I’m sorry that I’m not going to be as funny as the Saturday Night Live crew, but I had to share a few updates on some of the things I linked to just yesterday:
The Washington Times (not to be confused with the award-winning, serious newspaper, the Post) is a regular donor to the anti-gay National Organization of Marriage, was the primary sponsor of yesterday’s anti-gay marriage march, and usually finds a way to spin every story about a step forward for gay rights as a victory for their side, concedes:
After rallying the troops for years, and even with one New York politician recruiting people for what he told them was “a free trip to Washington, D.C. to see the monuments” (that’s right, some bus loads of people didn’t even know what they were going to), they were only able to get “hundreds.” So my caption yesterday saying it was “tens” was slightly off.
But wait, there’s more!
The official hierarchy of the Morman Church is also a regular donor to any anti-gay political action committee or group you can name (even if they did try to tone it down and hide their involvement a bit in 2012; something several of us predicted would end once Mitt Romney’s run for the White House ended, and we were right), owns it’s own newspaper, the Deseret News, and it tried to put a slightly less defeatist spin in its headline:
Funny, neither site mentions the leader of a French neo-Nazi (remember, it isn’t hyperbole when they are literally members of a Nazi Party) organization wasn’t just at the event, she was one of the people leading the march!
The Wonkette’s piece shows some pictures of some hateful signs. It’s worth noting that the people who organize this thing, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), keeps claiming that they are not anti-gay. They say we’re distorting their message when we call them anti-gay. They insist that they are simply defending traditional marriage, and not attacking anyone. But a quick perusal of the pictures at this article shows they are lying: Photos: Animus at #March4Marriage. You can see some more of the clearly anti-gay signs, read quotes from some of the speeches, and watch video interviews of some of the attendees to demonstrate the hate further: Inside NOM’s Second Failed “March For Marriage”. If you can stomach any more, the Daily Beast talked to a lot more of the attendees: Crucifixes, Gorillas, and Adult Diapers: My March Against Gay Marriage.
Just in case anyone ever tries to tell you that the people who oppose marriage equality aren’t anti-gay (and very ill-informed, too).
Marcus Bachmann is married to a vehemently anti-gay congresswoman, runs a cure-the-gays clinic, and calls himself “doctor” based on a degree from a diploma mill that didn’t even offer psychology degrees at the time he took classes.When I first came out to my family, nothing went smoothly. Mom went into full denial mode, even insisting she had never suspected I was gay (despite having regular prayer sessions with other family members and church friends begging god to turn me straight for at least a decade). One aunt sent me a 28-page handwritten letter outlining the words I wasn’t allowed to use in her presence, the topics that could not be mentioned in her house, and so forth. I lost track of the number of relatives who assured me I was still welcome to visit, but only if I promised not to act gay and certainly never accompanied with a boyfriend. One cousin-in-law—who happened to also be my best friend from college—got angry that some family members knew before he did, causing lots of drama. It has also been his excuse for 20-some years for ending our friendship (it’s not because I’m gay, see, it’s because I didn’t tell him first). Some relatives on Dad’s side blamed Mom. Some relatives on Mom’s side blamed Dad.
I could go on and on.
I think it was the first time in my life that I was unhappy that my parents and grandparents had so many siblings, and that many branches of our huge extended family had always been in regular communication with each other.
During one of the many melodramatic phone conversations I had during that first year after coming out, my Grandma was going on about why she didn’t understand how I could choose this. So I asked her to stop for a moment and think about that. Could she honestly say, I asked her, that she could choose to be gay? I had to rephrase it a few times before she understood what I was asking. Then she declared, very firmly, that of course there was absolutely no possibility that she could ever even imagine deciding to be gay herself. It was ridiculous to suggest it.
“In that case, Grandma, how can you keep accusing me of choosing this?”
She got flustered and started quoting the Bible at me. I quoted some verses back and pressed her again. If it’s a sin, then everyone is equally capable of being tempted by it. If she felt so strongly down to her bones that she couldn’t choose to do this, how could she believe that I could? She eventually admitted that maybe I was right about it not being a choice.
We were hardly the first people to have that conversation. For those of us queer people who were raised in exceptionally homophobic churches and families—who spent decades crying ourselves to sleep over feelings that would not go away; who begged god again and again in epic prayer sessions to make us “normal;” and who lived in constant fear of the being rejected by those we loved if they found out—the notion that this is all a matter of choice is so patently ridiculous that it defies reason.
Not to mention having watched people we know go through programs intended to “cure” homosexuality and seeing most of them come out not changed at all. Or seeing the ones who claimed to be changed so obviously projecting a facade that did nothing to hide how profoundly unhappy and unchanged they were. Or reading the statistics which show that literally 99.9% of them aren’t even able to resist their feelings for any length of time.
It’s deeply frustrating knowing that it was never a matter of choice for ourselves or anyone we’ve known, that the myth is still bandied about and still used to justify laws, policies, and practices that discriminate against us.
Then one day I read an op-ed piece by advice columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage, in which he described the same frustration, but then explained an epiphany he had had. He had been reading yet another news story of a vehemently anti-gay minister or politician having been caught having had a number of same-sex affairs, and remembering all the times said anti-gay person had publicly insisted that being gay was a choice, when it hit him. The reason they believed it was a choice because in a twisted way it was true for them. Every single day they looked themselves in the mirror and convinced themselves one more time that they weren’t going to be gay that day.
We know from both the medical research and the statistics that some so-called ex-gay therapists were forced to admit in court, that no one who feels same-sex attraction ever stops feeling it. No one. When the advocates of such quackery have been pinned down in court under threat of perjury and faced with actual evidence, they even admit that by “cure” all they’ve ever meant was that a person could learn to resist the urge to act on their feelings. Which is a very twisted definition of cure.
Congressman Shock was raised Southern Baptist in a rural community, has a consistent anti-gay voting record, but posts pictures of himself to Instagram like these, has never married, and has lived with a string of young athletic male “roommates” for over a decade.Before I came out, back when I was still fighting the feelings and still trying desperately to convince myself that maybe I was bi, it always struck me as weird that the preachers I met who preached most virulently and obsessively against homosexuality were always the most effeminate men I had ever met. When a group of ex-gay activists came to the methodist university I was attending, I was again struck by how stereotypically sissified the ex-gay men were, and how unladylike the ex-lesbian women were. Back at the dorm, one of the other guys on my floor went on and on about it, getting big laughs when he asked why they couldn’t find at least one non-faggy person to represent the program.
Just to be clear: not all gay men are sissies. Sexual orientation is a complicated thing, obviously the result of a whole lot of different things going on in our brains and hormones. Some gay men are great at football and have no interest in musical theatre, while some straight men have no interest in sports and like to cook. Believe me, I know.
But there are actual studies which show that almost all sissies are gay.
And my own epiphany about these anti-gay or ex-gay guys that I can’t believe are fooling anyone is this: they are so desperate to believe there is a cure precisely because they have never been able to hide.
As bad as childhood may have been for me, being called sissy and pussy and far worse by classmates, coaches, some teachers, other kids at church, or my own father, I bet Aaron Shock had it worse. I’m absolutely certain that Marcus Bachmann had it far, far, far worse. Convincing themselves that they aren’t gay, or convincing themselves that they could hide it, was a matter of survival for them.
So, yeah, they deserve at least some pity.
But not so much that we don’t hold them responsible for the tens of thousands of queer and questioning kids thrown out on the street by homophobic parents and driven into high risk of drug abuse and prostitution. Neither should our pity stop us for placing some of the blame for the thousands and thousands of kids who commit suicide for fear their parents will find out they’re gay, and/or because the incessant bullying and rejection at school, church, and in their homes.
Because people like Bachmann and Shock and all the other ex-gay and anti-gay folks are perpetuating and enabling that cycle of hate. They need to stop faking it, and start making amends.
expreacherman.comTwo leaders of Southern Baptist Churches have recently justified their opposition to gay rights with misleading allusions to the struggle for racial equality. In April, Pastor J.D. Grear, speaking at the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission’s Leadership Summit, said, “Preaching against homosexuality in our day is about as popular as preaching against slavery and racism in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1861.” A month later, Pastor David Price posted a commentary on the Southern Bapatist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission website which explained that anyone comparing the first openly gay NFL draftee, Michael Sam, to the first black major league baseball player, Jackie Robinson, has been deceived by Satan. Prince’s commentary goes on at length to describe how much hatred and opposition Robinson faced from the public at large.
Why these statements are so weird is because both preachers are clearly implying that Baptists are and always have been in favor of racial equality. Grear’s comments are the most explicit in that regard, but Price’s aren’t far behind. The problem is that those implications are absolute, unequivocal lies…
And it happens again.In a short segment on her MSNBC show last night, Rachel Maddow commented that this is the 13th state in a row to have a judge rule this way, and it’s almost reached the point where no one thinks it’s news anymore. She talked a little bit about how, for many years, almost every time the question came up, the forces of equality lost, and how now things seemed to have turned the other way.
But there is a difference with Oregon. There is a reason that none of the previous federal rulings have caused places such as Wikipedia or GLAAD or any other place that is covering his phenomenon to count those states as one that now allows marriage equality.
Oregon is the first state with one of these cases where not a single state or county official argued in favor of keeping the ban.
Cover of this week’s Arkansas Times.If I thought the weekend’s events was enough to make the bigots’ heads explode, I can’t think how they’re surviving this week!
A judge in Idaho declared that state’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, and refused to issue a stay, so marriages could begin Friday (depending on how the Governor’s appeal to the Circuit Court goes).
The Arkansas Supreme Court declined to issue a stay, but also pointed out that the judge’s preliminary ruling forgot to mention a third statute that prohibits clerks from issuing licenses. More on that in a minute.
The federal judge in Oregon who heard arguments about the ban last month (if you can call it arguments when the state Attorney General and every other group filing a brief agreed with the gay couples that the ban is unconstitutional) ruled that the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) could not intervene on behalf of anonymous citizens who allegedly fear reprisal, so they couldn’t be named.
Seriously, NOM’s behavior on this has been really pathetic. They issued a lengthy angry press release two months before the deadline to file a brief about the case, then they missed the deadline to file. Then the night before the scheduled hearing, they file an emergency request to be allowed to file a brief and come into the court to argue on behalf of the ban, claiming that they were caught off-guard by the hearing? The judge refused to halt the scheduled hearing, but promised he wouldn’t release a ruling until he’d had another hearing on their intervention petition.
Rumor had it that NOM had missed the deadline because they were looking for a county clerk who would agree to be their co-filer. Since marriage equality came to California because the Supreme Court rejected the case on the grounds that NOM and other groups had no standing to step in if the state declined to appeal the lower court ruling, NOM has switched to trying to recruit lower-level state officials to be their puppet petitioner. Rumors were that, with polls shows 58% of Oregon voters already wanting to repeal the state constitution’s ban, no state or county official who might arguably have standing was willing to come forward. That’s why NOM filed late.
They confirmed this in their arguments about why they should be allowed to intervene. They allegedly had several people who wanted to argue for the ban, but only if they could remain anonymous. It should have been no surprise to them that the judge denied the request. Come on! The Supreme Court had already ruled NOM didn’t have standing. Claiming you have anonymous co-petitioners who are afraid even to meet with the judge? That’s just crazy.
And then there’s Kentucky, whose ban was ruled unconstitutional a while ago, but the ruling has been stayed while awaiting the outcome of an appeal. But that doesn’t mean nothing’s happening. No, the original court has now ordered the state to pay the attorneys fees of the gay and lesbian couples who originally filed the case.
But it’s the Arkansas case that’s crazy. When the news first broke last week, I was kind of surprised to read that the Judge had to find both a state constitutional ban and a separate statute banning same-sex marriage violated the federal constitution. Arkansas had both a law and a constitutional ban? Talk about wearing both a belt and suspenders at the same time! But it’s worse than that, there’s another statute that separately prohibits clerks from issuing the licenses. Really? How paranoid can you be?
But apparently, since the state Supreme Court mentioned that third law, everyone, including the counties that had been issuing licenses since Saturday, has stopped following the first judge’s order allowing marriage equality. As more than one observer has pointed out, it seems absurd that once the ban is declared unconstitutional, that anyone could argue that an extra law whose only effect is to enforce this thing that has already been declared unconstitutional can itself remain constitutional.
The original judge had only issued preliminary ruling, not his final orders, so he could mention the third law in those final orders. No one knows if the justices on the state’s highest court did this to make certain everything is covered, or it it’s a delaying tactic to avoid having to decide whether to issue a stay. I’m not sure what the delay would accomplish. Do a couple of them hope that if they wait a few weeks this will all blow over?
Between thr time I started writing this and now, the judge has issued a revised order, and specifically ordered clerks to issue marriqge licenses. So it’s back in the state Supreme Court’s lap. There comes a point where you wonder when the bigots will admit the fight on this is over…
There were a lot of heads exploding this weekend…Marriage licenses issued to same sex couples in Arkansas. A drag queen/genderqueer performer won Eurovision despite angry protests from Russia and a few other places. And Michael Sam, an openly gay NCAA football player, was drafted into the NFL…Continue reading It bothers some people that we exist→
None of those bathroom or locker room horror stories have a basis in fact. (Click to embiggen)Media Matters has a nice compilation of statements from law enforcement officials and other experts from the 12 states that have had laws protecting transgender people on the books for a while (some going back to 1993!) about whether or not all those predictioned sexual assaults in bathrooms and locker rooms have occurred. Shockingly, no such assault has occurred in any of those twelve states. Who would have thought?
Well, obviously, since I debunked those sorts of claims in not one but two previous posts, I think a lot of us thought exactly that.
In my previous postings about transgender rights laws in particular, and LGBT rights laws in general, one of the dumb arguments I didn’t cover has come up and contributed to the temporary suspension and threatened firing of a teacher just because she was transgender. The argument takes several forms, but they’re all basically the same objection.
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’m sorry that I’m not going to be as funny as the Saturday Night Live crew, but I had to share a few updates on some of the things I linked to just yesterday:
Font Folly 