Pastor Manning is once again misquoting the Bible to bash gay people.Let’s all heave a big sigh, because Pastor Manning and his church sign are at it again.
This week the sign says, “When the homos bullied the poor and needy in Sodom like they do in Harlem, Jesus fire and brim-stoned them,” and then cites three Biblical passages: Ezekial 16:48-50, Leviticus 20:13, and Genesis 19:24-? – the last one is cut off, as it doesn’t quite fit into the lit up part of the sign.
The first thing to note about these Bible verses is that all of them are in the Old Testament, where Jesus does not appear, as he hadn’t been born yet, and is not the person speaking. One could argue that it might not have been the intent of the Pastor to imply that Jesus is being quoted in those verses, but given the context of why this sign is saying this particular message now (which I will get to), that argument is wrong. So, the first lie in the sign is the notion that Jesus said anything about homosexuals at all. Jesus did not at any point at all in the Bible.
A pair of bigots.In case you didn’t already know that neither Pastor Manning nor Pastor Driscoll are even slightly acquainted with logic, the last couple week’s revelations will make it crystal clear.
I’m not even sure where to begin. Pastor Manning’s most recently posted youtube video explains how NASA’s Voyager spacecraft proves that homos are perverts, with a long digressive rant about rectums. Pastor Driscoll’s supporters have been trying to distance themselves from recently unearthed postings on the church’s forums in which Driscoll explained that god created each woman as a special home for a particular penis.
I’ve written many times before about my own ambivalent relationship with football. And, as we enter the second week of the regular season, my enthusiasm for my Seahawks is high after our great opening game, but my deep misgivings about the league and the institution have me at a low, and not just because of the case that everyone has been talking about this week.
Ahmed Said (upper) and Dwone Anderson-Young (lower) were murdered, execution style, together.On the night of May 31st, two young men, Dwone Anderson-Young and Ahmed Said, spent an evening dancing at a gay bar, then were seen together later at a nearby pizza place. Dwone was the great-grandson of jazz legend Ernestine Anderson. Ahmed’s family immigrated more recently from Somalia. Dwone was less than two weeks from graduating from the University of Washington and already had a job lined up at Microsoft. Unfortunately, not many hours after they left the pizza place together, in the wee small hours of June 1st, they were both murdered on the street, not far from Dwone’s home.
The motive for the crime was unknown at first, though robbery was immediately ruled out. Neither young man was linked to any gang and neither had a criminal record. They were both openly gay and well-known in the neighborhood. While there are gay gang-bangers, they tend to be deeply, deeply closeted.
Witnesses placed another young man, one with a rather long and violent criminal record, near the scene…
The argument they are pushing is: “allowing same sex couples to marry is exactly the same as prohibiting interracial couples to marry.” If you don’t read that closely, it sounds like they’re finally agreeing with one of our arguments, but look again (and go look at the confusing graphic that accompanies the meme they’re trying to get their people to post everywhere).
Because interracial marriage bans prevented people from marrying who they wanted to merely because the color of one half of the couple’s skin didn’t match the other was bad. Most everyone agrees the interracial marriage ban was bad. And the Ruth Institute agrees. But, they say, allowing same-sex couples to marry is just as bad because it prevents straight women from marrying gay men if they want to. And so forth.
That’s literally their argument.
Which is wrong on so, so many levels. Allowing my husband and I to legally marry does not prevent any gay person (closeted or not) from entering into a marriage with a straight person if they want. It doesn’t. If they want to do that, they can. I don’t know why they would want to, but they can.
Allowing someone to do something doesn’t prevent other people for doing it.
The closest you can get to any “logic” in this argument is that if marriage equality is not available anywhere, it increases the odds that people will be closeted, and it makes it slightly more likely that unsuspecting straight people will get married to closeted gay people, and probably suffer a lot of heartache later on.
I think Jeremy is right: desperation is making them lose their minds.
Their new sign says that individuals and churches that support “homos” will be cursed with cancer, HIV (the virus that causes AIDS), syphilis, stroke, madness, and itch, then references I Corinthians 6:9: “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind…” Interestingly they don’t reference the next verse, which is a continuation of the sentence, “nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”
That’s important because Pastor Manning spent time in prison in both New York and Florida for burglary, robbery, larceny, criminal possession of a weapon, and other things. So verse 10 would seem to say that Pastor Manning may not be so welcome in the kingdom of God.
But less snarkily, look at another word there: “revilers.” A reviler is someone who insults or verbally abuses someone else, someone who criticizes abusively. Such as someone who calls people devils, or calls for whole classes of people to be stoned to death. That sort of thing.
I know that Pastor Manning is using one of the more hateful translations of the Bible. Since 1946 certain people have decided that the scriptures weren’t anti-gay enough, and they went through changing verses where it isn’t entirely clear what they are referring to to explicitly says “homosexual.” But the two words that used to be translated into english as “effeminate” and “abuses of themselves with mankind” are not so clearcut.
Scholars argue a lot about what the Apostle Paul meant there. Paul wrote in greek, which had a word for men who have sex with other men already, but Paul didn’t use that word. Greek also had a word for male temple prostitutes, and Paul didn’t use that word. Instead, he made up a word, arsenokoitai. That words has never appeared in any other Greek text at all. It appears to be a compound of the words “man” and “beds.” If Paul was condemning homosexual behavior, why would he make up a new word when words already existed for it? And also, it is important to note that he uses specifically male-gendered nouns, so if Paul was condemning homosexual behavior, it was only gay male homosexual behavior: so apparently lesbians are fine, as far as Paul is concerned.
My own guess, based on how much of a misogynist Paul appeared to be, and how much he despised sex of all kinds (the fundamentalists all ignore Paul’s other admonishments where he condemns marriage and having children as an anti-Christian waste of time that would better be spent preparing for Jesus’ return; yes, Paul was against people marrying and raising families), is that Paul was making a general condemnation of all kinds of sexual and romantic behavior, here. And he aimed it at men because Paul didn’t really believe that women mattered, or at the very least he didn’t believe that women made choices of their own, but rather simply did what men told them to do.
And there is nothing in 1 Corinthians at all about cancer, or the virus that causes AIDS, or itching.
But Manning sees lots of things that aren’t actually in the text. It’s very convenient for a man with as big an ego as his, and as long a history of abusing and using others as him.
The television version of the Doris Day Show was one of the most schizo programs ever.One day in middle school, in one of the boys-only classes1 one of the guys was going on about some actress he really had the hots for. Several of the other guys agreed. And then a general discussion of other actresses that guys thought were hot got rolling. I don’t remember any of the actresses in question. I remember that at least a couple of them were on shows that my family never watched, so I had only the slightest idea who they were.
Eventually one of the guys turned to me and asked which actress I thought was hot. It was asked in a fairly challenging tone of voice which clearly communicated that the topic of the conversation was shifting to What-stupid-thing-can-we-get-him-to-say. It’s one of the more subtle forms of bullying, asking the kid no one likes a question that to the ears of an adult who might be listening sounds like an attempt to include you in the conversation, but all the kids know that this is really just another test. Can you come up with an answer that isn’t going to result in derision and teasing?3
I knew where this was going, and I knew no matter what I said my answer would be wrong in some way. But ignoring the question could go even worse, so I quickly scoured my brain and said, “Doris Day.”
Even I was a little surprised when that name came out of my mouth.
So Time allowed a college student to write an op-ed piece they published this week called, “Dear White Gays: Stop Stealing Black Female Culture.” A lot of other people have written some great responses to it (I most particularly recommend Vice Magazine columnist Dave Schilling’s answer in his This Week in Racism column), but I want to focus on something that most of them have overlooked. Among the offences Ms. Mannie lays at the feet of white gay men as proof that we are stealing the culture of black women: having sex with black men.
Most of the color guard are Boy Scouts, plus troop 98, which recently left the boy scouts after the sponsoring church overwhelming voted not to fire the gay scoutmaster and force the BSA to kick the church out (they have since joined Baden-Powell Service Organization).It’s been more than a few years since Michael and I attended the Pride Parade or the Pride Festival. One friend, seeing the pics I was posting to twitter, commented, “I thought you didn’t like going to the parade any more!” And I had to explain that it wasn’t a matter of liking, but more a matter of trying to get both of us up and moving early enough on a Sunday to get there.
I like the parade.
It’s not zillions of blocks long, but we have a big rainbow flag!I like it so much, that one time I attended three in one year. San Francisco and Seattle weren’t on the same weekend that year (they’re usually both on the last Sunday in June), and the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Chorus (of which I was a member) sang a joint concert with the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Chorus for Pride weekend. So Ray (my late husband) and I flew down to San Francisco, went to a lot of pride events, I sang in the concert, and we watched the gigantic parade. Then, back in Seattle, we marched with the chorus in Seattle’s not quite so big parade. Then, about a month later, we spent a long weekend in Vancouver, B.C., where we watched and cheered a much, much smaller (but extremely enthusiastic) Pride Parade.
The only picture I got of us together at the parade. I know, nostril shot. Sorry.When I started dating Michael (a few years later, after Ray died), he was a bartender at a lesbian bar down in Tacoma. Tacoma didn’t usually have a parade, though they had a pride festival a week or two after Seattle’s. For several years he had had to work on the day of Seattle’s Pride Parade (he said it was always a weird night, because half the usual crowd was up in Seattle at our parade and parties). After he stopped working at the bar in Tacoma (by which point we were living together), he got a job at a non-gay bar in Seattle. Working late Saturday night and having to work again Sunday made attending the parade less than fun for him, though he did let me drag up off to it a couple of times.
Then we hit this long period of either having too many other things going on, or one or the other of us being sick, or just not quite up to getting up and moving in time. So we missed a bunch.
They make George Takei, one of the original cast members of Star Trek grandmaster? Of course I have to be there!Watching most of the parade today (we only watched for three hours… there was still a bunch of parade to go, but we wanted to get to the festival in time to see George Takei on the main stage), the thing that struck me is that the parade has become even more ordinary. I’ve described my first pride parade before, noting that while there were outrageous costumes, more than a few near-naked people (though actually less than most non-gay parades I’ve attended), and so forth, the majority of people marching and riding floats looked pretty ordinary: people or all ages, shapes, and sizes in t-shirts and shorts or jeans. That’s decidedly more true now than it was when we last attended more than eight years ago.
This was only part of the Alaska group, they had another vehicles and a crowd of employees on foot.I believe that is less about gays assimilating into mundane society (as some have suggested), as it is about corporations assimilating to the idea that inclusivity is good business. The first parade I attended had a few contingents of employees of some of the large employers in the area, but only a few. This year I saw groups of employees from several major banks, mobile phone companies, grocery stores, airlines, cruise lines, wineries, insurance agencies, restaurants, et cetera, et cetera. About half of the contingents, I would say, were groups of employees. And the standard ensemble for those groups is a t-shirt identifying their employer with pants or shorts.
Market Optical’s float said, “Look with your eyes, not your hands” and then had go-go boys with multi-colored handprints all over their bodies.There were still plenty of the non-profits and recreational groups, and those were where you most often saw the more outrageous costumes (though the Market Optical float was the one with the most scantily-clad go-go boys). There were scantily-clad people, including a large group of people on bicycles and roller skates wearing nothing but body paint. Most of the naked bikers were painted to look like characters from Star Trek. It didn’t occur to me while we were watching the parade that they had probably decided to do that because George Takei was the grand marshall.In the past it was the bars and dance clubs that would put a cage dancer in the float, not an optician!
I should mention the unpleasantness. Back when the Parade was on Cap Hill (aka, the Gayborhood) every parade I marched in had some “Repent sinners!” protestors. Except most years it was one grim-faced bearded guy holding up a sign at one corner, saying nothing. A couple times he had a small group, but that was it. Apparently now that we’re in downtown Seattle we now get an entire mini-parade of haters. According to the people standing next to us, last year or the year before there were some very angry confrontations. Now a couple of bicycle cops follow along. The haters walk the route before the parade officially starts. It looked like a lot of them, with a lot of signs and one guy with a bullhorn.
The parade committee invited a lot of people who participated in the first Seattle Pride, including a country band called Lavender Country.I say it looked like, because once I realized who they were, I simply turned my back on them, and refused to look at all. Michael did the same, except he glanced over when a lot of cheering broke out: two womyn ran out into the street and kissed in front of the bullhorn guy. Apparently it happened a lot along the route.
Now I feel a need to digress a moment, here. While I am a fierce advocate of free speech even for people I disagree with, here’s the thing: the Supreme Court has ruled that we have the right to exclude the ex-gay groups and the pedophile groups from marching in our parade, and the Boston St. Patrick’s Day parade has the right to exclude gay people from their parade. So, why is it, when the streets have been blocked off because we have a permit for a parade (and we are paying the city for the police to route traffic, and so forth) that we can’t exclude these people from the route that we’ve paid for for the duration? Instead of escorting them so angry faggots won’t attack them, shouldn’t the police arrest them?Two guys were walking along with one of the groups and had their Dalmatians with them–with rainbow spots!
I know all the reasons why we shouldn’t push for that: we should show more tolerance than they do, they’ll milk it for fundraising and propaganda purposes how they’re being oppressed, and so on. But you know darn well if we showed up at their church on a Sunday morning and starting reading a “How To Come Out To Your Parents” pamphlet over a bullhorn, they would call the cops.
That’s enough about the bad stuff.
I did manage to get one non-blurry picture of gay Batman, even if it is a silhouette.There’s so much more I could share. I kept trying to get a non-blurry picture of the guy skating as gay Batman. He was with two others, one was the joker, and the other had some Superman emblems mixed with other things. As far as I can tell the three were just skating up and down the full length of the parade, so they passed us several times. Then Batman crashed into a woman standing next to us. No one was hurt. It got a little funny, because she kept asking him if he was all right, and he said not to worry about him but was she all right? And that went back and forth several times.
Rainbow tie-dye overalls over rainbow tie-dye shirt!There was a very shy little kid who wanted candy, but would hide whenever anyone who was passing things out tried to give them to him. There were fun floats. There were several bands and drum and pipe corps, including the Police Department’s drum and pipe corps. There were several groups with pets. Lots of youth groups. Lots of trans* groups. There was a troop of librarians doing synchronized maneuvers with book carts. There were kids, lots of kids. And of course lots and lots of rainbows.
It was a great parade. And I’m so glad that we’re marching through downtown now, and filling the Seattle Center with hundreds of thousands of people, instead of cramming smaller crowds into the gay ghetto. I do want to support the businesses up there that have always been ready to answer the call of all the queer non-profits over the years. And since we have three parades now, we can! I think next year we need to make an effort to attend the Dyke March on Saturday and/or the Trans March on Friday.
Because it’s been a long, long time since I did three parades in a single year…
The second in what may be a long series of me recommending web comics for your perusal.
Since it’s LGBTQ Pride Parade Day here in Seattle (and a lot of other places), I’m going to lead off with a couple of strips with a gay sensibility:
I’ve been following The Young Protectors by Alex Woolfson, Adam DeKraker, and Veronica Gandini since the very beginning. I had been a kickstart funder for Alex Woolfson’s previous project (Artifice) and thus was alerted as he prepared the new project. The Young Protectors is a multi-chapter superheroes comic story. It begins when a young, closeted teen-age superhero who has just snuck into a gay bar for the first time is seen exiting said bar by a not-so-young, very experienced, very powerful, super-villain. Trouble, of course, ensues.
And if you haven’t already checked out The Less Than Epic Adventures of T.J. and Amal by E.K. Weaver, you really need to. Besides really liking the story and the art, I love the fact that she has notes on the creation of the story, her art references, and other goodies. And did I mention it’s a really good story, and I think, despite the title, that the adventures in question actually are epic?
I started reading: Adventures in Gay by Josh Lieberman about a year ago. I like the original four-panel gag format a lot. Lately he’s been posting videos more often than strips, but they are still quite amusing.
I first looked at Jesus Loves Lesbians, Too by Maria Burnham and Maggie Siegel-Berele just because I liked the title. I also like that they write short stories that are two to four comic book-style pages long, and that it isn’t a gag strip, but still finds moments of humor.
Font Folly 