Category Archives: news

That isn’t what wrong means

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During my lunch break at work I use a news reader to browse articles, and I regularly tweet links to the more interesting ones. One such article I tweeted recently explained how a formerly notorious Holocaust denier had changed his name and hid out in California for about twenty years, being very active in a group called the Republican Party Animals.

His true identity was uncovered recenty, and he’s admitted it’s true, the article said, and his RPA friends have been quick to distance themselves from him, to say he was no longer welcome at their events, and so on.

Some total stranger sent me a message, insisting that the story I had linked got a lot of things wrong, and sent me a link to a story on a right-wing “news” site.

I read the second story and learned that this Holocaust denier had changed his name, moved to California, and became involved in the RPA until his real identity was discovered and they kicked him out.

In other words, every single fact, every one, that was in the article I originally linked was repeated and confirmed as a fact in the second article. The second article did not dispute anything at all in the first.

Which isn’t to say that the articles are identitical. The first article focused on the imposter himself, explaining in some detail his activities before changing his name, then explaining in some detail how he cultivated friendships among the California Conservatives until they learned who he was.

The second article left out a lot of those details, sticking to the broadest facts, and spent most of its words saying again, and again, and again, “but none of us agree with his objectionable opinions.” In other words, it isn’t really a news article, it’s a defensive denial.

It is true that the first article does not explicitly say that none of the others agree with the Holocaust denier. It says that they have all disavowed his views. Which is not really a contradiction. The “disavowal” is a verifiable fact. The other version is at best difficult to prove, since we don’t have mind-reading technology. I suspect that the second one is also a lie: I would be surprised if there weren’t at the very least one or two who secretly holds some of those views, because such people are everywhere, even in liberal organizations.

People throw that word “wrong” around when what they really mean is, “it doesn’t espouse my worldview and priorities” often without regard to any factual content.

For several years I’ve been the editor of a very small science fiction zine, and in every issue I write a short editorial. For many years those editorials were simply essays on some aspect of science fiction or fantasy writing history. Once, in an essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s contributions to the genre, I mentioned that Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, and Mary Shelley are sometimes referred to as the “grandparents of science fiction.” That’s the only thing I said about Poe.

One reader wrote in, very upset about the gross inaccuracies I wrote about Poe, and he included an article he had xeroxed out of some magazine. The article was some conspiracy theory nonsense about Poe being involved in some secret behind the scenes war of espionage against some shadowy organization out to destroy democracy. Only one sentence in the entire article even mentioned that Poe was a writer of any sort. Nothing in the article contradicted the one and only thing I had said about Poe. My mention of one fact about Poe’s writing did not, in any imaginable way, disagree with anything in the article.

My mention of Poe was “wrong” because I didn’t make any mention of the insane conspiracy theory. I happened to mention someone that this person had some pretty whacko beliefs about, without furthering the whacko agenda.

That’s the case here. These folks are afraid that people will believe that many of them are Holocaust deniers because one of their buddies has been one. And anyone who doesn’t bend over backward to tell everyone multiple times that none of them feel that way is “getting things wrong.”

No. We’re just not helping you with your damage control. Damage control that would be a lot easier to believe if some of you hadn’t financed a couple of his more recent documentaries that don’t completely deny the Holocaust, but give equal time to the deniers.

But I’m sure you just went along with that because you believe in making things fair and balanced. Right?

Rough, manly sport, part 3

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“I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black and I’m gay.”

Jason Collins isn’t the first professional athlete to come out of the closet. But he is the first male member of one of the “major league” sports to come out while he is still playing in that league. For many reasons it shouldn’t matter. But as Martina Navratilova (who came out as lesbian while still competing in professional tennis years ago) asked, “How many LGBT kids, once closeted, are now more likely to pursue a team sport and won’t be scared away by a straight culture?”

The Atlantic has a great article about why sports journalist haven’t reacted much to any of the WNBA players who have come out over the years, while Jason’s coming out has prompted reactions ranging from publications congratulating him to a reporter insisting that God doesn’t approve.

The thing I found most interesting and troubling in the Atlantic’s article is a quote from a spokesperson for the gay student sports advocacy group, You Can Play. He talks about how incredibly hard it is for them to find straight female professional athletes who will join any of their campaigns. Straight women athletes spend so much energy battling the assumption that they are lesbian, that they don’t want to do anything that might imply they are.

And the reason people assume that woman playing basketball, softball, soccer and the like “must be” lesbian is because basketball, baseball, football, and hockey are considered the epitome of masculinity and machismo. Which is why so many people are threatened by the notion of a gay man playing those sports. And it is threatening. You wouldn’t have players issuing statements that “they wouldn’t be welcome” if they weren’t threatened.

Even the mild, “don’t they realize sex is private?” reaction is a sign of feeling threatened. If sex is private, why do straight athletes introduce people to their wife and kids? And before you say that marriage isn’t about sex, I want to point out that the group fighting most viciously to keep gays and lesbians from getting the right to marry argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court just last month that the primary reason marriage needs to remain a heterosexual right is because only heterosexuals can unintentionally procreate. The argument doesn’t make any logical sense, but all of their arguments insist that the sole purpose of marriage is procreation, in other words, sex. And if you’re okay with straight male athletes being seen in clubs with women, dating women, living with women, getting married to women and have children with them, then you don’t sincerely believe that sexuality is private.

And then there’s the football player who was tweeting about how immoral and against god’s law gays are, which is why he doesn’t want any on his team. Because that player has been living with a woman to whom he is not married for a few years—a woman who he has been arrested for battering, and who has kicked him out of the house more than once for fooling around with another women. And why is he worrying about other people’s morality, again?

Those bad reactions should really be the only answer anyone needs to the question of why such announcements are needed. People shouldn’t have to lie about who they are. People shouldn’t feel afraid to be who they are with their own teammates. Everyone should be equally free to talk about their girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses, et cetera.

Since we aren’t there yet, you do have to consider who’s really the more courageous: the one gay guy on the team who finally is tired of living the lie, or straight guy surrounded by other straight guys who is threatened to the point of anger at the notion of having a gay teammate?

Frothy!

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Ten years ago yesterday, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum gave his infamous “man on dog sex” interview.
Continue reading Frothy! →

Live your life with honesty

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My scouting career was like a patchwork quilt. I joined Cub Scouts in second grade. I don’t think I was a particularly outstanding member of the troop, but I’m also not sure how outstanding any 8-year-olds really are.

In third grade we moved twice during the school year (and once during the summer between the end of third grade and the beginning of fourth). One of towns we moved to didn’t have any scouting troops, it was just two small. Another we didn’t stay long enough to finish unpacking before Dad’s company said, “No, we need that oil rig back in Colorado. Time for y’all to pack up your families again.” That town may well have had a troop, but we weren’t there long enough to find out.

I don’t remember much about the troop I joined when we moved to Ft Morgan, Colorado. I do remember having to say good-bye again just before Thanksgiving. But what I really remember is how shocked I was, once we settled into the next town, that there was only one troop and it was associated with a church that (at the time) Southern Baptists considered a cult rather than a denomination. The feeling was more than a bit mutual. I was informed that the only way to join the troop would be for our family to convert to the other church.

That was only the beginning of a lot of bizarre experiences that most people think could never happen in America as we tried to get by in a town where more than 95% of the population belonged to the same church. Those experiences convinced me at an early age of the true value of separation of church and state.

That would come later. At that point, I was simply dumbfounded to learn that I wasn’t welcome. I hadn’t really understood, before then, how closely the Boy Scouts were tied to churches. Yes, my original troop had been sponsored by the church my family belonged to, but several of the boys in our troop weren’t members of our church. My subsequent troops had been similar. I’m not sure if it was because all of the towns were so small that each had only one troop that drew from all the churches in town, but I had never before felt that my membership as a scout had been dependent upon being a member in good standing of an “acceptable” church.

By the time we were once more living in a town that had a troop which wouldn’t exclude me because of which church I belonged to, puberty had hit and finally told me in no uncertain terms that all the bullies at each school who had called me “faggot” and “queer” had been on to something. I don’t know if the Scouts explicitly had the no gays rule at the time, but it was quite clear to me that “boys like me” weren’t going to be welcomed by “boys like them.”

A frame from the Family Research Council "Stand With Scouts" video.
A frame from the Family Research Council “Stand With Scouts” video.
So the current controversies about Boy Scouts of America polices strike close to home. I wasn’t kicked out for being gay. I wasn’t ever formally kicked out at all. But I certainly felt the sting of rejection, and can’t completely understand why there are so many people who claim to have the well-being of children in mind while they are being coldhearted and bloodyminded. It’s bad enough that people believe and repeat the lies that all gays are pedophiles, that all gay kids are predators, et cetera, but some of them seem compelled to lie about anything and everything to further their bigoted agenda.

The notorious Family Research Council has posted a video calling for people to stand firm on the Scout’s ban on gay members. The script of the video is full of all the usual lies and distortions, but also the image I’ve included here. A bunch of people in some sort of meeting room, with the Boy Scouts’ emblem on the wall, and a sign visible on the left that says “2013 Planning Meeting.”

Except it’s a lie.

U.S. District Court photo originally from LegalGeekery.com.
U.S. District Court photo originally from LegalGeekery.com.
The original photo was found, by Jeremy Hooper of the Good As You blog, to be from a 2009 story published at LegalGeekery.com, where it is identified as the federal district court for the District of Massachusetts.

It’s clear that someone swiped the original picture, cropped it a bit, then Photoshopped the BSA emblem in place of the U.S. District Court seal and the fake 2013 meeting sign on top of the closed circuit TV screen.

You can say that the stolen image is pretty trivial. Nothing they did to the image itself causes any harm to any gay scouts, but it’s still a lie. And it’s just one of many lies in the video. Why, if their cause is so just, must they lie so much?

They like to quote the part of Scout Law that calls for every scout to be “morally straight.” But when my old scout handbook explained that particular phrase, the explanation begins, “By morally straight we mean you are to live your life with honesty…”

So why does the Family Research Council—an organization that has been caught lying again and again about matters both great and (as in this case) exceedingly trivial—get to advise anyone on morality?

My week to complain about news coverage

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I thought it was bad enough when a New York Times article asserted that authorities are looking into connections between the Boston Marathon Bomber and Al Qaeda because the bombs used a design which was once posted on an Al Qaeda website.

That is bad reporting. Or at least bad thinking. Spectacularly bad. The design was posted on line several years ago. That alone means that anyone in the world could have the design. They don’t need to have any connection to the people who posted it. Because it was posted online. But that isn’t the half of it. Pressure cooker bomb designs were being published long, long before Al Qaeda existed. A version is in the Anarchist’s Cookbook, for instance, published back in 1971 (and reprinted again and again).

But no, CNN couldn’t let NYT out-do them in thoughtless reporting. They had to report an unconfirmed rumor as if it were an absolute fact, spending well over an hour repeating the rumor, finding pundits who knew absolutely nothing about what was actually happening to speculate on what sort of person the allegedly identified suspect might be.

As sources such as CBS and NBC reported that the FBI was saying these reports were false, CNN just got more insistent, announcing that the FBI had already arrested the suspect, describing the suspect as “a dark-skinned male” and reporting other details which supposedly came from anonymous law enforcement sources who allegedly claimed that they had triple-checked the facts.

The FBI finally had to issue a very specific (and rather scolding) statement that there had been no arrest, reminding news media that reporting unconfirmed reports sometimes has rather devastating unintended consequences, and strongly suggesting that media personnel should confirm rumors themselves in the future.

In a less serious example, a South Florida gay newspaper published an editorial some call scathing (the word they are actually looking for is ‘petulant’) about pop singer Adam Lambert. The editorial isn’t really scathing about Lambert, rather, the editor turns his venom on his own associate editor for running a story on the pop singer while the chief editor was on vacation. The editor thinks that people who are interested in pop stars are shallow. Though he seems particularly angry at this specific pop star. Not only that, the editor is pissed off because his associate editor got the scoop that Lambert had broken up with his boyfriend, causing so many people to come to their web site to read the story, that it crashed their server.

Okay, let me get this straight: you make money selling ads on your web site and in your paper. You make more money the more people come to read your web site. You’re angry that your underling got an entertainment scoop that brought millions more readers to your web site than usual. Have I got that right? And your underling got that scoop because this pop star you don’t like was in your city performing as the headliner at the community’s Gay Pride Festival.

You’re a Gay Newspaper, and you’re upset that your employee wrote a story about the headliner for the city’s big annual Gay Festival?

I get it. He’s just a pop star. But sometimes people want to read about the people whose music they like. And sometimes they want to read about people whose music they dislike. And if a musician draws a really big crowd to a local event, people expect to read something about the event and the musician in the local paper, particularly when the event is thrown by the very community your publication claims to serve.

When I was editor at two different college newspapers, I often published stories about things that I was not the slightest interested in myself, because I knew some of the readers would be interested. That’s your job when you’re publishing a community paper.

Just like it should be your job, when reporting on a national network, to actually try to confirm your rumor with someone other than the original person who told you the rumor.

Just like it should be your job, when reporting about a specific news event, to apply a little bit of intelligence and logic.

Should be.

Not exactly a surprise

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I was laying half asleep the other morning, the clock radio playing one of the local NPR stations (we have three), when I heard a story about the special office within our state’s department of motor vehicles responsible for making driver’s licenses for undercover cops.

The licenses are real, valid licenses, it’s just the identity that’s fake. The reason officers going undercover need valid licenses is so that the identity “holds up.” Right? If it’s a fake, the number and name on the license won’t be in the system, or the number won’t match the fake name. It would be a bit too easy for the bad guy they’re hoping to take down to find the undercover cop just by running a license.

I was laying there thinking it was cool that we had such an office. Then the story took an odd shift, because the reporter was surprised to find out that federal agencies obtain licenses for fake identities of their undercover people from states that have these programs. Again, it makes sense, and in our system, it’s states that issue most driver’s licenses and IDs, right? You only get a federal ID if you are a federal employee or a dependent of a federal employee. Which would kind of give it away.

All this has come to light because the state DMV has never obtained official approval from the legislature for this program. And the program was set up many decades ago (presumably with the approval of whoever was governor at the time), and since the identities are supposed to be secret, it’s just kept going without all the subsequent governors being fully involved. They decided that they ought to have official legislative approval, so there’s a bill moving through the legislature now to authorize the office to continue to provide these false identities to law enforcement agencies.

The reporter seems quite worked up that one of the federal agencies that obtained IDs was the CIA. It seems that when the first public information request was made, that the person responsible revealed which federal agencies obtained how many licenses. Which was a violation of the agreement that the office had with the feds. So there is a bit of a kerfuffle about that.

But I’m not sure why the reporter is so breathlessly wondering why the CIA needs so many false identities. I think I’m particularly confused because I’ve been following this reporter for years. He’s been covering government affairs stories in Washington and Oregon for several different radio stations and the national NPR news organization for a long time, and normally he seems very savvy and informed.

What is the big deal that the CIA has agents who need false identities? Has this guy never watched Alias, or Covert Affairs, or even the original Mission: Impossible? Those shows are all dramatic exaggerations, but yes, some agents are going to need more than one cover in the course of a career. Sometimes more than one in a year.

And sometimes you’re going to need a cover ID for someone who isn’t an agent, someone who’s gotten into trouble and needs to be relocated. I know the CIA doesn’t handle witness protection, but sometimes there really are defectors in real life. Someone who knows valuable things and wants to leave his or her country, bring their family with them, but their home government isn’t letting them.

I think the story was worth doing. It’s interesting to know that there is a process for this sort of thing. And it’s even very slightly newsworthy that the agency mistakenly released the CIA numbers, and then had to retract.

But the rest of it isn’t news. If you have any sort of understanding of how the world works, it shouldn’t even come as a surprise.

Things out of our control, part 3

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A couple weeks ago I was refilling my coffee mug at work when a co-worker asked if I had heard the news about a former co-worker. I said “no,” expecting to hear something about a new job. Instead he told me that the guy’s 24-year-old daughter had committed suicide just a few days before.

“Oh, no!”

I had never met the daughter. I vaguely remembered pictures of a wife and a couple of kids at different ages on the guy’s desk. But the news immediately dissipated my good mood and left me feeling as if there ought to be something I could do to help. I immediately tried to remember the faces in those pictures on his desk.

But there wasn’t, really, anything I could do beyond offering condolences. When tragedy strikes in the family of someone you know well, you can offer to help run errands, offer emotional support, or maybe drop off a casserole. When I was a kid living in small towns, whenever tragedy struck anyone, you made a casserole and delivered it to the family, so they could eat without someone having to go to the trouble of making a meal. If you didn’t feel you knew the people well enough to deliver it yourself, you might get a group together from the church and a couple of people who knew the family better would be deputized to deliver the food.

It’s a bit different now in the city. People don’t expect that sort of thing, and if it’s a co-worker rather than a personal friend, you often don’t know where they live. I know which suburb this guy lived in, but that was it. And we were co-workers for only a bit over a year, he left for a job at another company almost three years ago. We never had any contact outside of the office. If I did track his address down and showed up with a dish of food, it would be weird and awkward.

Plus, now you have to worry about whether people eat meat, and if they don’t are they ovo lacto vegetarians, pescatarians, or full-on vegan? Maybe his wife had to have only gluten-free food. Or maybe someone has a food allergy.

It still leaves you feeling as if you ought to be able to do something to help.

That same impulse is what most of us feel when we see news such as the bombing at the Boston Marathon, or the shooting at the school in Newton, and so forth. We feel powerless, and if we don’t know anyone directly affected, we can’t even offer condolences or emotional support.

I saw a lot of people on various media and forums admonishing anyone who seemed to be obsessing about the news. To be fair, it was usually admonishing people for repeating unsubstantiated rumor and speculation, but a lot of those admonishments certainly implied that there was something wrong with being anxious to learn more. In those discussions there were lots of references to fear: you want more information because at least subconsciously you want to assess the risk of how likely more people might be in danger, et cetera.

But I think another thing that fuels the need for more information is that feeling of wanting to help. When I heard about the suicide of the former co-worker’s daughter, during my urge to make a casserole, I tried to remember whether he had ever mentioned which neighborhood he lived in. Maybe we had enough information between several of us to at least have flowers sent, you know?

After the bombing in Boston, it was heartening to hear the news of how many people turned out to donate blood, to give money to a couple of funds to help with people who were stranded, and the set up a way for locals to offer places to stay for the stranded folks.

If feeling about this event leave you wanting to help, remember that you can always donate to the Red Cross. Even donating or volunteering at your local Red Cross can help make sure that resources will be available to help in the next disaster or crisis.

Mr. Rogers says to look for the helpers.

Not so recent

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Back in the early ’90s, when I was active with the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Chorus, we had some sort of social at a member’s house. Our host and his partner were showing us around, when someone commented on the photos hanging on the wall of an incredibly adorable kid. “Is that your nephew?”

“No,” our host said. “That’s my son. Here he is with his two moms. And here’s one of all of us.”

He proceeded to tell the story of how a friend he had known “since school” had one day asked him if he would donate the sperm so that she and her partner could have a child. “The next thing I knew, I was explaining to my boyfriend at the time about how in a couple months we’d have to go about a week or two without sex to maximum my sperm count.”

They were doing it without the help of a clinic. So, as he said, he had to “produce a sample” at the appointed time, and a friend who had been recruited for the purpose drove the container across town to where the lesbian couple were waiting. It all had to be timed around when she was most likely to be ovulating, of course. Then they had to wait for a number of weeks to see if it worked.

It didn’t.

So they tried again. And again.

“By this point I suspect we were driving all our friends crazy, because we were all paying attention to her menstrual cycle and talking about it in inappropriate places!”

Eventually, they decided that the problem was probably that the drive time was too long for the sperm to remain viable. So, he said, one night he and his boyfriend went over to their house. She and the friend who was assisting with the equipment were in one bedroom, and he and his boyfriend were in another—”He was getting a bit tired of all these bouts of no sex leading up to each try”—and the gal’s partner waited outside the door to take the specimen jar once it was ready.

“It wasn’t romantic for any of us!”

But that time it worked. And ten years later, the lesbian couple were still happily raising their son, with the occasional help of the friend who had donated the sperm.

I was reminded of this story while listening to this story on one of the local NPR stations.

It also made me think about those comments during the Supreme Court hearings a couple weeks back where a couple of the justices kept referring to gay parenting and gay-headed families as a recent development. One justice insisted that the very idea was “newer than cell phones.”

The first analog cellular network went active in 1979, but no one called the large, brick-like phones (some of them were closer to the size of a briefcase) a cellphone. The phones small enough to fit easily in a pocket came out in 1991. About nine years after the birth of the boy whose story I began this post with.

And that wasn’t when gay parenting began. The American Psychological Association published one famous peer-reviewed multi-year study on the outcomes of children raised by gay and lesbian parents in 1970, for goodness sake!

When I was first coming out of the closet, in the late ’80s, a rather large percentage of the lesbians I met had children. Some of my “lesbian aunties*” had children who were older than I was, and those children had children of their own. A slightly smaller percentage of the gay men I met at that time also had children, some of them with children of their own, as well.

Most of those gay and lesbian parents I knew back then had married young while they were still struggling with their sexual identity, and the children were the result of the marriage. Because of various inequities in child custody laws in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the majority of those children were in the physical custody of their mothers. So I knew of a lot more kids who had been raised by lesbian mothers than those who had been raised by their gay fathers.

On the other hand, one of the adults I knew back then had been raised by an actual lesbian aunt and her aunt’s partner after her own parents had died when she was a baby.

Bottom line: gay, lesbian, and bisexual people have been raising children for many generations. It isn’t a recent idea.

And as to whether gay marriage is a recent idea? Well, the Roman Emperor Constantius II issued what was probably the very first legal ban on gay marriage back in the year 324 A.D. If they decided they needed to explicitly ban it, and then later add the death penalty to the punishment, then gay marriages had to have been happening before that, right?

* Not my actual aunts. These were older lesbian women who sort of adopted me when I was coming out.

A beach, a blanket, and a song

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I’m not quite old enough to remember the original Mickey Mouse Club. It was cancelled almost exactly a year before I was born. Three years after cancellation, the original hour-log recordings were edited down to half-hour segments that were shown in syndication for a few years, and my Mom said I watched it fairly faithfully. I don’t know how much of my memories of the show are from that exposure, because those edited episodes was re-re-released into syndication around the time I was in middle school. I watched some of those episodes, though if my friends caught me, I claimed that I was just watching it to humor my younger sister.

I was already an Annette Funicello fan before. I remember her most from the Beach Party movies co-starring her and Frankie Avalon. When I was in grade school, before modern cable systems, when most places had only three or four stations, there always seemed to be one of those stations that ran movies in the afternoons. Silly comedies were a staple of those afternoon movies, so Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Pajama Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo, and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini made frequent appearances.

The movies were extremely silly, with outlandish plots. Despite being movies about kids spending a summer at the beach and the ensuing romantic soap opera, a lot of them had at least one sci fi/fantasy element (the professor’s ability to paralyze someone by touching a “nerve-cluster” at the temple, the “improved” chimpanzee that could surf and dance better than a human, a Martian teen-ager sent to the beach as an advance scout for an interplanetary invasion, a mermaid falls in love with one of the surfers, and Frankie hires a witch doctor is to send a sea nymph to the beach to keep the other guys away from Annette while he’s in the Navy).

Not exactly high-concept, but probably a big part of the appeal to grade-school-aged me.

She was in a few of the sillier Disney films of the sixties, as well (The Shaggy Dog, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, and The Monkey’s Uncle).

In all of those movies she played the wholesome good girl. The girl any boy would be lucky to have. Setting aside all the levels of sexism in that, it meant when I was a kid, I wanted to be her. I didn’t consciously admit it. I’m sure that to some of the adults in my life they assumed that I learned all the lyrics to all of her songs, et cetera, because I had a crush on her. (And for the record, I didn’t have a crush on Frankie; his pretty boy persona was totally not my type.)

So I’ve always had very fond memories of Annette and was sad to read that she died. I’m a bit miffed that news of her death has been overshadowed by reporting about the death of a certain former British Prime Minister. I certainly understand why the latter is considered more newsworthy.

Good-bye, Annette. I hope that somewhere you’re strolling along a beautiful beach, surrounded by love and music.

Damage control

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A few years back a church bought a recently vacated big box retail building about 8 or 9 blocks from my house and converted it to a worship center. The church was a regional megachurch, not affiliated with an existing denomination. I had heard a little bit about it, but wasn’t terribly familiar at the time. I’ve since learned a bit more.

Although they try to wrap their message in language that sounds hip and liberal, and they clearly aim their marketing at a younger demographic, it is anti-gay, anti-women’s rights, and anti-all-the-other-usuals. The head pastor drives a couple of Mercedes-Benzes. His sermons each week are broadcast on giant screens in the neighborhood worship centers. Dissenters in the congregation are kicked out and all church members who wish to remain in good standing (included the kicked-out person’s spouse, if applicable) are instructed to shun the person.

There is a beautiful historic church building in downtown Seattle, with a gorgeous doomed main building. The building is on the eastern edge of downtown, close to Capitol Hill, which has long been known as the city’s gay neighborhood. Years ago the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Chorus (of which I was a member) was one of about a dozen community musical groups that rented space in the church for weekly rehearsals. Every year they asked all the groups that rehearsed to participate in a Christmas concert. It was wonderful to sing under that big beautiful dome. But also sad to see how small the audience was. The congregation had been shrinking for decades, finding it increasingly difficult to even keep the lights on, let alone maintain the structure. The big beautiful building is on a prime piece of downtown property, and it seemed inevitable that the building would be torn down.

A few months ago, the megachurch announced that it would be leasing the property, moving its downtown neighborhood worship center from a converted warehouse space to the building. Their announcement included the statement, “being closer to Capitol Hill is a blessing as we are serving and ministering to those who are infected with AIDS on the hill.”

There were so many things wrong with that sentence. I’m not sure where to begin.

First, it is literally not possible to be infected with AIDS; you can be infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, but not AIDS itself. AIDS is a specific constellation of symptoms which are a late-term manifestation of an HIV-infection. It is a common misperception, but no one who was actively involved in any serious program to serve or care for HIV-positive people would not be aware of the distinction.

Second, it isn’t the 1980s. AIDS has not been cured, but thanks to the various new drugs, most people in the U.S. who are infected with the HIV virus do not have AIDS. Further, thanks to the drugs, a person can live thirty or more years without experiencing any symptoms. People do still die from the disease, and being on the drugs for decades is no picnic, but there are no longer thousands of people in every gay neighborhood living in near-hospice-care situations counting down the days (and T-cells) until they move into an actual hospice. Some studies, in fact, are beginning to indicate that a person infected with the virus living in a first world country, who begins treatment early, doesn’t even have a statistically significantly shortened lifespan because of it.

Third, while a higher proportion of white people infected with HIV are gay or bisexual than are straight, it is by no means a majority of gay people who are infected. Most gay people, like most straight people, don’t have the virus. In many places in the U.S., one’s ethnicity is a better predictor of HIV infection than whether one is gay and out of the closet.

Fourth, this specific church is anti-gay. Gay members are not allowed. Anyone is welcome to attend, but gay people are not allowed to become members until they become ex-Gay. No one wants to be “ministered to” by someone who thinks you are an abomination. And in the year 2013 if you are the kind of person who thinks that a gay neighborhood is filled with AIDS patients, you are the kind of person who thinks gay people are an abomination. You may not say it aloud, and you may deny it if confronted, but that level of ignorance is only achieved by assiduous avoidance.

Fifth, the statement is in the present tense. In other words, the church claimed to already be involved in some sort of service ministry to people with the disease. The fact that they are obviously unaware of my first, second, and third points shows the statement was a lie. Furthermore, not one single news article or press release in which the church had touted its various charity activities which mentioned anything about AIDS or HIV service could be found before this one statement. Not one.

Sixth, while that building is located close to one part of Capitol Hill, to the extent that the hill remains a gay neighborhood (more on that in a bit), most of the gayborhood is centered on the Broadway business corridor, about a mile walk (most of it uphill), from the church’s location. The church is not really conveniently located close to most of the homos on the Hill. And the Hill isn’t quite the great gay village it once was. The majority of queer people living in the Seattle metropolitan area live outside the Hill. The Hill is still very queer, don’t get me wrong, but one of the reasons the Pride Parade had to move off the Hill is because the neighborhood literally can’t hold all the gay people who want to attend the parade. I don’t live on the Hill, and I almost never go there, for instance.

Seventh, during my years of observation of their worship center in my neighborhood, the attendees drive in from somewhere else, attend the events on their property, and then leave. They aren’t part of the local community. They don’t seem to make the slightest effort to even get to know the local community. This last point may not be entirely fair. I’m a flaming homo, after all, and I don’t really want to get into any meaningful conversation with them. But from what I’ve read on other neighborhood blogs, it seems to be the case there, too. So I don’t see how moving the downtown meeting place a few blocks closer to Homo Hill is going to foster much in the way of interaction, constructive or otherwise, with the locals.

When the news broke, a lot of neighborhood blogs and the snarky, ultra-liberal alternate weekly newspaper raised similar points.

When contacted to explain at least in what way the church was “serving and ministering to those infected with AIDS” the church spokesperson became flustered and said someone would have to get back to the news people. They then issued a statement that claimed they were in “beginning stages of volunteering with the Lifelong AIDS Alliance.” Except the Lifelong AIDS Alliance has policies against proselytizing, which the church stated explicitly as its intention in its answer. Also, the Lifelong AIDS Alliance had received only one phone call from the church months before with no follow-up, and a second one less than an hour after the newspeople started asking questions. Volunteer applications had never been submitted from anyone identifying themselves as a church member.

When this was pointed out, the church backtracked. They made excuses. They bobbed and weaved, saying that they intend to help and repeating that bit about being in the beginning stages.

It’s not nice to laugh, but really, the sheer transparency of the lies, let alone the ludicrous depth of ignorance, demands it. I know, they don’t think they were lying. Someone had made a phone call, right? They planned to do something, right? I bet some of their members have even donated money to the charity. Or, at least went out to dinner at one of the restaurants participating in the annual Dining Out for Life fundraiser. That’s the same thing as serving and ministering to those poor AIDS victims, right?

It has been months, now, and there has been no further talk of any such ministry by the church. I’m not sure whether they were embarrassed about the whole thing, or just realized that there was nothing to gain from any effort. I know that people will say that at least some of them had their hearts in the right place. Jesus said to take care of the sick, right? But see, when the first thing that springs to mind when you find out your church is moving closer to a gay neighborhood is AIDS, that right there says all that needs to be said about how ignorant, bigoted, and self-deluded you are. If you feel god calling you to minister to people suffering and dying from AIDS, don’t move around an affluent city on the west coast, go to Africa, or south/southeast Asia.

This megachurch isn’t the only institution having a hard time grappling with its own ignorance and bigotry, as Stephen Colbert explained in this clip (click on Stephen’s name to watch):