As usual, there were a few big news stories of the week I didn’t include in Friday links, and a few that have had more developments that I didn’t see until after I set up the posts to publish. Because I put the Friday Links post together Thursday night, but also because I post a full version of the post to my old LiveJounal and Dreamwidth blogs and my Blogger site, none of which I’ve ever been able to fully automate, so I spend way longer putting them together than I probably ought to.
Anyway, my social media streams were flooded with a lot of Caitlyn Jenner stuff. Mostly people reacting to other people’s snark and derision, especially about her winning the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, Caitlyn Jenner at ESPY Awards: Accept People ‘for Who They Are’. The speech itself was awesome, with a lot of heart, and focused on the problems of trans kids: Caitlyn Jenner honors transgender boy with Macomb County ties during her ESPYs speech. But haters gotta hate. And I think all we can do when they do is shut them down, like Joey Vicente, a U.S. Army behavioral health specialist did in the post I’ve pictured here. Click it to embiggen and read it.
Tangentially: GoodAsYou.Org’s Jeremy Hooper reads all the news blogs and such of the professional anti-gay haters so we don’t have to, and reports that Maggie Gallagher of NOM is trying to claim that support for gay marriage is suddenly plummeting. Jeremy explains how Maggie has constructed this lie (or is it self-delusion), but there’s also this: U.S. Support for Same-Sex Marriage Stable After High Court Ruling. Which isn’t stopping the wingnuts (especially my relatives on Facebook) from continuing to post foaming-at-the-mouth rants about the coming apocalypse because of the gays, how the rainbow flag is a “dark symbol of tyranny,” and the need to assert their religious liberty by discriminating agains the gay. Patheos has a nice counter to this: Your “Deeply Held Religious Belief” Isn’t Biblical. If only there was some way to get people to stop screaming and listen, eh?
TheMetaPicture.com (Click to embiggen)My plan had been to wrap up most of the Hugo reviews with a couple more posts this week, since last week my blog was extra special über queer what with the final week before the Seattle Pride Parade and the marriage equality ruling. I failed to take into account how much the heat is sapping me of energy each day, among other interesting complications of the weekend. And then I saw this story: Orthodox Jews Can’t Protest Gay Pride Parade, Hire Mexicans Instead.
They hired people to protest for them.
It didn’t surprise me when the douche-iest presidential candidate, Donald Trump reportedly paid actors $50 to cheer for him at his 2016 announcement. (I especially liked one post I saw about this, someone photographed one of Trump’s employees collecting the “home made” signs and t-shirts from the actors afterward). But come on, if these are your sincerely held religious beliefs that us queers are evil or going to hell or luring other people into sin or whatever, you should have the stones to show up and protest. You don’t hire immigrant day laborers to be your poxies!
The Jewish groups outsourcing their hate got me searching for any more stories about protestors at the parade, and there were a few protests within some of the parades intended to remind us that there are still plenty of other civil rights battles left for the queer community. And there was a story of one protester at one of the smaller town parades yesterday who got his sign stolen by one of the parade marchers.
All the rightwing Christian sites had headlines yesterday about ‘thousands protesting gay pride parades’… except it was in Korea. They couldn’t come up with anything like that happening here.
Surveys show that at least 57% of Americans are in favor of gays marrying. And they also show that 63% think that gays should be legally allowed to marry (the discrepancy presumably meaning that about 6% of the population believing personally that gays oughtn’t marry, but that it shouldn’t be illegal for consenting adults to do it if they want to). Experience over the last decade has been that about a year after marriage equality becomes legal in a particular state, support for marriage equality jumps up by at least another 10%, with opposition shrinking. Lots of states have had marriage equality for a while, so the nationwide number probably isn’t going to jump that much, but it will jump.
When you add in the decades-long trend of support for any specific gay rights question increasing by about 2 percent a year, that 37% of the population sincerely and deeply opposed to it will just keep shrinking. I don’t know how tiny it will get, eventually. Will it be as infinitesimal as the percentage of people who think that women should have the right to vote taken away (estimated at less than two one-hundredths of a single percent)?
Maybe in a few generations. I think in the foreseeable future it’s going to drop down to about 22% and then hover there for a long time.
One may ask why is seems like all of the Republican presidential hopefuls went ballistically, foaming-at-the-mouth anti-gay starting on Friday when nearly two-thirds of Americans support marriage equality. The reason is that Republican primary voters are not at all representative of the country as a whole. Likely Republican primary voters oppose marriage equality at almost inverse rates of the population at large: 60% oppose, less than 30% support, and the rest are undecided.
Even the few Republican candidates who intend to try to sell themselves as moderates to the general electorate know that they have to get those hardcore haters to vote for them in the primaries in order to become the nominee. And let’s be frank, on most of the issues voters care about, all 16 or 17 or however many we’re officially up to now of the Republican candidates have extremely similar positions. Most of them have name recognition problems at this point in the campaign. The only way they can break out of the pack at this point is to latch onto something that some of those hardcore voters care deeply enough about to remember when the primaries actually roll around.
So despite the fact that a lot of the more mainstream Republican pundits and so forth were hoping that a Supreme Court win for the gays would finally take this issue away as a wedge issue that drives moderate voters to the Democrats, I don’t think they’re going to get their wish.
That’s the problem when you hitch your wagon to hate and anger.
From President Obama’s twitter account.I had had a post written that I was hoping to finish during lunch today to talk about Pride from a positive viewpoint, rather than about the adversity we survive. But then, particularly seeing some of the angry reactions of the homophobes to today’s Supreme Court ruling I thought, “What is a story with a happy ending? Usually it’s a story about someone triumphing against incredible odds. Sometimes triumphing over a villain, sometimes triumping over other things, but it’s a triumph over something. I’m a storyteller. I should know this.”
And what is the nature of our triumph today? Well, it’s summed up really well in the closing paragraph of the decision:
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.
—Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority in the historic Supreme Court decision legalizing marriage equality nation wide.
Our triumph is a love that may endure past death. Our triumph is equal dignity in the eyes of the law. Our triumph is not to be condemned to loneliness. Our triumph is a hope to find another person who we love and loves us in return, and together to become something greater than we were apart.
“Love your way through the darkness.”
—Cornel West
Our society is a collection of customs and laws. Those laws exist for the times when customs are not enough to prevent injustice. Some people still claim that love doesn’t need legal protection. The love itself may not, but the people who share it sometimes do.
Sometimes things happen. Our health fails. There is an accident. And suddenly one member of a relationship is no longer able to make decisions for themselves. The law steps in at that time, and if our relationships aren’t recognized by the law, that means that instead of a person we have loved and shared our life with for decades making decisions about our health et cetera, that person is kicked out of our hospital room by bigoted relatives. The person we have loved and shared our life with may find themselves legally barred from entering the home we shared for those years. They may find themselves, like one old friend years ago had to, trying to prove in court that his clothes, personal belongings, and his own family photo albums were his, and not the property of his partner who had died in a car accident.
So while I believe in the power of love, and believe that the best way to get through darkness is love, I also believe in the power of the law. And I and my husband deserve to enjoy the law’s protection exactly the same as anyone else.
“The opposite of injustice is love.”
—Ken Wytsma
Not everyone is happy about this, and they can say some pretty irrational things while expressing their disagreement. Others try to act as if this disagreement doesn’t matter. Well, Eleven years ago… my friend Barb, beloved wife of my other friend, Kathy, wrote this essay that says much of what I want to say on that topic. It’s a really great post.
Pride Flag carried near the front of Seattle’s Pride Parade, 2014 (photo by me).Friday Links (rainbow connections edition!)
It’s Friday! It’s not just Queer Pride Month, this is Queer Pride Weekend (at least in many places, including my home, Seattle)! Tomorrow, June 27th, is the anniversary of the Stonewall Riot, which most credit as the beginning of the modern gay right’s movement, which is why most folks in the U.S. celebrate June of Pride Month and why so many Pride Parades happen on the last weekend of the month. It’s time for every les-bi-gay, transgender, genderqueer, femme, butch, stud, stem, glittering fairy, cycle mama, leather daddy, drag king, queer nerd, gym bunny, baby dyke, cuddle pup, drag queen, bear, wolf, otter, twink, single, swinger, couple, trouple, PolyFamily, anyone I left out, and everyone who loves any of the above to step out and get down in the Pride Bash Extravaganza!
(Remember, you don’t have to be queer to celebrate it. Know someone who’s queer and want them to have a happy life? Then you can join the party!)
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
Conservatives Demanding ‘Fascist, Anti-Christian’ Gay Pride Flag Be Taken Down. Right… and exactly when, in history, did Gay people enslave non-gays, buying a selling them, ripping them from their families, and then declaring a war the resulted in the deaths of 300,000 americans to try to keep their right to enslave?
Leonard Nimoy reads Isaac Asimov’s ‘The Last Question’:
(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)
Asimov said of all the stories he wrote, this was his favorite. And he said the story had “the strangest effect on my readers. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a story, which they ‘think’ I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They don’t remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably ‘The Last Question.’”
He said people wrote and asked him so often, and the story they were trying to remember was always this one. So one time when he got a phone call that was clearly an international call on a bad connection (which we had to put up with back in those days), he could barely understand the person, but he thought he caught the phrase, “don’t remember the title.” So Isaac said, “I yelled into the phone, ‘the name of the story you can’t remember is The Last Question!'” Then he repeated it, in case the person couldn’t understand. The line was just static for a moment, he heard, “thank you” and the person hung up. “So now he probably thinks I’m psychic.”
I hear or read it at least once each year as Pride weekend approaches (or shortly afterward when people post pictures of their local Pride parade): what’s there to be proud of? Usually followed up with comments to the effect that if we are born this way, then there isn’t anything we’ve done to be gay, so why be proud? Why can’t we just be ourselves and go about our day?
The answer is quite simple: because every moment of our lives—from before we were old enough to understand—society at large (including very nearly every single person who raised us, took care of us, taught us, lived beside us, et cetera) has told us again and again that “just being ourselves” is shameful. We have been told that our very beings were wrong. Our selves are a sickness to be cured, or a sin to be despised, or a shameful secret to be hidden. We’ve been bullied, harassed, tormented, shunned, and beaten because of who we are. We have been told (and often shown violently) that our lives don’t matter. We’ve been told we can’t love. We’ve been told that those of us who do fine love deserve what happens to us when the bashers and haters decide to make an example of us.
In a world that insidiously and relentlessly drums that message into us—driving many to attempt suicide as children (and sadly for many to succeed), browbeating us into hating ourselves—just openly being our selves is no small feat.
Merely surviving all of that and managing to piece together lives of authenticity is a monumental victory over incredible odds.
That’s what we have to be proud of.
I used to react to this question by just thinking that the person was clueless. And certainly cluelessness is a factor. But I’ve also realized that it’s just another manifestation of that most basic form of homophobia. “Can’t you just be who you are and not make a big deal about it” is exactly the same as “why do you have to shove it in our faces all the time” which is the equivalent of “go back into hiding where you belong.”
The saddest part of this is that those people don’t think they are being homophobic at all. And they never think about that fact that straight people “shove their sexuality” in everyone else’s face all the time. Have pictures of your spouse, significant other, or children on your desk, wall, or phone’s home screen? Mention your wife or husband in casual conversation? Comment on how hot a particular actor or actress is? Routinely ask about family discounts? Expect that, of course, your spouse will be included in the company health insurance plan? Invite us to your wedding or your kid’s straight wedding? Show us pictures of yours or your kid’s straight wedding? Ever use the phrase “no homo”?
Since we get accused of shoving our sexuality in your face if we merely casually mention the existence of our significant other, we get to count all of those things as you shoving your sexuality in our faces. Straight pride happens 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, yet you begrudge queer people (trans, lesbian, bisexual, gay, genderqueer, polyamorous, asexual, pansexual, gender fluid, intersexed, gender neutral, and those who love and support us) a parade once a year?
Why am I proud?
I’m proud because they tried to drown us in lies, and we’ve risen above to reveal our truth. I’m proud because they have beaten and tortured us in the name of faith, and we’ve found the strength to show the world our love. I’m proud because they tried to smother us with fear, but we found hope in the most unlikely of places. I’m proud because we have endured hate, which has taught us how to love better. I’m proud because we have fled the shadows, and showed the world our light. I’m proud because no matter how many times we’ve been knocked down, we have gotten back up.
I’m proud because we’re all still here, we’re unstoppable, and we’re beautiful!
Mat Staver is the head of the anti-gay Liberty Counsel, featured speaker at several Values Voter Summits over the years, a man who has gone to court many times defending laws that discriminate against gay people, and someone who as recently as June has testified to congress about why gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered people shouldn’t be included in anti-discrimination law, and has many times on his radio show praised laws in places like Russia and Uganda that criminalize gay people and even talking about gay people. For example, last year he was on another radio show, ranting about those Christians who have said that gay rights and marriage equality are losing battles. “To assume that you can go against the created order is hubris, it’s arrogance, it’s dangerous and it is not something in which we can simply say, ‘the battle’s over, we need to figure out how to coexist.’ There is no coexistence.”
“There is no coexistence.” If he insists that his side can’t co-exist with us, that’s another way of saying either we have to cease to exist or he does, right? And I’m pretty sure he isn’t suggesting that all true believers (his side) should commit mass suicide.
When Staver says “there is no coexistence” that means he’s ultimately willing to kill. The reason Staver’s organization encourages things like Uganda’s kill-the-gays laws, and talks up the rhetoric of how dangerous we are to society is because he believes we should not be allowed to exist. Which means killing us. Or at least, scaring us with a credible enough threat of death that we all go back into the closet.
It’s the same tactics used by the hate leaders who radicalized Dylann Roof into shooting nine innocent people in a church in Charleston: making members of the majority believe that a historically oppressed minority somehow has all the power. Roof told the lone adult survivor of his shooting, “I have to do it. You’re raping our women and overrunning our country.” In a country where white police officers gun down unarmed black children in the street without facing murder charges, he believes that black people are the ones threatening the existence of white people.
Similarly, in a country where:
1500 queer children are bullied into committing suicide every year,
where thousands of queer children are thrown out onto the streets by so-called Christian parents whose religious leaders have told them they have to show tough love,
where the authorities don’t investigate those parents for child neglect,
where the numbers of homicides of LGBT people have climbed to record highs,
where more than half of hate-motivated murder victims are trans people of color,
where state legislators are rushing to enact religious-belief based “right to discriminate” laws,
where in most states it is perfectly legal for employers to fire someone simply because they think the person might be gay (and where landlords can evict gay tenants or refuse to rent to them, et cetera),
where queer people are 2.4 times more likely to be victims of hate crimes than jews, and 2.6 times more likely to be victims of hate crimes than muslims,
where the number of hate crimes against all groups except lesbian, gays, trans, and bi people is going down while all categories of anti-queer hate crimes remain the some or are rising,
where the overwhelming majority of elected officials at the federal, state, and local level are Christian (far out of proportion to their percentage of the population),
where state and federal tax dollars are funneled into “faith-based” charity organizations that are often allowed to discriminate in how they administer those tax-funded activities,
where religious schools are often supported by tax dollars diverted from public schools,
where high school kids are threatened with expulsion for wearing “Gay OK” t-shirts to school after a bunch of Christian bullies beat a gay classmate (but the bullies weren’t punished),
where a public school teacher responding to an incident of anti-gay bullying read a book about acceptance to his class, then was forced to resign for “promoting homosexuality,”
where Christian organizations rally and raise money to combat anti-bullying policies unless said policies include exemptions that allow their kids to bully gay kids in the name of their faith,
…Christians are claiming that queers are persecuting them.
Seriously? Not being able to bully, discriminate against, and torment their gay neighbors is oppression?
Indiana RFRA protest rally earlier this year. (WISH-TV/Howard Monroe)I stared at my iPad, flabbergasted. A writer whose work I admire, and who has always come across as thoughtful in his personal blog, stated that after carefully reviewing the blog posts and comments of another writer who has been spearheading a particular bigoted movement concluded, “I can find no solid evidence to support the frequently repeated charge of homophobia.” It took me three minutes with Google to come up with five rather blatant homophobic statements. One of which was in a post that the writer who now says he can find no evidence of homophobia had commented on. A few sentences later I found the answer: “While it’s clear he opposes marriage equality for religious reasons, there’s no evidence of blatant animosity.”
Oh, dear, not that old fallacy again!
It comes up all the time. People who consider themselves progressive and pro-gay rights, but who are themselves not queer, will turn a blind eye to homophobic statements and actions so long as the perpetrator refrains from employing obviously offensive language too frequently and claims they are doing it for religious reasons. As if, somehow, only when an oppressor is openly vicious are the actions actually oppressive…Continue reading Sincerely (up) yours,→
Just a year ago, many conservative pundits were pointing out that the number of states that had adopted marriage equality, and where a majority of the citizens of said states supported it, meant that there weren’t enough states left to ratify a constitutional amendment. Then we have polls released just this week that not only show that a majority of americans support marriage equality, but that a whopping 63% believe that marriage equality is a constitutional right and that the court should rule it so!
I have to point out that back in 1971, four years after a unanimous Supreme Court had struck down bans on interracial marriage, that a majority of americans disagreed with that decision. But no one even tried to pass a federal constitutional amendment to allow states to begin banning interracial marriage again. I don’t believe that anyone could make a credible run at an amendment to ban gay marriage now when a majority of americans support gay marriage.
I should point out, that while 63 percent said they thought the constitution protects the right, a “mere” 57% said they fully support it. Which means that about 6% are personally opposed to queers marrying each other, but also believe it should be legal. That isn’t a contradiction. Lots of us disapprove of things that we also don’t think should be illegal for other people to do if they really want.
The most interesting statistic on that, as always, is the demographic number. We’re used to, in these polls, seeing that young people are more supportive of gay rights than older people. So it is no surprise that roughly 73% of those under the age of 50 are in favor of marriage equality. But the surprise is that just over 52% of people aged 50 and older are also in favor. It’s almost evenly split, but for a long time it was a clear majority of older people who disapproved. Of course, some of that shift has been a simple matter of aging. People who were in their late 40s when polls were taken a few years ago, and were therefore at least slight more likely to be in favor of marriage equality, are now in the older cohort, and they’re brought their beliefs with them. But aging alone doesn’t account for the change. So in the last few years, some of those older people who previously opposed it or answered that they weren’t sure have changed their minds.
It’s that last piece, I know, that some of the haters hang onto. They remain convinced that somehow, if they just keep screaming about how horrible and icky gay people are, that they can start getting people to change their minds the other way.
I don’t think so. I continue to believe that our two best weapon are visibility and familiarity. The more people who know actual gay people—and specifically, the more they see their own relatives and the relatives of their friends not just be out, but stand in line for marriage licenses and have their weddings and so forth without the world coming crashing down—the more supportive they become.
The cliché is that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. I agree that the marriage equality genie is out and isn’t going back. More importantly, none of us queers are going to allow ourselves to be chased back into the closet.
No one’s coming out goes exactly the same as any other. The fear that the guy talks about in the first video (and the anxiety you can see on the young woman’s face in the first part of the second) is very real. Even in 2015, 40% of homeless teen-agers are homeless because they have been kicked out of their homes by parents because they are gay.
I tried to come out to my best friend—a guy I loved like a brother—dozens or more times. Because we were both attending fundamentalist evangelical churches, I tried to ease us into the conversation. But every single time that even a hint of the topic of non-heterosexuality came up, he would instantly go into “Gross! Sinful! All homos go to hell!” mode with such vehemence, it’s amazing I wasn’t physically hurled from the room by the strength of his condemnation.
Ironically, when I finally did come out years later, he insisted that the reason he was ending our friendship was not because I was “an unrepentant homosexual” (his words), but rather because I told someone else before I told him. He was also one of the people who insisted emphatically that he had never, ever, ever suspected at all that I was gay before I came out.
I don’t believe that statement, either.
Several relatives and close friends from back then made equally insistent denials of ever suspecting. Of course, one of those people was my Mom. And when one of my aunts found out Mom was claiming she had never suspected, that’s when the aunt informed me that beginning when I was about 14 years old, she and my mom and several ladies from church had begun meeting once a week to pray my gay away. I also was informed by one of the former board members of the evangelical touring teen choir I had been involved with as a teen-ager that it had been explicitly known that one reason I wasn’t given solos or put into one of the small ensembles for the first many years I was active in the group was because the leadership was certain I was “struggling with the sin of homosexuality.”
They were correct in that I was struggling mightily to stop feeling attracted to other guys. But unlike a lot of the guys who they did put into leadership positions and gave solos to, I wasn’t acting on my feelings. I wrote about one of those cases, but he wasn’t the only queer boy in the group fooling around with other guys back then.
I’m glad that more people are getting reactions like the second video: “I always knew. Were you afraid to tell me?” But far too many queer people have plenty of reasons to fear rejection (and worse) from their own families and friends if they admit who they are. And that’s just wrong.
The original Pride flag designed by Gilbert Baker in 1978 has 8-stripes. Colors were removed and changed originally due to fabric availability.I don’t remember when I first learned that the Rainbow flag was a symbol for LGBTQ pride. I do remember in high school finding out that a particular representation of a labrys (double-headed symmetric ax associated with several goddesses from Greek mythology) had been adopted by some lesbians. However, since the information came first from the same sorts of church people who saw Satanic symbols everywhere, I wasn’t completely certain it was true.
The next symbol I learned about was the pink triangle. Since it was an emblem used by the Nazis to mark prisoners sent to the concentration camps with the excuse that they were sexual deviants, and since the Allies had then re-imprisoned all of the gay men who managed to survive the camps, the emblem was more of an assertion of “never again!” than a pure statement of pride.
As usual, there were a few big news stories of the week I didn’t include in Friday links, and a few that have had more developments that I didn’t see until after I set up the posts to publish. Because I put the Friday Links post together Thursday night, but also because I post a full version of the post to my old LiveJounal and Dreamwidth blogs and my Blogger site, none of which I’ve ever been able to fully automate, so I spend way longer putting them together than I probably ought to.
Anyway, my social media streams were flooded with a lot of Caitlyn Jenner stuff. Mostly people reacting to other people’s snark and derision, especially about her winning the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, Caitlyn Jenner at ESPY Awards: Accept People ‘for Who They Are’. The speech itself was awesome, with a lot of heart, and focused on the problems of trans kids: Caitlyn Jenner honors transgender boy with Macomb County ties during her ESPYs speech. But haters gotta hate. And I think all we can do when they do is shut them down, like Joey Vicente, a U.S. Army behavioral health specialist did in the post I’ve pictured here. Click it to embiggen and read it.
Font Folly 