Jamie Kilstein is one of my very favorite comedians. He and his wife Allison Kilkenny (who I link here from time to time) run Citizen Radio, and they’re one of the few duos I’ve seen who truly bridge the gap between politics and comedy, without either side suffering. Jamie’s insanely funny, but he actually knows his stuff. And if he doesn’t, he can always ask Allison, because she’s scary smart.
ANYWAY.
The other night, Jamie performed in Chicago, and he just cold went off on Rick Warren, Ted Haggard, anti-gay fundamentalist bigots, and made one of the boldest, most raw arguments for LGBT equality I’ve ever seen.
So! You should watch it. But not at work. Unless you have headphones. Because it’s, as Jamie just said on his Facebook wall, “beyond offensive.”
So here’s your warning, in red, in case you missed the last paragraph:
DIRTY LANGUAGE IS AHEAD!!!
Okay, that all clear? Oh, and handling the objection before I get it, in the parts where Jamie’s talking about God, we should all remember that the construction is “IF God is like they say, THEN we should…”
Sometimes direct quotes are just…Wow. From a profile in The Guardian:
I don’t believe that any minority has the right to create changes that impact on the majority. That’s really the only issue for me.
I can’t keep myself from laughing at that one. It’s just too stupid. This, coming from the fundamentalist Christian personification of Derek Zoolander’s “Blue Steel” look.
The context is that gays are bad and gays shouldn’t have rights and he thinks “ex-gays” are “astonishing.”
(Yes, talentless Baldwin brother, they are, but not in the way you think.)
So, from his own words, we can reasonably assume Stephen Baldwin also believes the following things are bad:
1. Blacks being allowed to marry.
2. Blacks being able to vote.
3. Women being able to vote.
4. Black men being able to marry white women.
5. Haitian slave revolt.
6. Equal Protection Clause in the United States Constitution
7. Desegregated schools
8. Any small gesture to help American Indians.
9. Rosa Parks
10. Emancipation
Right, Stephen? Because any time a minority dares to cramp the style of White Male Heterosexual Christians, it’s totally NOT GNARLY, DUDE, right? RIGHT?
Alec, I’m begging you: This would be a good time for one of your famous “My God, My God, Why have you made my brother so stupid?” public comments.
What have we been saying? Some people think it’s extreme when I and others point out that what’s going on in Uganda is simply happening because Evangelical Fundamentalist Christians can get away with it there. Some people think, incorrectly, that American Fundamentalists are inherently civilized people and swallow down their weak condemnations of the Uganda legistlation. Some people want to apologize for these bigoted ghouls, want to tell us that all we need is to sit down and have a little chat so that we can “understand each other better.”
If you feel that way, you might just want to go ahead and check yourself right now.
The American Family Association radio host and head of the Idaho Family Alliance, Bryan Fischer, used these words in reply to an e-mail from a listener, reproduced in full by Joe Jervis:
Thanks for writing me about my comments on my program regarding homosexuality. It might be worth noting that what I actually suggested is that we impose the same sanctions on those who engage in homosexual behavior as we do on those who engage in intravenous drug abuse, since both pose the same kind of risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. I’d be curious to know what you think should be done with IV drug abusers, because whatever it is, I think the same response should be made to those who engage in homosexual behavior.
If you believe that what drug abusers need is to go into an effective detox program, then we should likewise put active homosexuals through an effective reparative therapy program. Secondly, I’m afraid you’re simply wrong about the Bible’s perspective on the law and homosexuality. Paul lists quite explicitly in 1 Timothy 1:8-11 the actions and behaviors that are the proper concern of the law:
“Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine…”
The bottom line here is that, biblically, those “who practice homosexuality” should come under the purview of the law just as much as those who take people captive in order to sell them into slavery. You express a belief in the Scriptures, and I trust your confidence in Scripture is not selective. If you believe all Scripture is inspired, then you are compelled to accept that legal sanctions may appropriately be applied to those who engage in homosexual behavior.
Yeah. You see, these people do not believe in what the United States stands for. They are not patriots, because they seek to destroy our Constitution, which allows them to have their beliefs without harassment, but which seeks to provide equal treatment for all under the law. We’re not there yet, but we’ll get there. But “men” (I use the term loosely) like Bryan Fischer don’t value this country. They want nothing more than a land where they can take their backwards, knuckle-dragging, pigheaded, bigoted belief system and enshrine it as the law of the land, to be lorded over anyone who is not white, heterosexual, Evangelical Christian and male.
And let’s be clear here. We can have our arguments all day long (as liberals do, quite nicely) about whether there’s a god, which god it is if there is one, yadda yadda yadda, ad nauseam. But we can all agree that Bryan Fischer does not represent the message of the Jesus Christ that’s written about in Christian texts.*
Quick factcheck, Bry:
1. Homosexual behavior is not, in itself, conducive to the spread of HIV/AIDS. Why don’t you consult with a physician about that, and get back to me?
2. The words “men who practice homosexuality” are not in any grown-up translation of the Bible. Perhaps you should devote a little more time to studying the texts by which you claim to live.
3. There is no such thing as “an effective reparative therapy program.” You can find detailed information on the success rates of so-called “reparative therapy” and its effects at a website called, oh lookie here, Truth Wins Out.
4. Dingbat.
*But! I would argue that he is representative of the parts of those texts that confirm his stupidity and hatred. They tend to be found in literal interpretations of the Old Testament god. So I really don’t want to hear the cop-out about Bryan Fischer not representing Christianity as a whole. He does. He represents the parts of it that give him cover for his own fear of things that are different from him, or are perhaps too much like him.
On this site, Evan Hurst wrote about new suspicions that Tim Tebow’s mother, Pam, may be fudging her story about defying a doctor’s recommendation to abort her unborn football star son Tim (pictured left) when she was facing a difficult pregnancy in the Philippines. CBS will air a controversial Focus on the Family ad during the Super Bowl where Ms. Tebow is portrayed as a hero, ironically, for choosing life.
The problem is, it appears unlikely that Tebow could have made this decision, since abortion is outlawed in the Philippines. Those who violate the law are often prosecuted and jailed.
As the facts come out, Ms. Tebow’s tale is under increased scrutiny. And if there is one thing we know, fundamentalists love magic stories of transformation, even if they are not true. In fact, the entire “ex-gay” industry is built on whoppers that often set a compelling narrative, but are left factually wanting.
Let’s be clear. The veracity of Ms. Tebow’s story may be verified. She could be honestly and sincerely recounting a true event in her life.
But, if Tebow is twisting the facts or exaggerating the circumstances to fit a desired storyline, perhaps she thinks that she can get away with it because the alleged incident took place overseas.
However, the truth almost always seeps out. Focus on the Family and Pam Tebow should remember the cautionary tale of another football player, Pat Tillman (pictured left). The military shamefully tried to conceal how the gridiron star turned soldier died at war in Afghanistan. They invented a heroic fictional storyline and thought they could get away with it because the incident took place in a distant land.
They were wrong.
If Focus on the Family executives believe that they can air a hoax and won’t be exposed as frauds, they are in greater denial than the hapless token “ex-gays” they keep on-staff.
A multi-million dollar ad aired during the Super Bowl will likely be investigated. Remember, there is a doctor still out there (unless he or she has passed away) who offered the alleged abortion advice to Pam Tebow. This doctor, if found, could very well contradict the her story.
Focus on the Family is already facing serious challenges, such as cutbacks and layoffs due to the recession. Their founder, James Dobson, is leaving the group next month to start a rival radio ministry with his son Ryan. If Mrs. Tebow’s story turns out to be a con job, her fable could destroy this once venerable, and now vulnerable, right wing organization. (Focus compound pictured left)
If they are wise, leaders of the Colorado Springs-based ministry will immediately dispatch a team of private investigators to the Philippines to rigorously fact check this fishy story. If they find a discrepancy and have the decency to pull the ad, Americans will be very forgiving. If the ad airs, however, and it is a fraud, they will lose face, trash their honor, destroy their reputation, and squander their already low stockpile of credibility.
Focus on the Family’s name is clearly on the line with this ad. If a mistake of consequence and magnitude is made, it will haunt this group and may cause the organization to go out of business.
Jeremy did it, so I’m taking the liberty to post this as well. This has nothing to do with the gay community or the Christian right, except that we’re all members of this democracy, and this extraordinary event yesterday, where President Obama went onto the GOP’s turf, as it were, and answered their questions for an hour, was a breath of fresh air. I would go as far as to say that it’s one of the most significant things I’ve seen in the American political sphere for years.
We need more of this.
Of course, the GOP has already started signalling that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, after all. You’ll see why.
As Joe Jervis points out, we’ve been hearing the propaganda for weeks now about how Tim Tebow’s mother was confronted with a difficult pregnancy, encouraged to have an abortion, and made the heroic and courageous choice to carry the pregnancy to term, so that her son Tim would one day sport Bible verses in his eyeblack and have a really hard time at NFL tryouts. As you all know, the propaganda has become even fiercer as Focus on the Family has spent $2.5 million on an anti-choice ad to be aired during the Super Bowl featuring Tebow’s story.
So, CBS rejects a pro-gay church ad a few years back and now a gay dating site with a comedy kiss. Yet, they are allowing Focus on the Family to broadcast an anti-abortion ad featuring football star Tim Tebow. Is this a double standard or did the dating ad deserve to be rejected? I’d love our reader’s thoughts on this matter.
This is so bizarre, I don’t even know what to say:
A while ago I wrote my testimony about how Covenant Eyes has greatly benefited my online accountability and facilitates a safe place online. I have tried various accountability software services out there and this is by far the best.
I have been using their service for almost three years. Maybe longer. We at Exodus have even partnered with Covenant Eyes. All of our staff at Exodus uses the service. Many of my friends outside of Exodus use it. I even use it on my personal computer at home. That said, I am running their banners (at the top of the blog mixed in with ours) because I honestly believe that it never hurts to be more transparent with trusted brothers and sisters in Christ about our online activity.
Weird! Weird weird weird weird weird weird!
This is fundamentalist Christian infantilization at its basest. Randall, you are an adult! You, theoretically, “minister” to adults. What kind of grotesque “healing” could you possibly be offering if you’re admitting that the entire staff of your corporation has to install an Internet Mommy to keep them from accidentally catching a glimpse of a male nipple?* And for that matter, what products do you have on your steering wheel to keep you from accidentally pulling into a Crate and Barrel? What kind of steel chastity belts do you wear at the gym? Or do you go the cilice route? Seriously, inquiring minds would love to know, just like we’d love to know these things about Mario Bergner, the “ex-gay” Anglican priest Wayne wrote about the other day.
One more question: How weak of a Jesus are you preaching that he’s so powerless to help you “conquer” your biological urges in the face of an empty Google search field?
Nah, don’t answer these questions. I’ll do it for you:
Sexuality is not a dependency like alcoholism. It is not something that you have to be exposed to, even if it runs in your family, in order for it to manifest. You and I both know, Randy, that our physical attractions to men showed up long before we ever acted on them. Why? Because they are innate. They are natural. They are biological.
Randy, you and Alan Chambers and Richard Cohen, and all the rest of the Diaspora of Denial, are marketing a scam, a transmogrification of healing, wherein to find freedom, one must consign him- or herself to a life of a self-inflicted bondage in order to appease a god too weak to intervene.
How shameful, and what a stain on your faith.
*OOH, look at me, I’m the temptress! See if your Covenant Eyes protect you from Ryan Reynolds’ sexy chest!
Wayne mentioned yesterday that the Janet Jenkins/Lisa Miller saga would be featured on Nightline last night, and now we have that video. Kyle at Right Wing Watch notes that the Liberty Counsel is still conspicuously silent on the case of their erstwhile star client.
Instead we get known windsock Peter Sprigg, speaking as a representative for PFOX.
Lisa Miller and Isabella have been officially missing since January 1, but neighbors say they haven’t been seen since September of last year.
Willa Sibert Cather said “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” So I’m reading a story in Today’s Deutsche Welle which, after another round of Vatican pronouncements on how defending marriage from same-sex couples is the moral equivalent of protecting the environment, and weeks of reading about American fundamentalism’s disturbing, sickening willingness to incite anti-gay violence in Africa, that reminds me how the more time change the more they stay the same…
For years, a tight lid has been kept on the activities of Germany’s Catholic and Protestant churches during the Holocaust. But now, historians have shown that many clergy actively contributed to the persecution of Jews.
The article gives me a piece of the puzzle I hadn’t fully understood before: that at the beginning Nazi rule, Churches in Germany performed a service for the fascists that nobody else could: identify who had Jewish blood in them.
In 1933, the Nazis passed a law that restored professional civil service and quickly demanded that officials, but also physicians, lawyers, authors or journalists provide the so-called Aryan certificate. Priests sifted through the records where personal data such as date of birth, date of baptism, and details about parents and grandparents was noted. If three or four of the grandparents were Jewish, the ministers and church archivists were not allowed to issue the certificate.
“This was something that only the church could certify, since the country had no other sources like the old church books. Civil registry records were first introduced in 1874-75 and all information before could only be obtained from the church books,” [archivist Hans] Otte said.
In fact, even though ministers and church archivists could not yet imagine that the anti-Semitism of the Nazis would end in the Holocaust, church representatives were still uncritically and overzealously involved in the exclusion of the Jews, said the Berliner historian Manfred Gailus.
…
Church archivists in Mecklenburg and Berlin were particularly proactive. There, the community church books were stored centrally and were systematically evaluated for Jewish ancestors. In Berlin, the minister responsible for this was Karl Themel, a proud National-Socialist who collaborated with public and party officials and delivered the names of those Christians that had Jewish roots.
“Here, millions of index cards were written, up to as far back as the 18th century, in order to assess, when and where in Berlin the steps from Judaism to Christianity had taken place,” Gailus said.
One of the myths that has risen since that war is that the Nazis persecuted Christian churches as vigorously as they did the Jews, and never mind Hitler’s famous quote from Mein Kampf that by fighting the Jews he was doing the work of the Lord. In fact, the Nazis quickly co-opted a number of churches and clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, in their rise to power and many of them, on or sympathetic to the political right were willing partners. It’s also true that some Christian clergymen were persecuted. The Deutsch Welle article is careful, justifiably so, to note toward the end that some clergy actively resisted the Nazis, pointing out the story of Catholic priest Bernhard Lichtenberg who prayed publicly for Jews after The Night of Broken Glass and was sent to Dachau for his trouble. He died on the way there. But you have to wonder how unhappy his fellow priests, let alone his superiors, were over that.
I can’t find any authoritative links to what I’m about to say, so take it with a grain of salt, but I recall watching a program about the history of antisemitism in Europe and hearing that Rome kept excellent records of its occupied lands, and that gives us some good figures for the Jewish population of Judea during the Roman occupation. So, I was told, if you apply some fairly well understood population growth calculations to that figure, you got a figure of something like 190 million Jews who should be walking this good earth right now, right this instant. In fact, there are about 13 million.
Hitler didn’t do all that. The killing of Jews began long before the 20th century brought us antisemitism’s ultimate horror. James Carroll in his history, Constantine’s Sword, wrote:
We shall see how defenders of the Church take pains to distinguish between “anti-Judaism” and “antisemitism”; between Christian Jew-hatred as a “necessary but insufficient” cause of the Holocaust; between the “sins of the children” and the sinlessness of the Church as such. These distinctions become meaningless before the core truth of this history: Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal.
Antisemitic fresco in St Paul’s Church in Sandomierz, Poland,
depicting antisemitic blood libel canard.
I want to emphasize that I’m not pointing my finger here at Christianity or even at organized religion as such. The author Mary Renault said,
Politics like sex is only a by-product of what the essential person is. If you are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your sex life and it will come out in your politics when what really matters is that you are the sort of person who won’t behave like that.
I think that’s absolutely right and I would only add to it religion. If you are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your religious life too. What really matters is the sort of person you are. Mean and selfish and cruel people find their way, sooner or later, to the sanctuaries of mean and selfish and cruel gods, and there they worship. And those sorts of people need their scapegoats, their devils, their embodiments of evil…someone they can point their fingers at, and wage war on, so they don’t have to look at the mean and selfish and cruel person they see in the bathroom mirror every morning.
After the end of the war in Europe, the culpability of various churches and clergymen in the Holocaust got swept under the rug. The Deutsche Welle article ends,
After 1945, the clergy’s actions during the Holocaust were rarely brought up, said Otte.
“The discussion was very quickly silenced, and then it ceased being a subject altogether. Instead, everyone was embarrassed by these Aryan certificates,” he said.
And Karl Themel, the pro-Nazi minister, quickly returned to his parish after the Holocaust, with the cynical reasoning that he had caused the Church no damage.
It would be interesting to read a history of how enthusiastic some of our American clergy were during the period leading up to the war and the Holocaust, for Hitler’s crackdown on the Jews. Even more interesting would be how they excused themselves afterward. I caused the Church no damage…
Thousands of homosexuals also perished in the concentration camps. A small figure compared to the millions of Jewish victims, but there it is. Homophobia has been made holy too, and like antisematism it has become lethal. Would today’s fundamentalist leaders witlessly shovel the hated other into the death camps, like their 1930s counterparts did? Hasn’t the news from Uganda been screaming the answer to that at us all these months? And would they say afterward that they heard the rumors but didn’t believe them? How many righteous American men of god are saying now, only after the mainstream news media got hold of the story, that they are shocked, shocked, at the prospect of African gays being dragged to the gallows, their families and friends sent to prison if they don’t turn them in?
A couple weeks ago in the D.C. Agenda (what was once the Washington Blade), I read an article about two young gay black men who walked out of their church during a sermon that turned into a homophobic rant…
The two gay men said they were startled and deeply hurt when Bishop Alfred Owens, the church pastor, appeared to be sending them and other same-sex couples a blunt message Jan. 3.
“Sex is only pleasing to God in the marriage bed, and the marriage bed is a man and…a woman!” Owens shouted from the pulpit, with hundreds in the church pews shouting their approval…
Mack and Garrett, 32, contacted DC Agenda about their decision to walk out on Owens’ sermon and are believed to be the first gays to publicly disclose their departure from a church that activists say has a large number of closeted gay members, mostly black.
“What hurt me more than what he said is how the congregation yelled and agreed with him,” Mack said. “It showed me that people that don’t even know me hate me just because of my sexuality.”
Mack and Garrett said they were aware of reports that Owens had previously made anti-gay remarks during his sermons at Greater Mount Calvary, which boasts a membership of more than 6,000 people. But the two noted they were attracted to the church’s charismatic, highly animated services, which include performances by several different choirs.
You read this and find yourself thinking about the Germans who thought they were Christians in good standing, only to be sold out to the Nazis by their own priests and ministers because they had Jewish grandparents. If the person behind the pulpit preaches hate for your neighbor instead of love, get up and leave. You’re probably next. And even if you’re not, you still don’t want to ride with that congregation to where it’s going. The road to heaven is not paved with the bones of your neighbors. That road leads elsewhere, to a much darker place.
On this site, Evan Hurst 
However, the truth almost always seeps out. Focus on the Family and Pam Tebow should remember the cautionary tale of another football player, 
Focus on the Family is already facing serious challenges, such as cutbacks and layoffs due to the recession. Their founder, James Dobson, is leaving the group next month to start a rival radio ministry with his son Ryan. If Mrs. Tebow’s story turns out to be a con job, her fable could destroy this once venerable, and now vulnerable, right wing organization. (Focus compound pictured left)
