Tag Archives: religious right

Weekend Update 3/12/2016 – there’s always silence

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CdSm6rvW8AAFaqQI already ranted last night about it: Blood stains on their hands, but it is really difficult to let it go. People I knew and loved went to early graves as a direct result of the indifference, contempt, and utter lack of compassion of an entire administration. It wasn’t just them, I know. One of the examples I gave last night was a preacher who had nothing to do with either one of the Reagans. But they were in a position of leadership. They were there when one of the world’s leading experts on epidemics made the case for why government action was desperately needed, and they responded by saying that it wasn’t actually a health crisis. Never mind that it is a virus, never mind that it was killing hundreds, then thousands of people. They laughed. Go listen to that recording I linked to last night, and think about it for a minute: hundreds of young people dying in horrible pain, and they laughed.

Why Is Hillary Clinton Trying to Rewrite Nancy Reagan’s Shameful Inaction on HIV/AIDS??

Hillary Clinton’s Reagan AIDS Revisionism Is Shocking, Insulting, and Utterly Inexplicable.

It’s hard for one ugly episode to stand out among so many ugly aspects of the Reagan administration, but Nancy and Ronald’s deliberate silence on one of the defining public health crises of the era is surely near the top of any list. What Clinton is saying isn’t just untrue, but erases the deadly legacy of the Reagan era.

I agree with each word of the headline. Especially the inexplicable part. Why? When Bill Clinton was running against George H.W. Bush for President in 1992, Bill and Hillary both talked publicly about the inadequate attention that the Bush and Reagan administrations had given to AIDS/HIV research, and assistance to people both inside and outside the U.S. suffering and dying because of HIV. Queers came out in unprecedented numbers to support and donate to Clinton’s campaign, because they made us believe that they saw us as human, which is something we didn’t see from either Bush or the Reagans. She knew that the Reagan administration had not just ignored AIDS, but actively impeded medical research and aid programs.

The Reagan Administration’s Unearthed Response to the AIDS Crisis Is Chilling.

Clinton Just Said Nancy Reagan Helped Start ‘A National Conversation’ About AIDS, Which Is Insane.

13 Times The Reagan White House Press Briefing Erupted With Laughter Over AIDS.

Former First Lady Nancy Reagan Watched Thousands of LGBTQ People Die of AIDS.

Hours later, Clinton offered a tepid apology: Hillary Clinton apologizes for praising Nancy Reagan’s response to HIV/AIDS. She misspoke? If it had been a brief comment where she had merely mentioned AIDS alongside Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, which were illnesses Nancy Reagan spoke out on later in life, breaking with Republican rhetoric against stem-cell research at the time, I might be able to believe that she misspoke. But Hilary had a long lead up to that. She said how difficult it was for anyone to talk about HIV/AIDS during the 80s, and so on. That wasn’t just a poor choice of words or a matter of mentioning one disease along with others. That was a well-thought out, planned talking point. And it was more than just a minor factual error, it was a whole pile of lies!

I know that there are other big things going on in the world that we could be talking about. The Nazi-salute throwing lady at the Trump rally, or the insane attempt by the big bully himself and his supporters to claim that their decision to cancel an appearance rather than face protestors means that they are victims (when they’ve been the ones literally attacking, punching, and violently tackling people who they only suspect might be protestors). Or people dying in floods in Louisiana and Texas. There are refugee crises and consequences and many more things to worry about, yes.

The Black Sheep. May, 1990 - April 1991, First Avenue between 1st Street and Houston. Photo © Dona Ann Mc Adams
The Black Sheep. May, 1990 – April 1991, First Avenue between 1st Street and Houston. Photo © Dona Ann Mc Adams
And I know if I keep giving in to my anger over this, it does me no good. Fortunately, I was reminded yesterday that there are other ways to remember and mourn those we lost. Other ways to indict those who sat silently by, or laughed, or offered public prayers thanking god for giving such pain and suffering to us. A friend reminded me of this poem, which was published on a bronze plaque mounted in a park in New York City for many months back in 1990-91, where it was erected by Creative Time, an organization that sponsors public art. The friend actually saw the bronze plaque while it was on display.

“Black Sheep” was written by Karen Finley and intended as a public poem. It opens with:

After a funeral someone said to me –
You know I only see you at funerals
it’s been 3 since June –
been 5 since June for me –
He said I’ve made a vow –
I only go to death parties if I know someone before
they were sick –
Why?
cause – cause – cause I feel I feel so
sad cause I never knew their life –
and now I only know their death
And because we are members of the
Black Sheep family –

In the middle it observes:

We’re related to people we love who can’t say –
I love you Black Sheep daughter
I love you Black Sheep son –
I love you outcast, I love you outsider
But tonight we love each other –
That’s why we’re here –
to be around others like ourselves –
So it doesn’t hurt quite so much –
In our world, our temple of difference –
I am at my loneliest when I have
something to celebrate and try
to share it with those I love but
who don’t love me back.
There’s always silence at the end
of the phone –
There’s always silence at the end
of the phone –

The full text is available at the Creative Time archive here.

Blood stains on their hands

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Silence = Death became a rallying cry that led to the formation of ACT-UP as the queer community declared, ‘silence about the oppression and annihilation of gay people must be broken as a matter of our survival.’ "
Silence = Death became a rallying cry that led to the formation of ACT-UP as the queer community declared, ‘silence about the oppression and annihilation of gay people must be broken as a matter of our survival.’ “
I included three links in this morning’s link post that were less than complimentary of former First Lady Nancy Reagan. That was a limited list. A whole lot more went across my social streams this week. I tried to limit it only to criticisms of things she had been directly involved in. I wasn’t going to say anything more about her. I hoped to avoid any coverage of her funeral. I tried. Oh, I tried.

Every year on December 1st, because it is World AIDS Day, I post a list of names. They are the names of people I knew personally who died from complications of AIDS. Those names are: Frank, Mike, Tim, David, Todd, Chet, Jim, Steve, Brian, Rick, Stacy, Phil, Mark, Michael, Jerry, Walt, Charles, Thomas, Mike, Richard, Bob, Mikey, James, Lisa, Todd, Kerry, Glen, and Jack.

Let me be clear, that isn’t every single person I knew who died from the disease. Those are only the ones I knew well enough that I cry when I type their name. Yes, I’m crying now. I have been alternating between crying and shaking with rage since reading that Hilary Clinton said, “The Reagans, particularly Nancy, helped start ‘a national conversation’ about HIV and AIDS.” And then went on to describe her as an advocate for AIDS research!

I get it. Nancy Reagan just died, and Hilary’s a politician on a national stage and is expected only to say nice things about the recently deceased. Fine. Compliment Mrs Reagan on bucking the rest of the Republican establishment and coming out in favor of stem-cell research. Never mind that it was for selfish reasons, at least it was for a worthy goal. But the Reagans absolutely did not open a national conversation about HIV and AIDS. We in the queer community had been shouting, begging the powers that be to do something, anything about it for five years (while tens of thousands in the U.S. were infected, and thousands died) before President Reagan actually mentioned the name of the disease in public. It took another two years before he referred to it as a health crisis—and don’t forget that Reagan recommended a $10-million cut in AIDS research spending the same year that the U.S. death toll reached 5,500.

When the Reagans’s close friend, Rock Hudson, was dying of the disease, trying to get into a hospital in Paris to try an experimental treatment, Nancy, after receiving a desperate telegram asking for her help, wouldn’t even authorize a staff member to call the hospital on her behalf to ask if they might let Hudson (who wasn’t a French citizen, of course) in.

Listen to this recording of a Whitehouse press briefing when a reporter asks about the Whitehouse’s reaction to a Center for Disease Control bulletin about A-I-D-S, “also called the gay cancer” officially labelling it an epidemic:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

You almost can’t hear the reporter ask, “In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?” because everyone keeps laughing.

As I mentioned above, that list I post every year consists only of the people I knew well enough that I still cry thinking about them decades later. Through the early nineties, my late husband and I went to more funerals and memorial services than I can count. Many of them were people he had known before we met. Some of them were friends, lovers, or relatives of people one or the other of us knew, but we hadn’t been particularly close to the deceased ourselves. We went to the services to support the people who were mourning the death. We went to the services because sometimes the deceased’s own families wouldn’t attend. Sometimes we held services separate from the family’s because the partner/lover/life-long companion was barred from the official funeral by the family.

There was more than one time that we had to choose which memorial service to go to, because more than one was happening at the same time, and too far apart for us to attend a part of both. So many people were dying, we had to choose who not to comfort, because at the point when research and medical intervention could have limited the spread of the disease, people at the Whitehouse had been laughing at our suffering and dying.

And then to have Clinton, who has tried to portray herself as an ally of the queer community, praise Nancy for being an advocate for AIDS research? That’s when I lost it.

I was deeply closeted in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I had only a very small number of sexual encounters with other men during the time when so many were getting infected with the virus that no one knew existed. Even with that limited exposure, it is shear luck that I’m alive to bear witness to those years. Even though I wasn’t out, once the illness had been identified, I was keenly aware of how ordinary Americans perceived it. One of the most chilling moments for me came while sitting in a pew of a church in 1984. Our heads were all bowed in prayer, and the visiting pastor leading the prayer actually thanked god for the “plague of AIDS which you have sent to exterminate the homosexuals.”

Reading Clinton’s comments took me back to that moment. People like Nancy Reagan were not having a conversation about how to save people from AIDS, nor were they advocating for research for a cure. People like Nancy Reagan were thanking god for our suffering.

Never mind that Jesus commanded his followers to take care of the sick. He didn’t say to care for the sick that we deemed worthy. He didn’t say to care for the sick that lived a specific lifestyle. He specifically said to care for the sick, and people in prisons, and other outcasts of society. He said that the way you treated those outcasts was how you treated him. And he said that anyone who came to him on the day of judgment and had not cared for the sick, prisoners, outcasts, and the other “least of these” would be cast out of heaven and into the eternal fire; because they were not following his commandment.

But we’re not supposed to say anything like that about a famous person who has died. Even if she refused to raise a finger to help one dying friend get medical treatment. And apparently especially if she helped impede access to treatment for hundreds of thousands of people who were sick and dying. We’re apparently supposed to lie and say that she helped the very people whose blood is on her hands.

Weekend Update 2/12/2016 – Angry white men

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"The very idea of the power and right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey established government." George Washington, Farewell Address, September 17, 1796
“The very idea of the power and right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey established government.” George Washington, Farewell Address, September 17, 1796
I had several links queued up related to the final holdouts of the Oregon Militia for yesterday’s Friday links, since the last militia members were finally arrested this week, but none of them conveyed anything useful except the fact that they were arrested. And I decided that wasn’t enough of interest to include with all the other links. Then Friday afternoon I saw this article: Dear Oregon Militia, Here’s why no one feels sorry for you and rejects your mission built on conservative Christian rage. Take it away:

The more the occupiers talked, the more obvious it became that they were not fierce warriors ready to die for a noble cause, but a bunch of fantasists who, bitter because white Christian conservatives don’t get the social deference they believe they deserve, have turned to conspiracy theories and other right wing argle-bargle in order to justify their sense that not being catered to is the same thing as being oppressed.

And:

…Slate’s Jacob Brogan live-tweeted the stream, and what struck him right away was “the combination of ideological incoherence and aggressive uncertainty.” They refused to recognize the authority of federal agents on federal land, as if wishing hard enough would make it go away. Their chatter suggested they “are intellectually and ideologically incommensurable even to one another”.

“All they seem to share are abstract reference points: guns, liberty, tyranny. No collective notion of how those things connect,” Brogan added. No big surprise, really. It seems at least a couple of them, possibly all, are deeply troubled people, drawn to this out of a sense of drama and not because they have a coherent or principled belief system to stand up for.

And before the final surrender, The patriarch of the Bundy family, scofflaw Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, was arrested at the Portland airport late Wednesday night. Hilariously, he was arrested because he posted his intention to fly to Oregon to join the hold out occupiers at the wildlife sanctuary on the internet, including his flight time, and then seemed to be shocked that federal agents were waiting to arrest him at the airport on his several outstanding federal warrants.

Speaking of angry white men whose ideology is less than coherent: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is dead at 79.

We’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, no matter how hateful, odious, or bigoted they were. As one person pointed out on twitter, I’m sure when Emperor Palpatine died at the end of Return of the Jedi there was an army of white dudes at the celebrations like, “A man is dead. Show some respect.”

Maybe I should show some respect. But it’s hard to respect someone who argued so vehemently in favor of torture, and not just argued, but legally enabled it. A man who compared homosexuality to murder, polygamy, and cruelty to animals and used those arguments and his vote on the Supreme Court to thwart the rights of gay people for many years doesn’t deserve any respect. A man who said (less than three months ago) that granting civil rights to gay people made as little sense as doing so to child molesters does not deserve any respect.

The typical argument is that he has family and other loved ones who are hurt by his loss. But I have to say, from decades of reading his opinions and listening to his speeches, that if a person was friends with Scalia, I have severe doubts about that person’s morals or judgment. And his family members? Well, one son is an attorney who has been instrumental in impeding Wall Street reform, another son is a priest who promotes ex-gay therapy and leads several other anti-gay causes, his wife is a pro-life advocate who has been a “sidewalk counsellor” outside Planned Parenthood clinics, which means she screams at women going into the clinics, calling them baby-killers.

I prefer the advice of Charles Finch, “If you want to feel sad, go ahead and think about all the gay people who died alone because their spouses didn’t have visitation rights.”

Confessions of a godless (-ish) homo devil

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World Net Daily's graph of just how godless some cities are
World Net Daily’s graph of just how godless some cities are (click to embiggen).
World Net Daily has the headline (here’s the DoNotLink if you want to see it): “These are the most godless cities in America,” and I was a bit disappointed to find that my beloved home, Seattle was merely tied for second, falling behind Portland, Oregon. The World Net Daily and the American Family Association has made the determination of godlessness based primarily on the percentage of inhabitants who describe themselves as “religiously unaffiliated” in a recent survey. A whopping 42% of Portland residents say they are religiously unaffiliated, with Seattle and San Francisco tied for second at 33%, followed by Denver at 32% and Phoenix at 26%.

I have a few quibbles. At several points the original AFA press release and WND story conflate “religiously unaffiliated” with atheist. Even though other parts of the story make the distinction that only about 15% of of the nation’s population identifies as atheist. Conflating unaffiliated with atheist is simply wrong. I, for example, am not atheist—I’m taoist. But on a survey like this, depending on exactly how the question was phrased, I would almost certainly pick the religiously unaffiliated option because I don’t belong to any church or temple or similar organized religious institution.

I realize, since I’m:

  • a big homo,
  • have been a firm believer in the separation of church and state since at least the age of 10,
  • believe in science,
  • usually vote Democrat,
  • support pro-choice candidates and policies,

…et cetera—that the AFA would of course classify me as godless. But I suspect they would classify my queer friends who regularly attend Christian churches (decidedly liberal ones) as godless, as well.

My point, however, is that there are people who believe in god, and even believe in the same god the AFA claims to believe in, who would describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated because people like the AFA have done everything in their power to redefine Christianity to mean hating gays and people who support them to the point that they’re driving people from their congregations.

The original article also asserts as one of the harms of all this godlessness the following: “religious groups, spiritual environmentalists, and secularists… sometimes must cooperate with each other to address the region’s pressing economic, environmental and social issues.”

Horrors! People must cooperate with other people who may not agree with them on some other things to get things done? Say it ain’t so! Too bad we have all this cooperation going on! If we didn’t, we might have the insanely high infant mortality rates, childhood poverty, and teen pregnancy rates like the more godly cities in the Bible belt have. You just gotta love that strong religious culture, right?

I’ve known plenty of misogynist, racist, and/or homophobic atheists, just as I know a lot of Christians who are feminist, pro-queer, pro-equality, and otherwise in favor of most of the things of which scolds like the AFA disapprove. So we can’t use religious affiliation to unerringly predict someone’s stance on public policy issues. And as I observed a couple weeks ago (Confesses of a recovering evangelical), most of the religious right isn’t terribly devout. They’re far more motivated by their conservatism, which manifests as a reactionary opposition to change. And they don’t really pay that much attention to anything that the Jesus actually said, as evidenced by their breathless enthusiasm for military intervention, condemnation of any unarmed people of color who have the audacity to get wrongfully killed by police, and so on.

It’s why Bill O’Reilly was able to say with a straight face that Jesus promoted charity, but not to the point of self-destruction. Except, of course, since Jesus’ whole reason for coming to earth was to get killed on the cross for the sake of imperfect humans, he was indeed promoting charity not just to self destruction, but to literal self sacrifice.

The World Net Daily story is also interesting in that the comment sections is overflowing with homophobic comments, because of course no place can be godless without us homos there egging the nonbelievers on, apparently. Just like Pastor Manning who is insisting today that the foreclosure auction ordered on his church building because of more than one million dollars in unpaid utility bills has nothing to do with money. No, he claims, it’s an illegal plot of the sodomites to silence him. (By the way, the Ali Forney Center has raised more than 58% of their goal to attempt to participate in that foreclosure auction. If you can donate to this opportunity to turn hate into love, please do!)

Amazingly, New York City doesn’t make it onto the AFA’s list of cities with a higher unaffiliated percentage than the national average of 22%. I guess “New York Values” aren’t completely unholy, after all. Equally amazing, Las Vegas barely exceeds the national average of godlessness! Who knew?

Weekend Update 1/30/2016 – Making things beautiful edition

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Support the #HarlemNoHate campaign
Support the #HarlemNoHate campaign
Not all of the good stuff makes it into Friday Links each week for various reasons. And sometimes more information about something I did include comes in afterward. Yesterday I included a link to a story about the hateful church of the hateful pastor David Manning and the fact that they haven’t paid utility bills in a long time. The GayWrites tumblr has a fantastic update:

Remember Atlah Worldwide Church in Harlem? The church that wrote “Jesus Would Stone Homos” and other anti-LGBT messages on its marquee?

They have racked up over a million dollars in unpaid bills, and now the building is up for public auction. The Ali Forney Center, which houses about 107 homeless LGBT youth in New York City, is ready and willing to make an offer, buy the space and convert it into an LGBT homeless youth shelter – if we can help them come up with the money.

The church owes more than one million dollars ($1,000,000) in various bills, mostly water and sewer bills. This is in addition to tens of thousands in fines the church has been assessed for various permit violations. While Pastor Manning personally has federal liens totaling $355,000 for non-payment of federal taxes on his personal income, plus $28,000 in back taxes to New York state, and about $30,000 in other collections. (Who would have ever predicted that someone who has spent time in prison in two different states for burglary, robbery, and larceny would, when he became a hate-spouting preacher, cheat on his taxes?)

The Ali Forney Center is a charity that provides shelter, support, education, and nourishment to homeless youth with an emphasis on providing safe spaces for queer homeless teens. You may remember that at least 40% of homeless teens are on the street because their families rejected them for being gay, lesbian, bi, or trans. The center happens to have one of its locations near the church, and the church has organized anti-gay rallies outside the center on more than one occasion.

They need to raise about $200,000 to be a serious contender in the foreclosure auction. They’ve raised about 20% of that since announcing this yesterday. If you can donate, please do!

Donate to the #HarlemNoHate campaign today!

In completely unrelated news: you’ve probably already read about a bunch of the Oregon Militia members being arrest this week: WTF Just Happened to the Oregon Militia, Explained. The federal charging indictment is very simple and conservative: they are simply charging them with conspiracy to interfere with a federal employee completing their duties, and the charge is full of public quotes from the militia members that make the case pretty open-and-shut.

Ursula Vernon did a very funny sum-up of the situation on Twitter, which someone has kindly storified so you can go read it in order. It is funny and worth the read: Here’s what I don’t understand about the Oregon militia, and because I’m me, I will use Star Wars as a metaphor…

The only quibble I have with her metaphor is this: the justification that the Oregon militia (and all the rest of the sovereign citizen crackpots) use for their actions is not the equivalent of referring to an ancient document from the Old Republic as if it were binding law on the Empire, it is more like referring to the some words that Jar-Jar Binks is rumored to have muttered in his sleep and claiming that those words are binding laws on the Empire.

I’m glad that this thing hasn’t turned into a massacre, and it’s sad that one of the idiots reached for his gun (it’s really clear in the video that’s what he did) while facing a bunch of feds who were trying to arrest him. Notice that no one else was shot. I hope once the grand jury is convened that they also charge this idiots for violating the native american archeological site and claiming on youtube they were going to sell the artifacts. That will get them some serious, and well-deserved prison time.

I hope the hold-outs give themselves up so that the refuge managers, the Audubon Society, local ranchers, and the Burns Paiute Tribe and other actual stakeholders in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to get back to work.

Confessions of a recovering evangelical

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Click to embiggen.
Click to embiggen.
Not only was I raised in very evangelical fundamentalist Southern Baptist churches during the time period when they were unapologetically racist, I was a teen-ager attending those churches when the so-called Moral Majority rose to political prominence.

The official Moral Majority organization wasn’t founded until 1979 (when I was 19 and only just barely still a teen), but it was merely a culmination of the efforts of several conservative Christian organizations which had been fighting against de-segregation, legalized birth control, interracial marriage, and the decriminalization of homosexuality since at least the late 1960s. The leader of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, was a Baptist whose radio show (The Old-Time Gospel Hour beginning in 1956) was extremely popular with people who attended the churches in which I was raised, so I was very familiar with his work long before he launched the Moral Majority. I was intimately familiar with a lot of people who supported him.

So my reaction when I saw the headline, “GAMERS HAVE BECOME THE NEW RELIGIOUS RIGHT,” wasn’t surprise, but rather, “it took you long enough to notice!”… Continue reading Confessions of a recovering evangelical →

Weekend Update 11/29/2015: You’re kidding me, right?

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Pastor Manning's church sign last August after a judge found the church guilty of five zoning citations. Note the church didn't win, they lost, lost, lost, lost, and lost. But Manning has never been known for speaking truth of any kind.
Pastor Manning’s church sign last August after a judge found the church guilty of five zoning citations. Note the church didn’t win, they lost, lost, lost, lost, and lost. But Manning has never been known for speaking truth of any kind. (Click to embiggen)
I’ve written more than once about Pastor David Manning and his frequently homophobic, hateful, lying, and violence-advocating church sign in Harlem. He’s in the news this week for a couple of reasons. There was a Love Not Hate protest outside his church, and he and some of his supporters came out and kept yelling incoherently about faggots. Seriously, it’s like he has a form of Tourette’s Syndrome that forces him to say “faggot” and other anti-gay slurs multiple times in every sentence. He and his church are also in the news because of zoning violations that have now added up to more than $11,000 in fines. And yes, the church sign is part of the issue, but it is only one of five violations.

The pastor’s church building is covered by a Historic Landmark Preservation Ordinance. As such, any renovations, remodels, or alterations have to be approved by the Landmark’s Preservation Commission. The church has never, ever applied for such permission, and in the last several years has erected the sign upon which they keep posting hateful messages, they removed ornamental ironwork from another part of the building, they removed a second floor balcony, they added an exterior door, and they added a marble fence. Not only did they fail to apply to the Landmark Preservation Commission, they didn’t attempt to get ordinary building permits for any of these alterations.

Way back in May of 2013, the Landmark Preservation Commission issues a warning letter about the violations. The church ignored it. Last March, after many attempts for nearly two years to get the church to respond, the city issued a citation. The church ignored that. The church continued to ignored numerous notices until finally last August when the pastor presented his defense to a judge. Said defense consisted of the claim that other churches have broken the same law, but no one cites them because they don’t put homophobic messages on their sign. He’s being persecuted for his beliefs, you see. The judge didn’t care, found them guilty of five violations, ordered the church to pay $1,850 in fines, and ordered them to work with the appropriate agencies to bring the building into compliance.

The church then changed their sign (as pictured above) to read: “We won, we won! Have a nice day you damned homos.” They didn’t win. Not one of their arguments was accepted. The judge ruled against them on every count. I guess that because he didn’t order a wrecking ball to destroy the whole building that very day, they decided that meant they won. I don’t know.

Because they haven’t made any effort to even discuss how the building would be brought into compliance, the city has issued new citations. But since the church wouldn’t pay the $1,850, I don’t think they’re going to cough up the $11,500 any time soon. The pastor claims that the church simply doesn’t have the money for the fines. Now, given how easy it was for a pizza parlor that wasn’t even facing a boycott or fines to get anti-gay people to crowdfun hundreds of thousands of dollars (let alone the money that bakeries, wedding venues, and other businesses run by homophones have been able to raise), I find it very difficult to believe Atlah World Missions couldn’t get donors to kick in for these amounts that are quite small by comparison. I think it’s fair to conclude that they have no intention to pay, and clearly no intention to fix the building.

But they can sure spew the hate, can’t they?

Spewing hatred is what a lot of people who claim to be Christian do: . It should come as no surprise when their followers act on that hatred: Here’s What We Know About The Suspect In The Planned Parenthood Shooting And then they get all defensive when any of us point out that said rhetoric inspires people to violence: Mike Huckabee: The Anti-Abortion Movement Has No Responsibility For “Domestic Terrorism”.

And just to be clear, Planned Parenthood Shooting Wasn’t the First — And It Won’t Be the Last, “Mass shootings at Planned Parenthood and other reproductive health clinics might not be common, but violence and harassment are.”

But that’s not the only acts of terror that so-called Christians have performed in the last few weeks: Armed protesters intimidate mosque in Irving, Texas.

And: Bomb hoax and molotov cocktails thrown at Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Virginia. “It’s enough that it would lead a reasonable person to believe, given the location of where he was, given the time, he was there at three in the morning … what he said … It would lead you to believe that this guy is doing this because we are of this religious denomination or ethnicity or combination of both.”

And also: Five arrested in plot to bomb synagogues and black churches, btw, the headline of that report says three, but this follow-up, Federal, state weapons investigations lead to five local arrests report details the subsequent arrests.

There’s also: SHOTS FIRED AT CONNECTICUT MOSQUE HOURS AFTER PARIS ATTACKS AS MUSLIMS FACE BACKLASH.

And of course: White supremacists shoot five at Black Lives Matter rally in Minneapolis.

We mustn’t forget: Dallas neighborhood on “lock-down” after 12 antigay hate crimes or Homicides of transgender individuals in U.S. reach alarming high.

So, pardon me if I have trouble feeling much sympathy for some members of the religious rightwing who claim that we are using violent tragedies to confirm a “narrative.” No, we’re too busy being victims of all this violence you’re encouraging to be worried about a narrative.

Oppressed Oppressors, part 4

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The percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation has grown since 2007 in both political parties. Source: Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2015.
The percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation has grown since 2007 in both political parties. © Wall Street Journal (Click to embiggen)
I always regret giving in to the emails, pokes, not to mention questions directly from some of my relatives about looking at Facebook1. The most recent example of why I shouldn’t look at Facebook wasn’t the crazy anti-immigrant meme that one of my cousins was sharing, it was the commentary he made along it: that it’s wrong to let these foreigners into the country, especially while treating good Christian white guys like him as a minority in his own country. There are so many ways to unpack that that I don’t even know where to begin2.

I didn’t begin, by the way. I’ve stopped attempting to communicate with him at all ever since the conversation a year or two ago while he was ranting about the War on Christmas where I tried to point out that not everyone who objects to manager scenes and the ten commandments in courthouses are foreigners who refuse to “learn our ways.”

So when I saw a news story today about a Pew poll showing that White Christians now make up less than half of the U.S. population, I realized this sort of irrationality is going to get a lot worse. Studies have already shown that people who are members of a privileged class start feeling as if something is being monopolized by another group when that group achieves 30% of the screen time or talk time, et cetera7. So now that White Christians actually do make up a minority, well, it’s not going to be pretty.

Of course many of them have felt that they were in the minority for a long time. I remember a few years back when the percentage of people who identified as non-Catholic Christian went below 50% that folks in the religious rightwing went bananas, claiming that Christians were now in the minority. This reveals a tiny piece of one of the major issues, here. Which is that a lot of the sorts of people who will non-ironicly talk about “taking back our country” don’t think that everyone (a lot of everyone) who claims to be a Christian actually is.

Another revelatory bit is an amusing string of posts that have been going around Tumblr. The original post talks about how sometimes the sheer cruelty of some homophobes makes them wish you could set them up with a blindfold, a stick, and a hornet’s nest, but tell them it’s actually a piñata. Someone else responded by commenting how casually anti-Christian most liberals are, and how they (the Christian commenter) are once again being demonized for their beliefs. The original poster then points out the the post said absolutely nothing about Christians, “but you chose to put yourself in there.” It isn’t liberals who define Christianity as anti-gay, it’s all the anti-gay people who call themselves Christians and claim that Christianity is anti-gay who have defined Christianity as anti-gay. The part that doesn’t often get acknowledged even on the liberal side, is that those folks refuse to accept anyone who doesn’t share their anti-gay views as part of their faith.

And I’m not just saying this because of a few Tumblr posts. During the lead-up to the 2012 Presidential Election, as Mitt Romney seemed poised to sew up the nomination, he met with the Rev. Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, (and the current head of Billy Graham Ministries). After Romney promised to fight marriage equality tooth and nail, a large section the the Graham Ministries website which had been there up until that meeting that went into great detail “proving” that the Mormon Church is a cult, rather than a legitimate part of Christianity, simply vanished. Literally deleted without comment. And suddenly Franklin Graham and all of the rest of the rightwing evangelicals were endorsing Romney.

A similar thing happened with Graham Ministries and Liberty University and the Moral Majority and such a couple of decades before when they all stopped referring to the Catholic Church as a cult (which they often described as ‘the whore of Babylon”) and the pope as the antichrist. It was 1994, after two years of the Clinton presidency, and it was becoming clear that popular sentiment was become less explicitly anti-gay. There was even a big conference that resulted in a bunch of evangelical leaders and Catholic leaders signing a document that supposedly outlined common doctrine. Except the document was mostly focused on a list of political goals, not least of which was overturning gay rights laws where they existed, and opposing any expansion of anti-discrimination laws by adding sexual orientation or gender identity.

So, while they like to claim that the word of god is inerrant and unchanging, they certainly are more than willing to forget all sorts of doctrinal differences in the name of preventing queers from having equal rights, or women from having control over their own bodies, or mega rich people having to pay taxes.

Because clearly when Jesus said to welcome foreigners, feed the hungry, visit the sick, clothe the naked, and so on, what he really meant was that god only helps those who help themselves… and happen to be white, and claim to be Christian, and never do anything foolish such as being born in poverty or in another country.

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Footnotes:

1. What’s the joke? “If I wanted to listen to my rightwing relatives most racist opinions I’d call them more often”?

2. First, there is the explicit notion that it’s perfectly okay to treat minorities poorly…3

3. It would be petty of me to also ask why a guy who hasn’t set foot inside a church in 30-some years except to attend someone’s funeral or wedding describes himself as Christian4.

4. And while church attendance doesn’t necessarily equate to belief, let’s just say no one in their right mind would describe his lifestyle as being even vaguely Biblical.

5. Note that it is not that Christians no longer make up a majority (They’re still about 70% of the population), nor even that Whites are no longer a majority. It’s that particular combination of being both White and a Christian. I think the more interesting statistic is that White Christians still make up about 70% of all Republican-leaning voters. While Democratic-leaning almost exactly one-third White Christian, a bit less than one-third non-White Christian, and then a bit more than one-third people of all races who either identify with another religion or none at all6.

6. Note that this still means that 64% of Democrats are Christian. So the Democratic Party is hardly the bastion of godlessness that some would have you believe.

7. Those same studies show that folks in the dominant group think that other groups are getting “equal time” when their representation or recognition amounts to 15%.

Trying too hard to proclaim oppression…

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"Slow down!! Let's eat the damn turkey first!"
(MemeGenerator.Net Click to embiggen)
When my husband asked me yesterday if I heard about people being angry about Starbucks holiday cups, my first thought was that people were upset because it’s too soon to be doing Christmas stuff. No. The actual problem, according to one of those anti-whatever groups that like to get the rightwing so-called Christian base up in arms is that the plain red cups with a green Starbucks logo is taking the Christ out of Christmas: Christian evangelists claim Starbucks fanned ‘war on Christmas’ with minimalist holiday red coffee cups

Yep, the annual fake War on Christmas is underway!

I can totally see their point. I mean, past Starbucks holiday cups have featured such unmistakeable symbols of Christ as extremely abstract snowflakes, abstract peppermint candies, a winking snowman, a bobsledding dog, a squirrel begging for an acorn, and who can forget the jazzy Santa Claus? [/sarcasm]

The number of times that these folks have claimed that people are erasing Christ from Christmas by citing a derth of Santa Claus imagery just cracks me up every time. I wrote previously about how when I was a kid growing up in Southern Baptist churches Santa Claus was not considered a symbol of Christian Christmas at all. Oh, we weren’t forbidden from having Santas in our homes or visiting Santas in shopping malls or expecting presents from Santa. But it was very clearly part of the secular celebration, and not to be allowed in the church building itself. Specifically I wrote about the time that the Day Care associated with the church I attended as a teen-ager allowed the children to sing a song about Santa Claus as part of the annual Christmas event at the day care, and how a whole bunch of the church ladies were very upset about it: Up on the house top…

For some context, I should point out that most of the Baptist Churches I attended growing up (we moved around a lot because of my Dad’s job) also didn’t believe in having a manager scene inside the sanctuary of the church, unless it was an actual reenactment of the birth of Jesus being performed as part of the service. They might have a big light-up manger scene out on the lawn next to the church sign, but not inside the chruch, because that was iconography or idolatry!

Many of them only allowed a Christmas tree to be out in the social hall or the lobby, but not in the sanctuary because the tree was considered mostly a secular symbol, as well.

Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Anyway, it’s silly. And it’s so silly, that when my husband and I went shopping later in the day yesterday, I had to go to Starbucks for the express purpose of getting something in the red cup.

Weekend Update – 11/7/2015: Children Being Failed

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Source: thedesmondproject.com/Homelessness-Info.html (Click to embiggen)
Source: thedesmondproject.com/Homelessness-Info.html (Click to embiggen)
Every minute I’m blogging is a minute I’m not adding to my NaNoWriMo word count, but some things have crossed my virtual desktop since making yesterday’s Friday Links post that I think need to be shared.

First, many weeks back I shared links to the story of Joel Andrew, an 18-year-old student who was kicked out by his parents for being gay. They didn’t just kick him out, they refused to pay for tuition at the college he was enrolled at, they refused to sign any financial aid forms (which means that legally he can’t apply for federal aid until he turns 25, yes it’s a thing), and they demanded that he stop using his last name (Andrew is not his original surname). The daughter of his dance teacher set up a GoFundMe page to raise money to pay his tuition for one semester, tons of people donated, and so on. There’s more news, and it’s good news (as much as you can get from a story like this): College Dance Student Raises $60K For Tuition After Parents Disown Him For Being Gay. Go read the linked stories.

The parents now claim that they didn’t kick him out, and didn’t demand that he stop using their last name, but I strongly suspect that’s a case of the classic, “I didn’t tell him he had to move out. I told him that if he was living under my roof who would have to stop seeing his boyfriend, stop admitting he’s gay, et cetera, et cetera.” Anyway, Joel is doing alright, now. Which is good. I want to echo Dan Savage’s comments that there are a lot of Joels out there who didn’t have someone to set up a GoFundMe page. We can help kids like Joel by donated to organizations such as the Ali Forney Center, the True Colors Fund, or the Point Foundation. There are a lot of local charities that serve the homeless, particularly homeless teens. Find one near you and help if you can.

Second: I included one link yesterday to news that the Latter Day Saints church has officially declared that gay members are no longer simply sinning, but are now apostates, and not only that, but that children of gay people in same sex relationships are banned from Baptism and serving in the church until they turn 18 and then only if they renounce their own parents. As Natasha Helfer Parker writes at Patheos: ‘…how dare we go against our own doctrines and punish the children for the “sins of their fathers?”‘ Being an apostate means that one has renounced or completely abandoned their faith and it in utter rebellion against said faith and principals. Calling being in a gay relationship ‘apostasy’ puts it on par with murder and rape, and as more than one observer as commented, the church doesn’t refuse baptism to the children of murderers nor rapists. It’s got more than a few members upset, obviously.

It would be really easy to make snarky comments. When stories like this are posted on gay news sites, there are always people chiming in with, “what gay person would want to live in {fill in name of extremely conservative state}” or “why would anyone want to belong to a religion that doesn’t welcome them?” or “all religions are B.S. anyway, so why should we care?” and so on. My answer remains the same: we don’t choose where we are born and we don’t choose which family we are born into. As children we were dependent on our families and communities of origin for the means of survival. Policies like this hurt people who cannot protect themselves. They create an atmosphere of bullying and coercion that drives children to commit suicide. And particularly in close-knit communities that encourage extended families to remain close and depend upon one another, this kind of intolerance ruins lives.

The repercussions of B.S. like this reach well past childhood or the children directly impacted. These teachings are what drives parents to kick their children who appear to be gay, lesbian, bi, or trans from their homes, for instance. The LDS church isn’t alone in this by any means. The Southern Baptists can claim that they love and respect everyone, but when in the same statement about marriage equality they say “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil” they’re saying to every queer or questioning kid growing up in their churches that they way they were born is evil. Which will lead many of them, after years of praying and doing everything in their power to stop feeling the way they do and being who they are to believing they are irredeemable and inherently unlovable. Just as the Catholic church can keep tricking reporters into repeating the claim that the church is “more welcoming to LGBT people” when that welcome is not unlike the parents I talked about earlier—you’re welcome to be told again and again that who you are is inherently disordered and you may only stay so long as you live a miserable, lonely existence constantly denying who you are.

Third: The loss of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance is not simply a matter of one city. Nor is it as simple as hate and ignorance winning. We need to do some evaluation like this one: Why Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance Failed 80 if for no other reason that we’ve seen before that the anti-gay folks will reuse arguments that worked once again and again to take rights away. They are going to mount more campaigns just like this one to try to take away protections in jobs, housing, and so on. It isn’t a new tactic, by any means, but it’s one that can be made to work: How The Religious Right Learned To Use Bathrooms As A Weapon Against Justice

And they aren’t just using it to get anti-gay people to vote against us, they are already trying to get us to turn on each other: Homocon Petition: Drop The “T” From LGBT. It’s an anonymous petition. It is being promoted by certain gay republican jerks who have in the past argued against marriage equality and anti-discrimination laws. Scores of books can be written about why those folks actively participate in their own oppression, but make no mistake: this petition is not coming from people who have the well-being and rights of any queer person in mind. It’s called divide and conquer. If they can get us fighting among ourselves, it will be easy to not just stop the advancement of freedom, but to actually turn back the clock.

Don’t be fooled!