Pastor Manning and his church are at it again with weird anti-gay messages on their church sign. (Click to embiggen)There have been further developments of some of the stories I posted about in yesterday’s Friday Links (Hugos and movies edition), as well as some things I would have included if I had seen them earlier.
Eric Flint delivers Some comments on the Hugos and other SF awards. Specifically explaining why any system of awards drifts into a subset of any large set of works. It’s a really good read if just for the information about some of the giants in the field who never won awards.
The Family Research Council is once again calling for weeks of fasting and praying to save America from the evil of homosexuality (they say it’s about other things, but just take a look at the list of prayer topics in the article). As part of this they have been publishing a suggested prayer each day. After they published one earlier this week that seemed to be suggesting that gay people raising children should be forcibly drowned, news sites started publishing stories about the other awful anti-gay things said in all of the published prayers. Suddenly, FRC has decided that the prayers needed “editing” and removed them. Fortunately, someone took screen captures each day as they were published: WHOA: FRC ‘reediting’ all those heinous fasting-for-marriage prayers I’ve been showing you!
It’s not just national anti-gay rights activists who are suddenly deleting things they were saying quite opening just a few weeks ago. The Sad Puppies (a.k.a. the anti-gay, racist, misogynist GamerGate allies who are trying to screw up science fiction awards) are suddenly trying to erase hateful things they posted, sometimes just weeks ago. Fortunately there’s Google Cache, Wayback Machine, and screen captures: since some puppies are deleting things.
The National Organization of Marriage’s (NOM) email money begs have started claiming they may have to cancel some of the buses to bring people to D.C. for this year’s anti-gay “march for marriage.” Jeremy Hooper as Good As You thinks that NOM pre-spins its likely low #March4Marriage attendance. Given how they tried to explain away the low turn-out last year, I bet he’s right.
DailyKos.comI admit, it’s heartening to see the outpouring of outrage over the latest so-called Religious Liberty laws and that clueless politicians are paying a price for pandering to the bigots. And it’s nice to see that some of the other bigots are starting to realize that pandering no longer works to their advantage.
The religious liberty bills are toxic. They address a non-existent problem. Freedom of conscience is already protected thanks to the Constitutions’s first amendment and loads of Supreme Court rulings. And the religious liberty bills can be used to discriminate against a whole lot of people, including trans* kids who just want to got to school and while at school sometimes they need to pee just like everyone else.
But these bathroom bully bills are just as toxic. They are also addressing an imaginary problem. It really is imaginary, and we can prove it:
None of those bathroom or locker room horror stories have a basis in fact. (Click to embiggen)Media Matters has a nice compilation of statements from law enforcement officials and other experts from the 12 states that have had laws protecting transgender people on the books for a while (some going back to 1993!) about whether or not all those predictioned sexual assaults in bathrooms and locker rooms have occurred. Shockingly, no such assault has occurred in any of those twelve states. Who would have thought?
Please look at that chart, and repeat this to any people who start repeating those claims about bathroom assaults: some states have by law allowed trans* people to use whichever bathroom matches their own gender identity since 1993, and not once, ever, has anyone used that law as a means to sneak into a bathroom and assault someone. Not once.
The problem is that while it’s pretty easy to get people worked up about a really broad-based license to discriminate law, it’s a little more difficult to get those same people to rally against these bathroom bully bills. Because a lot of people who think of themselves as liberal and open-minded, who label themselves “gay allies” still have problems with transgender people. And they still get irrational about anything having to do with “children.”
They wring their hands and say vague (but very emotionally laden) things like, “I don’t want my kids seeing… um…”
Here’s part of how you respond to that. “I get it. But think about it, none of us want to actually watch what people go into bathrooms for, right? You want to go in, do your business, wash your hands, and get out, right? Well, so do they.”
I mentioned that the Indiana license to discriminate law is different from and worse than others that have been passed before. The person who explains this best is, of all people, a Fox News anchor:
Indiana’s RFRA is categorically different from other “religious freedom” laws, because it includes for-profit businesses under its definition of “persons” capable of religious expression. The Indiana law also allows private individuals and businesses to claim a religious exemption in court “regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.” Those differences — which the ACLU has called “virtually without precedent” — expand the scope of Indiana’s RFRA and provide a legal defense for businesses and individuals who refuse service to LGBT residents.
Image posted to Twitter by @seamonkey237. Click to embiggen. Links to corroborating information in the picture itself.Indiana is the latest state to pass a so-called Religious Freedom Act, and they’re getting a lot of heat for it. Large conventions which bring a huge amount of money into the state have stated they’re considering pulling out. Corporations are canceling some activities and investments. Some corporate leaders have pointed out that bigotry like this law leads to an economic death spiral.
At the moment, Indiana’s governor is feeling heat because the law was clearly intended to give legal permission to people to discriminate against LGBT people, which he keeps denying. Because the fact that the bill was written by a notorious anti-gay activist, and is based on similar bills that have been promoted by the equally anti-gay Ethics and Public Policy Center, no one is believing the governor’s denial. It doesn’t help that he invited a bunch of notorious anti-gay activists to the private signing ceremony. (I’m kind of disappointed that it is even legal for a governor to have a private ceremony when he or she signs a public law into effect, you know?) But it’s worse than that…Continue reading Bullied bullies: Indiana’s license to discriminate hurts more than queers→
I’m sorry that I’m not going to be as funny as the Saturday Night Live crew, but I had to share a few updates on some of the things I linked to just yesterday:
While Indiana and Arkansas have passed so-called Religious Freedom bills, a democratic legislator in Georgia may have successfully derailed the bill there simply by proposing an amendment to add language that the bill isn’t meant to condone discrimination. The amendment failed, but: How To Kill A Discriminatory ‘Religious Liberty’ Bill: Call The Bluff.
Late last week, Ben Carson, one of the many people who are hoping to snag the Republican nomination for President, when asked about whether gay people deserve the same civil rights protections of other minority groups, gave a weird answer involving prison rape. He didn’t explicitly say prison rape (or any other rape in forcibly homosocial environments), what he said was that some people go into prison straight, and when they come out they’re gay. Therefore, this “proves” that being gay is a matter of choice, and therefore gay people don’t deserve civil rights protections.
I think he was more than a little surprised at how many people on his side of the political spectrum thought that was a ridiculous thing to say. There’s lots I could say about this, but I think the following clip from CNN in which a reporter talks to Dan Savage about this, sums up things fairly well. Please watch it, then I’ll continue on a related topic after:
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To be fair, before the day was over Ben Carson had back-pedaled and offered a so-called apology. Keeping in mind that Ben Carson is, literally, a brain surgeon, and had just the day before his interview had officially announced that he had formed a Presidential Campaign committee, his answer is that he doesn’t really know whether there is any medical or scientific studies about whether being gay is a choice, and because he isn’t a politician, he wasn’t ready to speak about this issue. He also tried to blame the media for taking his remarks out of context.
There is an overwhelming medical consensus that being homosexual is not a matter of choice, nor is one’s sexual orientation mutable. Every medical association, including all of those Ben Carson has been certified by, reached that conclusion quite some time ago. So as a doctor, he should already know whether or not that have been any medical studies. Second, the moment he formed a Presidential Campaign committee, he became a politician. It could be argued that he’s been a politician since he started taking speaking fees to go to conservative political events and talk about what a bad president Obama is, and how he would be better at the job. In any case, he’s a politician now, and he can’t claim not to be. Besides, his whole schtick up to now has been that the reason he’s qualified to be president precisely because he isn’t a career politician, because career politicians don’t speak truthfully.
And, of course, if you go watch the original interview, you can see that throughout Carson’s entire painfully stupid answer to the question, there is not a single pause or jump-cut. His comments were not taken out of context.
And, as Dan points out, if something being a choice disqualifies it, philosophically, morally, of ethically, from equal protection under the law, then a lot of people are going to lose their rights.
But that isn’t my biggest gripe in this whole case. I’m more irritated at how everyone, even reporters like the guy in the clip, keep saying that it was Dan Savage who took this into “vile” territory. That Dan shouldn’t have mentioned a specific sex act in his reply.
That’s a load of hypocritical hooey.
Carson’s dumb comments about prison turning someone gay were not about homosexuality as a sexual orientation, they were about the reality that in the closed environment of prison, straight men with no other means of getting sex will rape (even if sometimes the coercion isn’t a physical assault, it is still rape) weaker men, most of whom are also straight. Many of those less physically strong or mentally vicious men find that the only way to survive is to allow themselves to be used by the other men. That doesn’t make them gay. Being coerced into performing same sex acts is not the same thing as falling in love with, being attracted to, and feeling physical desire for members of the same sex. It’s different.
And that culture of prison rape was exactly what Carson was talking about. So, it wasn’t the gay activist who first made reference to a “vile” sex act.
In a bigger sense, conservative politicians and their anti-gay supporters, are always talking about gay sex when they make their arguments against gay rights. Some of them are like that crazy Harlem pastor I’ve written about and linked to stories about before, who can’t seem to stop talking about anal sex and gay semen. I could link to those stories again, but none of us need to go there. Or like the politician who sneered that marriage equality advocates were trying to equate “the violent invasion of a colon by a penis” with the love between a man and woman.
Other opponents of gay rights are more subtle, using the code phrase “gay lifestyle.” The religious right is especially fond of claiming that they love their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, but they can’t support the “lifestyle.” But when someone like me points out that my lifestyle is sleep, go to work, discuss with my spouse what we’re having for dinner, wrangle over who’s doing the dishes, sometimes watch TV, try to get some writing in each day before going back to sleep, and somewhere in their paying our bills and taxes—and then ask them which part of that lifestyle is wrong or harmful, then start stuttering. They will allude to the answer euphemistically: that two men are living together as husband and wife. And then I say, “Yes, paying bills, cleaning the house, sometimes disagreeing about whose turn it is to empty the garbage. What’s wrong with that?”
You keep pushing hard enough, and they’ll finally admit that it’s the sex. And usually they refer to specific sex acts which they incorrectly believe all gay men engage in all the time. Which is why some of us point out that hundreds of thousands more straight people engage regularly in anal sex than gay people do. That lots of gay men don’t do anal sex at all.
They may try to wiggle out of it by saying that most gay people are promiscuous, living a life of meaningless one-night stands and drug and alcohol abuse. When we point out that statistically lesbians are better at monogamy than either straight couples or gay couples, and that there are again hundreds of thousands more straight people trolling bars, consuming mind-altering substances, and looking for hook-ups with members of the opposite sex every weekend than gay people doing the same, they get flustered.
Seriously, the last time I was in a bar, it wasn’t a gay bar. We were celebrating the birthday of a straight friend. The last time I was in a gay bar was, um, I think 1999 or 2000, and we were having breakfast before the Pride Parade. The last time I was in a gay bar at night with the intention of drinking and dancing and so forth, was 1998. And I’ve written before about that fact that not only have I never been stoned, but I was in my mid-30s when my husband, a former bartender, had to explain to me that the annoying smell I was complaining about in a convention hotel hallway was pot smoke.
There are lots of single straight men out there living a “gayer” lifestyle than a lot of gay and lesbian couples.
When people from Focus on the Family, or the National Organization for Marriage, or the religious right wing of the Republican party talk about the gay lifestyle or claim we’re assaulting the sanctity of marriage, et cetera, they thing they are angry about is the kind of sex they think we’re having. We need to stop pretending that that isn’t what they’re talking about. We need to confront them about it, and remind them again and again that they are the ones obsessed with our sex lives. We’re not the one’s making “vile statements.”
I linked to a few stories yesterday about the American Family Association and the Republican Party trying to distance themselves from only a small subset of the horrifically anti-gay, anti-jewish, anti-muslim, and misogynist things that Bryan Fischer says every week on his radio show produced and paid for by the AFA by removing him from one of his posts in the organization, specifically Official Spokesperson. But while Fox News is now disavowing Fischer, Equality Matters reminds us of all the times When Fox News Defended Bryan Fischer’s Anti-Gay Extremism.
I also mentioned yesterday several bills filed with the Oklahoma legislature to enshrine more anti-gay discrimination into law. It’s being widely reported that Sally Kern Withdraws Anti-Gay ‘License To Discriminate’ Bill. Unfortunately, she is withdrawing only one of the three anti-gay bills that she’d introduced. Plus, there are seven others from other law makers. So there’s still plenty of anti-gay bigotry on the agenda of the Oklahoma state legislature.
Marshawn Lynch during a photo shoot for a an issue of ESPN Magazine last year. Copyright 2014 ESPN.The sports press keeps throwing tantrums that Marshawn Lynch doesn’t like doing press conferences. And the league fines Marshawn and tells him he has to talk to them. So he gives one word answers or just keeps repeating the line, “I’m only here so I don’t get fined.” This is all stupid, because the sorts of questions the reporters ask are never illuminating, the answers the athletes give are almost never illuminating (and it isn’t because the athletes are stupid–there are only so many ways you can say “We performed better today than they did” or “They performed better today than we did”, right?). Anyway, Marshawn gave more than one word answers yesterday: Marshawn Lynch finally speaks, rips media in Super Bowl press conference. This only thing just makes me crazy. His job is to play football, and he does that pretty damn well. *sigh*
I wasn’t going to comment on the story about the kid who is admitting now that he lied several years ago when he woke up from a coma and told an extremely elaborate and detailed story of going to heaven and playing with angels. I was a little disturbed to learn that there is an entire genre of such books about people who claim to have gone to heaven while unconscious (and related materials) being sold in “Christian” bookstores (the Washington Post calls the genre “heaven tourism”). Now that I think about it, I know exactly how that kind of snake oil would be gobbled up by a lot of people, and I shouldn’t be surprised that some people are willing to sell anything, as long as they make a profit.
Then an acquaintance posted one of the articles on Facebook, and another person commented that they were appalled that the publishers and the kid’s father have been exploiting this transparently false story for years, which prompted another person to become very outraged. “Are you going to tell some poor sick six-year-old who’s just awakened from a coma, ‘Proof, or shut the frak up?'”Continue reading This goes way beyond double-standards!→
The not-terribly detailed sketch local police released of the possible suspect.Last week someone set off some kind of explosive device outside the office of the Colorado Springs branch of the NAACP. This happened the day before news broke of the shootings in Paris, which completely overshadowed any reporting on the bombing, so you may not have heard of it. A week later, we still know very little about what happened. The FBI is investigating. Local law enforcement is searching for a person seen fleeing the scene.
At least some people are arguing that the NAACP bombing doesn’t deserve more extensive coverage because no one died. But the firebomb didn’t kill anyone only because the main gas can didn’t ignite. Yes, that means the attempted terrorist is incompetent at bomb making (or at least at deploying the bomb), but incompetence can still kill. The incompetent often kill more people than the competent, they’re just more likely to kill unintended targets.
The effort to which some rightwing groups are going to in an attempt to claim that the bombing didn’t actually happen doesn’t jibe with claims that the story isn’t being covered merely because no one died. When known racists start claiming that the people of color are making it up, that’s a pretty good indication that a lot of less obvious racist forces are also at work trying to sweep things under the rug.
Not to say that there is a vast conspiracy. There are several reasons this story doesn’t lend itself to the circus-like atmosphere of a good 24-hour news cycle story.
No one died. Because no one died, the networks can’t show you pictures of the victims. There are no images of grieving relatives to exploit. There are no images of bodies in body bags they can show you. There are no images of ambulances gathered around the site of the attack.
The amount of damage done was minimal. There are no dramatic images of a burnt-down building, or smashed windows, or collapsed walls that they can plaster on the screen again and again.
Authorities don’t have a specific suspect, yet. They especially don’t have any images of a suspect that falls into any of the usual categories we like to trot out as the perpetrators of such a crime. No mug shot-esque photos of swarthy-skinned men with middle eastern-sounding names that the talking heads can repeat over and over.
No hate groups have taken credit. There is no dramatic footage of protestors on the streets. They can’t dig up old stories of past incidents involving the group to repeat again and again to fill up time on their broadcast.
The media has certain narratives it knows how to exploit, and at the moment this one doesn’t neatly fit into their favorite terrorism narrative. While there are reasons to believe it is a race-motivated hate crime, we don’t yet have the details that fall into the media’s typical narratives for those, either.
Those things all contribute to the lack of coverage, but they aren’t the only reasons. Race-motivated crimes against people of color, when the perpetrator is believed to be a white guy, are always dismissed as the actions of a single, disturbed individual. Even when a bunch of people die. So in case like this, when, thankfully, there are no casualties, hardly anyone is going to give it a second thought.
But if we don’t give it a second thought, we’re just enabling the next incident.
In response to the gunmen shooting up the offices of a Paris satirical magazine and killing twelve people, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League has come forward with an editorial saying that the terrorists have a right to be angry. It’s a brilliant example of the religious right’s usual tactic of claiming that they don’t condone violence once or twice, and then spewing out several hundred words explains just how much the victims deserved what they got.
Meanwhile, Erick Erickson over on RedState radio is using the deaths in Paris as a cheap ploy to talk about an Atlanta fire department chief who was terminated recently for forcing his subordinates to read an anti-gay book that the fire chief wrote. According to Erickson, us gays have done just as heinous a crime as the Paris terrorists, because this guy was fired simply for publishing his beliefs. Um, no. He was fired for requiring other public employees under his command to read his book and for making numerous public statements about the suitability of queers to serve. Thus fostering a hostile work environment for any gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans employees, or any employee who didn’t share his views. That is not the same thing as merely publishing something. Particularly when, after he was suspended while an investigation when on, the fire chief went on a speaking tour of Atlanta churches, where he declared again and again when he got back to work he would keep proselytizing at work.
But the most insidious and dangerous of these is definitely people like Donohue who argue that what the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo did was so offensive, that it is immoral or unethical for us to defend them (and by implication, immoral to harshly punish the terrorists if caught). Neil Gaiman wrote the answer to this some time back on his journal (in answer to a rather long letter from a fan), Why defend the freedom of icky speech?
You ask, What makes it worth defending? and the only answer I can give is this: Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you’re going to have to stand up for stuff you don’t believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don’t, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person’s obscenity is another person’s art.
Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.
(I’ve excerpted only a small part. Neil’s answer includes the story of how a piece Neil co-created, consisted of a long passage from the Bible with accurate illustrations, almost got a publisher thrown in jail in Sweden. The full journal entry is worth the read.)
Font Folly 