If you don’t understand that trump is fanning the racist, ant-semeitic flames on purpose, I don’t know how to commuincate with you.
There have already been so many stories about mass shooters, would-be mass shooters, and related domestic terrorists that they’re going to overwhelm the Friday Five. So I’m going to post them now with a bit of commentary.
Second suspect wanted for stolen AR-15, tactical vest from Macon co. school turns himself in. So, the tactical vest and assault rifle were on school grounds in the first place because of the repeated idiotic “a good guy with a gun” arguments. (If you don’t understand why it is idiotic: first, can you shoot a bullet out of the air with a gun? No, you cannot. Second, responsible gun owners will all tell you that you never shoot into an area where you might hit innocent people. Which is why for most mass shootings where there were licensed conceal-carry people there, no one could safely take a shot at the shooter. And in a significant number of the few cases where a “good guy with a gun” tried to take out the shooter, bystanders got hit, instead.)
I frequently save memes, cartoons, and the like to use as an illustration for a blog post or Friday Five. I always gather a lot more than I can actually use, so every now and then I share some that I didn’t use.
If playing video games caused mass shootings, we’d see a lot more mass shootings outside the U.S.(Click to embiggen)As the stock market drops further while China stops buying our farm goods, and buys more from Russia and Brazil.Yep! (click to embiggen)Illegal diversion of campaign funds to cover it up… (click to embiggen)Yep!(Click to embiggen)
Since there is almost certainly going to be more outrageous political news by the end of the week that will be more urgent for the Friday Five, I also wanted to share some more stories and op-eds on the horrible crimes that happened this last weekend (which I wrote a about yesterday):
“If the pope was ever like, ‘Hey, I just realized, that we could cure world hunger…”“…if we sold some of these gold cathedrals.”“The next day that would be like, ‘Oh no! The pope died!’”
I thought I was getting over the current illness, and since when I woke up Friday morning I saw that my husband had gone into work rather than call in again, I figured he was feeling better, too. Well, not so much. I do not want to go into graphic details, other than to say that we spent a good portion of the evening, for different reasons, taking turns in the bathroom.
Speaking of things that turn one’s stomach,
Catholic Church Spent $77 Million To Remodel Crystal Cathedral Built By Scamvangelicals. A long, long time ago (1955) an evangelist named Robert H. Schuller rented a drive-in theatre in Garden Grove, California one Sunday morning. He invited people to come to church as they were in their cars. It was a drive-in church. He also preached at more traditional church building he rented about a mile away, but the thing that got him coverage in the news were the services (complete with an organ) at that drive-in. As money poured in, he eventually bought a 10-acre plot nearby, and in 1958 broke ground for a “walk-in, drive-in.” That’s right, he had a regular church building, but also a drive-in style lot with an enormous screen where he projected the sermons. Eventually he built the 13-story “Tower of Power” as an office building with a 90-foot illuminated cross on top, and then bought another 10-acres and constructed the “Crystal Cathedral” — hailed as the largest structure in the world constructed completely out of glass, and it contained the fifth-largest organ in the world. By this point he was broadcasting his sermons on television as the “Hour of Power” while continuing to have the drive-in section outside the church and was raking in the dough like never before. They built a giant Prayer Spire beside the building, they opened a private school on the property, the built a memorial garden (a portion of which was an actual cemetery). They staged elaborate holiday pageants at Easter and Christmas every year, charging $45 per person if you wanted to sit inside the church to watch it (admission fee? wouldn’t that mean this wasn’t a church service?). Anyway, despite the fact the Schuller literally once said that spending all those millions was better than trying to feed the poor because “the poor will always be with us, but this monument to god will stand for the ages” money just kept pouring in!
Until it didn’t. As Schuller aged, he eased into retirement, first appointed his eldest son as pastor in 2006, and then due to unspecified disagreements, asking his son to resign and eventually appointing one of his daughters in 2009. In 2010 the church’s board filed for bankruptcy protection. Eventually court filings would reveal that the money problems had been ongoing for a few years, with the board borrowing heavily from the endowment to pay the lavish salaries of the many relatives of Schuller who made up most of the senior staff. Hundreds of more modestly paid employees were laid off, actors and musicians and costume-designers and set-builders who had already put in months work for that year’s Easter Pageant were told they weren’t getting paid after all and so forth.
In the midst of all of this, Schuller’s wife fell ill with pneumonia, and in a particularly tone-deaf move, the church sent out a plea to members to make meals for the Schullers, but not to take them to the Schullers’s home, but rather take them to the Tower of Power and leave the meals with the limo drivers who would deliver the food to the Schullers. I kid you not!
Anyway, as part of the bankruptcy settlement, the property was eventually sold in 2012 to the local Catholic Archdioceses for $57 million dollars. The Catholics have since spent about $77 million dollars more renovating the building (including shipping that enormous organ off to Italy to the refurbished, then shipping it back). And this week, they consecrated the main building, now renamed the Christ Cathedral.
I give all these details because, as an ex-evangelical myself, throughout my childhood and teen years there were always people in my life who watched Schuller’s show faithfully. I thought it was always clear that he was in it just for the money. Schuller died in 2015, but despite the horrible bankruptcy, Schuller’s grandson is still broadcasting the Hour of Power every week from their new home, a nearby Presbyterian building called Shepherd’s Grove. Schuller’s eldest son runs his own ministry, broadcasting services online. His daughter is now a pastor at another church in Orange, California: Sheila Schuller Coleman: Hope Center for Christ opens in AMC Theater.
Which I guess is a very long way of saying, the scam goes on?
Okay, I have to stop looking that the religious news, because that’s all too depressing. Oh, look! Consequences: Three White Supremacists Get Prison Sentences For Charlottesville Rioting. Three of Trumps very fine supporters who were identified from the videos punching and choking counter-protestors are getting some prison time. Good.
And what comes to the top of many of the google searches I did looking for recent stories on the camp situation were people arguing about terminology. It doesn’t matter whether you think that the camps meet a particularly carefully cherry-picked definition of concentration camp: the conditions in the camps violate U.S. law and international treaties; locking people who present themselves at a border and ask for sanctuary is illegal; it is not illegal for people to present themself at a border and ask for sanctuary; the treatment of the children in particular is immoral, unethical, illegal, and appalling.
Call them Detention Centers if you must, but they are still illegal, they are as immoral as any historical Concentration Camp, and you should be ashamed of yourself for not caring what happens to any fellow human beings, but especially children.
Do not eat at Chik-Fil-A (click to embiggen)People who want to discriminate against others get really angry when you call what they are doing discriminate, despite that fact that a couple of years ago some of them made this argument at the Supreme Court: White House: We’d Be Fine With Bakers Hanging “No Gays” Signs In Their Windows. The weird part is, that in many states they can do just that. They are free to both discriminate against queer people and even put up signs in their shop windows saying so, and yet, virtually none of them do. And here’s why:
They want to quietly and discreetly refuse to serve individual customers who happen to be gay without their other customers finding out. They wanna hate on the down low because they know that customers who may not be gay themselves—people who know and love LGBT people, customers who don’t approve of discrimination on principal, other minorities who worry that they could be next—will take their business elsewhere.
—Dan Savage
And that internalized homophobia is often turned outward at your fellow gays, particularly if they don’t conform to your idea of what gay means…I commented on the weekend about the poorly written, nasty, inappropriate op-ed that The New Republic published about presidential hopeful Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and then removed for the site while listing a lame apology. While it was roundly condemned by straight people and queer people alike—and even some publications that no one would describe as gay-friendly—we have now reached the point where certain queer journalists are falling all over themselves to defend it. They are really leaning into the fact that several of the critics of the original piece saying that portions of it come off as homophobic. The counter argument is that, since the author of the piece, Dale Peck, is himself gay, the thing he wrote can’t possibly be homophobic. One particular op-ed that lots of people are linking to agrees that the piece was rude, and that it demonstrates a part of gay culture that many queer people are uncomfortable with, but insists it isn’t at all reasonable to describe it as homophobic because not only is Peck a gay man, but he was a gay man who was active in Act Up back in the day (which apparently means he can’t be homophobic), and the piece is simply a case of “reading” which has a long tradition in queer culture. The author of the defense piece also made the assertion that it was only straight people who were objecting, and clearly as straight people they don’t have a right to call out homophobia(?).
In case you don’t know, reading in this context is usually defined as the act of pointing out a flaw in someone else (usually publicly and addressed directly to them) and exaggerating it in a humorous way. It’s that last bit—that the exaggeration needs to be funny that I first complain about—because I didn’t find it any of it funny. And while, yes, reading is a tradition in parts of the queer community, it still is an ad hominem attack, which only belongs in political analysis if one is offering proof of several character flaws or harmful ideologies. In other words, if the piece had called Mayor Pete a bigot of some sort and offered up some evidence to back it up, then maybe doing so in the reading-style would have been appropriate. But that isn’t what happened.
So, since these folks think that only straight people object, let me be clear: I’m a gay man. I see Peck’s Act Up crendentials and raise my own Queer Nation involvement. I found the use of phrase “Mary Pete” over and over homophobic. The rest of the essay is a mess—badly written, the opposite of persuasive, and one long ad hominem attack—and The New Republic was right to pull it (and shouldn’t have published it in the first place).
Dan Savage has said many times that queer people have the right to throw slurs back and forth at each other so long as they meet this criteria: “so long as it’s used affectionately and ironically and so long as the term is embraced by the user and so long as it isn’t tossed around in front of strangers and so long as it isn’t used as an insult…”
Peck was not using the term Mary Pete affectionately nor ironically,
There is no indication Mayor Pete embraces the term “mary,”
This use of the slur wasn’t just tossed around in front of strangers, it was written specifically to be published in a publication whose target audience is the general public,
It was definitely intended as an insult.
So this queer man has absolutely no problem calling b.s. on these attempts to spin one bitter gay man’s homophobic attempt to read (and if this was reading, oh, it so missed the mark) another gay man for not being the right kind of gay as anything other than it was.
There is an argument to be made that some of Mayor Pete’s policy proposals are further to the right of center than both most Democratic voters and the country as a whole. One can legitimately critique the tepid response he had to a recent incident of a person of color being killed by police in the town of which he is mayor. And I want to point out that even Peck’s defenders aren’t certain if these were the sorts of things he was trying to imply in his essay.
But vulgar speculation about his sexual desires and practices (which was what most of the so-called “reading” was about) doesn’t belong in a opinion piece published on a serious political news site. Yeah, if you’re sitting with your friends in the local queer bar tossing back drinks and gossiping about people, that sort of commentary may get you some laughs. But it isn’t how you educate voters about issues you disagree with him about.
(click to embiggen)Even though I had two Friday Fivepostss yesterday, I am once again finding myself following up on either stories the broke since then, or ones that I’ve linked to before that have had new developments. Or at least I have more information that I did when I last posted. I suppose I’m being overly pedantic.
Onward! So yesterday I posted about These 9 Pride-celebrating companies donated millions to anti-gay Congress members – Despite giving millions to anti-gay politicians, the HRC gave these companies a perfect 100 score. A lot of corporations out there want to take in queer people’s money, because even if (as many claim) we only make up 4.6% of the population, first, 4.6% of 330 million Americans is still 15 million people. But not only that, we have a lot of supportive straight relatives and friends and other allies who might also be included to patronize a particular brand if that company appeared to be supportive of queer people. The report I linked yesterday and this one show a bunch of really large companies who have done such a good job pretending they support us (while donating millions of dollars to politicians actively harming us) that the Human Rights Campaign has given them a perfect pro-queer rating.
To be fair, when contacted by the reporter who first broke this story, HRC admitted that their criteria up to now had been whether a company had non-discriminatory hiring practices, extended benefits to queer employees, and so forth. They have since said that clearly they need to revise their criteria and start taking into account corporate support for anti-queer politicians. I look forward to the new ratings next year.
So, I knew something was up with disgraced former U.S. Congressperson, Aaron Shock earlier this week because suddenly a bunch of people were clicking on a post I did about his financial crimes and the very poor job he was doing hiding his queerness while being an extremely anti-gay politician. Well, this one shouldn’t surprise us: EXCLUSIVE: Former Republican congressman known for his anti-gay policies and using taxpayer dollars to decorate his office like Downton Abbey is filmed slipping cash into a go-go dancer’s tiny briefs while partying at a gay bar in Mexico City. Gee, it seems like only a couple of months ago someone got video of the former Congressman making out with another man with his hands inside the man’s pants! He posted shirtless with a bunch of shirtless hunks at the music festival in question, and then the guys he had been partying with were informed what at rat-bastard anti-gay politician he was, and all felt the need to issue apologies on their Instagram accounts for not recognizing him.
I guess maybe he was hoping he would be less recognizable in Mexico?
Before anyone tries to lecture me for outing him or (the new accusation I saw recently) “weaponizing his sexuality,” let me make a couple things perfectly clear. When someone who has caused measurable harm to the community (voting for laws that denied us right, stripped us of existing rights, and so on), while secretly being a queer themselves, it is a moral imperative to expose the hypocrisy. Second, the only weaponizing that is going on is by him and his anti-gay allies. Because his is not just a white man, but a wealthy white man with extensive political and financial connections, he is able to avoid most of the forces of oppression that he has helped to create. And part of the protection that he gets from the anti-gay forces of discrimination is precisely because he so vehemently advocated against queer rights.
When we expose these hypocrites we are de-weaponizing their rhetoric, you see.
That’s enough about that jerk. Let’s move on to another.
Jerry Falwell, Jr. Lashes Out at Christian Critic of Refugee Children Conditions. So, what happened? Well, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, a man named Russell Moore, expressed some sympathy for the refugee children our Republican government has chosen to put in concentration camps. He didn’t actually condemn the camps or the government, he just said that children ought to be treated with dignity and respect. Jerry Falwell, Jr, couldn’t have that. He launched into a bizarre attack about Moore having never be the head of a corporation that had to meet a payroll… and somehow this means he can’t comment on what the Bible says about how he and is co-religionists treat others?
I don’t quite see the connection. Also, it is deeply ironic the Fallwell, Jr., who became the wealthy real estate tycoon thanks to questionable investments from his father’s ministry plus obscene salaries as various offices of the far-right Christian college his father founded, would fault someone else from never starting an enterprise “from scratch.” Again, how that is relevant to expressing sympathy for grossly mistreated children, I can’t fathom.
Remember during the first year of our hellish dystopia when the neo-Nazis were marching with tiki torches? And there was a protest where one young man, who had been saying on line for some days before hand that he was going to drive his car into the counter-protesters and kill as many as he could? So, he pled guilty to 29 separate crimes, including killing one young women, injuring a bunch of others, and attempting to kill more. And at his sentencing he had the temerity to Charlottesville Killer Begs Court For Mercy. ‘Don’t ruin my life because of one little mistake!’ Yeah, right. Thank goodness, the judge wasn’t having it: Man who killed a woman when he rammed his car into Charlottesville counterprotest gets life in prison. Seems about right.
Finally:
I don’t even want to dignify the stupidity that is the straight pride parade in Boston. Literal Nazis are organizing this thing (some of them people connected to the Charlottesville rallies) were being portrayed as trolls, but given some of the past rallies and harassment and worse they have perpetrated, I’m not sure trolling is the right label.
I said plenty about why straight pride isn’t needed and is redundant, but let’s just close with this:
“Gay pride has zero to do with whom I sleep with and everything to do with the fact that I survived you and your friends in school and now I am tough enough to walk down the street in my own skin.”
(Click to embiggen)It’s Saturday morning and time for a news update. Once again, there have been some news stories that broke after I composed this week’s Friday Five which I want to comment on and don’t want to wait until next Friday—when there will have been at least (according to the latest statistics) at least 72 new lies from the alleged president, alone. So, let’s get to it!
A few years ago you may recall in a series of court cases various peddlers of so-called ex-gay therapy were forced to admit that no one was ever cured of being gay, and some of those organizations were shut down under consumer fraud laws? Well, at least one of them didn’t shut down: Judge cracks down on barred Jewish gay conversion group for operating under new name.
Back in 2015 a jury found that the organization then calling itself JONAH had defrauded a number of people while claiming to “cure” their homosexuality. The jury awards the former “patients” everything, including $3.5 million in legal fees. The judge later approved a settlement whereby the couple operating the charlatan ex-gay organization would pay only a fraction of the fees if they agreed to dissolve the organization and never engage in such practices again. The charlatans lied, and have been operating a similar scam since. So, the judge as issued a lifetime ban on them serving as an officer of any non-profit, dissolved their new company, and now they are on the hook for the entire $3.5 million. Good. Maybe this will shut them down.
Yesterday I included links to the hate pastors who are having a “Make American Straight Again” conference in Orlando. They picked the date to be close to the anniversary of the Pulse massacre, where 49 people were murdered in a gay nightclub. I want to pause for a moment here and remind you that the owner of Pulse (who opened the club in honor of her decease gay brother) had always said she wanted the club to be a place where queer people felt welcome, and where they felt they could bring their mothers. A couple of the people shot that night were, indeed, non-gay family members of queer people. Anyway, the hate pastors explicitly dedicated their conference to celebrating that massacre, because their mis-reading of six verses they have cherry-picked in the Bible are more important that the numerous times Jesus said to love each other, I guess. So they were live-streaming yesterday, until Youtube shut them down. The Friendly Atheist monitored it and got some quotes:
“If we can get the queers to go back into the closet, that’d be great. I mean, if we can get the government to actually do what it’s supposed to do and put them to death, that’d be amazing. They’ll kill you and it won’t bother them. They’ll molest your kids and it won’t bother them.
“They’ll go to bed with men, with women, with animals. They’ll do whatever and it won’t bother them. Why? Because their conscience is seared. If the government would put them to death, it would make America safe again. And here’s what we’re saying. When they die, we don’t feel bad about it. When they die, we don’t care!”
Can’t you just feel the unconditional love of god in every word (sarcasm)? Another of these paragons said:
I’d love to be able to just work for [a transgender suicide hotline] for, like, a week and just let them know that, “Hey, it’s okay, go ahead and just kill yourself.” Because these people were sick!
Apparently today since many of the pastors speaking and attending have Youtube channels of their own, and vow to keep switching channels as Youtube shuts them down so their hate can do its job? I really don’t know. Anyway, don’t forget that one of these hate-mongers is a Sheriff’s deputy, who, after he was outed as a hate preacher and warned by his superiors that a cop literally advocating for cops to start executing gays isn’t exactly in keeping with the oath to uphold the law, he went back to his pulpit and doubled-down.
That’s enough about them. Have you ever wondered why more of those kinds of stories don’t get reported more prominently in national media? Well: The lack of dedicated LGBTQ media is a disaster. The article isn’t saying that there aren’t enough queer news sites, it rather talking about both the lack of diversity in major news organizations and the cut backs in such organizations that his eliminated a lot of reporting jobs that used to be assigned full time to particular communities and areas of interest. It’s a good read.
We will beat them again!
And now we have another round of me commenting on some news that broke after I composed this week’s Friday Five, or new developments in a story I’ve linked to and/or commented on before.
First, let’s talk some more about that so-called Straight Pride parade! So yesterday I linked to the story about how Brad Pitt disavowed the parade and threatened to sue the organizers if they kept using his name and image, right? That didn’t really surprise anyone. I was, frankly, confused as to why the organizers even went there—Pitt’s support of marriage equality long before it became legal was well known, for example. And clearly the only sort of people who even think a Straight Pride parade needs to be a thing are insecure homophobes, right?
So now everything becomes clear. They knew that announcing a straight pride parade and applying for a permit would get them some news coverage. Mentioning a well-known celebrity like Brad Pitt as the parade’s “mascot” without Pitt’s permission served multiple purposes. First, it increased the odds that mainstream news sources would carry the initial story. Second, because they didn’t just name Pitt, but had pictures of him on their web site, it guaranteed a response from Pitt and/or his agent no doubt threatening legal action. Which git them a second day of being in the news. Then, they can announced the change in the mascot the next day, before any official cease and desist letters arrive, and get another day of press coverage. And they announced the change on their web site with some digs at Pitt (that aren’t actionable) that are phrased in exactly the way needed to appeal to any Incels/Men’s Rights Activities who weren’t already cheering them on.
This also explains why they are using the term “mascot” instead of “Grand Marshall” or something (I know there are headlines out there using saying Grand Marshall, but the official web site uses mascot exclusively). Because Milo isn’t just a neo-Nazi apologist who incites hate against muslims, jews, and trans people, he is also infamously gay. Which is a weird person to pick to symbolize and lead a straight pride march, but mascot? Sure, the lapdog gay boy—who loves to spout off the same genocidal racist, anti-semitic, sectarian, misogynist, transphobic nonsense that the rest of the organizers of the event believe—he can be a mascot.
Based on the past histories of all the folks we currently know are involved in this, the real point of the parade (beside publicity, which they hope will translate into donations) is to try to get a situation where protesters show up, one or two of whom might be provoked to take some action that will give the cops an excuse to go after the anti-fascists, as police are wont to do. So the purpose is to generate headlines and video that can be used to try to paint those of us who are opposed to the goals of the alt-right as the bad guys. And, of course, to provide money to Milo, who is deeply in debt.
With Milo’s involvement, the other thing we can expect is if the City of Boston requires parade permit holders to pay for police services, et cetera, those bills will not get paid (that’s how he racked up a couple million dollars of debt in Australia alone!).
One last thing before we change topics. The same group as officially announced a straight pride flag. They have had at least one made and, oh my goodness, is this the ugliest thing ever, or what? I understand that there are actual studies that show a high correlation between lack of cognitive skills and holding very conservative beliefs, but really, that attempt at symbolism is an insult to the intelligence of the people they hope to embrace the flag. Maybe they think they’re being ironic?
Okay, these don’t really need much in the way of commentary: to the surprise of no one with a functioning brain cell: State Dept Bans Embassies From Flying Rainbow Flag. It was only a week ago that the alleged president was tweeting about supporting LGBT people and joining the international fight against the criminalization and state-sponsored killing of LGBT people. And yet, this… I mean, compared to the very long list of anti-gay actions the trump administration as taken against us, this is pretty minor, but still!
What-about-isms and false equivalencies abound. (Click to embiggen)When I first saw people referring to straight pride this week, I didn’t think much about it. It’s one of the least intellectually-sound critiques that is ever leveled at Pride or Queer rights in general. And I’ve already written about why LGBTQ Pride is still needed more than once. Since the day before I saw these first mentions, I also saw a huge number of clicks on one of those posts I wrote years ago, I thought, “Okay, some idiot somewhere has written about straight pride, it made the news, and people are googling related terms.” Turned out it wasn’t just that someone had written about it. In case you didn’t hear, the leader of an alt-right group has strong-armed the city of Boston into giving him a permit to hold a so-called Straight Pride Parade.
That’s correct! (click to embiggen)Given that the parade organizer has previously organized or been featured prominently in alt-right/neo-Nazi rallies that have turned violent before, I guess we can’t treat this as a joke. No matter how tempting it is. The truth is that nothing makes a certain kind of straight white man more angry than when they aren’t the center of the conversation. They are outraged someone they perceive as “other” gets treated equally.
And it isn’t even fair to say equally. There have been studies that show when women talk for more than 15% of a class or presentation or similar activity that the men perceive that the woman are dominating the conversation. Only 15%, the men describe it as “equal time.” I haven’t found similar studies about their perception of people of color or queers, but I have a life time of personal observation to say the participation of other marginalized people are perceived the same way. If queer characters exist in a story or movie or whatever in more than a restricted token manner, they scream “why are the gays ruining everything?!” And when it comes to people of color, well, a black actor was featured prominently in the first trailer for The Force Awakens and they lost their collective minds, calling for boycotts (and worse).
And I know it isn’t just angry straight white men. There are angry straight white women who make the same “why don’t we get a straight pride day?” arguments, too. Believe me, I know. I’ve had that one thrown at me by relatives at family get-togethers.
There are two different, completely true answers to the question of why there isn’t a straight pride day.
The first answer is: every day is straight pride day! Every day day society and strangers celebrate and cheer straight marriages. Every day society recognizes and approves of the existence of straight people. Every day thousands of television episodes are broadcast in which the straight characters are the protagonists and their stories and concerns are recognized, accepted, and celebrated. Every day little boys are described as future lady’s men, and little girls are called heart-breakers, and no one screams at the people who say it that the children are too young for that. 99% of all movies, books, songs, plays, and TV shows center straight people and their concerns.
(click to embiggen)The second answer is: there is no systemic bigotry against straight people. There are no laws, and never have been, baring straight people from teaching or adopting children. There have never been laws against straight people getting married. No straight child has been thrown out on the streets by their family because they are straight. Straight people have never been barred from the military for being straight. No one has ever claimed that programs to stop bullying of straight children in schools is a violation of freedom of religion. No child or teen-ager has ever been forced into ex-straight therapy. People aren’t bashed and murdered for being straight. Straight couples holding hands in public have never been attacked by a mob and beaten for being straight. When a straight couple is depicted kissing in a movie no one organizes boycotts to stop straight sexuality being shoved down the public’s throat. No authorities have ever said that they don’t hate straight people, they just disapprove of their lifestyle. No medical associations or governments have ever officially defined being straight as a dangerous mental disease.
All that has happened is that when some straight people express bigoted opinions about queer people, society as a whole no longer chimes in to agree. Worse than that, some people actually point out the homophobia. In some circumstances the law doesn’t penalize queer people the way it used to. In some circumstances the law no longer privileges straight people to the detriment of queer people.
That isn’t the same as being oppressed. It isn’t the same as being bashed. It isn’t the same as being murdered. It isn’t the same as being forced into homelessness. You did not have to overcome adversity, bigotry, threats of violence, actual violence, family rejection, and more just to live as an openly straight person.
“Gay pride was not born out of a need to celebrate being gay, but our right to exist without persecution. So instead of wondering why there isn’t a straight pride movement, be thankful you don’t need one.”
Virulently anti-gay disgraced former congressman caught making out with a guy with his hands down the guy’s pants at Coachella.
So, disgraced former Republican Congressman Aaron Shock is in the news again: Former GOP Congressman Aaron Schock spotted at Coachella making out with a guy and What Happens at Coachella Doesn’t Stay at Coachella (If You’re Hanging with a Gay Right Wing Republican). He was a public official who voted for and campaigned on anti-gay causes. He tried to make it legal for people to fire folks merely for being suspected of being gay. He voted against amending federal hate crimes laws to include crimes where the victims were targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, gender and disability. He voted against the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in December 2010. He has never renounced those positions, even after resigned from office while he was being charged with a lot of financial malfeasance.
Last month prosecutors reached an agreement with Schock where all charges against him were dropped in exchange for him paying $42,000 to the IRS (taxes owed on a fraction of the money he illegally obtained while in congress) and $68,000 to his congressional campaign fund. As part of the deal, Schock’s campaign committee pled guilty to a misdemeanor count of failing to properly report expenses.
For years rumors circulated around about the anti-gay congressmen, because of his unusual fashion choices and the years of being unmarried and wealthy but always having unmarried male “roommates.” But things hit mainstream media after someone reported that his personal Twitter account and Instagram account was following hundreds of gay models and male athletes who were always known for posting pictures of themselves scantily clad. Shock abruptly unfollowed those hundreds of accounts en mass when a major news site finally mentioned the gay rumors
Then on a taxpayer-funded trip abroad Congressman Shock had this guy who was listed as a staff photographer (but he never took pictures) put in a hotel room with a door adjoining his, get upgrades and other things using programs that are usually meant for spouses, and so on. The supposed photographer sat with Shock at banquets similarly to the spouses of other congressmen on the trip, The supposed photographed posed in pictures standing beside Shock like the spouses of other congressmen and the American service members abroad they met with on the trip. Read that again: the official staff photographer didn’t take pictures, he posed as if he was the congressman’s spouse in the pictures.
Totally normal to have your photographer (far right) pose with you in all the official photos rather than actually operating a camera. Even if the taxpayer is picking up the photographer’s tab, right?Let’s not forget the time when when he was walking around a gay neighborhood with reporters during Pride week where he was supposed to be talking about some urban issues but he kept getting distracted on camera with his eyes following the hot shirtless men who walked by. Those are among the many, many, many reasons that everyone with a lick of sense had been saying for years that the anti-gay (ex-)Congressman is probably a closeted gay man.
I’ve seen people–gay people–posting on some sites that Shock’s private life is his business, and if out gay guys want to hang with him, we shouldn’t judge.
No.
He used the power of his office to cause harm to queer people. He used the power of his office to argue that anyone should have the right to fire, evict, or refuse to give medical services if they even suspect that person might be gay. He argued that employers and private citizens should be able to pry into other queer people’s private lives and discriminate against them. Until he makes amends for that by coming out, apologizing for the harm he caused, and make some kind of significant contribution to pro-queer causes, he has forfeited any right to a private sex life of his own. And I can absolutely judge any other queer people who friends with the douche who enabled hate crimes and more.
The protestant reformation in the year 1517 was just one of literally thousands of times that some christians decided to make up their own version of christianity.So, Pete Buttigieg, openly gay mayor of South Bend, Indian has been in the news a lot. First for being an openly gay public official announcing his intention to run for president, then by raising enough money (fairly quickly) to qualify for the first Democratic Candidates’ Debate, then by kissing his husband on the campaign trail (which didn’t hurt his standing in the polls), then by refusing to back down on criticism of the blatant homophobia of Vice President Mike Pence, then by officially announcing his candidacy (and having his husband on stage, where there was another kiss while the crowd cheered). Last I counted, we have about 18 officially announced candidates, and the first primaries and caucuses are still ten months away, so it is way too early to know if Mayor Pete is going to wind up being the nominee. But all the media attention and his success so far as sure gotten some of the religious right into a tizzy: Christian College President Everett Piper Slams Pete Buttigieg’s Faith and ‘Proclivities’.
I’m not going to link to Everett Piper’s full commentary (published in the Washington Times—a small far-right newspaper not to be confused with the prestigious Washington Post), but the article above has a link, and it’s not hard to find. The title of Piper’s commentary is: “Pete Buttigieg doesn’t get to make up his own Christianity.” And that’s just hilarious!
Because Piper is a member of the Weslyan Methodist Church (and is the president of a Weslyan Methodist college), which is a denomination that form in 1843 when it split off from the Methodist Episcopal Church, which officially split from the Church of England in 1784, which was formed in 1534 with King Henry VIII split with the Roman Catholic Church. And each of those splits were over doctrinal differences (yes, there was a specific personal and political aim that Henry was going for, but it was over a doctrinal dispute about what would constitute reasons for annulling a marriage). That means that each of those splits was because someone decided to make up their own version of christianity.
Mayor Pete is a member of the Episcopal Church, an American denomination that is part of the Anglican Communion. And the Episcopal Church has been accepting of gay and lesbian members, priests, and bishops for some years now. Mayor Pete wasn’t even one of the movers and shakers in that regard, so you can’t even accuse him of having made that particular doctrinal change.
Piper’s denomination, while being a splinter from a splinter of the Anglican Communion, has far more in common with fundamentalist evangelical denominations such as the Southern Baptists, than the Episcopal Church. And many of those fundamentalist evangelical denominations which Piper considers to be practicing his version of christianity are descended from groups that split from the Roman Catholic Church back in the year 1517, after Martin Luther nailed 95 theses (proposals for reforms) to the door of his church.
Each of the thousands of denominations are the result of someone deciding to make up their own version of christianity. If Piper is going to insist that no one has the right to do that, he darn well better resign from his current church and go join the Roman Catholic Church. Of course, if anyone confronted Piper about this, he would quickly deflect, because the real issue is that Piper and his co-religionists don’t think that denominations such as the Episcopalians are “real christians.” But he doesn’t want to admit that. Instead, he tries to cast this as somehow it is Mayor Pete all by himself deciding that queer people can be out and non-celibate and be good christians at the same time.
The fact that christian denominations such as the Episcopalians, the United Church of Christ, and the Presbyterians, welcome and affirm queer members is something Piper and his ilk want to ignore. Just as they keep pretending that it is only a minority of the U.S. population that favors marriage equality and civil rights protections for queer people.
I suspect that Mayor Pete won’t actually wind up as the party’s nominee, but I hope he keeps making the haters foam at the mouth! And the more they do, the harder it is for others to ignore the bigotry
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