They say that fundamentalism springs from fear of the unknown. They say it’s a retreat from reality into the comfort of dogma: a mental padded cell where no doubt ever disturbs the peaceful tranquility. It is a place they say, where there are no questions, no doubts, only comfortable certainties. A place where you don’t have to think for yourself, and most importantly, where you are not responsible, only forgiven.
I disagree. Fundamentalism I believe, springs not from fear of the unknown, but from fear of the people next door. Fear that they can cope with the world as it is, better then you can. Resentment of their courage in facing a world that you cannot. Envy that turns into hate. Fundamentalism doesn’t so much give you a place to hide from the world that the rest of us manage, somehow, to go on living in, as give you permission to put your thumb into our eyes.
Here, Mara Schiavocampo captures Peterson Toscano in a couple all-too-brief passages from his one man play, Doing Time In The Homo No-Mo Halfway House. She intercuts excerpts from Peterson’s play, and an interview with him, with an interview of John Smid inside his little ex-Episcopalian church, turned conversion therapy camp. There’s a moment in the video with that’s telling, and it comes when Peterson explains how he finally had to ask himself one day, what he was doing to himself, and John he insists that The Truth…The Truth…The Truth…has set him free…
The Truth…The Truth…The Truth… Jacob Bronowski in his magnificent book and BBC series on the history of science, The Ascent of Man, devoted an entire episode to the difference between truth and dogma, titled Knowledge or Certainty. He begins with the face of his friend, Stephan Borgrajewicz who, like himself, was born in Poland. And he asks us, how well, how precisely, can we describe this man’s face? He asks a painter to render it, and says…
We are aware the these pictures do not fix the face so much as explore it; that the artist is tracing the detail almost as if by touch; and that each line that is added strengthens picture but never makes it final. We accept that as the method of the artist. But what physics has now done is to show that that is the only method to knowledge. There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. That is the human condition; and that is what quantum physics says. I mean that literally.
This episode is the heart of the entire series. In it, Bronowski calmly and methodically rips to bits the view that science is only about dry facts and figures. It is a method of knowledge he insists…a very human one. We are not Gods, we do not have the perfect God’s eye view of reality. So we must approach what we know with humility, and question it, and test it, and verify it, because we do not have that perfect absolute knowledge of Gods. We can be right, we can be wrong, but when we do not test our knowledge against reality, when we set ourselves apart from that need to test our understandings and let nature speak its truths for itself, we open the door to the worst that is possible within us. And that worst has no bottom. Bronowski ends the episode on one of public television’s most powerful, most moving moments, and it ends as it began, with the face of Stephan Borgrajewicz, many years younger, taken when he was imprisoned in a concentration camp…
We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people. The truth John, is that you won’t stop forcing gay teens through your program against their will, because it’s the ones that are comfortable with who they are that you need to force your cheapshit cowardly self loathings into the most. The truth John, is that you sold out every moment of pure and honest happiness you could ever have had, for the sake of pleasing a world that Still thinks you’re a pervert. The truth John, is that now you can’t bear to see a happy, well adjusted gay kid, because they remind you of everything you could have been, everything you could have had. The truth is the wall is yellow John. Take a look at it someday god damn you. An honestly lived life isn’t necessarily an easier one, but it’s…you know…Authentic and Real.
While the vast majority of Hillcrest’s gay population rejects the Bible, it may prove useful to them to at least consider what the Bible has to say about the self-destructive choices they are making. The Book of Deuteronomy reveals the high cost to a community or group of people who reject God’s commandments and laws:
"But if you refuse to listen to the Lord your God and do not obey all the commands and laws I am giving you today, all of these curses will come and overwhelm you: You will be cursed with confusion and disillusionment in everything you do, until at last you are completely destroyed for doing evil and forsaking me. The Lord will send diseases among you until none of you are left in the land you are about to enter and occupy. The Lord will strike you with wasting disease, fever, and inflammation. These devastations will pursue you until you die. The Lord will cause you to be defeated by your enemies. You will be oppressed and robbed continually, and no one will come to save you."
…and so on. Ever get the feeling when you hear people reciting those verses that they’re not so much warning their neighbors about God’s wrath, as cheering it on…? Anyway, Hartline’s post is pretty long and rant-rambling as you might expect from a babbling bible thumper, but here’s a couple passages from it that I think get to the meat of it. First, Hartline recounts his crusade against the annual San Diego (his hometown) Pride Day festival, and how the defiant San Diego gays just kept listening to Satan rather then the prophet Hartline…
During the San Diego City Council hearing on July 25, 2006, over 90 gay activists and their supporters showed up to influence the council’s decision to issue a proclamation to honor the San Diego Gay Pride organization and its annual events. Rather than acknowledge the terrible decisions that the group had made the previous year when San Diego Gay Pride had hired the network of sex offenders, the multitude of gay activists used the city council hearing to lambast Christians opposed to the pornographic gay pride events. In speech after speech, gay and lesbian gay pride promoters attacked Christians and their beliefs. It had now become perfectly clear that there would be no repentence on the part of those gay leaders who have been so determined to continue their rabid quest to indoctrinate San Diego’s youth into their crusade of sexual anarchy.
Well of course they only have themselves to blame for what happened next…
Several days later, the San Diego Gay Pride Festival turned from a celebration of homosexuality and pornography into a tragic blood bath as several gay males were severely beaten outside of the gay pride festival grounds (www.gaylesbiantimes.com/?id=8193&issue=979). The assaults were so severe that one of the victims, Oscar Foster, remained in intensive care for two weeks due to a fractured skull and mutilple facial injuries. Baseball bats and a knife were used in the horrific attacks. James Allen Carroll received eleven years in prison for attempted murder on the victims after accepting a plea bargain with prosecutors. Two other adult attackers also received lengthy prison terms for their roles in the heinous attacks.
Yes…he’s saying their that God sent those thugs to beat the living crap out of the homosexuals to punish them. A little further down Hartline makes it specifically and abundantly clear:
While there may not be any apparent moral conviction for embracing such anti-christian discrimination, is it possible that these same gay leaders will ever consider that their actions are reaping a judgment from God on their community? Is it actually possible that God is angry with their mockery of the Bible that has become a cornerstone of the gay community in San Diego? If so, will there be any reconsideration by San Diego’s gay community for their anti-god, anti-christian behaviors? Is Hillcrest being warned by God? What will happen if they don’t heed such warnings?
Although leaders of the San Diego homosexual movement have rejected any Biblical references to homosexuality and lesbianism as being a sin, perhaps it is time for them to rethink their conclusions. The Bible teaches a premise that the wages for sin include death. While most in the gay community reject that premise, is it possible, that in doing so, they could be wrong? Is it possible that God does judge those that harm children? Is it possible that God is now judging San Diego’s homosexual community for its continued promotion of rebellion against the Bible?
The wages of sin are death… But it wasn’t God striking down peaceful festival goers that day, it was a gang of gay hating thugs acting out in an atmosphere that had been charged for months with Hartline’s venomous accusations that San Diego Pride was facilitating pedophilia, and indoctrinating children into homosexuality. Hartline stoked a climate of hate in San Diego in which violence toward homosexuals attending Pride Day became practically inevitable. And now that it’s happened, he’s telling gay bashers yet waiting in the wings that they’re not responsible. Even if the blood of gay people is literally on their hands, Hartline says as far as God is concerned, that blood is upon the gays themselves. That club isn’t in your hands…it’s in God’s hands…so swing away because you’re only doing God’s will…God smites them through you… Black market arms dealers selling explosives to terrorists for money probably give more thought to the human lives they’re putting at risk then Hartline does.
This is how the game is played below the radar of the mainstream news media, that accepts at face value the protestations of the main religious right celebrities, that they love the sinner, and only hate the sin. It isn’t true. To a man, they all believe what Hartline so blatantly shouts there in that blog post: that violent attacks on homosexuals represents God’s judgment upon them…that violent attacks on homosexuals fulfill the will of God.
For those of you who have been following it (which is likely only those of you who read the gay news sites), the 72 year old gay man who was beaten with a pipe the other day, by a man on his bus who asked him if he was gay, has died…
Andrew Anthos died Friday of injuries sustained during an attack last week outside his downtown Detroit apartment building. Family members said he was a victim of an anti-gay hate crime.
Anthos was on a city bus Feb. 13 when a man asked him if he was gay. The man followed Anthos off the bus at the stop in front of his building and beat him with a metal pipe.
Anthos, whose family said he was gay, was taken to a hospital and later fell into a coma.
Local and national gay rights groups condemned the attack. Police told The Detroit News in story published Friday that the department was investigating whether the attack was a hate crime.
This is what Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin, looks like in practice, or as one of Bill Donohue’s nemesis, Shakespear’s Sister, points out…
This shit doesn’t happen in a void. Like the sexualization and objectification of women in the media being psychologically damaging to girls, the constant drumbeat of negative stereotypes and exploitative hatred issued by the GOP and social/religious conservative leaders is dangerous for members of the LGBT community. And the hatemongers’ faux-naïveté at the reality that you can’t continually put a target on someone’s back but expect no one to shoot at it is growing really goddamned old. The hate-the-gays schtick isn’t just infuriating and spiteful and wrong; it’s irresponsible.
But it’s effective. It keeps winning them elections. It keeps the cash flowing in. And it keeps the gays fearful. A fearful homosexual is a good homosexual. Not perhaps, as good as a dead one, but it will do.
The reference to "Dome Man" comes from Anthos’ campaign to light the Michigan Statehouse dome in red, white and blue colors one night a year…
Photo by Lansing State Journal file photo
So he loved his country, and he loved his state. Too bad they couldn’t have loved him back.
Couldn’t You At Least Have Offered A Moneyback Guarantee?
…and…a blender?
Here’s Peterson Toscano and Lance Carroll on the Montel Williams show, briefly discussing how they came to find themselves in reparative therapy. Two things are worth noting here: Peterson went in of his own free will, while Lance was forced into it by his parents. Peterson left of his own accord, finally accepting himself just as he was, and remained very close to both his parents. Lance is now estranged from both of his.
This conversation is all too brief, but I guess that’s the format of the Montel Williams show, to flit from one topic to another to another during the course of an hour. Someone should sit those two down together for a long talk on camera where they can talk about their experiences in more depth, how it felt, what it did to them, what their lives are like now: the one who went in of his own accord out of devotion to God, and the one who was forced in against his will.
And here’s a clip from a Boston Legal episode about a man suing his ex-gay ministry. Great line at the end…
John…are you reading this? Have you given Lance’s parents back their money yet? Bring families together do you? Ever tell Lance you’re sorry? Ever find where you buried your conscience? You had one once…didn’t you? Do you remember what it was like…way back then…to have a conscience…?
Kevin-Douglas Olive responds to this post and to all your comments and mine, and he implores us all not to hate the Groffs. Quakers are some of the most decent people I’ve ever met in my life.
I’ll post my own response later…I want to take some time to think over what he wrote. But in the meantime you should go read his comment, and remember that a Christian wrote it, the next time you hear the kook pews hollering out for war and vengence and hate in the name of Christ.
Friends who betrayed me with their votes for George Bush while the republicans were busy waging one of the most vicious anti-gay campaigns in American history. Family members who love the sinner while hating the sin. They smile in your face, and they stab you in the heart. In the wake of Tim Hardaway’s very public bellyaching about much he hates gay people, Arthur Silber posts a first-rate fire and brimstone sermon up on his blog titled, We Are Not Freaks. It’s addressed to all the ersatz liberals and progressives out there that Truman Capote was talking about when he said that "A faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room", but he could just as well have been speaking for me on the day after I watched a gay teenager being shoveled into an ex-gay program simply for liking himself just as he was. That day I turned my back on all the people in my life who graciously extended their tolerance to me, but not, not really, their friendship and love.
My emailers agreed with my outrage, and they understood, at least in general terms, the source of my anger. Still, they wondered: "But, Arthur, why are you so angry? Do you think expressing that kind of anger will help to change anyone’s mind, or encourage others to try to look at these issues from a different perspective?" To explain my answer in part, I reposted yesterday an essay from two years ago: Living on the Inside…and Living on the Outside. In that piece, I detailed how and why it is undeniably true that those who enjoy the most privileged position in our culture — those who are white, heterosexual and male — cannot possibly understand, not completely, what it is like to be one of those who is shut out in different ways, and to varying degrees.
But even that essay is written from a perspective of some distance. It doesn’t fully capture the emotional reality of being marginalized, being excluded, and very often being ridiculed, and even demonized. This realization hit me once again with great force as I read a comment recently added to that lengthy thread at TAPPED. Here it is:
oh this is tedious, yet as mortally debilitating as any of the thousand cuts. what i feel, down to the core, is that i have again been brought to the fore of the class, denuded, so that the students can point and discuss the freakish example that i am, as if this were the anatomy class of In Human Bondage. except you are the freaking freak, pal. it makes me sick to hear you confess your elastic confusions, because i suffer them daily, but the primary sickness is your entitlement, your entitlement to be a jiving idiot, to muse in public about me, that I am expected to stand here as you cheerfully enumerate the social failings you participate in, do not regret, and therefore have no intention of changing. do you imagine that i live in any state of happiness because you have found room for me in your untested world view, or that I don’t know, every day of my life, that when push comes to shove you and your joshing buddies would shove me? do you somehow think, because a gay man describes your haircut, it somehow balances the force with which an entire being is declared revolting, and violently threatened, beginning with his very first memories? For your information you have not described me in any respect that is insightful, you have simply corralled me into a cage, whereby rudely pointing at me you demonstrate your limited understanding of the human heart and mind: I promise you that you are far from original in that enterprise. In fact, by so doing, you have described yourself. It is one thing to be ignorant, as we all are when it comes to fully understanding the prejudice that minorities we are not members of endure, but it is another to brag of it, which is the essence of your tone.
When you strip away all the verbiage, all the intellectual tap dancing, and all the efforts to "understand" and be "tolerant," that is the inescapable, the terrible bottom line: many of you think we are Freaks. Speaking for myself with regard to these issues, I don’t want you to "understand" me or to be "tolerant" of me. I don’t want you to "study" me, and try to graph all the various points of similarity and difference between us: I want you to recognize that I am completely and entirely a human being, just as you are. And I want you to understand fully what that means, and to genuinely mean it.
It is one thing to be openly hated and despised, as gays and lesbians are by many on the right. We’re used to that, and we got used to it a long time ago. As was required, we manufactured intellectual and emotional armor to protect ourselves. In the current climate, we have to put it on every single damned day. It weighs a great deal, and it exacts an awful price. But without it, we would suffer injuries too grievous to be borne.
But how much worse it is to be cajoled into taking off that armor — to hear you tell us that you understand we’re "just like you" in all the ways that matter, and that we’re really "just the same" — and then to read or hear about "how easy" you think it is to "make fun" of us, especially when our status as Freaks is too obvious. How much worse it is when we believe you, when you tell us you think we’re all equal — except that you can get married, while almost every leading Democrat will say, well, no, we can’t get married. But we can have "civil unions." Because, you see, Freaks don’t get married.
But we had believed you, so we took off the armor — and then you plunged the sword deep into our guts. You revealed that many of you actually do think we’re Freaks. Many of you don’t believe we’re really "just like you."
If you want to know exactly where I’m coming from these days, go on and read the whole thing. We are not freaks. We are human beings. What should have been the most wonderful, magical, life affirming moments of our lives…falling in love…finding that soulmate…making a life together…has been turned into a brutal nightmare for some of us, and a difficult, heartbreakingly painful experience for most of us, and I’m beyond asking why. The promise of love has been systematically ripped away from us for generations, and there are those who would take it away from us still, when we’ve only just begun to take it back for ourselves. We can cut your hair. We can decorate your house. We can be the butt of TV jokes. We can even have sex now. But we can’t love.
We can’t so much as kiss or hold hands in public without danger to our lives. This from a New York Times article on the controversy following the Snicker’s Superbowl ad…A Kiss Too Far?
Yet gay-bashing still occurs routinely, Mr. Patton of the Anti-Violence Project said, even in neighborhoods like Chelsea in Manhattan, where the sight of two men kissing on the street can hardly be considered a frighten-the-horses proposition. “In January some men were leaving a bar in Chelsea,” saying goodbye with a kiss, Mr. Patton said. “One friend got into a taxi and then a car behind the taxi stopped and some guys jumped out and beat up the other two.” One victim of the attack, which is under investigation by the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, was bruised and shaken. The second had a broken jaw.
“The last time I was called a faggot was on Eighth Avenue,” said Joe Windish, a longtime New Yorker who now lives in Milledgeville, Ga., with his partner of many years. “I don’t have that here, and I’m an out gay man,” said Mr. Windish, whose neighbors in what he termed “the reddest of the red states” may be fundamentalist Christians who oppose gay marriages and even civil unions, but “who all like me personally.”
Tolerance has its limits, though, as Mr. Windish found when he and his partner took a vacation on a sleepy island off the coast of Georgia. “I became aware that if I held my partner’s hand, or kissed him in public, the friendliness would stop,” he said.
Imagine living in a world where you could not so much as hold the hand of the one you love without being attacked.
(Scottsdale, Arizona) The reward for information leading to the arrest of a gang of men who attacked a gay couple outside a Scottsdale restaurant last December has been raised to $12,000 thanks to a donation from PFLAG.
Andrew Frost and Jean Rolland were set upon by as many as seven men as the couple walked out of the restaurant hand-in-hand.
Frost, 19, needed more than a dozen stitches to close wounds on his head and face. Rolland, 28, suffered many bumps and bruises.
Frost said that as he and Rolland exited the restaurant he heard someone yell "fag". He said he turned and saw two men.
Frost said that he replied to the slur and one of the men punched him. He said that at least five others rushed from the restaurant and joined the attack.
Frost and Rolland have filed a police report, but no one at the restaurant seems to have seen anything. The couple said they had never seen their attackers before.
…but no one at the restaurant seems to have seen anything. And that’s why I am not speaking now to a lot of people in my life that I used to speak to on an almost daily basis. Lovers are viciously attacked for daring to love openly and joyfully and as a warning to the rest of us not to even attempt it. It happens on the streets, it happens in the courtrooms, it happens behind the pulpit and in the pews, it happens on the campaign trail, it happens on the floor of congress and in the Oval Office and you don’t seem to have seen anything. May you be dammed.
This Is Either Good News For Gay Listeners, Or Very Bad News…
My first thought upon hearing this was, Okay…what happens to OutQ…?
To: SIRIUS Subscribers
Today is a very exciting day for SIRIUS customers. As you may have heard, SIRIUS Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio are merging to form the nation’s premier audio entertainment provider.
This combination of our two offerings will benefit you – our loyal listeners. As a single company, we’ll provide superior programming to you every day with the best of both SIRIUS and XM. Currently, XM and SIRIUS broadcast a wide range of commercial-free music channels, exclusive sports coverage, news, talk, and entertainment programming. Howard Stern. Oprah and Friends. The NFL. MLB. NBA. ESPN. CNBC. Fox News. Additionally, the combined company will be able to improve existing services such as real-time traffic information and rear-seat video as well as introduce new ones.
You see what’s missing from that list. No, no… Not just OutQ, but any indication that they’ve been providing something for people to listen to, who are sick and tired of all the right wing pap being broadcast out there, posturing as non-partisan news and information. Fox News? They tell us about Fox News (sic) and not Talk Left? But Clear Channel owns a major stake in XM.
I have a Honda Accord, and since it came with a factory installed XM radio, the first thing I did was bellyache to XM about their lack of a gay channel like Sirius had. I could have been shouting my complaints up at one of their satellites for all it mattered. So shortly after I bought the Accord I yanked the factory radio out and spent $180 plus the cost of a new radio plus the cost of installation so I could listen to OutQ on Sirius.
At the time Sirius had two other channels going for it that XM didn’t: Swing Street and Air America. But then Air America defected to XM and Sirius dropped Swing Street when they picked up Howard Stern, merging it’s programming into the god awful American Standards channel, which I think they call the Old Fart’s Channel internally. Now it’s a sickening combination of big band swing and 1950s lounge music and I hate it.
The Trance channel is now more a electro-pop channel except some evenings when it gets back to being hard core trance. The only thing that hasn’t changed for the worse since I subscribed to Sirius is OutQ. Well…and the 60s channel and the New Age channel (elevator music for my generation). Basically I’m paying their subscription fees now just to listen to Michelangelo Signorile and Sunset Cruse and a couple other channels I wouldn’t have yanked the old radio out for since XM carried them too. Actually, XM’s 40s channel is much better then Sirius’ god awful American Standards channel.
For me the promise satellite radio wasn’t so much that you could drive from one end of the country to the other without having to constantly retune your radio all the way, but that niche content that wasn’t profitable regionally, could work on a national scale. Radio that actually spoke to gay audiences only happened in some large cities, and then only for a few hours at week at most. But with the ability to reach the entire country from a satellite, my hope was that we’d finally have something that regarded us as its primary target audience, instead of "oh…yeah…and you gays too."
Ironically, there’s not a lot I actually like on OutQ. Derek & Romaine are way too crude for my liking. I just won’t listen to that. OutQ in the Morning is almost as bad sometimes. But I can forgive any gay channel that kind of crap that broadcasts Signorile and Sunset Cruse. Especially Sunset Cruse…which is a lovely gay dedicate-a-song-to-your-sweetheart program. I just love it. After a long week of reading about one goddamned attack on the gay community after another in the news, Sunset Cruse is just the thing I need to remind me that love still has a chance in this world.
My fear right now in this proposed merger is that all that will simply vanish just like my Swing Channel did when either the bean counters decide it isn’t pulling in enough listeners, or the stock block that belongs to Clear Channel (they own a major stake in XM), decides they don’t want any of that faggot stuff on their airwaves. The reason competition is a good thing isn’t to drive down prices, but to encourage producers to exploit markets their competition isn’t, and to keep the top dogs responsive to All their customers.
A gay Baltimore man who’s fighting to keep his late partner buried in rural Tennessee may have to sell his car and home to fund the legal battle.
Kevin-Douglas Olive said the parents of his late partner, Russell Groff, have appealed a court ruling that granted Olive an early win in the case. The appeal effectively restarts the case, making progress a costly proposition.
Olive said he’s committed to continuing a case in which he’s already invested $8,000 — but fears his legal bills may demand another $20,000.
"I’ll do what I gotta do," he said, "but they’re telling me to expect to spend a lot more than I spent before."
Read more at the Washington Blade’s site Here. The article references the comments from the Groffs to this post on my blog that I’m pretty certain are genuine, and which if they are they show just how far into the gutter hate has led them. They’ve lied through their teeth pretty consistently throughout about the condition of Russell’s gravesite and the events that led to their lawsuit, claiming that it was neglect when it was the removal of their cheapshit insults to the man Russell loved that provoked them into going to court.
Olive said Groff became so weak that he couldn’t leave his bed to urinate. To best help the man he loved, Olive would hold the bedpan for him.
“This is my soul mate, so I just did it,” he said. “You don’t even think about it. You just do it.”
Eventually, a staph infection that originated in Groff’s gall bladder spread throughout his body, and on Nov. 23, 2004, he died.
"I just collapsed on the floor of the hospital, face down and shrieking," Olive said. "Part of me knew that was entirely inappropriate, but part of me didn’t care.”
And how does an all-American God fearing family treat the man who cared for their son in his last hours. Well…like dogshit of course…
In keeping with the burial instructions signed Nov. 18, Groff was interred in the West Knoxville Friends Cemetery outside Knoxville, Tenn.
Olive said the grave, located about 30 minutes from Groff’s childhood home, was to remain simple and clean. But Groff’s mother, Carolyn, made changes.
"She made it into this shrine that really offended the sensibilities of the Quakers," he said, "because we’re all about simplicity."
Olive said Carolyn routinely decorated the grave. At one point, she posted a picture of Groff with his female prom date, plus a poem Carolyn wrote wherein her son essentially apologized for being gay.
"I was so insulted by seeing this,” Olive said. "She was trying to paint him as this repentive person who was heterosexual, really."
After seeing that picture and poem, Olive said he could tolerate no more and cleaned his husband’s gravesite.
"When I cleared the grave, that was the final straw for her,” he said. “She filed the caveat and challenged the will."
Without a doubt Russell knew what was coming after he died, and that was why he had that will drawn up. He loved Kevin, and he didn’t want him to go through the kind of hell he knew his parents were going to bring down on him. And without a doubt, the reason why the homophobes want to deny same sex couples not just the right to marry, but Any legal rights whatsoever, is Precisely so they can twist the knife in our guts, just like the Groffs are twisting the knife in Kevin’s. There is no other plausible reason for the all-out assault on any and every possible legal status for a same sex couple, other then to facilitate this kind of grotesque scorched earth warfare where even our lover’s graves aren’t safe. None. When they talk about fighting to preserve the sacred institution of marriage, what they mean is they’re fighting to preserve the right to dig up your spouse’s grave.
A Maryland judge upheld the will, on the staringly obvious grounds that Russell knew what he was doing when he made it. Russell saw it coming. He did the only thing the law in Maryland allows a gay man do, to to protect the man he loved from it. But the Groffs are bound and determined to bleed Kevin as much as they can because now all they have in their lives is how much they hate him. He’s having to sell off possessions now, and perhaps even his house in order to pay the legal bills over this continuing fight.
I want to ask everyone reading this blog to help him out in any way they can, however much. Do you believe in love? Did it make a difference in your life? Do you remember the first time someone you loved took you into their arms? Do you remember that first kiss? Does it make you angry that some people feel as though they have a god-given right to spit in your face whenever moments like those bring you joy and peace and contentment? Kevin-Douglas Olive watched the man he loved and was loved by die, and now he’s having to fight over the ground he laid his body to rest, and I think even more then money to pay the legal bills, it would help him now to know that there are people out here who Care.
Donations can be sent via mail to the Kevin Olive Defense Fund, c/o C.W. Hardy, 715 Park Ave., Apt. B, Baltimore, MD, 21201.
As a point of interest, it looks like Kevin’s lawyer is Mark Scurti. In fact some years ago I had his law firm, Scurti and Gulling do my own will, and Medical Directives document. They’re good people, known and respected in Baltimore’s gay community for their work fighting for our legal rights.
What emerged from the gay adoption business is that the issue of homosexuality is terribly dangerous to the Roman Catholic church. It comes away from such a debate with its public image damaged. And of course this is true of the Anglican Church too. Indeed, it seems to me that the debate about homosexuality poses such a serious threat to organised religion in this country that it is not absurd to compare it to the reformation of the 16th century.
Some will reply that the churches have always faced difficult moral issues, and they have muddled through: the gay issue is nothing unusual. Until quite recently I would have agreed. But it becomes ever clearer that the issue of homosexuality really is different. It has managed to tie the finest Anglican theologian of his generation in knots, effectively disabling him from leadership. And more widely and more seriously it is undermining the churches’ claim to the moral high ground.
…
Firstly, this is an issue that shuns compromise. It has a stark "either/or" quality. Either homosexuality is a fully valid alternative to heterosexuality or it is not. There is no room for compromise, no third way: poor Rowan Williams is trying to make himself a perch on a barbed-wire fence. You don’t find such absoluteness in other moral debates, such a complete absence of shared assumptions and aims.
I think you do, and the obvious example of it is the fight over abortion. But here’s the critical difference, even with that bitter struggle:
The public change in attitudes towards homosexuality is not just the waning of a taboo. It is not just a case of a practice losing its aura of immorality (as with premarital sex or illegitimacy). Instead, the case for homosexual equality takes the form of a moral crusade. Those who want to uphold the old attitude are not just dated moralists (as is the case with those who want to uphold the old attitude to premarital sex or illegitimacy). They are accused of moral deficiency. The old taboo surrounding this practice does not disappear but "bounces back" at those who seek to uphold it. Such a sharp turn-around is, I think, without parallel in moral history.
These factors have combined to make the gay issue the church’s perfect storm, perhaps even its nemesis. Because previous shifts in public morality have been slower, and more amenable to compromise, the Church has been able to move its clunky stone feet, and keep standing. This shift has floored it. By resisting the new moral orthodoxy on homosexuality, and hardening against it, the church is fast losing the aura of moral authority it has more or less retained all this time. When a bishop defends discrimination against homosexuals he is, in the eyes of most of the population, displaying a lamentable moral deficiency.
So the issue of homosexuality has the strange power to turn the moral tables. The traditional moralist is subject to accusations of immorality. And this inversion is doing terrible damage to the Christian churches.
(Emphasis mine) And there it is. At least in the abortion fight, there are two plausibly moral sides to it, that of concern for the life of the unborn, verses concern for the lives of women. And there is a more general question of who decides how your own body is to be used. But in arguments over homosexuality, there is only the judgment that same sex relationships are either damaging in some way, damaging enough to justify acting against them, or they are not. You can take a stand for the rights of women to decide for themselves how and when to give birth, and still be forced to concede that the other side in the fight may well feel compelled to fight for the lives of the unborn, even against the lives of the living. You can disagree with it, you can disagree profoundly with it, but there it is. But in the case of homosexuality, there is only the damage that is done to gay people. Either homosexuality is destructive or it is not. And if it is not, then what have you been doing all this time to homosexual people? Every same sex relationship torn asunder is either two souls saved, or two loving hearts cut to ribbons.
One side in this fight, has a lot of human misery and grief to answer for. And the time is long past for claiming that you couldn’t have known the damage you were doing. Back in the 1950s, when gay people were still living their lives in the shadows, and at least plausibly throughout the 60s and much of the 70s, when gay people were just beginning to step forward in society and demand their place at the table, you could argue that you didn’t really know any gay people, nor much about their lives other then what you heard in the newspapers and from the guy thumping his pulpit in church. But there is no excuse from ignorance today.
And yet you see otherwise decent and intelligent people digging in their heels over it, to ridiculous lengths nowadays, and in the face of overwhelming evidence that not only there is nothing necessarily damaging about homosexuality, but that same sex romantic love and intimacy is just as necessary and life affirming for gay people, as it is for heterosexuals. It’s startling to look at sometimes. The opposition to this is essentially boxing itself in the same coffin made of junk science and religious dogma that the creationists have. Why? For some I’m sure it’s fear of loosing their brittle faith, the only thing keeping them afloat in a rapidly changing world. But for others, the ones who are otherwise more flexible in their spirituality, more able to cope with change, it’s something far more disturbing then the loss of one’s inner bearings. They can feel a mountain of guilt hanging just over their heads.
What have we been doing to these people all this time? What have we done? What have I done?
NEWS ITEM: Michigan Court Of Appeals Says No To Benefits For Same Sex Couples.
The judges said that a the ban on same sex marriage, voted into the state constitution back in 2004, applies to domestic partner benefits. "The marriage amendment’s plain language prohibits public employers from recognizing same-sex unions for any purpose," the court said.
This wasn’t exactly what the voters were being told would happen back in 2004. Marlene Elwell, campaign director for the Amendment was emphatic, stating that "This has nothing to do with taking benefits away. This is about marriage between a man and a woman." But that was double talk. The clear intent of the groups working to pass the amendment, was to insure that same sex couples could only be legal strangers in the eyes of the law, and the language of the amendment reflected that intent precisely. When they told the voters that their intent wasn’t to take benefits away, they were only telling a half truth, if that. Their intent, was to take everything away from same sex couples that the law might legally provide…not benefits specifically.
Their rhetoric during the campaign was tactical and dishonest and it worked. And the proof of that is their silence now, as the rights they kept insisting would not be taken from same sex couples are now being stripped relentlessly away by the courts, who are only following the plain and unambiguous language of the amendment.
A January news article in The Christian Science Monitor quotes Ian Douglas, professor of Mission and World Christianity at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., on the troubles now facing the Episcopal church as it continues to schism over homosexuality. Observing that the Anglican Communion’s tradition of inclusion is being put to the test, Douglas goes on to say, "Part of the problem with the Anglican community today is that the different constituencies are so convinced of their own truth, that they say they have no need of others – and that goes against Anglican tradition."
In other words, the blame for the hostility toward homosexuals now raging through the Episcopalian Church is at least partly the fault of gay people, who are too convinced of their own truth to listen to others. On the other hand, you could argue that gay people have been beaten over the head with the viewpoint of people like the Archbishop of Nigeria Peter Akinola (who supports a proposed Nigerian law which would ban gay people in that country from so much as sitting down together in a public restaurant) for generations. What part of their own truth, should gay people renounce in order to accommodate others like Akinola?
Every time the homophobes put one of those all embracing anti-same sex marriage amendments forward, the ones that ban Any legal recognition whatsoever of same sex couples, they take pains to reassure the public that their amendment isn’t intended to strip everything away from same sex couples. Oh no…they say…it’s only about keeping marriage between a man and a woman. The gays will still have rights too, they claim. Just not the right to marry.
Public universities and governments can’t provide health insurance to the partners of gay employees without violating the state constitution, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled Friday.
A three-judge panel said a 2004 voter-approved ban on gay marriage also applies to same-sex domestic partner benefits.
"The marriage amendment’s plain language prohibits public employers from recognizing same-sex unions for any purpose," the court said.
The decision reverses a 2005 ruling from an Ingham County judge who said universities and governments could provide the benefits.
A constitutional amendment passed by Michigan voters in November 2004 made the union between a man and a woman the only agreement recognized as a marriage "or similar union for any purpose." Those six words led to a fight over benefits for gay couples.
Gay couples and others had argued the public intended to ban gay marriage but not block benefits for domestic partners.
But the court said: "It is a cornerstone of a democratic form of government to assume that a free people act rationally in the exercise of power, are presumed to know what they want, and to have understood the proposition submitted to them in all of its implications, and by their approval vote to have determined that the proposal is for the public good and expresses the free opinion of a sovereign people."
In Michigan, Citizens for Protection of Marriage repeatedly stated in its literature and in press interviews that a ban on same–sexmarriage would not affect domestic partnership benefits.
“This has nothing to do with taking benefits away,” Marlene Elwell, campaign director, told USA Today on October 15, 2004. “This is about marriage between a man and a woman.”
The campaign’s communications director was equally adamant. The proposal would have no effect on gay couples, Kristina Hemphill told the Holland Sentinel. “This amendment has nothing to do with benefits,” she said.
To secure and preserve the benefits of marriage for our society and for future generations of children, the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose."
And that’s standard operating procedure for the religious right: lie through your teeth…Jesus won’t mind if you’re doing it for him.
But look at what the judges decided. Even though the rhetoric coming out of the mouths of the amendment supporters was telling the voters one thing, the voters are assumed to have meant to vote for what they were repeatedly told they weren’t voting for anyway.
And, in a sense, you can’t blame the judges here, because it’s right fucking there in the text of the amendment: "…the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose." What part of "For Any Purpose" didn’t you understand when you voted?
And you have to figure that a lot of voters Did intend this result, even as they were nodding their heads and saying to themselves yes, yes, yes…this isn’t taking anything at all away from the homos… Hypocrisy is how you save face, when you’re busy putting a knife in your neighbor’s back. But given the results in Arizona, I expect that just enough people were fooled by the rhetoric, that the amendment might have failed if they saw clearly what it was they were voting for. Maybe.
And of course, that’s exactly why the religious right lies.
Good interview of Peterson in the Portland Mercury…
Ex-Ex-Gay
Peterson Toscano: A Survivor of the Ex-Gay Movement
For 17 years, Toscano identified as a "born-again, conservative, evangelical, Republican Christian," at odds with his orientation. He now travels the country to educate people on the dangers of ex-gay programs, and how he was finally able to reconcile his faith (now as a Quaker) with his identity.
If his show ever comes around to your neck of the woods you just have to see it. It is amazing.
I remember vividly the day I realized for the first time that I was in love. A more magical, wonderful moment there has never been. I’d gone through most of my adolescence thinking love and sex were boring, stupid, icky things only jocks and dweebs cared about. And then in an instant the world, and my life, became more richer and fuller then anything I could have ever imagined before. When he smiled, I smiled. When he looked at me a certain way, my heart would skip a beat. Life was more wonderful, more beautiful, then I’d ever thought it could be. Everything my eyes beheld seemed to radiate the joy I felt inside of me. The future beckoned, bright with promise. So long as we could be together I thought, everything was possible. I was 17. He was 17. I would live my entire life over again, and every bully’s fist, every curse, every attack on my person, every assault on my intimate spirituality by piss ignorant bible thumpers, every job I’d ever been fired from for being gay, every opportunity denied, every tear I’ve ever shed in loneliness…I’d live it all over again, so long as I could live that moment over again too.
Now I’m 53, and desperately lonely. But I know better then to blame my sexual orientation for that. Rather, I never fully appreciate how much harder a gay person has to work at finding their other half, even in the best of tolerant cultures, let alone ours. We are few, and when you realize how hard it is for heterosexuals to find the love of their lives, you wonder how gay people can even hope to stand a chance at it. But many of us do…I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and it is beautiful. Some people are just naturally good at the dating and mating game. But most of us aren’t, and especially the deathly shy and clumsy ones like me. But were I heterosexual, I’d have had the unquestioned support of the culture around me in guidance and nurturing and encouragement. Instead I had to endure not merely indifference, but outright hostility toward my efforts at finding love. I can’t help thinking now, how much different my life might have been had I lived in a culture where same sex lovers were given the same respect, the same chance to succeed, that heterosexuals take for granted. I’d have known earlier on that boys could fall in love with other boys. Perhaps I’d have been more ready when my first love came into my life. Things may have turned out differently. But I didn’t grow up in that culture. I grew up in one where the lives of gay people are the monopoly money with which so many heterosexuals buy their righteousness.
My fury at the way same sex marriage is under attack is in large measure a reaction to my own loneliness I’m sure. I don’t think even my close friends know how utterly solitary my life is these days. Fighting off the loneliness is a constant battle and it leaves me emotionally drained. And then I hear some self righteous jackass step up to the pulpit to denounce same sex lovers as unfit to enter into the Sanctity Of Marriage and I think of how much that unmitigated contempt for the hearts of gay people has taken away from my own life and I just want to shove their faces into a burning wall. It’s that kind of anger that worries my friends, and I’ve had more then a few recently tell me that I’m getting too angry. But as long as I still believe finding my other half is possible to me, I’m unlikely to act it out. When I meet him, I want to be worthy. But I won’t deny that it is a struggle to keep anger, from becoming hate.
Sanctity. I’ve loved and lost several more times since I was 17, but even so my dating history is a pitifully short one. I’m just too damn shy. Most of the heterosexuals I knew in school had been on several times as many dates as I’ve ever had by the time they were out of college. You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find prince charming, as they say. And it’s true. But when it did happen to me, it was so wonderful, so awesome, so profoundly life affirming that to this day I just can’t grasp what kind of bottomless pit must exist in someone’s heart to make them want to spit on the affections of two people in love. But every time they say they’re fighting to protect the sanctity of marriage, that’s exactly what they’re doing. And I am convinced now, that a lot of them do it knowing full well how deeply it cuts into the hearts of gay people. But if we don’t bleed, they’re not righteous. So we have to bleed.
By Jessie Torrisi
Columbia News Service
December 31, 2005
On the face of it, Sam Beaumont, 61, with his cowboy hat, deep-throated chuckle and Northwestern drawl, is not so different from the ranch hands in Ang Lee’s Critically acclaimed film "Brokeback Mountain," which opened in Indianapolis on Wednesday.
"Listen," the character Twist says to del Mar as part of a dream that goes unrealized. "I m thinking, tell you what, if you and me had a little ranch together –little cow and calf operation, your horses – it’d be some sweet life."
That pretty much describes the life Beaumont had. He settled down with Earl Meadows and tended 50 head of cattle for a quarter-century on an Oklahoma ranch. "I was raised to be independent. I didn’t really care what other people thought," Beaumont said. In 1977, Beaumont was divorced and raising three sons after a dozen years in the Air Force when Meadows walked up to him near the Arkansas River.
"It was a pretty day — January 15th, 65 degrees," Beaumont said. "He came up, we got to talkin’ till 2 in the morning. I don’t even remember what we said." But "I knew it was something special."
Beaumont moved to be with Meadows in his partner’s hometown of Bristow,Okla., a place of 4,300 people. Together, they bought a ranch and raised Beaumonts three sons. The mortgage and most of the couple’s possessions were put in Meadows’ name.
"People treated them fine," said Eunice Lawson, who runs a grocery store in Bristow. But in 1999, Meadows had a stroke and Beaumont took care of him for a year until he died at age 56.
That’s where the fantasy of a life together on the range collides with reality. After a quarter-century on the ranch he shared with his partner, Beaumont lost it all on a legal technicality in a state that doesn’t recognize domestic partnerships.
Meadows will, which left everything to Beaumont, was fought in court by a cousin of the deceased and was declared invalid by the Oklahoma Court of Appeals in 2003 because it was short one witness signature.
A judge ruled the rancher had to put the property, which was appraised at $100,000, on the market. The animals were sold. Beaumont had to move.
"They took the estate away from me," said Beaumont, who said he put about $200,000 of his own money into the ranch. "Everything that had Earl’s name on it, they took. They took it all and didn’t bat an eye.
Every state has common-law marriage rules that protect heterosexual couples. If someone dies without a will, or with a faulty one, his or her live-in partner is treated as the rightful inheritor.
But only seven states currently give gay couples protections — such as inheritance rights and health benefits — through marriage, civil unions and domestic partnerships. What’s more, Oklahoma last year amended its state constitution to ensure that neither marriage nor any similar arrangement is extended to same-sex couples.
Last year, Beaumont moved to nearby Wewoka, Okla., to a one-bedroom place with 350 acres for his horses, white Pyrenees and Great Dane to roam.
Sanctity. I got your Sanctity right here…
He said he was continuing to fight the cousins, who are suing for back rent for the years he lived on the ranch.
Sanctity. They took the ranch Earl left to his beloved Sam away. But you need to understand that it wasn’t so much about taking the ranch away from Sam, as taking Earl away from him, and everything inside of Sam, that remembers Earl in peace and contentment and joy. That’s why they’re suing for back rent. So that Sam won’t be able to remember any of the years they had together without feeling pain, so any place inside of Sam where there was once love, must be emptied. They want what was rightfully theirs, back. Not merely the ranch, but the love Sam felt for Earl.
When they speak to you about the Sanctity of Marriage, this is what they mean. Our hearts must be empty. Our lives must be empty. If they’re not, if we’ve somehow managed despite their best efforts to find our other half, then we’ve stolen what rightfully belongs to them…Sanctity…And they want it back. If they have to cut our hearts open to get it.
Sanctity.
One final note… I don’t expect everyone in my life to agree with every political or moral stand I take. And there was a time when I’d make exceptions for family. But since mom passed away a few years ago my heart has grown that much lonelier, and that much harder, and I am disinclined now to accept excuses, let alone make any for people who have been content to sit back and watch me walk into my fifties utterly alone. I have gone to bed with an aching heart for far, far too long to politely ignore the knife in my back. If you’re about denying gay people, if you’re about denying Me, the means to find our someone to love and to build a life together with them to the best of our ability…And That Damn Well Means Also The Right To Marry Them If They Consent…then you are no friend of mine. I do not know you.
I’m reading about the big blow-up at ABC over Isaiah Washington’s insults to fellow Grey’s Anatomy actor T. R. Knight. Knight is gay and Washington called him a faggot on the set. Then during the Golden Globe award ceremonies Washington announced to all the assembled reporters that he’d never called Knight a faggot. You have to admit, the guy has a certain deft charm when it comes to his co-workers. Seems like now everyone is calling for Washington’s head…
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 21 — Executives at ABC and its parent, Disney, are mulling the future of the actor Isaiah Washington, a star of the hit series “Grey’s Anatomy,” after Mr. Washington last week publicly used an anti-gay slur for the second time in roughly three months, a Disney executive said Friday.
…
The executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because company officials were instructed not to go beyond a prepared statement, said that Mr. Washington’s behavior could be considered grounds for dismissal under Disney’s corporate antidiscrimination policy.
ABC and Touchstone, Disney’s television studio, called Mr. Washington’s behavior “unacceptable” in a statement issued on Thursday, three days after Mr. Washington’s most recent remark, which occurred in the backstage press room at the Golden Globes ceremony last week.
The situation has potentially great implications for ABC, which is reaping millions of dollars in advertising revenues from a show that, in its third season, is among the highest rated on television.
If you piss on the grave of a dead gay kid and it gooses your tabloid news show’s ratings…that’s good business. But if a fag baiting actor’s antics start cutting into your multi-million dollar profits on your high rated prime time TV series…well, that’s just plain unacceptable.
And…by the way…I hear the right wing shock jocks at ABC/Disney’s San Francisco talk radio station who called Barack Obama a "halfrican" still have their jobs.
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