arcadius decreed that “All persons who have the shameful custom of condemning a man’s body, acting the part of a woman’s… shall expiate this sort of crime in avenging flames.” …
… But over time, the Christian truths about God’s hatred of homosexual activity, Sodom and Gomorrah, etc., diminished in the law. As well, punishments for same-sex activity declined in severity — from death to imprisonment to fines.
Burroway has followed this article up with the beginnings of a list of organizations that use Paul Cameron’s data in their anti-gay political campaigns. This follows in the footsteps of work that Ex-Gay Watch has done in the recent past, castigating Ex-Gay groups like Exodus for their use of Cameron’s junk science. It’s time to call all these groups to account for their spreading the lies of this one man, for embedding them so deeply in the political discourse.
To repeat: The Southern Poverty Law Center put Paul Cameron’s group in the same league as the Ku Klux Klan, Neo Nazis, and other active hate groups in America. It’s time, it’s long past time, to call citing Paul Cameron for what it is: pure and unadulterated hate mongering, no different from burning crosses, and painting swastikas on people’s houses. If groups like Focus on the Family, NARTH, Evergreen, The Family Research Council, The American Family Association, Renew America, and others who use Paul Cameron’s data in their political campaigns against gay equality, want to keep on using it, then they need to know they are doing nothing more noble then burning crosses, and painting swastikas. In Paul Cameron’s own words, the Nazis had it right when it came to homosexuality. In Paul Cameron’s own words, the extermination of gay people is a "plausible idea."
When the SPLC said, “Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany,” I dismissed that statement as mere hyperbole even though I found the rest of the report informative. Whenever anyone is compared to Nazism, they all too often wind up diminishing the horrors of what really happened there. The truth is, there was only one Hitler, and there was only one Holocaust. The world looked Evil in the eye during those darkest of hours, and history since then has rendered its just judgment on that unimaginable scourge. So whenever someone invokes Hitler or the Nazis while expressing their outrage over something, it’s usually a good indication that they’ve run out of ideas for their argument.
But what I didn’t know then (and apparently neither did the SPLC, since they didn’t mention Cameron’s newsletter article), was that Cameron himself drew a direct line between his own theories and those of Nazi Germany. I didn’t do it, and neither did the SPLC. These are Cameron’s own theories, expressed in his own words and backed by examples of his own choosing.
Cameron is neither a Hitler, Himmler nor Höss. He’s not even close. He is his own man, and he bears his own unique responsibility for the vile agenda he proposes for our nation.
But that responsibility doesn’t rest with him alone. If no one else were to spread his messages or cite his “research,” he’d quickly disappear into the fog of irrelevance. But that hasn’t happened. He continues to be quoted by anti-gay activists and the conservative press. His reputation is built on the fact that others find his bogus statistics useful to feed their anti-gay animus.
No more excuses. Citing Paul Cameron is like burning a cross. It’s time for the religious right, for the virtuous warriors for Christ, for the noble crusaders for morality and virtue, to decide to either wear the hood proudly, or denounce it. They get it out there, they own it. No more excuses.
Yes, the republicans are horrible on the issue of GLBT equality. Absolutely horrible. I’ve been a yellow dog democrat ever since Connie Morella voted for the Defense Of Marriage Act. Morella, a so-called moderate republican, absolutely did not have to cast that vote to hold onto her seat…if anything casting it helped lead to her eventually being turned out of office. To add insult to injury she said, when questioned about it she averred that the entire same sex marriage issue was too much. She said it was like the world being turned upside down. I wanted to scream in her face, "Lady, spend a few days in Sharon Bottom’s shoes…and you’ll know what a world turned upside down looks like!!!"
But having said all that, we need to remember that not all democrats can be trusted either. Some of them will look us right in the eye, and lie through their teeth. One blogger asks our forgiveness, for supporting one of them…but I don’t think he has anything to apologize for…
Blue America doesn’t ask much of our prospective endorsees. On GLBT issues, for example, we don’t ask them to promise to support a gay marriage bill; we just ask them if they will fight for gay equality, even if they have to exhibit some leadership in a tough environment. If they can’t do that, we may still root for them to beat a much worse Republican, but we don’t raise money for them. We expect the candidates we endorse and raise money for to support a woman’s right to choice, to support serious campaign finance reform, to favor serious proposals to end the occupation of Iraq, to support gay equality– and, like I said, to be willing to exercise leadership on difficult issues. I mean, sure, we want candidates who are for the minimum wage and who oppose the dismantling of Social Security, but those should be the easy issues for Democrats.
Fair enough. But the word of some politicians isn’t even worth the hot air it took them to speak it…
We don’t expect the men and women we support to necessarily support the same position we do on every single vote. But even in the short time Carney has been in Congress, he has moved further and further away from all the other Blue America endorsees who won seats. In terms of supporting progressive issues in general, he has established himself at the bottom of the barrel among the freshmen, along with candidates we chose not to endorse, like Jason Altmire (PA), Rahm Emanuel’s Heath Shuler (NC), Nick Lampson (TX) and Brad Ellsworth (IN). Some of us were disappointed but none of the writers at DownWithTyranny, Firedoglake or Crooks & Liars chose to castigate Carney. And then something happened that has made us decide to speak up. We realized Chris Carney lied to us. When he wanted our support he told us he favors equality for the GLBT community, something he also made clear to the folks at Project Vote Smart, when he checked the little box that indicates he would like to "Require that crimes based on gender, sexual orientation, and disability be prosecuted as federal hate crimes."
So weren’t we in for a surprise a few days ago when Congressman Carney joined 13 of the most die-hard reactionary Democrats in the House– near-Republicans who almost always support a reactionary social agenda– to vote against the Hate Crimes bill. The bill passed 237-180 and all but 14 Democrats supported… well, supported exactly what Carney promised in his campaign he would support, "that crimes based on gender, sexual orientation, and disability be prosecuted as federal hate crimes." I felt betrayed– like I had been kicked in the stomach. Based on my research and interview with candidate Carney, Blue America had endorsed him and hundreds of our members had donated effort and money to his campaign. Some of these donors are members of the GLBT community and others have friends and family who are part of that community and others just like to think that the candidates they contribute to will support equality as a core value. Chris Carney let us down, violently.
I requested an opportunity to speak with him and went back and forth with his office a few times until they finally sent me this e-mail:
Hi Howie, I have a short statement for you that I hope will be sufficient. This statement has been issued exclusively to you. Please let me know that you received it. Thanks.
Congressman Carney has not wavered from his original position of equality. Treating people the same is one of his core values, creating separate constitutional classes detracts from that goal. This was overarching legislation that created too many classes of people, and Congressman Carney could not support it.
This was a difficult decision and some of our supporters will disagree. As always, Congressman Carney voted with what he saw to be the best interests of Pennsylvania’s 10th District.
I explained that sending me the Republican Party talking points — which have long and routinely been used by the party of hatred and bigotry to try to please their rabidly homophobic base while covering their asses is not satisfactory.
Tough shit…he’s in office now. To get him out you’re probably going to have to allow a republican to take the seat back unless you want to put up a scorched earth fight during the primary.
But at least we know. Chris Carney (PA-10). Remember this man. He will look you right in the eye, and lie through his teeth.
Legalizing gay marriage would "only strengthen New York’s families," according to Governor Spitzer, who laid forth his most detailed argument in favor of recognizing same-sex relationships in a legislative memo.
Mr. Spitzer, who late last month became the nation’s first governor to propose legislation legalizing gay marriage, articulated a legal and moral argument in defense of the bill in a two-page "statement in support" that is being distributed to lawmakers.
The governor’s forceful language adds even more contrast between his position and that of the major Democratic candidates for president, including Senator Clinton, all of whom oppose gay marriage but favor civil unions.
Supporters of the bill said they were heartened and surprised by the governor’s appeal and said they viewed it as another sign that gay marriage could become a more mainstream Democratic position. While Mr. Spitzer’s stance is not shared by his party’s top-tier White House hopefuls, it could become a more widely accepted position within the party by 2012, when Mr. Spitzer, a nationally known political figure, may be a candidate for president.
The memo, which was prepared by the governor’s counsel, directly confronts one of the main arguments made by opponents of gay marriage, who have warned that allowing same-sex couples to marry would erode the institution of marriage.
"Same-sex couples who wish to marry are not simply looking to obtain additional rights, they are seeking out substantial responsibilities as well: to undertake significant and binding obligations to one another, and to lives of ‘shared intimacy and mutual financial and emotional support,’" the memo states.
"Granting legal recognition to these relationships can only strengthen New York’s families, by extending the ability to participate in this crucial social institution to all New Yorkers."
Opponents of gay marriage said the governor was trying to co-opt their argument.
"He’s couching it in this family values language, which is insulting. He’s trying to turn our argument on its head," a spokesman for the New York State Catholic Conference, Dennis Poust, said. The conference is the public policy arm of the bishops of New York.
Actually Dennis, the insult was you and all your pals in the American political gutter turning the words "Family" and "Values" into code for prejudice and hate. On its head, did you say? I’m laughing in your face bigot. Your kind has turned two precious human institutions, Family and Marriage on Their heads; from things that nurture and sustain us, into instruments of your cheapshit culture war. May. You. Be. Damned.
The bill memo also suggests that civil unions, adopted by a number of states to confer many of the legal rights enjoyed by married couples, offer insufficient protection.
"Civil marriage is the means by which the state defines a couple’s place in society. Those who are excluded from its rubric are told by the institutions of the State, in essence, that their solemn commitment to one another has no legal weight," the memo says.
Mr. Spitzer also tries to place the legislation in a historical context by arguing that the "history of this country" has been a story of excluded groups achieving access to equal rights. New York has long been a main character in that story, the memo says.
They say, like a bunch of Johnny One Notes, that the "Gay Agenda" is an assault on families. They say it with the utmost sincerity, while driving their knives into the hearts of families of gay children.
On a recent road trip with my dad I asked him what it was like when he and my mom came to Memphis for the Family and Friends Weekend at LIA, a concentrated family encounter. Here is some of what he said.
We went to the meeting and had no idea of what we were going into. We met a lot of parents in the same category. Lots of kids had no parents there.
Everything seemed to be on the up and up at first. Yeah, but we found out these things aren’t so. I said to them, "You can’t change a zebra’s stripes." They didn’t go along with me, and they were very aggravated with me for saying so. Some people go through two colleges and they don’t have common sense. I hate when people keep things locked up.
They made me feel that I failed you. That’s how I felt after they got through with me. That’s how they made all the parents feel.
Years after I left LIA and I began to write my play, I interviewed my younger sister, Maria, about that time. What she told me broke my heart. She said that when our parents returned home from the Family and Friends Weekend, they were devastated. They didn’t eat right or look right. They acted sad and depressed. This went on for weeks. My sister felt so concerned that she actually called Love in Action and asked, "What did you do to my parents?!" She felt frustrated by the lack of concern or comprehension she encountered from the staff.
My parents were very disappointed and didn’t know what to do next, feeling that they had tried everything. My mom took it upon herself to somehow change me. This began with daily bouts of verbal abuse, her telling me how ashamed she was of me. After a few months of this, the verbal abuse escalated into small episodes of physical abuse, with her cornering me and slapping me, while telling me what an abomination I was.This type of behavior continued until I could no longer stand to live at home. One day I packed up all of my belongings into my car, and told my parents that I was moving out right that minute. My mother got so angry when I told her this that she exploded and beat me into a corner, ripping my shirt and giving me scratches and bruises in the process. My dad had to pull her off of me so that I could get to my car to leave.
Of course John Smid was nowhere to be seen while all this was going on in Lance’s family. It isn’t just the kids John is heart-wounding. He puts his little mark on the hearts of vulnerable parents too, and other family members, and leaves a wreckage strewn landscape behind he doesn’t even bother looking back on as he walks away from it. Perhaps he’s afraid of turning into a pillar of salt.
…we move on to the condescending protection of "minorities" in the form of superfluous hate crimes legislation. The latest attempt has been named the Matthew Shepard Act, in honor of a Wyoming meth addict killed in a drug deal gone bad. The fact that he happened to be gay apparently entitled him to more protection than your average straight meth addict.
Thank you, ABC News, and especially you Elizabeth Vargas, for giving gay haters everywhere a way to pistol whip that poor kid’s memory forever, if not his actual body like they’d like to.
Almost immediately after the bill passed the House, president Nice Job Brownie threatened to veto it, saying that the laws "already on the books" were sufficient. One of the most pernicious memes the religious right is putting out there regarding hate crime laws is that they’re unnecessary, because the violent crimes committed against gay people are already illegal.
It’s one of those pat little bits of dishonest rhetoric by which they poison the national discourse. Yes, killing someone is already illegal. But motive has always been a part of how killings are prosecuted. It is more then simply determining the kind of punishment that fits the crime. You have to know what crime was actually committed, before you can know the punishment that fits it. Was the killing accidental? Was it accidental but reckless? Was it reckless in a depraved and indifferent way? Was it intentional? Was it committed in a heat of passion, or in a cold, calculating and deliberate way? This process of evaluating a criminal’s motive, and differentiating between them as to the charges and punishments applied works the same for just about every serious crime that comes before a court of law. When the religious right argues that hate crime laws are thought crime laws, they are in effect arguing that four-fifths of the laws on the books today are also thought crime laws.
That’s not what they mean of course. What they mean is that crimes committed against gay people should not be treated as what they are, but as something they are not. Murder is murder is murder, they say. But it isn’t. Otherwise, why have so many different laws for it? And where you really see the effects of hate crimes on the gay community, isn’t in the murders, but in the far more common, and often devastating to the survivors, assaults, beatings, gay bashings.
Gabi Clayton called me on Wednesday to tell me that she had some very good news. She sent me the link to lennonpiano.com and said that they had contacted her to participate in an even to happen this next Tuesday at her house May 8, the anniversary of the death of her son, Bill.
Longtime readers of my diary know that I met Gabi at least 10 years ago over the net after having seen a picture of Bill. I also wrote and recorded a song — "Will It Always Be Like This" — about her and the whole incident.
The story of Bill Clayton is just heartbreaking…
Bill came out to us as bisexual when he was 14. He was afraid to tell us, because he knew that other kids had told their parents and that their parents had disowned them or reacted in other ways that were frightening. He had read the book I had loaned him "Changing Bodies, Changing Lives," and there were coming out stories in the book. Finally he worked up the courage to tell us and we assured him that we loved him and accepted him. He was so happy that he wanted to tell the whole world. We recommended a support group out at the college which I had just graduated from. Bill went to that group three times and stopped – he said he really liked it but that he was fine and didn’t need to go any more.
An older man had sexually assaulted him after one of the support group meetings. Bill struggled afterwards with the trauma, and with suicidal throughts…
Bill finally told Sam, his best friend. He told Sam that the memories of that sexual assault were overwhelming him and that he was suicidal. He asked Sam not to tell anyone, but Sam put the friendship on the line and told me, because he didn’t want to lose his friend. Bill was relieved once we knew, and we reported it to the police and got Bill started with a therapist.
It took the police a long time to find the man. When they finally questioned him he confessed to exactly what Bill had said. Then he got a lawyer, plead not guilty at his arraignment, and managed to avoid jail and court until a month after Bill died. (He finally went to prison for 13 months.) So, Bill would see him around town — which aggravated the post-traumatic stress he was in counseling for. There were times when Bill would suddenly take a nose dive into severe depression for no apparent reason. Later we would find out that it was because he had seen this man on the bus or at the movies. Bill was so depressed and suicidal at one point that he spent some time in the hospital.
He stayed in counseling, and finally was getting back to being his old, impish self again. His mental health improved tremendously. He had a summer job doing computer and office stuff, and he loved it. He started looking forward to school again (after two rough years), and he felt like he had a future. Yes, he was back! He and his counselor agreed that he was done with therapy, and she closed his case with Crime Victims Compensation — on April 5th, 1995.
And then it all came apart…
On April 6, 1995, Sam and his girlfriend, Jenny, were walking with Bill near their high school to Jenny’s house to watch a video they had rented. Four guys — one of whom knew Bill and Sam because he was in the same high school (and had gone to their middle school before that) — followed them in a car and yelled things I will not repeat related to sexual orientation. Bill and his friends ignored them and decided to walk through the high school campus, thinking it would be safer because the gate was closed. The four guys drove off, but they parked the car nearby, because the next thing Bill and his friends knew, they came up on foot and surrounded them. They said "You wanna fight?" Bill, Sam and Jenny tried to walk away — they didn’t want to fight at all.
The four then brutally assaulted Bill and Sam, kicking and beating them both into unconsciousness while Jenny screamed at them to stop. It was broad daylight during Spring break.
When they regained consciousness a minute after the attackers left; Bill, Sam and Jenny ran to the school custodian’s office and called the police and then their families. They were taken to the emergency room where we met them. Bill had abrasions and bruises. They thought he might have kidney damage, but he didn’t. Sam was a mess too, with a broken nose and many bruises.
While we were in the emergency room, one of the guys who did the assault came casually walking through with two other friends, to visit a friend who had just had a baby. Sam saw him and Sam’s parents called the police. When they found him he confessed and told the police who the other guys were – they were all under 18 years old. The police treated it as a hate crime from the very beginning.
It did its work…
We thought he was going to make it – he seemed to handle things really well until after the rally, and then he crashed back into depression. He was suicidal again – it was too much. The assault sent him right back into the place he had fought so hard to get out of. He suddenly became depressed and suicidal, and we had to put him in the hospital again. While he was in the hospital he heard that a friend of his was gay-bashed at school in a nearby town.
After about 10 days he came home. We and his doctors in the hospital thought he had gotten past being suicidal. But Bill took a massive overdose on May 8th. Alec found him unconscious on the kitchen floor and had him rushed to the hospital, but they couldn’t save him.
And the attackers? Well the police may have treated it as a hate crime from the beginning, but the courts sure didn’t…
The boys who assaulted Bill and Sam were finally sentenced to 20-30 days in juvenile detention followed by probation and community service and 4 hours of diversity training focusing on sexual orientation.
Hate crimes really are different in kind, from other crimes, just as manslaughter is different from murder one is different from terrorism. That much is obvious from the overkill police often see in them. But the religious right doesn’t want people to see it that way. Partly, it’s because they don’t see it that way themselves. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… In their eyes, gay people aren’t even human. We don’t feel pain like real humans do. We are sick, depraved, lower then animals. Attacks on us simply do not do the kind of profound damage they otherwise do to real humans. If anything, the gay haters think that crimes against us should be treated Less seriously then crimes committed against real people…as something tacky and graceless, that polite upright god fearing men don’t do, at least not in public anyway, but not rising to the level of an actual crime against a Person. More like kicking a dog. These are homosexuals after all.
But gay bashings are more like rape then like common assaults. For the victim, a gay bashing strikes a knife into the heart of their most intimate sense of sexuality and self. And that is the intent. And they are a kind of domestic terrorism. It is that last quality that makes them particularly useful to the religious right, and why they emphatically don’t want the nation to become serious about combating anti-gay hate. A fearful homosexual, is a good homosexual. Fearful homosexuals stay in the closet. They don’t agitate for equal rights. They don’t live openly. They don’t hold their lover’s hand in public. They are not proud.
This is what the fight against hate crime law is about. This is why the gay haters are taking such a scorched earth attitude toward the Matthew Shepard Act. When a gay person is murdered, the religious right can point to the seriousness of the crime and argue that a hate crime enhancement is meaningless. When the killer is brought to justice they can say that the law already prosecutes murder, what is the point of adding a hate crime charge too? But most gay bashings do not result in death, most are random and sudden attacks such as the one that left a same sex couple beaten and bloody on the streets of Scottsdale Arizona last year, when they’d dared to hold hands in public …
Scottsdale police are investigating an alleged hate crime reported by a gay couple who said they were jumped by as many as seven men outside a Scottsdale restaurant near McDowell and Scottsdale roads.
As they held hands and began to leave Frasher’s Steakhouse late Sunday, Jean Rolland and Andrew Frost said they were humiliated and beaten in the restaurant’s entryway.
Frost, 19, was taken to Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn, where he was treated and released. Frost received several staples to treat a wound on his scalp, and several stitches to seal other wounds to his face.
Rolland, 28, suffered minor injuries.
The men, who had been dating for a couple of weeks, are seeking to press charges against their attackers – none of whom have been arrested as of Monday afternoon, according to Scottsdale police.
"My only hope is that they’re going to brag about it and tell their friends how tough they were," said Rolland, a native of France who lives part-time in Scottsdale.
"How tough is it to use seven guys to take on two guys, including one 19-year-old who weighs 120 pounds?" he asked.
Frost, a Scottsdale resident who graduated from Mesa Westwood High, said the attack was the second he endured in the past three years. When he was 16, he said, he was attacked by two teens and an adult in Mesa. One used an aluminum baseball bat.
The Sunday night incident was upsetting, he said, because no one from the restaurant said they saw anything, though the attack happened only a few feet from the front door.
Of course no one saw anything. And George Bush and James Dobson would like it very much if this nation keeps right on not seeing anything. Except this:
Imagine. Imagine a world, where there was no hate…
Okay, I’m going to actually link to Sullivan for this one. I know…I know… In blindly supporting Bush out of nothing more noble then a puerile contempt for democrats, progressives and liberals, for so many years, Sullivan has helped keep the time when the following stops being a horrific reality for gay and lesbian Americans just out of reach. Even those of us blessed enough to live in places where our relationships are given some sort of legal status, can have it all go nightmarishly wrong the moment we step over a state line. And if the republicans Sullivan has passionately supported for so long have their way, eventually nearly every fucking state in the union will have an anti same-sex marriage amendment in its constitution. Just never mind that for a moment. You want to know why we fight…why the struggle for same sex marriage is so important…?
I remember a story told by a friend during the plague years. He was visiting a dying friend in hospital and a couple of beds down the ward from his friend, the curtains were drawn around a patient. From behind the curtains, he could hear a man softly singing a show-tune. "Well, at least that guy’s keeping his spirits up," my friend remarked. "Actually," his dying friend replied, "the man in that bed died this morning and was taken away by his family. That’s his boyfriend. The family won’t let him go to the funeral or ever see his spouse’s body again. They’ve kicked him out of their apartment. It wasn’t his name on the lease. So he’s just sitting there, singing their favorite song to an empty bed. It’s the last time he’ll get that close to his husband. The nurses didn’t have the heart to tell him to leave yet. He’s been there for hours."
There it is. Why we fight. What our enemies are fighting to preserve. It’s not about marriage. It’s not about the bible. It’s about keeping that knife in our hearts, and their right to twist it whenever they feel like it. Preferably, right when our hearts are most exposed and vulnerable. Because if we don’t bleed, they’re not righteous.
Hey Stu…you still think I’m too angry? Still think I need to be a tad more closeted in order to get along with people? Of course you do. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Right? It’s like I have this nasty disgusting little…personal issue…or mental disorder, as you’ve suggested a time or two…and as long as people like me just keep that disgusting part of ourselves under wraps we’ll all get along, won’t we?
So he’s just sitting there, singing their favorite song to an empty bed…
I’d tell you to go to Hell…but what the fuck, you’re already there.
What’s Good For Business Is Good For America. Well…It’s Good For Business Anyway…
Toastmaster: Gentlemen, pray silence for the President of the Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things.
(There is much upper class applause and banging on the table as Sir William rises to his feet.)
Sir William: I thank you, gentlemen. The year has been a good one for the Society (hear, hear). This year our members have put more things on top of other things than ever before. But, I should warn you, this is no time for complacency. No, there are still many things, and I cannot emphasize this too strongly, not on top of other things. I myself, on my way here this evening, saw a thing that was not on top of another thing in any way. (shame!) Shame indeed but we must not allow ourselves to become too despondent. For, we must never forget that if there was not one thing that was not on top of another thing our society would be nothing more than a meaningless body of men that had gathered together for no good purpose. But we flourish. This year our Australasian members and the various organizations affiliated to our Australasian branches put no fewer than twenty-two things on top of other things. (applause) Well done all of you. But there is one cloud on the horizon. In this last year our Staffordshire branch has not succeeded in putting one thing on top of another (shame!). Therefore I call upon our Staffordshire delegate to explain this weird behaviour.
(As Sir William sits a meek man met at one of the side tables.)
Mr Cutler: Er, Cutler, Staffordshire. Um … well, Mr Chairman, it’s just that most of the members in Staffordshire feel… the whole thing’s a bit silly.
(Cries of outrage. Chairman leaps to feet.)
Sir William: Silly SILLY!! (he pauses and thinks) Silly! I suppose it is, a bit. What have we been doing wasting our lives with all this nonsense (hear, hear). Right, okay, meeting adjourned for ever.
(He gets right up and walks away from the table to approving noises and applause…)
Ever have one of those moments? Silly! I suppose it is, a bit. What have I been doing wasting my life with all this nonsense… I remember my Ayn Rand days with about the same bewhildered emberassment that I remember my early teenage bible thumper days. In my defense first, hey…I was raised in a Baptist household…okay? Second, I can honestly say that the rarefied heights of my passion for all things scriptural occurred within months of my having a "the whole thing’s a bit silly" moment. I guess I’m just one of those people who has to smack into every damn brick wall for himself, before he knows its there.
I was a passionate Randian right up until Ronald Reagan convinced me that an utterly unregulated market will happily drive itself off a cliff chasing after that one last dollar it hasn’t yet pocketed. I devoured her books. Re-reading them again after all these years is really, Really embarrassing. She may be a good at plot and scenerio, but a writer of believable characters, let alone believable dialogue, she simply wasn’t. I’ve read yaoi romance novels with less embarrassing dialogue then Rand’s. And she never, never trusted her readers to understand anything. Why simply make your point in the story’s action, when you can pound it into your reader’s head with a jackhammer. She’s like a little bird perched on your shoulder while you read, constantly chirping in your ear, Do you get it? Do you get it? Do you get it?
So I remember very well, all her novel’s heroic capitalists, and her school girl idolization of the manly titans of industry. I once heard romanticism described as an art form that wasn’t concerned with reality, but with the idealization of reality. Probably the one and only thing I still have from Rand that I believe in, is that this is false, that romanticism is not only an idealization, but an essentialization of the world around us, and that no one who disconnects themselves from reality, can ever be a good romantic, because you cannot idealize something you do not understand. Oh…had Rand only taken her own advice a time or two, and actually looked the fuck at what she was writing about…
May 1 (Bloomberg) — The cheating episode at Duke University may cause academics to conclude the post-Enron emphasis on teaching ethics in graduate business schools is a failure.
Thirty-four first-year candidates for a master’s of business administration degree at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business were disciplined in the program’s largest cheating scandal. Nine students face expulsion for collaborating on a take-home test, in violation of the professor’s rules.
Business students are more likely to cut corners than those in any other academic discipline, several studies show. A Rutgers University survey last year found that cheating at business schools is common, even after ethics courses were added following scandals that bankrupted Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc.
"What is taught in a business program sometimes reinforces students’ tendencies to be entrepreneurial and results-oriented", said Timothy Dodd, 50, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke, in an interview from Durham, North Carolina. "Those sometimes aren’t the people who understand that moral means have to be used to achieve moral ends."
Well…duh. The Baptist Boy in me would say that if they’re not getting their lessons on ethics at home, they won’t learn them in school. But there have been good, bad, and indifferent families for generations, and I think the world worn middle aged guy I’m becoming has come to believe now, that the problem isn’t the home life a kid has, but that sharks simply gravitate to where the good hunting is, and a marketplace where ripping people off and bleeding them dry is not only legal, but an easy and respectable way of life, is going to attract a lot of sharks.
I’m old enough to remember when our economy had some regulation that made it hard for business to do that. I can remember when folks who worked in the retail sector could afford decent if modest housing, a basic car, and still raise a family, pay their bills, put the kids through school, and take a short vacation to someplace once a year. I was raised through most of my childhood by a single working woman who made nothing more then basic clerical wages all her life and I never went to bed hungry once, never walked out of the house without clean clothes on, and had everything I needed for school and my health provided for. The bills got paid, we lived in a series of pretty nice garden style apartments, I got the usual gifts on my birthdays and at Christmas, and once a year we all went to the beach for a couple weeks. When mom retired, she got a basic pension (you may have to look up that word ‘pension’) which combined with her social security and medicare gave her a pretty nice retirement right up to the day she died.
They called it trickle-down economics during the Reagan years. A rising tide would lift all the boats they said. So they freed big business from the shackles of the liberal welfare state. And golly, a lot of businessmen are doing much better for it, aren’t they. But I’m sure as fuck glad I’m not a kid today, being raise by a single mother trying to make ends meet on clerical wages. I go to the store these days, and I see the faces of the people serving me behind the counter, being nickeled and dimed to death now and no, the tide didn’t rise, it went out and left a lot of boats stranded, which doesn’t make sense because people can’t spend money they don’t have and when they don’t have a living wage anymore they aren’t bloody likely to be buying stuff they can’t afford. But what you have to understand about an unregulated marketplace, is that nothing, not even its own sustainability, matters more then the profit you can make Right Now. The sharks will happily drive our economy and our country off a cliff chasing after that last dollar they haven’t pocketed yet, just because it’s there.
At some point, hopefully, the nation will have a "the whole thing’s a bit silly" moment, regarding the innate goodness of unregulated markets and we can start talking about how to put back together again, what the Reagan republicans started tearing apart. It would be nice someday, to be able to walk into a store and not feel ashamed at being served by people who simply cannot make ends meet on what they’re being paid.
I wrote here about how we found out how Peter Pan peter butter got poisoned: the company, months after the event, did a belated inspection that blamed a leaky roof. The FDA hadn’t been able to find that same leaky roof when it inspected fact two months earlier.
Neither the company nor the FDA, we know now, managed to notice what it took those evil "trial lawyers" conservative Republicans so love to hate to discover some three months after the fact: a dead rat, rat traps, and roaches, and more. Conditions worthy of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.
"Attorney Randall Hood of Rock Hill and 15 other attorneys were inspecting a ConAgra foods plant in Slyvaester, Ga., in April when they found the dead rat, bird fathers inside the plant, roaches on raw peanuts and other things ‘consistent with salmonella contamination,’ according to a court document."
Ask your Aunt Millie to stop voting for Republicans. If she won’t, at least tell her to skip the Skippy.
Now go back and read that post I put up a few days ago, where David Broder waxes happily about the times he spent eating quail with Karl Rove.
[Update…] Fixed the link to the Broder post. Sorry…
OK… Thanks to a blog reader and supporter over in Tennessee, I’ve gotten copies of the articles (which were never online) concerning David Crockett High School senior Curtis Walsh, who was dismissed from school for a day after organizing the Day of Silence at his school.
The Day of Silence is a national event in which middle, high school and college-aged students take a vow to silence, symbolically representing the silence that is forced upon LGBT people every day by our society.
The articles (which can be viewed as photos: Page 1 and Page 2) state, in part:
Senior Curtis Walsh said he was dismissed for the day early Wednesday morning by David Crockett High School principal Henry Marable for his own safety.
…
“I showed up at school and within two minutes (Marable) called me and three others into his office. After first period I was dismissed for the day.”
…
Marable as well as Director of Schools Grant Rowland said they had no comment on anything pertaining to the student of the “Day of Silence,” in which several students reportedly left school early.
However, Rowland was quoted by a local television station later in the day:
“One student and one reporter caused one heck of a mess to be stirred up for no reason,” said Rowland in regard to the article on the “Day of Silence” that appeared in Wednesday’s edition of the Johnson City Press.
This principal has apparently kept Curtis out of his school ever since the Day of Silence…
As it seems, Curtis was kept out of school not only on the Day of Silence (Wednesday, April 18th) but also on Thursday, April 19th and Friday, April 20th.
Just wanted to give you an update on Curtis Walsh, the Tennessee senior who was dismissed for supporting the day of silence. I am Curtis’ mother. On Wednesday, he was sent home as the newspaper article said, but we were given NO REASON (the paper said for his own safety). On Wednesday afternoon about 4:00, I received a phone call from Marable, the principal, and he said that Curtis did not need to come to school on Thursday. I asked if he had been threatened (Curtis) or if it was a punishment. He replied, “It don’t matter, He just don’t need to be here.” On Thursday afternoon my husband, Curtis’ STEP-FATHER, NOT HIS MOTHER, received a call from Marable saying that Curtis did not need to be in school on Friday. As you may guess, this fight is NOT over.
This story hasn’t really gotten all that much attention yet… but I hope it will. What is happening to Curtis is beyond unacceptable.
Gotta love it… “It don’t matter, He just don’t need to be here.” Right. Anyone who agitates on behalf of the dignity of gay kids let alone their safety, doesn’t need to be in Henry Marable‘s school. Sorta gives you a flavor for what life is like for gay kids that have to walk those halls doesn’t it? Meanwhile Pat Robertson’s legal sharks are threatening any school that refuses to support their "Day Of Truth" with litigation.
Contact info for David Crocket High School in Jonesborough, Tennessee can be found, Here. More info on another kid who was punished for organizing a Day Of Silence, and a school in Indiana that was put into a lockdown over threats of violence during the Day Of Silence, Here. You can suppose that Jay Sekulow won’t be stepping up to defend the rights of those students…
…or This Teacher who allowed this student editoral calling for tolerance toward gay students to be published. She stands to loose her job now , for allowing these highly controversial words to be published in the student newspaper, and read by impressionable young minds…
Would it be so hard to just accept them as human beings who have feelings just like everyone else? Being homosexual doesn’t make a person inhuman, it makes them just a little bit different than the rest of the world. And for living in a society that tells you to always be yourself, it’s a hard price to pay.
Well we wouldn’t want our kids taking any of that shit seriously now would we?
You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
Those Little Twists Of The Knife That Are Meant To Remind You That You’re Human Garbage
Via Pam’s House Blend… All those happy little amusements that heterosexuals take for granted…because the No Homos sign doesn’t apply to them of course…
I had a hard time getting started on this post. My mind couldn’t wrap itself around how the TN anti-gay marriage amendment weaseled itself into the most mundane aspects of our life.
Back when I first posted on the effects of an amendment within the state, I focused on the obvious problems such as being denied access to or the right to make medical decisions for a partner. Little did I consider at the time, that we wouldn’t even be able to participate in a "vow renewal ceremony" at the Tennessee Renaissance Festival.
The vow renewal ceremony has no legal standing, even for heterosexual couples. It’s purely a declaration of love and devotion. There is no earthly reason to limit it to legally married couples, other then the casual matter-of-fact bigotry that motivated the Tennessee anti-same sex marriage amendment, which the operators of the Tennessee Renaissance Festival apparently share. You just don’t treat devoted dedicated couples like dirt otherwise.
So now we see that all the anti-same sex marriage amendments are meant to act in the way the old sodomy laws used to, before the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional: by defining gay people as innately depraved and legally unequal. It’s about more then marriage. Even the smallest things in our lives, must constantly remind us that we are different, that we are unequal, that we are hated.
May 12 – 13: Romance Weekend
In the spirit of Romeo & Juliet, love is in the air, along with many a love ballad…
Our vow renewal ceremony is a group ceremony performed by one of our vendors,
who is an ordained minister. Participants in the ceremony must be legally
married under the state laws of Tennessee. We encourage participants to come in costume.
For our homosexual attendees, we suggest something sodomites might have worn back in the middle ages, when they were being burned at the stake…
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