Tag Archives: religious right

Weekend Update 10/03/2015: More varmints among the sheep

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Friday morning, after reading the morning news during my bus ride to work, I posted to Twitter: “Nice to see the vatican still knows how to do PR… These tidbits change nothing. Don’t fall for the spin.”

And it got re-tweeted. And one of the retweets got re-tweeted by someone I don’t know. And then some people replied to the re-re-tweeted post feeling the need to tell me how wrong I was because the story about the pope’s meeting with a notorious homophobic county clerk was being greatly exaggerated. I particularly liked the ridiculous “The pope loves [name of Kentucky grifter/county clerk in the news] and the pope loves you. Get over yourself.”

Now they’re responding to a few sentences, and it is understandable that they didn’t understand what I meant by spin. So before I say anything else let me be crystal clear: By “spin” I mean the lie that the Catholic church and many associated organizations constantly peddle that they are not anti-gay. That is what I mean by “spin.”

In that regard, whether or not the pope met with anyone doesn’t change the fact that he continues to insist that homosexuality is both a sin and a disorder, that gay people should not be allowed to adopt, that relationships between same sex partners are not marriages, that laws ought not recognize our relationships as marriage, that we and our relationships are a threat to families, that transexual people are a threat to civilization on a pare with nuclear weapons. Yes, he and his surrogates have issued statements that talk about welcoming gay people and calling on people not to do violence to us, but other parts of those same documents (which never get quoted by the media which has swallowed the whole this-pope-is-different myth) continue to call us disordered, et cetera.

49fe6_pope_francis_gay_marriage_francis-gay-marriage.jpeg.pagespeed.ce_.ix8FsynTSVThe Catholic church is officially homophobic and bigoted. That is a fact. This pope is a homophobic bigot. That is also a fact. He tries to couch it in language that sounds accepting and loving. But just as the parent who beat her child to death because she thought he would grow up to be gay insists that she loved the child and was doing it out of love, the church’s and the pope’s claim that they love queer people is at best a self delusion.

A narrative has emerged that the pope’s meeting with the Kentucky clerk was part of a sort of receiving line arranged by some of the Washington D.C. Catholic officials, and that the pope didn’t know in advance that she was invited, and at the time only knew that she was a “faithful Christian who is standing up against religious persecution.” The way this might have happened is quite plausible, given that despite the statements I’ve documented above, this pope is perceived within the church hierarchy as too soft on gays and related social issues. So finding a way to either give the appearance that he was endorsing a harder anti-gay line, or to embarrass him, is certainly plausible. And maybe that is part of what has happened.

But there are reasons to suspect this explanation.

First, the Vatican itself has changed their story several times in the last few days. First they admitted there was a meeting but they had no comment. Then they said it was just a brief meeting along with several other people of faith. Then they said that the pope’s people had nothing to do with arranging the meeting. Then they said that the pope was blindsided by the meeting. And then they said it was a meeting that should have never happened, oh, and by the way, the pope did have a private meeting and it happened to be with a gay couple. I’m going to come back to that last piece, but if the pope really was blindsided by the county clerk and so forth, they would have said so sooner, rather then wait through several news cycles as they saw each of their stories met with skepticism. Also, if he was blindsided by American Catholic officials so much that he regrets it happened, someone would have been fired in the Nunciature. Yes, already. Because look how fast a Catholic priest who came out as a gay person this week got fired, not by a local organization, but by the Vatican.

Also, before the Kentucky clerk’s slimy lawyers “leaked” the story about the meeting with the pope, the pope told reporters during the flight back to Europe that he believed government officials have a right not to perform some of their duties if it violates their religious beliefs, comparing this to being a conscientious objector. The problem with that comparison is that if a person who is drafted into the military becomes a conscientious objector, they stop being a soldier altogether and are assigned other duties. That’s different than refusing to perform some duties for some people, but keeping your job. So it is a really bad analogy.

And if you think I’m being harsh on the pope and the church, note that as recently as last year Catholic groups have donated millions of dollars to campaigns to limit or take away civil rights from gay people. A group of the Catholic organization, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, stood side by side with white supremacists and similar groups at rallies in support of the Kentucky clerk just last month.

Finally, that gay couple the pope met with? One of them is a former student of the pope. The person was not invited to meet with the pope because the pope wants to extend an olive branch to queer people, but because they are personally acquainted. And I have no doubt that the pope prays regularly that his gay former student will magically stop being gay and leave his husband. Much like my homophobic aunt who regularly says that god will destroy America because of gay rights, and then doesn’t understand why my husband and I didn’t drive 150 miles to attend her Independence Day barbecue with some even more homophobic relatives.

Also, the Vatican didn’t reveal this meeting with the former student until all those news cycles of their previous claims about the meeting with the Kentucky clerk had been less than convincing.

Don’t misunderstand, I believe that the Kentucky clerk and her lawyers are milking this and exaggerating the meeting a huge amount. If the pope really was blindsided by this meeting, it would not surprise me one bit that the clerk’s lawyers knew it. Clearly the law firm (which is so anti-gay it has been named a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for years) is using the Kentucky clerk to milk more money from their anti-gay donors. I also believe the clerk is a grifter with dollar signs in her eyes. Given that her church doesn’t even consider Catholics to be Christian, and not that long ago described the office of the pope as “the whore of Babylon,” I can’t believe that this meeting on her part was motivated by anything other than a desire to get in the news spotlight again and continue to set her up for book deals or speaking fees on the often lucrative wingnut circuit. But the fact that her motives were hardly pure, that her lawyer’s motives are even more venal doesn’t subtract one iota from my initial claim: the Catholic church as an organization, and this pope in particular, are still very anti-gay.

Enough about that!

Updates to News of the Week

4 Pro-Gun Arguments We’re Sick of Hearing is good, but they really missed the mark on the fourth one. The original intent of the Second Amendment was to sanction state laws that banned blacks from having guns and mandated able-bodied whites to serve in militias and regularly go on patrols to make sure neither slaves nor free blacks were stockpiling guns or plotting revolt or organizing escapes into free states. That phrase “a well-regulated militia” has always meant that states have the right to limit who can own guns.

Rather than reading another story about the gunman (who is probably not mentally ill), let’s talk about one of the unarmed heroes from Thursday: Hero Army Vet Shot 5 Times While Protecting People From the Gunman in Oregon.

Weekend Update 9/26/2015: in the land of crazy

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Click to embiggen.
Click to embiggen.
People have been predicting John Boehner’s resignation or ouster as Speaker of the House of Representatives for a while. He’s never had the whole-hearted support of the teabagger wing of his party, who perceive his attempts to actually govern (i.e., do the job Congress is supposed to do) as collaborating with the enemy. But I think it’s wrong to blame his failure on the crazies in his party (the “crazies” is rumored to be the term Boehner himself uses while speaking with other more traditional conservative colleagues). The teabaggers only have about 80 seats in the Congress, which is far from a majority out of 435 members total, and not even a a majority of the Republican caucus (247 members). Half the problem is how much he and the so-called non-crazy members of his party coddle the crazy bullies: Speaker Boehner’s Resignation Highlights Problems with Coddling Nativist Wing.

But that’s only half the problem. The other half is that the alleged sane branch of the party believe enough of the same crazy things as the teabaggers that what they see as compromise is still skewed way over in crazy land. This is merely a subset of another phenomenon that infects most Americans about the political spectrum in general. I’ve pointed out before that a majority of Americans are in favor of more liberal positions than the vast majority of Democratic politicians are. In other words, the Democratic Party isn’t liberal, it’s slightly on the conservative side of moderate, compared to the country as a whole.

Some of it is a perception problem. I can’t count the number of times I’ve tried to explain to some of my wingnut relatives, for instance, that Social Security is a socialist program, just as Medicare is. They love Social Security and Medicare, and they believe that Ronald Reagan was absolutely right to push through the law that allows people who have no insurance to get needed medical care at emergency rooms—but hate anything anything socialist, especially socialized medicine. And don’t get me started on everyone’s misunderstanding of how wealth is currently distributed. If you want to talk about crazy misperceptions, that’s a doozy!

Speaking of crazy, it’s been a while since I wrote about Pastor Manning (he of the hateful church sign). His ministry was long ago designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and he’s been clashing with his other neighbors in Harlem for some time. To the point that he occasionally draws protesters. Which happened earlier this week. And as anyone who has read or heard any of his homophobic rants before could have predicted, he doesn’t respond to it with the sort of love and kindness that Christ commanded: Harlem Hate Pastor Has Must-Watch Manic Meltdown at Protestors Outside His Church: VIDEO. By the way, I disagree with the headline, it’s not a must-watch. The quotes in the article give you a good idea of what went down.

Weekend Update 9/12/15: It’s about ethics…

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Florida: So, twitter and other places lit up with the news that a notorious GamerGate person has been arrested by the FBI for terrorism. The Florida Man twitter account had the best take: Florida Man Plots Fake Terrorist Attack Because, I Don’t Know, Ethics in Games Journalism…Or Something? Other sites have a few details to add: GamerGate supporter arrested by FBI over terror threats. I understand, and even share a teeny bit of, all the schadenfreude that’s happening on the internet over this. But I’m having trouble actually applauding.

The thing is, people have been calling for investigations into the swatting and doxing and death threats that shut down events for a long time. There have been rumors that the feds were looking into those things at least since last year: #Gamergate Is Reportedly Being Investigated by the FBI.

But this isn’t about any of that. An FBI informant contacted this 20-year-old douche, claimed he wanted to set off a bomb at a 9/11 memorial, and convinced the douche to send him bomb-making instructions. In other words, like every other domestic terrorism arrest in the last decade and a half in America, it’s a case of entrapment. No actual terrorist plot existed. No actual people were in danger. That’s why I’m having trouble applauding. There are actual terrorists active in America right now. But they’re not plotting to bomb 9/11 memorials. They’re burning down Planned Parenthood clinics, burning down mosques and churches, shooting people in temples and churches, murdering doctors who have performed abortions, or threaten to burn down an entire town in upstate New York because muslims live there… and they are never investigated as terrorists. Their support groups and organizations are never investigated as terrorist groups because they all share two convenient traits: their membership is predominantly white, and they claim to be Christian.

So, while I am happy that at least one douche who has threatened and harassed people is getting some legal punishment, I wish it wasn’t on these sort of trumped-up/entrapped terrorist charges instead of things he and others like him are actually doing on their own.

Michigan: I posted in Friday links a few weeks ago about the virulently anti-gay and emphatically “Christian” legislator in Michigan who attempted to frame himself for having a drug problem and having hired male prostitutes as part of a really ill-thought-out plan to cover up the fact that he and another anti-gay legislator had been having an old-fashioned opposite-sex affair (while they were both traditionally holy matrimonied to other people). This week an ethics committee voted to recommend that the two of them should be removed from office. One resigned, and the other refused, so a 14-hour series of votes ensued before she was officially removed from office: 1 Michigan legislator expelled; 1 resigns. It took so long and so many votes, by the way, because liberal democratic legislators kept voting no on the principal that conservative hypocrisy and adultery shouldn’t be reasons to remove someone from office (the only democrats on the ethics committee abstained on the vote to recommend removal).

The two of them had co-sponsored several anti-gay bills, so again there is a bit of schadenfreude going around. I have absolutely no problem applauding this outcome, because they are being expelled for things that they actually did, and I disagree with the liberal lawmakers precisely because these are public officials who used their office to attempt to pry into, criminalize, marginalize, and deny the basic civil rights of their fellow citizens based on sexual orientation—in the name of their religion—while they themselves engaged in sexual conduct that is at least just as wrong according to said religion. When people in authority use their official power to condemn and attempt to police other people’s sexual activities, their own sexual activities become germane to any discussion. Also, there is more going on than just the affair. As this story notes: Disgraced lawmakers, out of office, now face criminal probe, investigation is also underway as to violations of campaign finance laws, official misconduct, and a misuse of public resources.

I didn’t save the link to the most infuriating article I read, and now I can’t find it. But Cindy Gamrat, the one who wouldn’t resign, was trying to paint herself as a victim. She told the interviewer how humiliating it was to have people in public talk about her private shame, passing judgment on her private conduct, and voting on her future because of it. Right. And her bill to make it legal only for “minister of the Gospel, cleric, or religious practitioner” to issue marriage licenses and to revoke all the privileges of marriage from people who hadn’t been married by such a clergyman wasn’t at all invasive of citizen’s private lives. And none of the rest of her actions opposing civil rights protections for queer people had anything to do with passing judgment on citizen’s private conduct.

tumblr_nugs6s2rbg1s5wv6vo1_540Kentucky: And you may have thought the Kim Davis issue was over, since she promised the judge she wouldn’t interfere in the issuing of marriage licenses to gay couples, but no: the Associate Press reports Kentucky clerk again asks for delay on gay-marriage licenses. Her attorneys argue that the only couples she denied licenses to before she was sent to jail all got licenses while she was in jail, and now she should be free to refuse any others who come along because those people got thiers. In other words, she’ll refuse licenses until the next couple sues and judges order her to give that couple the license.

Except she doesn’t think that will happen, not because she doesn’t think there aren’t any more queer people in her county, but because Oath Keepers offers Kentucky’s Kim Davis a ‘security detail’ and Oath Keepers Send Armed Guards To Protect Kim Davis From US Marshals – See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/oath-keepers-send-armed-guards-protect-kim-davis-us-marshals#sthash.p5Exjxbp.dpufThese gun-totin’ good ol’ boys have vowed to protect Davis from any federal marshals or judges who attempt to arrest her or otherwise punish her for denying queer people their legal rights.

It has been reported that Davis has declined the offer, and that the Oath Keepers leader has told his men to stand down… but apparently they aren’t leaving Rowan County. And given that Davis has clearly stated in her new filing to the appeals court that she has no intention of keeping the promise she made to the judge to get released from jail, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to contemplate that she may un-decline the offer from the Oath Keepers when things don’t go her way with the appeals court.

Weekend Updates: From Sea to Shining Sea Edition (7/4/2015)

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MemeoGraphs.Com (Click to embiggen)
MemeoGraphs.Com (Click to embiggen)
So CatholicVote.Org, a political action organization that tries to portray itself as serious but is known far and wide as a haven for the most bigoted of wingnuts, put out a video depicting people who discriminate on the basis of their religious beliefs as victims. To call it ridiculous, melodramatic, ludicrous, or even batshit stupid would be an insult to actual bat guano.

MemeGraphs.Com posted a review pointing out that the video has received over 1 million views, far surpassing any previous video by the group by more that 800,000 views. Unfortunately, it’s also gotten 30,000 thumbs down and and even for YouTube a truly amazing number of negative comments. Here’s the best part of the MemeGraphs review:

The auteurs at Catholic Vote have created an instant classic Christian cinematic masterpiece to rival Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas. Not since National Organization for Marriage’s “Gathering Storm” of 2008 have we seen delusional hyperbole, paranoia and self-pity lifted to such delirious heights. Like an episode of The Bachelor or a Lindsey Lohan court appearance, Not Alone is both terrifying and impossible to look away from. This important piece of filmmaking will surely inspire countless imitators, but Not Alone is so earnest in its own clueless, privileged insensitivity that parody may be superfluous (see Poe’s Law). Still, I look forward to seeing what influence this motion picture exerts on Stephen Colbert and the creative staff at The Daily Show, Funny or Die and Saturday Night Live.

As always, the bigots are completely unaware for their own deeply tragic irony. One of the lines from their video lamenting the fact that they are no longer allowed to discriminate against gay people is, “No one should be looked down upon, no one should be suppressed or their views be suppressed.” Unless, of course, you’re a gay or lesbian or bisexual person, then you should be looked down upon, you should be told to keep your feelings to yourself, to hide your relationships, and most definitely not get any legal rights to visit your dying partner in the hospital or not be kicked out of your home by bigoted relatives when a partner becomes incapacitated. Then, of course, you should be suppressed, looked down upon, and told to stop complaining.

Soundly Awake made a nice and funny video assuring Catholic Vote that they’re not alone:

People claiming to speak for Catholics aren’t the only ones flipping out. Presidential hopeful (and Baptist minister) Mike Huckabee has doubled-down on his calls to “protect religious liberty” in an opinion piece for Fox News (which I will not directly link to it (here’s the Do Not Link link, if you don’t want to go to Fox News, If You Only News has a nice summary) where he vows to issue executive orders to protect hospitals, public schools, private business’ et cetera religious liberty to discriminate against gay people. Hospitals. Can’t you just feel the christian compassion?

Meanwhile Scott Walker, another clown with presidential aspirations, thinks that the reason we celebrate Independence Day is because we don’t want government. Except that’s completely wrong. Independence Day, and the Declaration of Independence, are about our right to form our own government. Which is a very different thing. His official campaign email also manages to mix up the 4th of July with Veteran’s Day and to make it all about america’s founding being about god. (Forgetting that important clause of the Treaty of Tripoli, “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion” which was initiated by George Washington near the end of his last term in office, signed by Secretary of State John Marshall, submitted to the Senate by newly elected President John Adams, ratified by said Senate in a unanimous vote in the 7th of June, 1897, and affirmed in a signing statement by John Adams).

But enough of these people who don’t know what Independence Day is all about. Please enjoy this, one of my favorite songs from the musical, 1776:

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

While we’re at it, enjoy another great song from this, the perfect movie for this holiday:

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

Hired hate

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TheMetaPicture.com (Click to embiggen)
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!

On the other hand, Vice reports from Los Angeles that, Protesting Against Gay Pride Was Super Boring. It does give me new appreciation for Jessica Willams’ report for the Daily Show last month about this being the end of a hate era: The Hate Class of 2015.

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.

Oppressed oppressors, part 3

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CBbs1thUsAALYOrMat 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.

Just like the people who regularly go to Seattle’s old gayborhood (Police investigating weekend hate crimes on Capitol Hill) every weekend (‘Not one more’ — March strikes back at anti-queer violence on Capitol Hill), the aim isn’t to kill each and every queer person, it’s to scare the rest of us back into the closet. When rightwing Texas preacher Rick Scarborough announces that he’s willing to be burned to death to oppose gay marriage, he doesn’t mean that he’s going to set himself on fire; he wants to whip up fear and anger so that people who agree with him will do horrible things to some of us to frighten us into silence.

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?

Sincerely (up) yours,

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Indiana RFRA protest rally earlier this year. (WISH-TV/Howard Monroe)
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, →

Bullied bullies, part 4

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cartoonThis is last week’s news, but still worth commenting on: Mark Driscoll resigns from Mars Hill Church. Mars Hill is a megachurch (consisting of 15 branch churches, several in the Seattle area, both others in other states) that preaches a slightly modernized/pseudo-hip version of the usual misogynist/homophobic fundamentalism. And the lead paster/senior pastor/whatever he called himself was a particularly douche-y man named Mark Driscoll. Continue reading Bullied bullies, part 4 →

Traditional marriage?

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BzSbHKKIAAAEyiyYesterday, the Supreme Court officially declined to review any of the Marriage Equality cases that had been appealed to them thus far. Declining to review means that the ruling by each appeals court is, essentially, upheld. The immediate effect was the stays against those rulings were lifted, and in five more states Marriage Equality now is the law of the land. The secondary effect is that any other states covered by one of the five Circuit Courts whose rulings were upheld will almost certainly become marriage equality states as soon as an appeal gets to the circuit. That means very soon the number of states that have marriage equality will be 30. In fact, officials in Colorado, knowing that the circuit court they are currently appealing to has already ruled against a nearly identical ban in a neighboring state, have decided to drop the appeal, and have told county clerks to start issuing marriage licenses.

Now, there are several other cases that have yet to be ruled on by any circuit court, so those last 20 states may take a while.

Governors of at least two of the states who lost Monday are not taking it gracefully. Most hilarious of these is Mary Fallin, governor of Oklahoma. Fallin’s righteous indignation is so funny because Fallin is a divorced adulterer. Continue reading Traditional marriage? →

Who’s the devil, actually?

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I had planned to post on several other topics completely unrelated to Pastor Manning and his fellow purveyors of hatred, but then this:

Woman beheaded in Oklahoma attack was grandmother who had just lost her home in tornado as it emerges Muslim attacker was let out of jail early.

Colleen Hufford was a wife, mother, and grandmother who is described by her neighbors and co-workers as quick to smile. Her husband (the man she has been straight-married to for 25 years) was parked outside her place of work waiting to take her home, as he did every day, when she was murdered by a co-worker who appeared intent on a massive killing spree.

Horrible news, right?

But not horrible enough. Pastor Manning has weighed in. In a video rant (posted on his Youtube channel) that is at the same time disgusting and yet somehow mesmerizing in its sheer stupidity, Manning claims that the killer murdered that Oklahoma grandmother because that Oklahoma grandmother was a Sodomite. The killer felt compelled to murder her because she was a lesbian, Pastor Manning explains, which is exactly what lesbians deserve.

Except, of course, that she was married to a man, was a member of Southgate Baptist Church in Moore, Oklahoma (a church that is very active in anti-abortion activities), et cetera, et cetera.

I have no idea why Manning has decided that this woman was lesbian. Other than, of course, because he’s totally obsessed with gay people and seems to have a pathological need to blame anything bad that happens in this country on us.