Via Ex-Gay Watch, I read this story about Levi Kreis, a gay musician whose only desire was, as he writes “to sing Christian music and be the purest vessel for God that I could be.” At 15 he secretly checked himself into one of Exodus ex-gay programs in order to, again as he puts it, “heal the homosexual in me”.
Well, you know where that’s going. He eventually came out, was dropped by his record label and expelled from the Christian college he was attending. Love the sinner.
There’s a passage in that interview that moved me deeply. It comes where Kreis discusses the impact seeing a performance of Del Shore’s Southern Baptist Sissies. What artists do for the world that they find themselves in, they do even more urgently for one another…
Southern Baptist Sissies’ was the sole catalyst in putting years of pain behind me. Embracing the thought of being an abomination to God and an embarrassment to my family instilled within me the heaviest, darkest self-hatred I could imagine. Walking in that theater one day, having no idea what I was about to see, I found myself in a fetal position in my chair crying uncontrollably. I had no idea there were other young men out there that had experienced the same journey as I had.
There is this hoary old bromide I would love to get my hands on and strangle, about how before an artist can produce great works that move people, they have to suffer. Paying your dues, as they say. It’s a lie. More often then not, the creative gift is strangled by great personal pain and suffering. It dies without ever being noticed. The one blessed with great creative gifts who manages to create something, anything, while in a state of great internal pain, does so in spite of it, not because of it.
“Del happened to be sitting behind me during my break down in the first act,” Levi continued. “He came to me during intermission to see if I was okay. After the show, he invited me to come in anytime and see the show as many times as it took for me to come to terms with my past. It was SBS that introduced to me the idea of a loving God; that helped me realize that I could actually love myself. The impact it had on me could never be accurately conveyed in words.
Creative gift or not, this is why our stories are so important. In telling them to the world we both heal ourselves, and one another. Don’t imagine you need a lot of talent to just tell your own story in your own voice, in your own way. Just put it out there. It will find someone to heal.
It might have to bounce off a few brick heads first though. In googling Southern Baptist Sissies…I came across this…
Shores, in an interview, said Southern Baptist Sissies, which won an award from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), is about “love and acceptance” for homosexuals who “have felt excluded from the church, from the love of God because of the teachings and doctrines that were taught to us as children and beyond.” Shores, a homosexual activist, has said he was raised in a Southern Baptist church in Texas and attended Baylor University in Waco.
Shores described his play as ending “with the message of hope — that God loves us all, just as He created us.”
…
While the theme that God creates people to be homosexuals likely will be promoted in the film, it is unfounded, said Michael Dean, pastor of Travis Avenue Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, the site of a recent seminar on what the Bible says about homosexuality.
“The viewpoint that homosexual behavior is ‘natural’ for some persons cannot be supported by Scripture,” Dean said, noting that the behavior is regarded as sinful in both the Old and New Testaments. “But even if it were discovered that there is a genetic predisposition to homosexuality, that would not remove the sinfulness of the expressed behavior. Heterosexual desires are ‘natural,’ but are also sinful when expressed outside of a biblically defined marriage between a man and a woman.”
Dig it. Even if the reality is that homosexuals are born, not made, it’s still unnatural because scripture says it is. Reading that pure submission to dogma over reason put me immediately in mind of this passage from Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man:
It happens that there is a philosopher called Friedrich Hegel, whom I must confess I specifically detest. And I am happy to share that profound feeling with a far greater man, Gauss. In 1800 Hegel presented a thesis, if you please, proving that although the definition of planets had changed since the Ancients, there still could only be, philosophically, seven planets. Well, not only Gauss knew how to answer that: Shakespeare had answered that long before. There is a marvelous passage in King Lear, in which who else but the Fool says to the King: "The reason why the seven Starres are no mo then seven, is a pretty reason". And the King wags sagely and says: "Because they are not eight". And the Fool says: "Yes indeed, thou woulds’t make a good Foole". And so did Hegel. On 1 January 1801, punctually, before the ink was dry on Hegel’s dissertation, an eighth planet was discovered – the minor planet Ceres.
Never mind what nature reveals…what does scripture say? But in the end it isn’t even scripture that matters, but the word of the person who claims to be an authority on it. Or as Groucho Marx once said, “Who are you going to believe…me or your lying eyes?”
Shores told Baptist Press he does not anticipate that Southern Baptists will “stand up and applaud” the message of his forthcoming film, that of “love and acceptance that would include gays.”
But Stith said he believes Southern Baptists will respond biblically. “The most loving thing we can do for them is say that this is not what God wants for them, and that they need to live in obedience to His Word,” he said.
No, no Mr. Stith…not God’s word after all…but yours. The reason why the seven Starres are no mo then seven, is a pretty reason…
I forget sometimes how old I am. This may sound surprising to someone younger, or it might not. I don’t know. When I was a kid, I always assumed the adults around me knew how old they seemed to me. Most of them, certainly acted it. But I keep forgetting.
I’m 53, which isn’t all that old objectively. My body is in good health. I can see the age setting in on my skin, and in the increasing field of grey in my hair. But just I don’t feel all that old. And yet I find myself surrounded more and more by people who don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. Standing in the line during my draft pre-induction physical is a memory as vivid to me now as when I first lived it (they told me to go back home and put on a few more pounds…and then a few months later the draft was canceled so I didn’t have to go back for a second exam). The race riots in the late 60s and early 70s. Watergate…Nixon giving his resignation speech. Seems like it happened only last week. The world before the Internet and personal computers. When the phrase "Made in Japan" denoted junk, not quality. The local head shop. The ERA battle. Underground comix. The unmitigated hassle of banking before direct deposit and ATM machines. Ma Bell. Black and white TVs with vacuum tubes inside. Duck and Cover. Cap guns. The invention of skateboarding. Meet the Beatles. Soda cans before they put the pop top on. Something keeps telling me I’m older then I think.
Today, Dreher has an extraordinary (oral) essay at NPR in which he recounts how the conduct of President Bush (for whom he voted twice) in the Iraq War (which he supported) is causing him to question, really to abandon, the core political beliefs he has held since childhood.
Dreher, 40, recounts that his "first real political memory" was the 1979 failed rescue effort of the U.S. hostages in Iran. He says he "hated" Jimmy Carter for "shaming America before our enemies with weakness and incompetence." When Reagan was elected, he believed "America was saved." Reagan was "strong and confident." Democrats were "weak and depressed."
In particular, Dreher recounts how much, during the 1980s, he "disliked hippies – the blame America first liberals who were so hung up on Vietnam, who surrendered to Communists back then just like they want to do now." In short, Republicans were "winners." Democrats were "defeatists."
On 9/11, Dreher’s first thought was : "Thank God we have a Republican in the White House." The rest of his essay:
As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool’s errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.
But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.
In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did.
The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government’s conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.
I turn 40 next month — middle aged at last — a time of discovering limits, finitude. I expected that. But what I did not expect was to see the limits of finitude of American power revealed so painfully.
I did not expect Vietnam.
As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.
I had a heretical thought for a conservative – that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word – that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot – that they have to question authority.
On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?
Question Authority. Yes. You cannot understand the 1960s, without first understanding the stifling, conformist 1950s. We saw it all go down, the communist witch hunts, Viet Nam, Watergate, and we took away from it something ironically enough, John Mitchall, Nixon’s Attorney General and a central figure in the Watergate conspiracy, once said to reporters…
"You will be better advised to watch what we do instead of what we say."
No kidding. Those are words that should be embossed in bold letters at the top of every ballot in every election. Never mind what they say…pay attention to what they do. And when they start hiding things from the voters, it should set off every alarm bell you have. At minimum, we can’t govern ourselves if we don’t know what the fuck our government is up to. Nixon was legendary for his secretiveness. But Bush makes him look like he lived in a glass White House.
Sometimes I forget how old I am. Not everyone remembers that past like I do. Barbara O’Brien puts Dreher’s experience into perspective for me…
The answers to your questions, Mr. Dreher, is (1) yes, and (2) because you were brainwashed. As I wrote here,
I noticed years ago that the rank-and-file “movement conservative” is younger than I am. Well, OK, most people are younger than I am. But surely you’ve noticed that a disproportionate number of True Believers are people who reached their late teens / early twenties during the Carter or Reagan years at the earliest. They came of age at the same time the right-wing media / think tank infrastructure began to dominate national political discourse, and all their adult lives their brains have been pickled in rightie propaganda.
Because they’re too young to remember When Things Were Different, they don’t recognize that the way mass media has handled politics for the past thirty or so years is abnormal. What passes for our national political discourse — as presented on radio, television, and much print media — is scripted in right-wing think tanks and media paid for by the likes of Joseph Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife, and more recently by Sun Myung Moon. What looks like “debate” is just puppet theater, presented to manipulate public opinion in favor of the Right.
In this puppet theater “liberals” (booo! hisss!) are the craven, cowardly, and possibly demented villains, and “conservatives” are the noble heroes who come to the rescue of the virtuous maid America. Any American under the age of 40 has had this narrative pounded into his head his entire life. Rare is the individual born after the Baby Boom who has any clue what “liberalism” really is. Ask, and they’ll tell you that liberals are people who “believe in” raising taxes and spending money on big entitlement programs, which of course is bad. (Read this to understand why it’s bad.)
Just one example of how the word liberal has been utterly bastardized, see this Heritage Foundation press release of March 2006 that complains Congress is becoming “liberal.” Why? Because of its pork-barrel spending.
But I want to say something more about betrayal. One piece left out of most commentary on the freaks (not hippies, children; the name preferred by participants of the counterculture was freaks) was how betrayed many of us felt. Remember, we’d been born in the years after World War II. We’d spent our childhoods dramatizing our fathers’ struggles on Normandy Beach and Iwo Jima in our suburban back yards. Most of us watched “Victory at Sea” at least twice. Most of our childhood heroes were characters out of American mythos, like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone (who seemed an awful lot alike). Further, some of the scariest times of the Cold War unfolded during our elementary and middle schools years. We grew up believing the Communists would nuke us any second. Our schools (even Sunday School, as I recall) and media made sure we were thoroughly indoctrinated with the understanding that liberty and democracy were “good” and Communism was “bad,” and America Is the Greatest Nation in the World.
For many of us, these feelings reached their apex during the Kennedy administration. I was nine years old when he was elected. He seemed to embody everything that was noble and good and heroic about America. I remember his tour of Europe the summer before the assassination. I watched his motorcade move through cheering crowds on our black-and-white console television and never felt prouder to be an American.
But then our hearts were broken in Dallas, and less than two years later Lyndon Johnson announced he would send troops to Vietnam. And then the young men of my generation were drafted into the meat grinder. Sooner or later, most of us figured out our idealism had been misplaced. I was one of the later ones; the realization dawned for me during the Nixon Administration, which began while I was a senior in high school. Oh, I still believed in liberty and democracy; I felt betrayed because I realized our government didn’t. And much of my parents’ generation didn’t seem to, either.
The counterculture was both a backlash to that betrayal and to the cultural rigidity of the 1950s. And much of “movement conservatism” was a backlash to the counterculture, albeit rooted in the pseudo-conservatism documented earlier by Richard Hofstadter and others.
Just so. I forget this. More and more people I live and work with every day now, came of political age during Carter. It always amazed me how they could idolize that cardboard right-wing conservative figurehead Reagan, who famously laughed at Bob Hope’s AIDS jokes during the re-dedication of the Statue of Liberty. But Carter’s handling of the Iran Hostage situation probably affected a good many of them the way it affected Dreher, and Reagan’s theatrical posturing as a force for American strength and values probably inspired them the way Bush’s did after 9-11, and never mind that the families of tens of thousands of "disappeareds" in south America might view it a little differently. You can’t trust a president who treats the lives of helpless impoverished people with indifference, if not contempt, to respect American lives any better. The conservative juggernaut Reagan helped usher into American politics has been an unmitigated disaster for American democracy, and we can see that disaster’s culmination in Iraq…in Katrina…in Bush.
Nixon and Reagan were both notorious for the grandiose trappings of luxury and royalty they attached to the presidency, prompting the columnist Mary McGrory to say of the Reagan republicans that they were "Free, free at last from the loathsome hypocrisy of the respectable republican cloth coat", ironically a phrase Nixon coined back when he was Eisenhower’s VP. Nixon’s nemesis on the editorial pages of the Washington Post, the political cartoonist Herblock, once averred that the proper degree of respect for the president was as public servant number one. Because in this democracy, that’s what the president is. But it’s a lesson lost to a lot of us now, because the right wing noise machine has deftly associated that basic principle of democracy with national weakness. Kings don’t suffer questioning by the peasants, and we have a president now who seems to really think the office he was elected to was king, and not public servant number 1. That’s no accident. It’s taken them years to get us here. But it’s starting to look as though one more Viet Nam might bring us back to democracy again. Maybe.
This is no hippy slogan. This is how democracy works. Ask the Watergate generation why this is so. Or just sit back, and watch it all happening again. I guess for some of you this would be the first time you saw it. But not just democracy, this is how Life works, unless you aspire to be nothing more then someone else’s sock puppet. If I could, I would put this on all our coins instead of the Christianist, "In God We Trust", that became de rigueur for American currency by a law passed in the 1950s.
There is a new movie out that I absolutely cannot fathom ever watching; Alpha Dog. As I understand it, the film dramatizes the true life kidnapping and murder of a 15 year old boy. I glanced at a review of it, which gave a few details. The victim was the brother of an older teen who owed a drug debt. Murder was not the original intent, only to make the brother pay up. The kid was taken to a house where he eventually began to enjoy the drugs and the scene and party it up a bit himself, not taking too seriously the situation he was in because his kidnappers were other kids not much older then he was. He thinks he is making friends with them.
But then the kidnapper talks with his lawyer and realizes the magnitude of the crime he’s committed, and step-by-step, feels backed into a corner where actually killing the kid looks like the only thing he can do. The review I read remarked on how uneasy you feel watching the whole situation unfold, watching that kid in the company of his kidnappers, enjoying their company, not taking too seriously the situation he’s in, hoping that what what you just know is going to happen won’t And then it does. I can’t watch that. Just thinking about it now as I type this, is stressing me out. I feel an urgent need to get that kid the hell out of there, by any means necessary. And I can’t. It’s too late. It’s many years too late. I think about how I was blissfully enjoying my own life, while this fifteen year old was in the company of kids who would eventually murder him and it just stresses me out. No way am I going to watch that movie.
On June 26, 2006 I initially left voice messages for Alan Chambers of Exodus International and another national ex-gay leader about inappropriate incidents that affected youth at an Exodus member ministry. I will not go into the details at this time, but I shared three specific situations that happened within the previous year. The shocking details of the third situation compelled me to contact Alan and this other national leader. In my initial messages I said that I would rather discuss this privately, but if they did not wish to talk, then I would initiate a public discussion.
Peterson Toscano, after all he’s been through in his life, is one of the most inwardly calm and decent people I’ve ever met. His style is not to be confrontational, but to speak to a person’s conscience, to their better nature, and try to work together with them to resolve problems. He would not be making this matter public if there was any other way. But Exodus doesn’t seem to want to address the issue. For half a year, he has been trying to get Exodus to agree to some basic guidelines for protecting the kids in their "programs". Now it looks like he’s just getting the brush-off.
The non-violent work that I do involves attempting to connect with people to create a "win-win" situation if at all possible. Building relationships, shedding assumptions, believing the best in people are all part of my Christian testimony. Joe Brummer outlines some of these non-violent steps in his most recent post. I don’t hate Alan or Exodus. I have used much restraint in hopes of seeing real change.
Some of us who feel we have been wounded by the ex-gay ministries and the anti-gay church may have sometimes wish to do them harm and to think the worse, to malign them the way that we feel they malign the LGBT community. For me Jesus’ teachings is that I should seek to do good and speak out against injustice but not exact revenge.
Perhaps some people would love there to be a major Exodus scandal. I want to see one avoided.
Do I wish them harm? Here’s what I wish. In a just society anyone who participated in forcing a gay kid into one of these places would be in jail, along with the other child molesters. That’s my wish. But the possibility of a scandal of this nature disturbs me so deeply that I have to step back from this fight periodically, for the sake of my own sanity. I think that’s why a lot of people hold this fight at arm’s length. It’s just too emotionally stressfull. You want to get those kids the hell out of there and you can’t. The law is against you. There’s nothing you can do but watch in a kind of growing gut wrenching horror. Ever since the Memphis protests, ever since I read that Refuge Rule Book Zach Stark posted, I’ve felt like I was watching a situation unfold, watching gay kids being put into camps run by men with no training other then religious dogma, no understanding of human sexuality, and no respect for the sexual nature of these kids, hoping that what what you just know is going to happen won’t And when it does, I am not going to be happy, I am going to be sick.
Peterson Toscano is one of the most decent people I have ever met. I hope his way of conflict resolution has the desired effect. I trust, since he actually knows more about this environment from first-hand experience then I’ll ever know in a lifetime, that he knows what he’s dealing with. I hope I am wrong: He believes there is a better nature within these people that can be reached. I think they’re rotten to the core. I think they’ve taken their conscience around behind the barn and killed it. I hope I am wrong. I hope I won’t see happen, what I just know is going to happen. But I don’t think even a sex abuse scandal will cause these people to reconsider what they are doing to kids. They’re on a mission from God, and God is never wrong.
People already know there is a potential for abuse here. This isn’t rocket science. And yet nothing is done, and kids are still being shoveled into it. Perhaps the reason for that is because the people involved in running these places Don’t Care. Exodus is not about helping people out of homosexuality…it is about fighting against gay civil rights. It’s about enforcing the pariah status of homosexual people. That is what Exodus is about. You may disagree, but that’s the only scenario where this behavior, this practical if not rhetorical indifference to the welfare of the kids in it, Makes. Any. Sense.
You think that any sane parent, even one that was vehemently opposed to homosexuality (I know…I know… It’s like being vehemently opposed to left-handedness…), would be disturbed to learn that their kids where being tossed into a mix of adults that included men who admitted to being sexual addicts and compulsives. You’d think that even these parents would be appalled to learn that some of these "former" sexual compulsives were staff members themselves, who could at any time get their kid alone somewhere on campus for a little private counseling. You’d think.
But then you watch these parents come and go in and out of Exodus "Love Won Out" conferences, you see them taking part in the larger anti-gay political agenda, and you listen to them mouth the same filthy lies about gay people we’ve all heard over and over thousands of times like a mantra of hate, and you realize that…yes…they probably wouldn’t care anyway. For a lot of these parents, I am convinced, these ex-gay camps aren’t a last resort to changing their kid’s sexual orientation at all. They’re punishment, pure and simple. What the religious right likes to call "tough love" and what otherwise decent people call child abuse. They want the kid to suffer, so they’ll never forget how much their own parents hate them for turning out to be faggots. Not necessarily suffer actual physical sexual abuse…no. Of course not. But the environment they’re being tossed into is primed for just that kind of thing to happen. It cannot be defused without gutting them of their mission, which is not to cure, but to enable the social and political abuse of these kids, and the adults they will grow into. You cannot enable the one, without some degree of indifference for the other. And it is of a piece with the indifference of the religious right to anti-gay violence in general. Here is Randy Thomas of Exodus, in an ad campaign against hate crime laws:
Of course, yes, many parents, not vehement about homosexuality, are simply terrified into sending their kids into these camps. They’re afraid for their kids, afraid because of the lies they’ve been taught by the religious right about homosexuals and homosexuality, afraid for their immortal souls. The last thing in the world these parents want is for their kid to be sexually abused while in one of these things. They trust in the people who run these camps, being righteous men and women of God. But the horrible nature of these places is that sexual abuse is in fact, what these places do. It is what they are meant to do.
We know instinctively that sexual abuse isn’t simply a matter of the physical act alone. It is a dagger plunged into their heart of the one who suffers it. We know this. And yet, we loose sight of it when it comes to what the ex-gay ministries do. We think of the child abuser as a monster, acting in pure selfish contempt and greed. We picture them as evil, vicious, brutal thugs. But greed has many faces. Consider for a moment instead, the victim. What do we often see in the victims of sexual abuse, and in particular, in the kids who have suffered it. Withdrawal. Guilt. Shame. Alienation. Self destructiveness. Guilt. Shame. A fear of sex and sexual intimacy that can work against any intimate human relationship they might attempt throughout their lives. Shame. Guilt. Shame. Shame. And shame. And what do we see in gay kids who have been taught to fear and loath their sexuality? Exactly the same things.
To methodically teach a gay kid to fear and loath their sexual nature is to do to them essentially what a rapist does to their victims, but without the physical act. And worse: because the child molester is universally condemned in our society and in human societies all over the world, but the people running these camps are held in high esteem as doing the work of God. For gay kids who internalize the message these camps do their damnest to put into them, there is no refuge from shame, not even the slightest comfort that what was done to them was a profound and unforgivable crime. To the contrary, the sense that they were to blame for what happened to them, is brutally re-enforced by the culture around them, particularly if they come from fundamentalist families.
What kind of people do this? Monsters? Perhaps. But not necessarily. There is hate, and there is greed. Sometimes they dance together. Sometimes they dance alone. Sometimes greed wears a face that seems compassionate and loving, until you realize that it’s the face of a vampire. There is love that is selfless and giving, and rejoices in the happiness of the beloved. And there is that greed that is selfish and needy and possessive and wears love like a mask, to hide a bottomless indifference to the damage it does.
Peterson has been trying hard to raise awareness of the potential for something worse then what he’s already discovered happening in these camps, and he’s made little headway judging from his post. He would greatly disagree with me on this I’m sure, but the problem as I see it is they’d have to care first, and you can’t care about what happens to kids physically without caring about what happens to them spiritually too. And the problem with that is it raises too many uncomfortable questions. Questions that call into doubt the very existance of these camps. Better not to ask them.
This is all of a piece. Note that none of these places keep any follow-up statistics on their "clients". As Wayne Besen found out while investigating them for his book, Anything But Straight, they can’t tell you their success rate because they don’t know it themselves. They don’t know how many of their "clients" stay heterosexual. They don’t know how the bond between parent and child does after a kid is run through their "program". They don’t know anything at all about the sexual, let alone the emotional health of their "clients" one, two, three years or more after they’ve been in the "program". They don’t want to know. The anecdotal evidence after all, is bad enough. I’ve heard the stories first-hand, from kids who have lived it. And the recurring theme through all of it is that none of these places seemed to give a good goddamn what happened to them after they’d gone through their "program".
This isn’t rocket science. Following up should not only be easy, but for people who are acting out of love for the kids it should be imperative. They should be critically intent on knowing how well they are doing their job. Are the kids better for having been though the program, or not? Are we doing anything wrong? Could we do better? Yet, they don’t want to know.
This blindness to the sexual safety of the kids in their custody is telling, in precisely the same vein. You need to pay attention to this. The great crimes against humanity don’t happen because of people who shake their fists at God and hoist the Jolly Roger. They happen, because of indifference to the humanity of their victims. Elie Wiesel, who survived the extermination camps of the thousand year Reich, captures it perfectly here:
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The claim of the ex-gay camps is that they do what they do to kids out of love. To that, Peterson Toscano says taking steps to protect young people from abuse while in these camps is not only good business, but shows a genuine love for them. But there’s the problem.
Arline Isaacson of the Massachusetts Gay & Lesbian Political Caucus, said she believes political opponents such as Mineau are acting in good faith. But she said any campaign against gay marriage inevitably draws virulently anti-gay activists from out of state who will say hateful and destructive things. Groups such as Mineau’s have to take responsibility for that, she said.
"It’s naive at best to think it won’t happen," Isaacson said.
Are you nuts? Those people are about as much good faith as a used car dealer selling models pulled from last year’s flood. This guy has it Exactly right:
Tom Lang of Know Thy Neighbor.org, a sponsor of the vigil, said he’s skeptical of calls for civility in the debate because gay marriage opponents aren’t honest about the real reason they oppose gay marriage: "They don’t like gay people."
"The dialogue can’t exist unless they’re honest and they come clean about how they really feel about gay people," he said. "We’d like them to just admit it."
But of course…they won’t.
Mineau said his group isn’t against gay people, but rather for promoting the man-woman model of marriage as the best way for society to raise children.
"That’s what we should all be esteeming for," he said. "We shouldn’t try to deconstruct it."
Well let’s deconstruct you instead asshole. The man-woman model of marriage is the best, because homosexual relationships are inferior to heterosexual ones. We should all be esteeming for it because homosexuality is a choice and a bad one at that since it’s inferior to heterosexuality. And since the man-woman model is the best and a homosexual one inferior, that means that homosexual households damage the children in them. And since homosexuality is a choice that means that gay people are deliberately choosing to do damage to children. That is what you managed to say in just two short sentences. But without actually saying it outright, of course. And you’re not against gay people.
Good faith. Good faith. Any more of this good faith and the churches up there might as well start selling flood cars.
MFI and VoteOnMarriage.org – the ballot question committee seeking to advance the Massachusetts marriage amendment – has endeavored to advance a campaign that refrains from name calling and does not denigrate individuals. However, as many political pundits predict, the same sex marriage debate, much like the abortion debate, will be with us for decades and MFI sees a need and an opportunity to work with leaders on all sides to promote justice in the way we discuss our differences.
"The tone and rhetoric around this public policy issue has escalated to a frenzied level, too often with shouting that does nothing promote understanding. Denouncing individuals as bigots does not bring people with honest differences together. We would like to work with our opponents to raise the quality of the dialogue," said Kris Mineau, president, Massachusetts Family Institute and spokesman, VoteOnMarriage.org
…Even as this initiative beings to take shape, MFI and VoteOnMarriage.org will continue to urge supporters of the marriage amendment to be respectful of human differences and always maintain a dialogue that affirms the dignity of every person.
You know how this works…right? We stop calling them bigots, and they get to keep calling us AIDS spreading child molesting family destroying abominations in the eyes of God.
Honest differences? There is nothing honest about these people. Nothing. And especially nothing honest about their calls for mutual respect and civility. Every time you hear something like this coming out of an anti-gay hate machine, you know they’re talking to the heterosexual majority, not the gay people they’re busy bashing. They didn’t place that press release in the local gay papers. This call for mutual respect wasn’t addressed to the gay people they’re trying to take the right to marry away from. This is window dressing for the big vote in a couple years. They need to convince just enough voters that voting to take away their neighbor’s right to marry doesn’t mean they’re jumping in bed with bigots. That’s what this is about. Nothing else.
Picture a bunch of white racists pleading with black Americans for mutual respect while arguing for segregated schools and neighborhoods. Picture a bunch of antisemites insisting they want a dialog about the Nuremberg laws that affirms the dignity of every person. It’s to laugh.
"Everything you know is wrong" – The Firesign Theater
I’m looking through my server logs and I see a reference to my blog coming from a site I’d never seen before…Why the hell are you here? Check out the Bad Science and Dead Racists tags for some good reading. Anyway…I was looking around and I found a link to this…of all things…
The Geocentrism Challenge
CAI will write a check for $1,000 to the first person who can prove that the earth revolves around the sun. (If you lose, then we ask that you make a donation to the apostolate of CAI). Obviously, we at CAI don’t think anyone CAN prove it, and thus we can offer such a generous reward. In fact, we may up the ante in the near future.
Scripture is very clear that the earth is stationary and that the sun, moon and stars revolve around it. (By the way, in case you’re wondering, "flat-earthers" are not accepted here, since Scripture does not teach a flat earth, nor did the Fathers teach it). [Bruce: Actually…I belong to the Flat Mars Society…] If there was only one or two places where the Geocentric teaching appeared in Scripture, one might have the license to say that those passages were just incidental and really didn’t reflect the teaching of Scripture at large. But the fact is that Geocentrism permeates Scripture. Here are some of the more salient passages (Sirach 43:2-5; 43:9-10; 46:4; Psalm 19:5-7; 104:5; 104:19; 119:90; Ecclesiastes 1:5; 2 Kings 20:9-11; 2 Chronicles 32:24; Isaiah 38:7-8; Joshua 10:12-14; Judges 5:31; Job 9:7; Habakkuk 3:11; (1 Esdras 4:12); James 1:12). I could list many more, but I think these will suffice.
This was copied from a site called Catholic Apologetics International, and seems to have since been pulled from it, as the page they’ve linked to is no longer found. But some digging around among the other links back at Why The Hell Are You Here? turned up this amazing little tidbit …
The non-moving Earth
& anti-evolution web page of
The Fair Education Foundation, Inc.
Exposing the False Science Idol of Evolutionism,
and Proving the Truthfulness of the Bible from Creation to Heaven…
– since 1973 –
Marshall Hall, Pres.
Questions from Daniel Ott and his audience will be seeking hard evidence from me
which proves that the Earth is neither rotating on an axis nor orbiting the sun.
You won’t want to miss this unraveling of the granddaddy of all conspiracies, and
what the Truth about the Non-Moving Earth issue means to every living person.
This site doesn’t appear to be satire. In case you’re wondering, they seem to be claiming that the stars we see in the sky at night are mostly reflections of sunlight off of ice crystals. Which explains for me a reference that’s always puzzled me in Jacob Bronowski’s wonderful book Science and Human Values. In Part 2, The Habit of Truth, Bronowski relates a story of how the great German scientist, Werner Heisenberg, was denounced by the S.S. He mentions a letter Himmler wrote defending Heisenberg, and suggesting that Heisenberg might be useful in a Nazi Academy he was planning to establish, "which Himmler proposed to devote to the conviction which he either shared with or imposed on his scientific yes-men, that the stars are made of ice."
Why, I wondered, would a blood drenched Nazi lunatic want people to believe the stars were made of ice? Well now I know. It’s necessary for an earth centric model of the universe. The universe just can’t be as huge as it is, and work in an earth centric model. So it has to be much smaller. Which means the stars can’t be so big, and so far away. They have to be much smaller, and huddled around the earth like a halo. So the stars must be a cloud of ice crystals, reflecting the light from the sun. That was what Himmler was wanting to prove, so he could prove the earth centric model, so the Nazis could throw out mountains of science that existed, and which was the result of free inquiry. That much of modern physics by that time had been done by European Jews was probably on his mind. But science, regardless of who is doing it, is anathema to totalitarians, who exalt authority over free inquiry, and the Nazis, contrary to a lot of claptrap about their so-called paganism, time and time again appealed to the bible, and to their own brand of biblical fundamentalism for justification.
It’s incredible to find people so afraid of the world as it is, that they’ll shrink back from it into this kind of delusion. Galileo blew this model apart when he took a telescope he made and pointed it at the heavens and saw with his own eyes that the earth centric model simply didn’t work, and Copernicus’ powerful insight had been right. You can buy a pair of binoculars nowadays that are far better then anything Galileo had in his day. But Bronowski, writing this time in his book The Ascent of Man, puts his finger on it…
Galileo seems to me to have been strangely innocent about the world of politics, and most innocent in thinking that he could outwit it because he was clever. For twenty years and more he moved along a path that led inevitably to his condemnation. It took a long time to undermine him, but there was never any doubt that Galileo would be silenced, because the division between him and those in authority was absolute. They believed that faith should dominate; and Galileo believed that truth should persuade.
And there it is. This is why the republicans and the Bush administration have been waging an unprecedented (for America) war against science and knowledge. When people say that the rush back into religious fundamentalism comes from fear of change and apprehension about where science is leading us, that may well be true in part. But it is not the whole. This is a fight over who is in charge, and at the core of it is the struggle for free inquiry. Does your life belong to you, or to some strongman dictator, to the man thumping his bible at you, to your local committee of some national authoritarian political party? Every time you ask a question, you challenge authority. That is what is wrong with asking questions. That is why science must be brought to heal. Because it sets a bad example.
Perhaps We’ll Be Able To Sell Our Wedding Rings On eBay
So here I am…watching the auction of a couple of really nice looking original Canon F1s, and two really nice 85mm f1.8 lenses on eBay. The F1 I bought back in 1971, after a summer of working behind the counter at Burger Chef, has only had to visit the repair shop once and is in great shape now, but I worry about what will happen if it ever needs another repair. So I’d like to get another spare F1 body. I love that camera…best 35mm SLR film camera ever made in my opinion…
They made them practically bombproof. Solid overbuilt mechanical guts, alloy frame, solid brass lens focusing helicoids, roller bearings, titanium foil shutter curtains, oversized film pressure plate, and that breach lock bayonet lens mount that never got loose. The thing was a tank compared to the Nikon F it was competing with when it first came out, and yet in operation it was as smooth as silk. Heavy and yet precise in feel. My friends used to call it the Brass Monster. But in almost 30 years of nearly constant use (at one time I’d wanted to become a professional photographer) it never once failed me. It’s been smacked by a horse, slammed by basketballs and players while covering my school sports, knocked down stairs, knocked out of my hands by angry protesters, taken into the bitter freezing cold, and baking hot conditions. I’ve probably run tens of thousand of feet of 35mm film through it. And only once, did it ever need to be taken to the doctor. That was in 2001 and it took them six months to find a part they needed to fix it. They did a great job…the camera came back restored back to absolutely great shape. But immediately afterwords that repair shop announced they would no longer be servicing any Canon FD series cameras.
So I worry what will happen if mine ever needs repairing again. I just don’t want to be without one of these. For my money, this is the perfect 35mm SLR. Simple, elegant, beautiful, over engineered, yet smooth and precise like a fine watch. I never work better then when I have one of these in my hands. And after all this time, that one I bought back when I was a teenager after months of flippng burgers has great sentimental value to me. So there I am prowling around eBay…looking to buy another backup body (I actually have two others, but one of those is more of a parts camera as it is missing a few pieces), and perhaps get a lens I still don’t have.
Mr. Romney’s supporters came armed with lists of friends and, in the case of politicians, their own contributors. A lot of internal planning had gone into the day, so the recipients of calls asking for donations of $2,100, the legal limit, were not surprised. And Mr. Romney was certainly not taking any chances. When it came time for him to make a fund-raising call, piped over the loudspeaker and in front of a crush of cameras, he chose to call his older sister, Lynn Keenan, at her home outside Detroit.
…"I’ve never done anything like this before," said Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, in a break from her callers. "I start out by saying: `You won’t believe where I am! I’m at the Boston Convention Center with four or five hundred other people dialing for contributions for Mitt Romney.’ "
Meg is one of Mitt’s regional chairs for his finance committee, and apparently she’s doing a bang-up job for him. According to this link, Meg gives money to, among others, Orrin Hatch and…yes…George Allen. No macacas on her payroll I guess.
There is apparently no way to cancel your eBay account. Once you sign on, you’re in their system for life. In the meantime I’m trying to find a viable email point of contact, just to let them know that I’ll be shopping elsewhere for the time being, and maybe forever if Mitt’s anti-gay same sex marriage amendment succeeds in cutting off the ring fingers of gay people in Massachusetts. I’m probably better off shopping for used camera equipment at a real camera store anyway, like B&H in New York City. I’ve never bought anything from their used camera department that wasn’t in exactly the condition advertised. I can’t say the same about everything I’ve bought on eBay. That parts F1 I have being one example.
I doubt that even Barack Obama can save us from our anger now. That’s because the anger that lately pervades our politics is more than just an after effect of six years of Democratic setbacks (although the strikingly angry Democratic response to their six bad years does call for an explanation).
An explaination…did you say? Well…how about this one…
You should go read the rest of Digby’s post. Digby says of the Kurtz review that, "It’s fascinating because it once again illustrates the degree to which conservatives have absolutely no self-awareness", but I don’t think it’s a lack of self awareness so much as a lack of conscience. When they kick people in the teeth, conservatives don’t see that as anything less then their god given right as superior beings. The role of all the rest of us lesser beings is to just stand there and passively take it because…well…they have a god given right to dish it out to us and if we object, we’re the ones being mean. To them. And of course, if we decide to dish it right back then we are being positively uncivil.
Speaking of which…have you noticed how the word, "civility" has become some kind of watchword recently? Civility. Civility. The news media has suddenly discovered that it is important for us to be civil. Now that the democrats are back in power. Goodness knows it wasn’t important when people like the lady in the photo above were in power. Goodness knows it wasn’t important back when Rush Limbaugh was playing "It’s Raining Men" right after news broke that a New York Times reporter had committed suicide by jumping out an office window. Goodness knows it wasn’t important when Ann Coulter said the only problem she has with Timothy McVeigh is that he didn’t go to the New York Times building. Now that democrats are back in power, the news media that treated Limbaugh and Coulter like elder statesmen have suddenly discovered that incivility is a bad thing. Gosh.
Digby reminds us about the little list of words the father of the new incivility, Newt Gingrich made for republicans to use every time they talked about democrats…
He became famous (with some help from his cohorts) for being a manipulative, vicious asshole and the lesson was well learned. He went on to create a lexicon of derision, used by Republicans everywhere, to describe Democrats and liberals. He called these words "contrast":
Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.
I realize it is churlish of us liberals to attempt to defend ourselves from this kind of bad faith and even worse for us to lose our Gary Cooper cool. But, you know, when you push people far enough and hard enough they start to fight for their survival. The level of vitriol and hate emanating from the right — and encouraged by Republicans leaders of all stripes — has been overwhelming. These past twelve years alone have been characterized by smears, toxic rhetoric, impeachments, abuse of power, stolen elections, power mad governance, corruption and ineptitude. So yes, we’re angry — but more importantly, we are fearful for our country.
Until Republicans admit what they have wrought and recognize that their trash talking and boot-to-the-throat mode of fetid politics are responsible for our state today, then for the good of the country, I hope the left remains angry and battles them back with everything they’ve got.
This is ugly, I admit. But the country just can’t take another couple of decades of Republican politics and Republican rule. We have to stop it — and it won’t be stopped if Democrats play nice.
No. It won’t. I say this over and over again but it’s true: we’re in a knife fight with these people. You either fight back to win, or you just stand there and let them laugh in your face and kick your balls, because that’s just what they’ll do, and keep doing, even after you’ve curled up in the fetal position. They don’t care. They hate you. They hate you with a passion that your gay and lesbian neighbors have seen first hand for decades now. Digby’s right. Until the republicans are held accountable for the past couple decades of vitriol and hate they’ve been spewing into the political well all that this newly discovered concern about the level of incivility amounts to, is just another way of keeping us passive while they get to keep kicking everyone they despise in the face. It won’t stop until they’re held accountable.
Somebody finally sits up and takes notice! Wonderful! Over at Eschaton, echidne says that it is an odd juxtaposition that our new congress may well repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, at the same time Massachusetts takes the right to marry away from its gay and lesbian citizens. "Equal for war but not for love?" She asks. Good question.
In fact, it is precisely to prevent people from asking that question, that we are not allowed to serve. Did you think that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was really about military readiness? Have some second thoughts please. It is because the sight of openly gay people fighting for, and dying for their country, would cause people to raise those kinds of questions that the bigots have been fighting so bitterly to prevent us from serving.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has nothing to do with national security. It has nothing to do with close quarters contact on the battlefield and all the other shibboleths the religious right keeps raising. It has exactly zero to do with troop moral. It is about preventing gay equality. It has always been about preventing gay equality. Nothing else.
Simply put, I can get news and information of concern to the gay community that I could not before. It isn’t merely that a lot of hate crime news never makes it beyond the local media. It isn’t merely that the mainstream news media often chooses not to even report hate crimes against us. It’s that more often then not you catch them actively downplaying it. In effect, hiding it from view.
Chicago police are investigating the shooting of six men at a party in a house on Chicago’s South Side in what may have been a homophobic hate crime.
Police say two masked men burst into an apartment in the house early Sunday morning, spraying semi-automatic gunfire throughout the living room hitting six men.
Residents in the area say the apartment was rented by two gay men and was the scene of frequent loud parties. One neighbor told the Chicago Sun-Times that the building was known as the "Gay House".
"We always be seeing them, and they always be looking at people," Kevin Carter, 18, told the paper.
"They give you that gay look, like you’re a female or something. That ain’t cute. People be ready to fight. … I knew something was going to happen to that house."
…
A man who said his brother lives in the apartment told the paper that his brother had complained for several months about being harassed by people in the neighborhood for being gay.
That’s from the story at 365Gay.Com. The gunmen didn’t use homophobic slurs, apparently didn’t say anything at all, just opened fire. They wore masks, and there have been as I write this, no arrests.
But 365Gay.Com does not field their own reporters. They mostly get their stories off the wire and serve as a news aggregate. That story was based on the reporting from the Chicago Sun-Times. So I went around looking for the story via Google News to see if there were any other takes on it. This is typical of what I found:
Six people were wounded, two of them critically, when masked gunmen opened fire early Sunday on a South Side party, authorities said.
About 100 people were at the party in the first-floor apartment of a two-story building in the 7900 block of South Woodlawn Avenue in the Grand Crossing neighborhood about 5:30 a.m. when two men–armed with semiautomatic handguns–kicked down the front door and starting shooting, said Chicago police spokeswoman Monique Bond.
"Because the gunmen who kicked in the door and opened fire were masked, we don’t have a good description," she said.
The men fled into a nearby gangway, Bond said. Detectives were still questioning witnesses and neighbors.
The victims were all men between the ages of 19 and 35, she said. None lived there.
…
Neighbors said residents of the apartment often held loud parties that lasted into the morning and that police had been called there several times recently. Bond confirmed that officers had been called to the apartment several times since October, including some calls for complaints of aggravated battery.
Outside the apartment Sunday, blood still stained the front steps, porch and door. .
"All I want is for my friends to be OK and healthy," said a man in his 20s who spoke from a window but declined to give his name.
A neighbor who lives in the unit above the apartment, who also declined to give her name because the gunmen were still at large, said the party was going full force when she fell asleep about 2:30 a.m. Then, about 5:30 a.m., she heard shots from directly below her and tumbled out of bed.
…
She said the men who live there held raucous parties almost every weekend and many times on other nights of the week. Officers also had gone there several times responding to shouting and physical confrontations, she said.
"It’s not just on Friday or Saturday; the police have been here Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, when normal people have to work," the woman said.
Not a word, not a breath, about the fact that the victims were gay, and that the renters had been complaining about harassment from the neighbors. The only neighbor quoted complained about the parties and the noise they made (the landlord, also quoted in that article, said he’d only had one complaint and that was when they held a party after they moved in and the upstairs neighbor complained). This was from the Chicago Tribune. Yet another reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times had no trouble getting neighbors of the men to state that they thought the attack was motivated by the men’s sexual orientation. But that reporter, Mark Konkol, was apparently the only one at the scene who thought it was noteworthy.
And it was the Tribune’s take on the matter, that it was merely an attack on a loud party (and whoever heard of loud parties happening on New Year’s Eve), that made the wires. The story came up on google news and I went through one after the other, from papers in California to the Jerusalem Post, and none of them breathed a word to me that the victims were gay men, that they’d previously complained of harassment by their neighbors, and that there was the slightest bit of hostility toward them in the neighborhood where they lived. You saw none of that in the media reporting.
I constructed a google search string using that quote from the kid who said that the men were giving people "that gay look, like you’re a female or something". The only stories that popped up were from the online gay news organizations, and that one Chicago Sun-Times article. That was it.
Now…maybe this shooting wasn’t motivated by anti-gay hate. But there is at least a reasonable suspicion that it was. In the days before the Internet, all I’d have seen of this, perhaps, would have been the sanitized version set out by the Tribune, and accepted by most of the rest of the heterosexual news editors around the country, and in my local neck of the woods, who all decided that the gay angle on it wasn’t worth printing. Nobody outside of Chicago would ever have any inkling that there might be a hate crime here. And so the gay community wouldn’t have had any reason to pay attention to it, to how well it was being investigated, to question what was going on in that neighborhood, and whether hate had once again turned into bloodshed.
I can well remember a time when violence toward homosexuals just didn’t matter to the police, let alone the press. And we are not out of those woods as much as some would like to believe. Between covering that aspect of it up because you believe they had it coming, and not reporting on it because you just don’t give a good goddamn about the faggots anyway and can’t imagine why any normal person would, anti-gay violence would still be swept under the rug, even today. And even the most committed gay rights activists won’t make their voices heard, if they don’t even know what is happening. Silence equals death. What has made a difference now is the Internet. We are not many small and isolated ghettos anymore. The heterosexual majority can avert their eyes all they want, but now we can see what is happening to us as a people in this country. We can’t make the rest of the world pay attention too, if we ourselves don’t even know what is going on. That is why for so many decades, we believed it when they told us we had it coming. We endured the violence in silence and shame. Those days are over.
There’s Knowing…And Then There’s Not Wanting You To Know Too…
There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent. -Ezra Pound
The raging debate about gay rights ultimately turns on one simple question. And, bizarrely, the fact that answering this question will put a definitive end to the national battle over gay rights is almost completely unknown, not only in America in general, but among gay people as well. At its core, the answer to this question is the only one that matters, the one that determines the most appropriate public policy course, and the one that will win the political struggle over gay rights: Is homosexuality a lifestyle choice or is homosexuality an inborn biological trait? Put another way, does someone choose to be gay or are they just born that way? You may be surprised to find out that we already know the answer to this question. In fact, surprising as it may be, we’ve known the answer for several decades.
I disagree that this is the only question that matters. But never mind. The brilliance I’m referring to here, isn’t in Burr’s framing of the question, but of his framing of the answer. We’ve known the answer for several decades. Yes. Just so. If the question is a pitch by the religious right, then Burr smacks it clear out of the ballpark with this…
A bit of Biology 101: For every human trait they study, clinicians and biologists assemble what’s called a "trait profile," the sum total of all the data they have gathered clinically (clinical research basically means research done through 1. questions and 2. empirical observation to answer the questions) about a trait. Researchers gather groups of subjects from different areas of the world, question them about their trait, observe the trait in them, and record the data. The various aspects of the trait are precisely described: gradations and variations in eye color are assessed, eye color’s correlation or lack thereof with gender, geography, race, or age is noted, scientists observe the way eye color is passed down through generations—all of which are clues as to whether or not eye color is a biological trait. The data are summarized in papers and charts and published in the scientific literature. That, in sum, makes up the trait profile.
Here is the profile of a trait on which clinical research has been done for decades. It is taken from the published scientific literature. The trait should be rather obvious:
1) This human trait is referred to by biologists as a "stable bimorphism"— it shows up in all human populations as two orientations— expressed behaviorally.
2) The data clinicians have gathered says that around 92% of the population has the majority orientation, 8% has the minority orientation.
3) Evidence from art history suggests the incidence of the two different orientations has been constant for five millennia.
4) The trait has no external physical, bodily signs. That means you can’t tell a person’s orientation by looking at them. And the minority orientation appears in all races and ethnic groups.
5) Since the trait itself is internal and invisible, the only way to identify an orientation is by observing the behavior or the reflex that expresses it. However—and this is crucial—
6) –because the trait itself is not a "behavior" but an internal, invisible orientation, those with the minority orientation can hide, usually due to coercion or social pressure, by behaving as if they had the majority orientation. Several decades ago, those with the minority orientation were frequently forced to behave as if they had the majority orientation— but internally the orientation remained the same and as social pressures have lifted, people with the minority orientation have been able to openly express it.
7) Clinical observation makes it clear that neither orientation of this trait is a disease or mental illness. Neither is pathological in any observable way.
8) Neither orientation is chosen.
9) Signs of one’s orientation are detectable very early in children, often, researchers have established, by age two or three. And one’s orientation probably has been defined at the latest by age two, and quite possibly before birth.
These data indicated that the trait was biological, not social, in origin, so the clinicians systematically asked more questions. And these started revealing the genetic plans that lay underneath the trait:
10) Adoption studies show that the orientation of adopted children is unrelated to the orientation of their parents, demonstrating that the trait is not created by upbringing or society.
11) Twin studies show that pairs of identical twins, with their identical genes, have a higher-than-average chance of sharing the same orientation compared to pairs of randomly selected individuals; the average rate of this trait in any given population— it’s called the "background rate"—is just under 8%, while the twin rate is just above 12%, more than 50% higher.
12) This trait’s incidence of the minority orientation is strikingly higher in the male population— about 27% higher—than it is in the female population. Many genetic diseases, for reasons we now understand pretty well, are higher in men than women.
13) Like the trait called eye color, the familial studies conducted by scientists show that the minority orientation clearly "runs in families," handed down from parent to child.
14) This pattern shows a "maternal effect," a classic telltale of a genetic trait. The minority orientation, when it is expressed in men, appears to be passed down through the mother.
Put all this data together, and you’ve created the trait profile. The trait just described is, of course, handedness.
Yes. What we’re all seeing with regard to human sexual orientation, is nothing new or surprising. Burr compares the two traits, handedness and sexual orientation side-by-side and the likenesses are striking, as is the obvious conclusion. We already know this… I entered first grade back in 1959. I remember vividly the sight of a classmate having his left arm tied down to his side by the teachers (two of them). The boy’s parents had asked them to do that, if they saw the boy using his left hand to write or draw with. The thinking being that if you just forced a kid to use their right hand, they would eventually grow out of using their left. That was 1959. You may notice that they’re not doing that to left handed kids anymore. But there was a time when left-handedness was considered a mark of the devil.
It’s an image that has stuck in my mind ever since, and all the more so after I began my own process of coming to grips with my sexual orientation. I’m gay. You can pressure me into acting against it…teach me one lie after another about homosexuality, make me come to fear and loath my sexual nature so much I might never touch another male with desire without experiencing waves of guilt and self hatred and fear. You can pass one law after another, penalizing and even criminalizing same sex relationships…in effect tying that part of me down. And yet I am still gay. The idea that you can make me not-gay by tying that part of me down is false. You can no more make me not-gay then you can make me left handed by tying down my right arm. That model of sexual orientation, as a learned or adaptive behavior is wrong. It isn’t like that. Neither was handedness. But…we know that.
We’ve known the answer for several decades… Burr, and many other people of good conscience, need to look at that simple fact. I mean…really look at it. Ironically, Burr gives it a glancing shot here:
Behavior isn’t sexual orientation, and the difference between behavior and orientation is as obvious as lying: When you tell a lie, you know perfectly well what the truth is inside…
And so do people like James Dobson, and all the others of his kind in the religious right, who routinely lie about the work of real scientists in order to incite anti-gay passions. Because inciting anti-gay passions translates into money in the collection plate, and votes at the polls, and tens of thousands of obediant followers who jump whenever you tell them to…and more importantly, bend their knees. You can’t distort the science the way the leaders of the religious right are, without knowing that you’re distorting it. That’s lying. And when you lie, you know you’re doing it. They Know.
This is where Burr, and others, chiefly honest men and women of science and other civilized people, get it wrong. Yes, facts matter, because ultimately you cannot fool nature. But this isn’t a matter of convincing the opposition that they’re wrong. They know they’re wrong, or they wouldn’t be lying. The only question that matters isn’t whether sexual orientation is chosen or not, it’s whether the people who still insist that it is, have a conscience or not. Because if they don’t have one, then appealing to it is utterly futile.
But…you should go read the rest of Burr’s piece. For the shear pleasure of watching him smack the ball out of the park. For the next time next time someone like Dobson goes babbling on about homosexuality and choice, so you can see with sickening clarity what a moral runt they are. We don’t force right handedness on left handed kids because we know how damaging that is to them. It’s damaging to gay kids too. Profoundly so. And yes…the religious right knows that too. They’ve known for several decades.
A gay couple holding hands as they left a Scottsdale restaurant were attacked by as many as seven men leaving the pair badly beaten.
Andrew Frost and Jean Rolland say the attack took place just feet from the restaurant’s front doors.
Frost, 19, needed numerous stitches to close wounds on his head and face. Rolland, 28, suffered many bumps and bruises.
"I had blood pouring out of me and I actually blacked out at one point," Frost told the Arizona Republic.
He 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.
Tempers boiled over at an anti-gay marriage rally yesterday when the executive director of the Boston-based Catholic Citizenship emerged from behind a lectern outside City Hall, rushed toward a female counter-demonstrator, and pushed her to the ground.
Sarah Loy, 27, of Worcester was holding a sign in defense of same-sex marriage amid a sea of green “Let the People Vote” signs when Larry Cirignano of Canton, who heads the Catholic Citizenship group, ran into the crowd, grabbed her by both shoulders and told her, “You need to get out. You need to get out of here right now.” Mr. Cirignano then pushed her to the ground, her head slamming against the concrete sidewalk.
"It was definitely assault and battery,” said Ronal C. Madnick, director of the Worcester County Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. Police interviewed Mr. Madnick and several others moments after the incident.
As Ms. Loy lay motionless on the ground, crying, Mr. Cirignano ran back behind the lectern, where moments before he had opened the afternoon rally by leading a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Emphasising the words "under God" and Leaving out "indivisible", no doubt…
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been asked to help with the investigation into two attacks on women Ada Oklahoma where homophobic epithets were marked on their bodies.
But apart from helping develop a profile of suspects in the case there is little the FBI can do. Gays and lesbians are not protected under federal hate crime legislation.
Sara Kaspereit, 20, said she was grabbed by two men as she got out of her car in front of her home on Monday. One of the men carved the word lesbian into her forearm.
Earlier this month a second woman said she was blindfolded, bound to a tree and the word "Hellbound” was written in marker pen across her chest.
…
In previous homophobic attacks where the FBI has been asked for assistance there is little the bureau could do.
Last July the FBI was called for help in investigating an incident involving a burning cross in front of the home of a gay man in Athens, Tennessee. After determining the incident was homophobic rather than race related the bureau declined to help. (story)
Federal investigators examined evidence but said that even if the people responsible are caught they cannot be prosecuted under federal law. (story)
Legislation that would have included crimes against gays and lesbians in federal hate crime laws was dropped in the Senate in May. (story)
Sitting cross-legged in jeans and an open-collar shirt, Barnes spoke in his video about evolving feelings growing up in a firm moral family: from confused little boy to adolescent racked with self-loathing and guilt.
In their only talk about sex, Barnes said his father took him on a drive and talked about what he would do if a "fag" approached him.
Barnes thought, "’Is that how you’d feel about me?’ It was like a knife in my heart, and it made me feel even more closed."
I have a strong hunch that dad was having some thoughts about how manly his boy was, and decided to lay it on the line for him. It did it’s work. When Abraham took his son to the sacrificial altar, so the story goes, an angel stayed his hand just at the moment he was about to put the knife into his son. But I don’t think even an angel could stop some parents.
What It Looks Like When Playing To The Moonbats Doesn’t Win You Anything
Canadian Prime Minister Stephan Harper, who campaigned on a promise to hold a free vote on restoring the traditional definition of marriage, read the tea leaves and instead ended up holding a vote on whether or not to hold a vote. You can’t govern from the far right in a country whose political process and news media haven’t been utterly corrupted by right wing billionaires and big business.
Demonizing minorities for the sake of driving the bigot vote to the polls can only get you so far in the civilized world, and Harper apparently wants to keep on being prime minister…
Tory attempt to restore traditional definition fails in House; social conservatives cry foul as Harper declares debate over
OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper has declared the contentious issue of same-sex marriage to be permanently closed.
After a Conservative motion calling on the government to restore the traditional definition of marriage was defeated yesterday by a resounding 175 to 123, Mr. Harper said he will not bring the matter back before Parliament.
"I don’t see reopening this question in the future," he told reporters who asked whether same-sex marriage would return to the table if the Conservatives won a majority government.
Nor does he intend to introduce a "defence of religions" act to allow public officials, such as justices of the peace, to refuse to perform same-sex marriages.
"If there ever were a time in the future where fundamental freedoms were threatened, of course the government would respond to protect them," said the Prime Minister, who voted for the motion. "The government has no plans at this time."
The declared end of the same-sex marriage debate brought comfort to those who have been fighting for such unions. But social conservatives who have supported Mr. Harper’s government said they felt betrayed by his decision to quit their fight; some said it will come back to haunt the party in the next election campaign.
"I am afraid that the Conservative Party feels that they can take social conservatives for granted in this country," said Joseph Ben Ami, executive director of the Institute for Canadian Values.
Social Conservatives…? That’s a polite way of saying ‘bigot’ isn’t it? And as I understand recent Canadian political history, calling Harper a Tory is a bit misleading. Harper’s party, the Conservative Party of Canada, was formed from a really odd (to this outsider) merger between the Progressive Conservative Party and the Canadian Alliance, which, particularly in Alberta, couldn’t seem to fag bash enough. The Alliance was Canada’s bigot right, in morals and tone not all that dissimilar from the southern state republicans down here in the U.S,. They can’t be happy with this.
But the rest of the western industrial world isn’t still arguing about evolution. Whatever levers big money has to pull in Canada, it looks like playing the fundamentalists for votes isn’t a winning proposition. So for now anyway, gay people in Canada don’t have to play the roll of the bogeyman herald of the apocalypse who drives the batshit crazies to the polls and keeps the conservatives in power. They can have lives. Real lives.
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