The argument they are pushing is: “allowing same sex couples to marry is exactly the same as prohibiting interracial couples to marry.” If you don’t read that closely, it sounds like they’re finally agreeing with one of our arguments, but look again (and go look at the confusing graphic that accompanies the meme they’re trying to get their people to post everywhere).
Because interracial marriage bans prevented people from marrying who they wanted to merely because the color of one half of the couple’s skin didn’t match the other was bad. Most everyone agrees the interracial marriage ban was bad. And the Ruth Institute agrees. But, they say, allowing same-sex couples to marry is just as bad because it prevents straight women from marrying gay men if they want to. And so forth.
That’s literally their argument.
Which is wrong on so, so many levels. Allowing my husband and I to legally marry does not prevent any gay person (closeted or not) from entering into a marriage with a straight person if they want. It doesn’t. If they want to do that, they can. I don’t know why they would want to, but they can.
Allowing someone to do something doesn’t prevent other people for doing it.
The closest you can get to any “logic” in this argument is that if marriage equality is not available anywhere, it increases the odds that people will be closeted, and it makes it slightly more likely that unsuspecting straight people will get married to closeted gay people, and probably suffer a lot of heartache later on.
I think Jeremy is right: desperation is making them lose their minds.
So Time allowed a college student to write an op-ed piece they published this week called, “Dear White Gays: Stop Stealing Black Female Culture.” A lot of other people have written some great responses to it (I most particularly recommend Vice Magazine columnist Dave Schilling’s answer in his This Week in Racism column), but I want to focus on something that most of them have overlooked. Among the offences Ms. Mannie lays at the feet of white gay men as proof that we are stealing the culture of black women: having sex with black men.
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.
I’m about 5 years old in this picture of myself and my sister.I can’t count how many times I’ve been asked a variant of, “When did you realize you were gay?” or the more exasperating “When did you decide to be gay?” For the latter question my response for some years has been to turn it around and ask when the person asking decided to become straight.
But there isn’t an easy answer to the first version of the question. I can remember very vividly the first time it was made clear to me, without a doubt, that I was different in a fundamental way from most of the people I knew. And furthermore that that difference had something to do with the meanings of the words “boyfriend” and “girlfriend.”
Pastor Manning’s infamous sign now warns about sell-out negroes and demonic homosPastor Manning is at it again. And I understand why no one should be surprised, except this sign means more than it appears to. The sign went up a day author, civil rights activist (not to mention former actress, singer, and many other things) Maya Angelou, died. Angelou was an African American who fought for the civil rights of many minorities, not just other African Americans, and was notably an early supporter of including gay and lesbian civil rights in the fight. And she owned a home not far from Manning’s church. And Manning’s sign is visible from front door of the Apollo Theatre, which had just changed the message on its famous marquee to honor Dr. Angelou. It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch, then, to conclude that the sign’s reference to “pinch nosed sell-out negroes” is meant to be a slam on the Maya Angelou.
The other interesting thing to note on the sign is the date of the “next meeting” given on the sign. June 2nd is not a Sunday, it’s Monday night. The same night that another nearby institution, the Ali Forney Center (“Housing for Homeless LGBT Youth”) which opened a new shelter near the church the same night Manning’s sign went up. And the Ali Forney Center is having a rally to raise money for more shelters for queer homeless teens on the evening of June 2.
Manning and his church sign have featured in several of my previous posts, where he warned about white homo devils steal black men from good black women, where he proclaimed that Jesus would be stoning homos to death if he were here now, and so on. And people have argued that we should just ignore him, because he’s just crazy and the only people listening to him are crazy, et cetera.
Here’s why I especially can’t do that in this instance: Manning and scores of other ministers like him (and the “crazy” people who listen to him) are the reason that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans children are thrown out of their homes by their own parents. Manning tells these parents that their gay kids are sinners. He tells them that their gay children are demonic. He tells them that their gay children will molest their own brothers and sisters unless they are driven from their homes.
He is one of the reasons that the majority of homeless teens are non-heterosexual. He’s one of the reasons that so many of those homeless teens are murdered on the streets every year. He’s on of the reasons that so many queer teens commit suicide rather than risk telling their parents that they think they might be gay.
And he’s planning a special service to pray for the failure of a charity event intended to raise money to help a fraction of those teens beat the odds and survive.
He is an evil, evil man. And it is immoral for us to stand silently by while such evil men perpetuate their evil.
I’m just a fat, old white homo living on the other side of the continent from this particular evil man. And this is just one very small blog. But I’ll use what voice I have. And I’ll make a donation to the Ali Forney Center as well as one to the local YouthCare.
And I’ll urge (and plead) that anyone who reads this does the same.
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→
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
“Porno Pete” LaBarbera tried several times to goad Canadian authorities to arrest him. They finally did.Pete LaBarbera, head of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (an organization designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2010, among others), has the colorful nickname “Porno Pete” among gay and liberal bloggers because he is famous for going to churches and showing slide shows of photos he takes at places like the International Mister Leather Conference and similar events of men scantily clad in leather and fetish gear. He makes a big deal in his talks and on his website about how he disguises himself and sneaks in undercover to these events to get these shocking pictures and reveal the hidden truth. Which he then posts all over his organization’s website, includes in all his mailings begging for donations, and displays in those slide shows.
Why that is so hilarious is that the IML conference, the Folsom Street Fair, and the pride events he “sneaks into” are all open to the public. Furthermore, all of those events encourage their members to send in the pictures they themselves take at events to post on their web sites. You can go to the IML website and find links to attendees’ Instagram streams of themselves and their partners in all their naughty gear. In other words, he doesn’t need to go in disguise. He doesn’t need to sneak in. He doesn’t even need to attend in order to get all these shocking pictures. He can just go to a few social media sites and search on a few hashtags to gather all the shocking pictures he wants.
So in addition to being a hate monger (he and his organization continue to quote long-debunked and wholly disproven “research” claiming that all gay people are pedophiles, that being gay is caused by incest, that kids who come out as gay will rape their siblings, et cetera, et cetera) and a sleazeball who leverages prurient imagery to titillate and shock in order to manipulate people into donating to his cause, he’s also a liar. Because he isn’t sneaking into any of these places. He isn’t uncovering things that people are trying to keep hidden.
On Friday he was briefly detained at the Canadian border because the literature he was carrying with him appeared to violate Canada’s hate speech laws. Not surprising, given how hateful his stuff usually is. Eventually they decided to let him and his papers enter the country, but he spent the entire weekend appearing on every rightwing radio show and so forth that he could, talking up how horribly he was treated and how the Canadian policies violated his religious liberty.
He has since escalated, having gone to a university to distribute his literature and spout off his hate. And when he was asked to leave, he refused, then proceeded to kicked up a fuss until the police were called to arrest him. I think he assumed he would be released on his own recognizance right away, just like the Canadian anti-abortion/anti-gay activist who was arrested with him. But he’s been held in custody until he can face a deportation hearing.
Given his long-running history of using lies, titillating imagery, and shocking “facts” to attract attention and donations, one must conclude that this was all on purpose. We know from tax filings of most of the other anti-gay organizations that donations have been plummeting the last several years. Support for gay rights in general and gay marriage in particular has been going up, up, up throughout the country.
We also know he’s done this sort of thing before: picking fights with audience members at the speaking events of gay rights activists, getting removed by police, then going on the rightwing talk circuit to explain how he was abused “merely for stating his religious beliefs.”
He isn’t merely stating his beliefs. Demonizing gay people has been his livelihood for about two decades. For nearly twenty years he has earned his living by doing things like convince evangelical and fundamentalist parents that they must kick their gay kids out or bully them (often leading to suicide), then turn around and use those gay homeless teen death and gay teen suicide statistics to beg for more donations and convince more parents to abuse and reject their children.
And now the money seems to be drying up. So, sitting in a jail cell in a nice, civilized country like Canada is probably a smart move. It will amp up the sympathy from that shrinking rightwing base. It will get him appearances on radio and TV shows where if he doesn’t get paid, he’ll at least get free advertising. It will probably land him some new paid speaking gigs. Donations will take an uptick for a while.
A few nights being held by the mounties in a low security cell is a very small price to pay for that.
I keep telling people it wasn’t that long ago that opposition to interracial marriage was stronger than the current opposition to same sex marriage.A common point of contention in discussions of gay rights is whether it is appropriate, logical, or even accurate to compare the struggle for equal rights for gay people with the struggle for racial equality. There are a wide variety of rationalizations given for saying they are not comparable. Rather than pick each of those apart, I’m more concerned with two undeniable ways in which they are similar:
The arguments that opponents to gay rights use are identical to arguments that the opponents of racial equality use or have used in the past.
The demographics of the people who most adamantly opposed racial equality are nearly the same as those people most opposed to gay rights.
A friend shared the graphic I’ve included above from @HistOpinion on twitter recently, and I was most amused by the people who were shocked to learn two things: as recently as 1970 there were still several states with laws against interracial marriage, and as recently as 1970 a lot of people approved of those laws.
I was alive in 1970, but even more important to this discussion, I was alive in 1967, the year that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that those laws against interracial marriage were unconstitutional. It is true that I was only in grade school when that ruling came down, but I remember the time clearly. Suddenly, it seemed as if every adult in my life was talking about interracial marriage. None of them—not my parents, not my parents’ friends, not my Sunday School teacher, not my friends’ parents, not the pastor at church, not any of the adults at the monthly church potluck, not my grandparents—bothered to tell me why they were talking about it, but they were all talking about it.
Font Folly 