A while back I ran across a music video by a singer that I like. I own a few of his albums, and several of his singles are in some of my favorite playlists. I had never heard the song, but the title seemed familiar. As I watched this video scenes from what was clearly a movie kept appearing. I found out that the song was the theme song for the movie in question. Then I remembered that I had read about the movie, which was written and directed by a director whose previous works (a pair of gay romantic comedies) were movies with which I was familiar.
I really liked the theme song, and it was available in iTunes. I went to buy it, and saw that the entire soundtrack of this movie that I had never seen was available. And as I browsed the track list, I saw that several of the songs were recorded by other singers I knew and liked. I listened to samples of several of the tracks, and the next thing I knew I bought the whole album.Continue reading Sometimes you need to know→
Maggie Gallagher appearing on one of the news showsLots of places have been running similar headlines this week, about how Maggie Gallagher, who for many years was the president of the anti-gay National Organization of Marriage, has announced their surrender.
Except that isn’t what she had done, at all.
For a little background, for many years she pulled in a six-figure salary from this group while she went around the country, explaining how letting gay people have either civil unions or get married would destroy families, would harm children, would cause irrepairable harm to non-gay people’s marriages, and so forth. She raised and spent (every year) tens of millions of dollars putting advertisements onto local radio and television filled with lies and distortions about how immoral, unhealthy, et cetera, et cetera gay people were. She sent people into churches to rally the faithful. She repeated the lies on local and national “news” shows, and so forth.
Then, when it became clear that the battle had been lost on civil unions, she and her organization started insisting that they only meant to protect traditional marriage, and they claimed to stop opposing civil unions (though they did keep more quietly funneling money into campaigns opposing those), and asserted they were only against marriage.
She kept repeating the same lies, demonizing gay and lesbian people, quoting all those debunked studies and so forth. They fought tooth an nail, mounting speaking tours, spending large amounts of money on ads to defeat judges and legislators who helped civil unions and marriage equality move forward.
Then, she resigned as president of the organization, letting her longtime friend and ally Brian Brown take over. She still pulls in a healthy, six-figure salary as chairperson of their board of directors. And they still spread the same lies. But now, they spend as much of their time and money trying to block gay adoptions, trying to block transgender rights laws, trying to repeal school policies against bullying gay and trans children, and so forth.
And recently, Maggie has started going on conservative radio shows and the like saying things that, when quoted out of context, sound like she’s surrendering. “Gay marriage is inevitable, now,” and “we’ve lost that fight.” And everyone who has been blogging about and covering the struggle for marriage equality, are repeating those quotes, slapping a “she’s surrendered!” headline on them, and sometimes wondering why she’s going around admitting that they’ve lost.
Here’s what they all misunderstand: admitting that they have lost the marriage argument is not the same thing as surrendering. And if you listen to the rest of what she says in these interviews or go read all of her blog, instead of stopping as everyone seems to assume as a consequence of the admission of loss, you find a different story:
“The rapid collapse of opposition to gay marriage we are witnessing did not just happen, and it was not inevitable. But it is.
“The question now on the table is: will orthodox Christianity (and other traditional faiths), be stigmatized and marginalized as the equivalent of racism in the American public square? Will Biblical morality be wiped out as an acceptable public position in America?
“Or will we regroup, rebuild as a subculture, and survive to become the possibility of a new foundation in the future?”
—Maggie Gallagher
She goes on to lament that “version of America we were born into is no more,” and she talks a lot about how faithful Christians and Jews and Muslims are being intimidated into silence. There are two flaws with this claim. She believes that anyone who doesn’t feel the same as she does about gay rights are not faithful or true Christians, et cetera. And she also believes that not everyone who claims to support our legal rights really do support us.
She then segues to something that may seem a little bizarre and disconnected:
“7 percent of the American people believe contraception—while legally acceptable—is not morally acceptable.”—Maggie Gallagher
This betrays another secret of the anti-gay movement that lots of people don’t understand: they aren’t just anti-gay, they think that birth control (all forms) is immoral. Rick Santorum originally got is name turned into a gross sexual slang term not because he opposed gay marriage, but because he was campaigning for re-election to the Senate on a platform of restricting access to birth control for everyone (including married people), and wanting to impose laws against kinky sex on everyone (including married people), in addition to outlawing all abortions, re-criminalizing gay sex, banning gay marriage, and repealing sex discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination laws.
Maggie quotes that 7 percent statistic for another reason, she goes on to describe how the battle for marriage equality that has been won in the hearts and minds of Americans was pushed by a mere 2 percent of the population. Because she things that only 2 percent of the population is gay and lesbian. From my study of the methodologies of all the studies that have tried to pin that number down, I think it’s closer to 6 percent. But the more important thing Maggie doesn’t understand is the studies conducted by the CDC in the 80s and 90s that concluded that merely 45% of adults have sex with some regularity with members of both genders (the other thing that study found was that Americans, at least, would rather admit to being heroin addicts than label themselves bisexual).
So, while she soothes herself thinking that only 2 percent of the population is non-heterosexual, and therefore if 2 percent of the population can bamboozle a big majority of Americans to decide that gay people are human and deserve the same rights as other humans, her 7 percent will be able to reverse all of that. She also soothes herself by believing (and until just the last week ago, continuing to insist) that the vast majority of Americans agree with her, they just aren’t speaking up.
She’s also using all these things to prepare to keep up the fight. To look for new ways to take away our rights:
the first struggle we now face is internal and spiritual: Will we accept the newly dominant culture’s view of our views—of ourselves—as hateful and bigoted and stand down?”—Maggie Gallagher
She is not surrendering, by any means. She’s saying that they have lost this battle, but the war goes on. Which is best caught by this line from the middle of her most recent blog post:
“There is no line we can draw that pushes gay people “outside” and leaves us free “inside” to be angry, foot-stomping, and morally “pure.”—Maggie Gallagher
Pastor Manning is at it again.Once again, Homophobic Harlem Church Erects New Anti-Gay Sign. One side, after declaring Harlem a Sodomite free zone, demands that someone (it doesn’t say who) stop sodomizing children is schools.
Now, last time I checked, children were far more likely to be sexually abused (or at least meet their abusers) in certain churches, parochial schools, and orphanages. Other schools, yes, but not in nearly the numbers as the other places. In fact, the statistics show a rather strong correlation between how anti-gay the rhetoric of a church is, and how likely it is to harbor such child abusers.
Of course, this is all tangled up in notions that Manning has about sexual orientation that have been debunked by many, many studies now. And clearly he isn’t interested in facts.
The other side of the sign compares the way the church has been treated to a horrific racist bombing at a black church decades ago.But what really takes the cake this time is the other side of the sign. The sign claims that the way the church has been treated since they’ve begun posting the previous homophobic and violent messages is the same as the horrific and despicable bombing of a church in Birmingham in 1963, when white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church on a Sunday morning. A group of children were just entering the basement of the church for the children’s service, when the bomb exploded, injuring 22 people and killing four girls.
It was evil and totally reprehensible act whose victims were primarily innocent children.
And what horrors have been visiting on Pastor Manning’s church since his homophobic church sign messages have become news? A lot of news sites and bloggers made fun of them. A woman embarrassed a church employee by showing up to say she was there for her stoning. Someone vandalized the sign with spray paint.
And that’s it. As I wrote before, the spray paint vandalism was wrong, and shouldn’t have happened. But none of these things compare, in any way at all, to the horror or magnitude of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
Usually it’s clueless white people who make the mistake of trying to compare their minor inconvenience to actual hate crimes and acts of terror that resulted in bloodshed. Pastor Manning, as an African American, should therefore be doubly ashamed for this crass attempt at self-martyrdom.
I started to write that words can’t describe how Pastor Manning’s latest antics make me feel. Then I realized that someone has already described Manning and his ilk quite well:
Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.—Jesus, Gospel According the Matthew, chapter 7, verses 22-23
I mentioned earlier that Michael used to say that he considered NorWesCon our anniversary, because he was even worse about forgetting the date of our first date (which is one of the dates I tried to remember as an anniversary) than I am, and neither of us could ever remember the date of our commitment ceremony without digging out the paperwork for our domestic partnership registration.
To be fair, we made it a very small thing we tacked onto another get-together with friends. So it wasn’t like an event planned for months ahead or anything. We needed to file domestic partnership paperwork to get us both on the same health insurance, so we did it and that was that. Just a few months afterward I had already started forgetting what the date was. It just never stuck.
I have not had the issue at all with remembering our wedding day…
Explaining that he’s “not homophobic,” but believing marriage should be between one man and one woman is being “on the right side of the Bible.”I get tired of people telling us that it’s intolerant of us to point out when certain people make bigoted remarks. Especially when they insist that the reason we should not call a bigot a bigot when he or she says such things, is because we’ll never be able to change their mind. As if people who say things such as being gay is “an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle” are open to discussion on the topic.
The folks who quote Leviticus are so deeply mired in superstition and fear of an angry god that logic is just lost on them.
I say superstition instead of faith because the ones that are choosing to fight for the six or so times that English translations of the Bible seem to be talking about same sex sexual activity, but not the dozens of times that Jesus said to love one another, to stand up for the downtrodden, to place compassion over a literal interpretation of the law—those people don’t have faith. They are not engaged in a spiritual journey of discovery in hopes of a deeper understanding of their fellow humans. They want something that justifies their dislike of anything different. They want assurance that they are right, and anyone who disagrees with them is wrong.
Unless they are willing to pull their heads out of the dark place they’ve shoved it, there is no reasoning with them. There is no persuading them. And it’s really not worth our time and energy to try to convince them. Nothing any of us can do or say is going to be able to trump the very simplistic (and limited) notion of god they have enshrined in their head.
This is why I get so tired of people admonishing us with arguments that begin, “You can’t persuade people if you…”
Because folks like Mike Huckabee or Brendan Eich are not persuadable. They have demonstrated that they are not making their decisions based on any semblance of rationality. When Huckabee says that marriage equality opponents are on the right side of the Bible, he’s saying that he rejects logic, science, and even the possibility that any other perspectives are worth consideration. When Eich said that he had nothing to apologize for his participation in an effort to not just ban marriage equality in California, but to literally undo the marriages that had already taken place, that demonstrates that he’s not open to other opinions. When he doesn’t see how giving money to the campaign that went to court after Proposition 8 passed and demanded that judges declare the marriages that had already happened null and void, goes beyond “holding a private opinion,” he proves that he is not using anything a rational person would call logic.
There is nothing private about forcing other people to divorce. And demanding that the courts and state officials undo all those marriages was precisely that: forcible divorce. Forcing other people to end their marriage is not “expressing an opinion.” Forcing children of some of those same sex couples off of one parents’ health insurance (which was another thing that Eich’s money was used to ask the courts to do) is not “expressing a private belief.”
And not being able to see that people would feel hurt by that, and that perhaps some acknowledgement that he contributed to the pain and suffering of a lot of people shows that he isn’t able to see things from another perspective. That means he’s not persuadable.
Not seeing that people would be loathe to trust someone who would do that sort of thing six years ago to make fair and equitable decisions about promoting and compensating his current employees? Not willing to even admit to the possibility that he might owe an apology some of the people who were hurt by the campaign to pass the law and the law itself? He refused to even issue the classic non-apology, “I’m sorry if someone was offended.” He even refused to say something along the lines of, “When I donated, I had no idea that the campaign would go to go and demand this other things.” Instead, he insisted that it was just an opinion, and not anyone else’s business.
Forcing other people to divorce isn’t the business of those other people? Or their friends and family? It isn’t the business of any of your customers or employees who might be members of that community? Really?
Where, in any of that, do you see a person who is willing to be persuaded?
I keep telling people it wasn’t that long ago that opposition to interracial marriage was stronger than the current opposition to same sex marriage.A common point of contention in discussions of gay rights is whether it is appropriate, logical, or even accurate to compare the struggle for equal rights for gay people with the struggle for racial equality. There are a wide variety of rationalizations given for saying they are not comparable. Rather than pick each of those apart, I’m more concerned with two undeniable ways in which they are similar:
The arguments that opponents to gay rights use are identical to arguments that the opponents of racial equality use or have used in the past.
The demographics of the people who most adamantly opposed racial equality are nearly the same as those people most opposed to gay rights.
A friend shared the graphic I’ve included above from @HistOpinion on twitter recently, and I was most amused by the people who were shocked to learn two things: as recently as 1970 there were still several states with laws against interracial marriage, and as recently as 1970 a lot of people approved of those laws.
I was alive in 1970, but even more important to this discussion, I was alive in 1967, the year that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that those laws against interracial marriage were unconstitutional. It is true that I was only in grade school when that ruling came down, but I remember the time clearly. Suddenly, it seemed as if every adult in my life was talking about interracial marriage. None of them—not my parents, not my parents’ friends, not my Sunday School teacher, not my friends’ parents, not the pastor at church, not any of the adults at the monthly church potluck, not my grandparents—bothered to tell me why they were talking about it, but they were all talking about it.
An oldie, but a goodie by D.C. Simpson.So, Mozilla, the non-profit company that produces (among other things) the Firefox web browser, recently appointed a man as their new CEO who, a few years ago, donated the maximum amount allowed for individuals to the Proposition 8 campaign. And several developers, most of them gay married developers, have decided to boycott. Note, since the entire purpose of Proposition 8 was to take away the legal right to marry from an entire class of citizens, and since it won and did then remove those rights, one can understand the sentiment.
I’ve seen several people say it’s wrong to do this, because boycotts don’t accomplish much, it’s hypocritical of gay people to demand discrimination against others, and beside, a company isn’t legally allowed to make hiring decisions based on political affiliations.
Two of those statements are unequivocally false. And the third isn’t much better.
I’ll tackle the last one first: there is no federal law prohibiting private companies from hiring, firing, or promoting because of one’s political affiliations. There is a federal law against the government doing so, but no such federal law applying to corporations, non-profits, et cetera. Only a limited number of states have such laws applying to private employers.
Even then, most of the legal protections for employees’ political activities are fairly narrow: in five states it’s specifically only illegal for employers to post or announce that workers will be laid off or fired if a particular candidate is elected or fails to be elected. Only two states have a more generic ban against any attempts by an employer to coerce employees to vote one way or another. Several states (I could find five) have laws prohibiting employers from retaliating against employees for off-duty political activity, but most of those have exemptions that are broad enough that even a passing reference to their political opinions in the workplace is enough to qualify as political activity on-duty, and therefore subject to being fired. And, of course, one may recall the employer in 2004 who threatened to fire all the workers who had John Kerry bumper stickers on their cars. That was totally legal.
So, no, it would not be illegal for Mozilla’s board to decide not to hire this guy because he is known to have supported (and actively took part in enacting) a law that took away civil rights from a number of their own employees, vendors, et cetera.
Second, everyone over simplifies boycotts. They say a boycott doesn’t accomplish anything if the target doesn’t immediately reverse their position, for instance. It is true that the outright and instantaneous admission of wrongdoing and a change of policy is a very rare thing. But that doesn’t mean the boycotts accomplish nothing. The boycott of Florida orange juice in the 70s because the Florida Orange Commission’s spokesmodel, former beauty queen and singer Anita Bryant, had become prominently involved in a number of campaigns to pass anti-gay laws around the country, didn’t effect the outcome of the first several votes. However, the boycott got more coverage than Bryant’s speeches. And though the Florida Orange Commission never admitted that the boycott and negative publicity was the reason they significantly reduced Bryant’s sponsorship deals, it was clearly a factor.
Bryant had a difficult time getting any sponsorships after that, and went from donating her time and semi-famous face to the anti-gay cause to charging exorbitant fees to speak at churches and religious events about various moral issues. In other words, diverting money that might have been spent on more campaigns to take away our rights to trying to pay off Bryant’s enormous debts.
When the Coors Brewing Company starting routinely giving polygraph tests as part of the hiring process, and one of the questions was whether a person was gay, a boycott was called. The company never admitted when they dropped the questions for the test and added nondiscrimination language to their employee’s handbook that that was the reason why. It was decades later, when Scott Coors, an openly gay member of the family that still controlled the company, was unable to buy a Coors beer at a gay bar in San Francisco (because the Coors family charity foundation had continued to donate huge amounts to anti-gay causes), that we learned that internally the leaders of the company had been very aware of the boycott and specifically the publicity. On the other hand, Scott’s surprise indicated that the boycott’s effectiveness had sufficiently diminished when the media stopped paying attention (which they had done as soon as the company changed its anti-gay hiring practices). The company had been well aware of it, and had been trying various ways over all that time to convince gay bar owners that the foundations activities had nothing to do with them.
A boycott’s publicity doesn’t just negatively affect a company, a boycott serves as a way to raise awareness within the community as to who some of the culprits out to hurt us are. Talking about and debating the boycott within the community and with allies gets more people talking about the situation.
Boycotts are also personal statements. I can decide that I don’t want to spend money supporting someone who promoted discrimination against me. Whether they are hurt by it or not isn’t always the point.
Don’t forget, every time the queer community even hints at a boycott, the right wingnuts all start screaming that boycotting is homofascist intimidation, intolerance, and bullying. They also insist that calling a boycott tramples their religious liberty and right to free speech. If boycotts didn’t accomplish anything, why do the wingnuts get so upset?
Third, we throw around the word discrimination without qualifying the difference between fair and unfair discrimination. To discriminate is to draw a distinction between things. When we decide not to hire a person because they have no experience applicable to the job, we have made a distinction between candidates, but we have done so in an area that is pertinent to the job. Everyone agrees that that’s fair. If we decide not to hire someone because of the church they belong to, most people would agree that (unless you are a church yourself hiring a pastor) that’s not pertinent to the job, and isn’t a fair distinction to draw.
A CEO is not just a manager, they serve as a spokesperson for the company. You want a CEO to represent a company’s values to current and potential customers, as well as to vendors, partners, and even the employees within a company. So what sort of value is represented by a CEO who actively worked to take away civil rights from his fellow citizens? And make no mistake: this isn’t just a privately held belief. A privately held belief means you keep it to yourself, voting in the privacy of the ballot booth, and never say anything to anyone except possibly close personal friends.
When you donate the maximum amount of money allowed under the law for an individual to donate, you have become an active participant in the political process. In the case of Proposition 8, it was an extremely focused effort. The only effect was to target a specific group of people and strip them of a right to marry that they had recently won. To strip them of the other 1000 federal rights that come with marriage and which are not available by any other means. To strip them of the right to designate their partner as the person to make medical decisions if they are incapacitated, to strip them of community property rights, to strip their children of the rights that come from having both parents legally acknowledges as guardians, et cetera, et cetera.
Supporting Proposition 8 literally and unequivocally makes him an oppressor.
And the real problem here isn’t that he supported this thing a few years ago that has since been overturned. The problem is that he has not disavowed his position. He said he didn’t want to talk about it at the press event, and then he talked about it for quite a long time before finally saying that, of course he will abide by the law. And did he mention that the company has a nondiscrimination policy?
Sure, the company has a right to hire him if they want. But all of the rest of us, especially their vendors and partners and customers who happen to be members of the community which was the victim of that attempt at oppression, has a right to tell the board of directors that selecting this man tells us that we aren’t part of their values. It tells their gay and lesbian employees that respecting their rights isn’t part of their values.
And that sure as hell is pertinent to that job.
This photo of Edith Windsor greeting the crowd of supporters after stepping out of the Supreme Court building one year ago today after the court heard arguments in her case against the Defense of Marriage Act adorned the cover of Pride Magazine.It’s true that Prop 8 was overturned. In fact, exactly one year ago today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on challenges to Prop 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act. And eventually the court overturned a crucial section of DOMA, and let stand the lower court ruling declaring Prop 8 unconstitutional (without actually declaring it unconstitutional themselves). It can be argued that we won. It has certainly been argued that we should be gracious winners. But we have only won the last few skirmishes, we haven’t won the war, yet. Remember: we haven’t won until every queer person has full equality before the law. Everywhere. Not just marriage rights in some states (with other people having the right to discriminate against us because of the gender of our spouse), but all rights, everywhere.
Instead of having to argue about one of the oppressors who tried to take rights away from some of us (and seems to still wish he could keep the rest of us from getting them) we ought to be hailing our heroes. Such as Edith Windsor, who went to court to defend her right to inherit property from the woman she legally married in one of the few jurisdictions that allowed it back then, and eventually fought it all the way to the Supreme Court. Which got us last summer’s ruling that is beginning to look like the tipping point that may eventually bring marriage equality to every state.
The “Jesus would stone homos” sign was vandalized.The church sign which two weeks ago said that Homo white demons were stealing black men from good black women, and then followed up by proclaiming that Jesus would stone homos, has been vandalized. The vandals spray-painted “God is Gay” onto both sides of the sign. Security footage shows the guy initially trying to rearrange the letters on the sign, perhaps to spell out his message that way. It’s unclear.
Pastor Manning, who has used the sign to proclaim anti-gay messages many times over the years before the “homo white devils” proclamation that got him headlines, has said he isn’t surprised, since homosexuals are “outright bullies” and he has been expecting “some violence.” He also claimed this was a violation of his right to free speech.
I don’t approve of vandalism. If there is anything that will make me have a violent reaction, it’s seeing some crap you can barely read spray painted across someone else’s private property. Admittedly, one of the reasons I have such a violent reaction is because of having the word “Fag” spray painted on my car when I was 17 years old. So any time I see spray paint like the words on that church sign, I have an immediate flashback to that morning when I came out of the house to drive to school and saw what some cowardly person had done to my car.
So, the first time I saw a news story with that picture of the hateful sign vandalized with the spray paint, my first thought was, “damn it, why did someone have to do that?”
That said, I pretty much everything that Pastor Manning said in interviews about this crime have been wrong. Not just quibblingly not quite accurate, but unequivocally, factually incorrect.
First, this is vandalism is not bullying. Bullying has very specific definitions according to the experts. In order to qualify as bullying the behavior has to satisfy three criteria:
It has to be verbal or physical aggression
It has to be repeated over time.
It must involve a power differential.
All the experts further agree that the final criteria is the most essential. If that imbalance of social and/or physical power doesn’t exist, the behavior doesn’t induce the some long-term stress related trauma that typifies bullying. Bullying is socially coercive. The intent of bullying is not just to terrorize the victim, but to remind the victim that they are not in charge, that they don’t have a say in what happens to them. Bullying leverages all of the ways that we, as humans, are hardwired to conform or try to get along with “our people.” It is not merely being mean.
Spray painted words certainly can constitute verbal assault, but it is a bit muddled when those words aren’t implicitly or explicitly a threat. “God is Gay” isn’t a threat. Further, it is in direct reaction to (and covers up) words that absolutely did constitute a threat. A single act of self-defense, even one like this one which I think steps over the line, does not constitute an act of bullying.
It’s a single action, not repeated. So, under the second criteria it fails. Not bullying.
One man with a paint can does not have more social or physical power than the guy who has a church full of people, the pulpit from which to preach, the church sign that spreads his message to the whole neighborhood, a weekly podcast that spreads his message to whoever wants to hear it, a youtube channel to spread it further, and the ear of the entire rightwing-o-sphere to rush to his aid because of those mean, mean gays!
I mean really, how dare a homo object to your public declaration that gays should be stoned to death? Clearly the solitary homo with a spray paint can who objects is being the bully there, not the man using the power of the pulpit, podcasts, youtube, conservative radio, in addition to the sign to call for the violent execution of all the gays. [End sarcasm mode]
So, this incident doesn’t meet any of the three criteria to qualify as bullying.
Now, to the accusation that gays are violent. As I pointed out in part 1 of this series, contrary to what many on the right have been claiming, there are ten times as many hate crimes against gay, lesbian, trans, or bisexual people than crimes motivated by hate toward Christians. When you take into account what a large proportion of the population Christians are, and what a small proportion gay people make up, that makes the likelihood that a trans/gay/lesbian/bi person is going to be the victim of a hate crime monumentally more likely than a Christian is going to be targeted for such a crime.
Finally, the free speech argument. Do I really need to explain that the right to freedom of speech is not the same as the right to speech with no consequences?
Obviously, the pastor doesn’t understand this. Legally, freedom of speech means that the government cannot preemptively censor your expression, nor is it allowed to legally punish you merely for the content of your speech (with certain narrowly defined exceptions, such as making a credible threat to commit harm to another person, or communication in aid of a conspiracy to commit a crime, or the famous ‘yelling fire in a crowded theatre’). It does not mean that the government has to punish people who react badly to your speech. It does not mean that other people aren’t allowed to say bad things about the things you said. It does not mean that other people aren’t allowed to think you’re a horrible person because you have said hateful things.
And even though Pastor Manning doesn’t believe what he said was hateful, he knew he was proclaiming a message that would anger some of his neighbors. As Justice Scalia, of all people, said a few years ago when some rightwing Christians from my state were trying to prevent the release of the names of the people who had signed the petition to put an anti-gay measure on the ballot here in my state, “Politics takes a certain amount of civic courage. The First Amendment does not protect you from civic discourse — or even from nasty phone calls.”
Spray painting the words “God is Gay” doesn’t even constitute a nonspecific threat, so you can’t even make the argument that the vandal is trying to intimidate Pastor Manning into silence.
His sign has been vandalized. I wish it hadn’t happened. I think we should be able to call out the Pastor’s hate speech for what it is without resorting to damaging property. Such as the woman who showed up and said she was there for her stoning.
But freedom of speech means that other people have the right to disagree with what you say, and to tell you they disagree, and even to be less than nice about it. It means we have the right to laugh at you, to call you a bigot, to tell other people the awful things you have said, and so on.
I’ve spent some time this morning crying at weddings more than a thousand miles away. I’ll likely spend a lot of time this weekend doing that. A federal judge ruled yesterday that Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional (given all the other rulings that isn’t much of a surprise).
Couples getting married in Michigan today.He refused to issue a stay on the ruling, pointing to the evidence presented in the trial that denying the marriages causes harm to the thousands of Michigan children already being raised by same sex couples. This is different than other such rulings, or the situation in Utah where the state simply didn’t think to ask for a stay until the weddings had started.
The Court finds Sankaran’s testimony to be fully credible and gives it great weight. He testified convincingly that children being raised by same-sex couples have only one legal parent and are at risk of being placed in “legal limbo” if that parent dies or is incapacitated. Denying same-sex couples the ability to marry therefore has a manifestly harmful and destabilizing effecton such couples’ children.
The clerks in four counties, so far, have opened their offices on the weekend, to give out “no waiting period” marriage licenses. State and county officials have come in to work on their own time to facilitate the weddings. Judges, ministers, and other people legally authorized to perform the ceremonies have also come in to perform them. Ordinary citizens, some of them friends and families of the couples, but others just people who believe in equality, have come in to help, to congratulate, to cheer.
Couples who have been together over 50 years have been among the people married this morning.
My favorite part of this judge’s ruling (in his findings of fact—that will be very important during the appeals process), is his total evisceration of the notorious Regnerus study:
“The Court finds Regnerus’s testimony entirely unbelievable and not worthy of serious consideration. The evidence adduced at trial demonstrated that his 2012 ‘study’ was hastily concocted at the behest of a third-party funder, which found it ‘essential that the necessary data be gathered to settle the question in the forum of public debate about what kinds of family arrangement are best for society’ and which ‘was confident that the traditional understanding of marriage will be vindicated by this study.’ While Regnerus maintained that the funding source did not affect his impartiality as a researcher, the Court finds this testimony unbelievable. The funder clearly wanted a certain result, and Regnerus obliged. Whatever Regnerus may have found in this ‘study,’ he certainly cannot purport to have undertaken a scholarly research effort to compare the outcomes of children raised by same-sex couples with those of children raised by heterosexual couples. It is no wonder that the NFSS has been widely and severely criticized by other scholars, and that Regnerus’s own sociology department at the University of Texas has distanced itself from the NFSS in particular and Dr. Regnerus’s views in general.”
(You can read Judge Bernard Friedman’s entire ruling here.)
A little girl with rainbow star stickers at a courthouse in Michigan with morning. (Photo by Steve Friess)In case you are unfamiliar, Regenerus compared a few hundred children whose parents had divorced, and in which the non-custodial parent later came out as gay or lesbian, to a control group of children raised by parents who never divorced. Not surprisingly, the children whose early childhoods were disrupted by a divorce tended to have trouble in school and show the other typical problems that have been documented many time before when families experience “household instability and parental relationship fluctuation.” Regenerus then claimed that this proved that children raised by same-sex parents have worse outcomes than children raised by opposite-sex parents.
Except that this doesn’t show that, because none of the children in that group were actually raised by a pair of same-sex parents. None.
It is true that his study also included two children whose parents divorced and the custodial parent came out as lesbian. Those two children did spend part of their childhood being raised by their mother and her same sex partner. Regenerus was forced to admit under oath that these two children did better than average in school, and otherwise had “better outcomes” in all the areas he measured than the others.
So, the only children in his ‘study’ who actually were raised by a same sex couple were success stories, rather than the horror story he has claimed.
So far, every state that is defending bans against marriage equality has cited the Regenerus study, despite its having been debunked many times before this. As far as I can tell, this is the first time that a court has specifically gone into the reasons that they have not been persuaded by the study.
“The Washtenaw county clerk @kestenbaum hands out xeroxes of the 14th amendment, equal protection.”Freelance journalist (and former POLITICO writer, and now an instructor at Michigan State University) Steve Friess has been at a courthouse in Ann Arbor covering the story all day. He posted a link to his dropbox folder containing photos he’s been taking all day, which he is offering free with attribution. But I think my favorite is one he tweeted earlier: a print-out of the 14th Amendment one of the county clerks is handing out, reminding us that this has nothing to do the activist judges, and everything to do with enforcing the constitution.
I’m going to go look at more wedding pictures. Pass me another box of kleenex.
Update: Alas, the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court has issue a stay at least until Wednesday, when they will hear arguments as to whether the stay should be permanent until the Appeals Court rules on the original case. It’s disappointing, though not entirely unexpected. I do have to re-ask the question of just what the attorney general requesting this stay hopes to accomplish? He can’t be so delusional as to think the the whole country is going to reverse course on this sometime soon, can he?
Always check the dictionary.It was reported some weeks ago (on a Christian news blog), that Mars Hill megachurch had spent about $210,000 to place a book written by their head pastor, Matt Driscoll, on the New York Times Bestseller list. Several people had been suspicious when the book first made the list, since it shot onto the list the first week after it was available, and then completely dropped off the list never to return the very next week.
The church emphatically denied everything, calling the allegations ridiculous. Doing such a thing was antithetical to their mission.
The original accusation was soon corroborated when someone got hold of the contract (which outlined the procedure) from a particular marketing firm that does this on a regular basis for religious books. And more evidence began piling up, including allegations of crates of the book gathering dust in church storage rooms, and so forth.
While not uncommon or illegal, this unwise strategy is not one we had used before or since, and not one we will use again. The true cost of this endeavor was much less than what has been reported, and to be clear, all of the books purchased through this campaign have been given away or sold through normal channels. All monies from the sale of Pastor Mark’s books at Mars Hill bookstores have always gone to the church and Pastor Mark did not profit from the Real Marriage books sold either at the church or through the Result Source marketing campaign.
In other words, having insisting that they would never do such a dishonest and immoral thing, when they admit they did do it their excuses are that everyone else does it, it isn’t technically illegal, they are never going to do it again, the “true cost” isn’t as much as people say, and they gave the books away, so no harm. Oh, and the pastor didn’t profit from this unwise thing they did which they had swore up and down they had never done.
At a later point the statement commends the pastor for enduring these false accusations with grace. Except, of course, that they are totally not false.
This pastor has demonstrated, again and again, that he is one of the world’s biggest attention whores. So whether he actually made any money from it was never the point. The point was to be able to brag that he was a New York Times Bestseller writer… which (until now) had been plastered all over the church web pages, his personal web page, his twitter profile, on every single press release the church had issued since it happened, on posters for their various conferences and seminars, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Over the weekend a non-apology letter has surfaced, where he spends a lot of time explaining how the pressures of trying to fulfill the mission that god has repeatedly called him to do forced him to do things he’s not proud of. He never says what any of those things are, though he did say things like, “my angry prophet days are over” and “I must learn to be humble.”
It’s hard to take the humble comment, or the apology, seriously when every other sentence is some kind of bragging about his calling from god, what a humble man he is, how he doesn’t deserve all the talent that god has given him, and so on.
Besides the blatant contradiction between first claiming that they never paid to manipulate a bestseller listing, then admitting they did it, they’ve lied many times before. I wrote before about their press release that (while equating all gay people with people living with AIDS) lied about working with the Lifelong AIDS Alliance. They issued several clarifications that just compounded the lie as the Alliance denied any relationship. No one from the church even called the Alliance to get basic volunteering information until after about the third clarification statement.
Pastor Mark has made too many misogynist and anti-gay sermons over the years to list, though I am particularly fond of both his sermon that compared wives to waterboarding, as well as the times he explained that his wife has to ask his permission if she wants to get her hair cut. Besides the dozens of times he’s made fun of, mocked, and otherwise denigrated effeminate men, there’s also his famous assertion that masturbation is clearly an act of homosexual sin.
And let’s not forget that several Christian news sites and scholars have been slowly demonstrating that large proportions of all of the pastor’s books are plagiarized from other, more obscure, Christian authors.
Driscoll commands a megachurch, which is a bunch of large congregations that meet in several locations around the region. His congregation tends to be younger and more well educated than the typical evangelical crowd. I’ve never really understood the appeal, particularly since he is so transparently egotistic. I understand why he, and the other leaders keep doing what they’re doing. Jesus himself had something to say about people like them:
“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said to them, ‘It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves.'” — Matthew 21:12-13
Font Folly 