Today, “60 leaders of religious orders representing 59,000 Catholic nuns” sent a letter to federal lawmakers urging them to pass the Senate health care legislation. They decried the “false” information floating around about abortion provisions and said that the bill’s “historic new investments” for pregnant women are the “REAL pro-life stance.” The nuns’ letter was a significant and unusual break with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which continues to denounce the legislation. This afternoon, Stupak dismissed the nuns, saying that he listens to only male religious figures and far-right religious organizations:
Congressman Bart Stupak, D-Mich, responded sharply to White House officials touting a letter representing 59,000 nuns that was sent to lawmakers urging them to pass the health care bill.
The conservative Democrat dismissed the action by the White House saying, “When I’m drafting right to life language, I don’t call up the nuns.” He says he instead confers with other groups including “leading bishops, Focus on the Family, and The National Right to Life Committee.”
That a member of the Democratic Party is listening to groups like Focus on the Family or National Right to Life is pathetic. It would be one thing if he were a Republican, because you could at least say “Well, in that echo chamber, there’s probably not anyone smart enough to break through the paranoid wingnut version of reality and lead the Congressman along to smarter, more honest people.” But as a Democrat, Stupak has no excuse.
But as was pointed out when Bart Stupak became a household name among misogynists and those of us who fight against them, no one has ever accused Bart Stupak of being intelligent, and as long as he keeps listening to the windsocks at Focus, that accusation will likely continue to steer clear of him.
UPDATE: Here’s a little perspective from Wonkette’’s “Jim Newell” character, on the split between Stupak, Focus on the Family and the obnoxious Catholic bishops holding up healthcare reform, and the 59,000 nuns who support it:
Don’t know about you people, but we trust America’s old virgin nuns much more than we do the Catholic Bishops, who just run an ancient kiddie-rape cult, since they can’t have sex with the virgin nuns and are also pedophiles.
I know that’s right.
It’s funny how the NUNS aren’t all hot and bothered about the abortion provisions in healthcare reform (that don’t even exist unless you’re a liar, stupid, or on hallucinogens) the same way the bishops are, isn’t it? (No. It’s because the nuns are women and women don’t tend to support misogyny the same way men do. Crazy, I know!)
As she so often does, Amanda Marcotte has noticed something in the Christian conservative worldview that I’ve never seen pointed out before. The tabloids are apparently having a minor freak-out over the gender presentation of one of Angelina Jolie’s children, you see, and in order to present an “expert voice on parenting,” Life & Style Magazine went to Focus on the Family’s Glenn Stanton, of all people. Britney Spears was apparently otherwise tied up and didn’t have time to comment, I guess? Anyway, reacting to the fact that little Shiloh is going through some sort of tomboy phase, Stanton had this to say:
Says FotF’s Glenn Stanton, “Little girls have never been women before. They need help, they need guidance of what that looks like.”
Oh, how right you are, Mr. Stanton! Let’s make sure this poor misguided tot gets to spend some time with a traditionally feminine woman—say, one with long silky hair, pillowy lips, bountiful curves, perhaps even one considered the hottest sex bomb Hollywood’s ever seen! But where oh where are we going to find a woman like that for Shiloh to emulate?
Heh.
So anyway, off ran Amanda Marcotte’s brain, and she noticed that there is a huge, glaring contradiction in the teachings of Focus on the Family and similar groups on gender, gender presentation, and sexuality. I’m going to excerpt a good bit, and then you should read the whole thing:
[W]hat’s really interesting to me is that social conservatives want to have it both ways—they argue both that gender is innate and unchangeable, and that it’s learned. When feminists criticize domestic sexism, conservatives are all about how gender roles are natural and fixed—and in complete opposition to each other. That men are naturally boorish pigs and women are naturally nurturing, so women who resent being told to nurture people who can’t even be expected to show gratitude are bucking nature and need to learn to live with our debased roles. But then they turn around and say things like Stanton did, which is basically to admit that femininity (they also believe this about masculinity) is a learned behavior, and not only that, but it’s a long, hard process learning your gender. You’ll hear from conservatives that boys are naturally drawn to trains and girls to dolls, and then they’ll flip around and tell each other that it’s extremely important to steer your children towards the “right” gender roles.
Their homophobia is clashing with their sexism, and showing how intellectually bankrupt both positions are. Social conservatives portray homosexuality as a “choice”—which makes sense. They want gays to get in the closet, and they’re just portraying that as authentic heterosexuality. But in order to argue that it’s a choice, you have to position homosexuality as a serious temptation and gays as simply very weak people who give in. If you buy into that argument, then you start to see homosexuality as a temptation that preys on all people, and your job as a parent becomes about shoring your child up to resist that temptation. Focus on the Family has long taught its followers that homosexuality can be warded off with strict teaching of gender roles. In other words, they’ve been forced to make explicit what they’ve always pretended wasn’t true, which is that gender roles are learned and performed. The irony is that the one avenue where they’ll admit gender roles are learned is the one avenue where they’re not actually going to have as much influence as they think. Forcing a little girl who wants to be a tomboy into dresses is not going to make her not be a lesbian, and also that many lesbians prefer to present a feminine manner to the world. And a lot of little girls allowed to be tomboys grow up straight.
What groups like Focus are unable/unwilling to grasp is that concepts of gender and sexuality are actually unique for each of our lives, and they can’t handle that reality. Even if one were to grant that their “god” created us (I do not, obviously), they can’t stand the fact that the humanity they think he created simply doesn’t fit into artificially proscribed gender roles. I was talking to someone the other day, whose high-school aged son recently came out, and the father was apparently doing some of that all-too-typical “If I had only introduced him to more guy stuff, this wouldn’t have happened” thing, and I said, “Actually, even if he had, and the kid turned out to be the most talented football player in the state, he would simply be a gay teen who happens to be the most talented football player in the state!”
It’s ludicrous. The teachings of James Dobson and pals are so stupid, so completely unaccredited by any real parenting experts, that it’s obnoxious to have to spend time refuting them, but the sad fact is that lots of normal garden-variety Evangelicals read his titles for advice. In his book Bringing Up Boys, Dobson actually spends a significant amount of time talking about “preventing homosexuality” by enforcing strict gender roles. It’s laughable to us, because we know that homosexuality isn’t a disease to be prevented. It’s a simple fact that homosexuality exists, and it bears no relation to a person’s gender presentation, or how well they fit into societally proscribed gender roles. The only thing Dobson can really teach parents to do is to make their gay kids hate themselves so much that they’re driven to depression, general unhappiness, inauthentic living, and in some cases, suicide. (I’m never quite sure whether that’s not Dobson’s actual goal in the first place, the insipid dog-abusing monster.)
So yeah, Focus, etc., are wrong on all counts. In the world of actual human beings, most of us, if we’re honest, are sort of a composite of the characteristics ascribed traditionally to “male” and “female.” Likewise, there are many, many kids who go through experimental phases where they like to dress up like the opposite gender, and most of these kids just sort of outgrow it. Others, as they mature, find themselves to be transgender. Still others find themselves somewhere in between the two! And others, and others, and others… It’s the same with sexuality. All you have to do to realize this is to spend five minutes in a large gay or lesbian bar and do some people-watching. Sure, there are those who conform to stereotype. Others don’t. Still others find themselves somewhere in between. The point is that the reality of gender and sexuality is complex, and those like Glenn Stanton will always be wrong as long as they insist on interpreting the world though a disproven, black-white, good-evil, male-female dichotomy that doesn’t exist in the real world.
Anyway, three cheers to Amanda for picking up on yet another example of extreme cognitive dissonance in the Christian conservative worldview. There are so many, it’s hard to keep track sometimes.
Focus on the Family today mourned the NCAA’s cancellation of a Focus ad which implicitly shamed the parents of gay Americans.
The ad, which had been shown on the basketball tournament web site, insinuated that politically incorrect families — non-evangelicals, pro-choice families, and families of gay people — can’t “Celebrate Family” and “Celebrate Life” like everyone else.
The ad’s tagline further insinuated that fathers whose sons are not “right” for any reason are doomed to a life of disappointment — and that someone or something sinister should be blamed.
Focus failed to explain to its readers the many reasons why the NCAA found its ad offensive.
It is generally understood that today’s youth are more supportive of equality for gay and lesbian people. Faced with losing the next generation, fundamentalists are ferociously scrambling to capture the minds of youth through homeschooling and the subversion of public education. By sequestering students at home or creating public schools where the only drink served in the cafeteria is Kool-Aid, they hope to reprogram tomorrow’s leaders.
It appears America’s religious fanatics are modeling their efforts on the success of radical Islamists in the Middle East, who reversed the trend of secularization in the region by hijacking education. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently wrote about this phenomenon:
Beginning in the 1970s, the trend in Yemen, Morocco, Egypt and the Persian Gulf “was to Islamicize education as a way to fight the left…”
…Then, in 1979, after the Saudi ruling family was shaken by an attack in Mecca from its own Wahabi fundamentalists, the Saudi regime, to fend off the anger of its Wahabis, gave them free rein to Islamicize education and social life in Saudi Arabia and neighboring states.
The rest is a very sad and tragic history.
In America, according to the Aug. 7, 2009 edition of The Economist magazine, the number of children who are home-schooled—1.5 million—has doubled in the past decade, and 83 percent of home-schooling families do so for religious or moral reasons.
It is important to realize that the goal of many in the homeschooling movement is to create an army of zealot zombies who are committed to transforming America into a fundamentalist “Christian Nation.”
“We are not home-schooling our kids just so they can read,” said Michael Farris, the founder of the Home School Legal Defense. “The most common thing I hear is parents telling me they want their kids to be on the Supreme Court. And if we put enough kids in the farm system, some may get to the major leagues.”
Many of the cult-kiddies are coming of age and have already infiltrated Washington. Homeschoolers are well represented on Capitol Hill, and they played a disproportionate role in George W. Bush’s administration.
While many of these students are educated in terms of test scores, they may lack critical thinking skills. In a sense, they are like computers with large hard drives that have been programmed with faulty software. No matter how fast they compute they always arrive at same flawed conclusions based on the Biblical bugs planted early in their memory chips.
For example, Children’s Conferences International hosts events across the nation for homeschoolers. Their “2010 theme” is science fiction, except to keep the minds of the children pure there will be no extraterrestrials allowed.
“Parents won’t have to worry about their children learning about aliens or some mysterious force in this fun filled futuristic space age theme,” according to their website. “Children WILL learn important life lessons about trusting God, faith over atheism, and the dangers of being enamored by the world.”
Instead of E.T. and space, these poor children have to endure crazy, spaced out adults determined to strip-mine their minds and corrupt their imaginations. In my view, this is a form of child abuse and deprives these students of real childhood experiences, while making them closed-minded.
Of course, funneling children into homeschooling is not enough for these predators. In order to succeed, the extreme right must hijack the curriculum of public schools. They are already making serious inroads in Texas, with zealots on the state school board rewriting history textbooks. This is vitally important because Texas is such a large consumer of textbooks, that they essentially have the ability to set the standards for much of the nation. So, if history is rewritten in Austin, the revisions will likely appear in your state as well.
One leader of the public school putsch, according to a recent cover story in The New York Times Magazine, is Cynthia Dunbar, a member of the Texas Board of Education. In 2008, she published a book called, “One Nation Under God” where she wrote: “Hence, the only accurate method of ascertaining the intent of the Founding Fathers is from a biblical worldview.” She also stated, “this battle for our nation’s children and who will control their education and training is crucial to our success for reclaiming our nation.”
For all of her passion, Dunbar is opposed to public education, writing of, “The inappropriateness of a state-created taxpayer-supported school system,” and says that sending children to public schools is akin to, “throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel threw their children to Molech.”
Clearly, Dunbar’s real agenda is infiltrating the school system in order to destroy it.
When it comes to support, the next generation was supposed to be a wash. However, this successful trajectory is threatened if we allow today’s youth to be brainwashed. While paying attention to school boards is boring, it must become a priority for all Americans who want schools to be about education instead of indoctrination.
UPDATE: Lookit, the American Family Association ALSO needs your help to decide whether or not gays should be able to serve in the military. GO HELP THEM!
I am not a gay conservative…to say the least. And I’ve questioned in the past the wisdom of GOProud, the gay conservative group, participating at CPAC along with groups that want to legislate away their dignity. I still question that wisdom. They’ve been sending out reports from CPAC along the lines of “Nobody has beat us up yet, so that means conservatives aren’t bigots after all!” They’re also stupidly suggesting that because Dick Cheney got a standing ovation, that the wingnuts are somehow supportive of gays because Dick Cheney supports gays.
It’s pathetic. Newsflash: Wingnuts like Dick Cheney because Dick Cheney is a torture-mongering ghoul, and wingnuts are weak people, so they feel strengthened by the idea of torturing people, as long as they don’t have to personally exhibit any strength or courage of their own.
Anyway. I don’t care how nice people are to the gay CPAC-ers; what matters is what policies they support. Lots of people are nice to people they hate, especially Southerners, who I would imagine are overrepresented at Winguttapalooza. It’s so ingrained in our culture that we have code phrases that express disdain while always being able to claim the mantle of gentility. (”Bless her heart.”) So personally, the fact that the gay conservatives haven’t been shot at yet at CPAC isn’t impressive.
Also, they’re dealing with the fact that the GOP line on their dignity and existence is that they shouldn’t have any. Consider this quote from Chris Plante, who’s running the National Organization for Marriage (nom nom nom) booth just a few feet away:
“Gays and lesbians have the right to live as they choose, but they don’t have the right to redefine marriage for the rest of us,” Plante said.
Uh huh, right. And believe me, NOM is more welcome there than GOProud is. Again, I don’t care now nice and polite CPAC-ers are to the gays in their midst. The fact that gay conservatives are impressed and excited to be included without having to wear pink triangles is pathetic and reveals the self-loathing and the deeply ingrained beliefs in their own inferiority that we’ve always seen in them.
Meanwhile, an insane press conference happened, featuring Elaine Donnelly, Queen of the 101st Chairborne Brigade, and Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family (who apparently can’t pronounce the word “debacle”), who projected their pathetic Fear of the Gay onto our brave troops as they came out in opposing DADT repeal. Also speaking were know-nothing Tony Perkins and David Keene, who organized the entire conference. Oh, also, there was an old retired admiral who probably had to be helped onto the stage, testifying about his 1930’s version of reality. Watch it if you want, but you’ll lose a few brain cells.
All of that being said, though, this video of Jimmy LaSalvia, the King of the Gay Wingnuts, is pretty funny:
ZING! The boys at the NOM booth are total pansies! On that, we agree.
Anyway, so there you go. Jimmy LaSalvia made a funny and nobody’s been gay-bashed yet at CPAC. Glad to see, again, that they’re persevering in their quest to win the gay rights battles of the 1970’s.
UPDATE: Okay, so all of that being said, this video is also funny. Ryan Sorba, a hysterical and likely closeted anti-gay activist, decided to take to the stage and condemn CPAC for inviting GOProud to the event, and he was received poorly by some in the room. What I notice is that at the beginning, some were booing him, and some were cheering him, but as his childish tantrum grew more hysterical, the boos got louder. Mike Madden at Salon’s War Room opened his report on this by saying, “Turns out CPAC isn’t quite the place for insane jeremiads against homosexuality.” I would suggest, rather, a more balanced reaction, because if you click on the link above to watch the aforementioned press conference, you’ll see that there is indeed a place for insane jeremiads against homosexuality at CPAC. It seems to me that what’s become socially unacceptable, even in CPAC, is the kind of frothing, unhinged anti-gay ranting that’s the hallmark of Ryan Sorba’s “career.” I guarantee you that, for a lot of people in that room, their issue is not the content of Sorba’s tirade, but rather the unfiltered nature of it, because they know that their bigotry is not acceptable in intelligent society. So NOM and Elaine Donnelly and Tom Minnery are fine with them. The rhetorical equivalent of playing with your dingleberries on stage, as exhibited by Ryan Sorba, is not.
Focus on the Family today applauded a Missouri senate panel’s endorsement of legislation which Focus claims would merely protect religious freedom.
In fact, the legislation does the opposite:
The legislation, Senate Resolution 31, establishes a ballot issue to amend the state constitution. The amendment would permit conservative Christians to impose official prayer and official religious symbols in public schools — against the will (and the faith) of Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, atheist, and liberal Christian parents.
The Resolution would violate the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It is poorly written and, while likely to increase litigation, may be difficult to enforce, according to Leigh Hunt Greenhaw in an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The real purpose of the law is to scare conservative voters into believing, falsely, that their right to pray is under fire so that they will go to the polls and vote for extremist candidates who are intolerant of religious minorities. The Post-Dispatch writer observes:
The proposed amendment to Section 5 could be a partisan strategy. If voters hear our right to pray is endangered and that an amendment to the Missouri Constitution is needed to protect it, they might come out to vote for it. And those that do might well favor candidates and parties that have supported the amendment.
Focus and its Missouri affiliate hinted at this true intent in today’s statement:
Joe Ortwerths, executive director of the Missouri Family Policy Council, said his group promoted Senate Joint Resolution 31, because groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, for example, are trying to convince public school officials that freedom of religious expression cannot be permitted in public settings.
The Christian Rightists deliberately mischaracterize the ACLU’s defense of individual religious freedom — in particular, the freedom of minorities to pray as they wish without official school interference or official religious indoctrination.
The “religious freedom” that Focus and Missouri’s Christian Right seek is a freedom from the religion of others, not religious freedom for all.
I was impressed with British journalist Patrick Strudwick’s report in The Independent, “The ex-gay files: The bizarre world of gay-to-straight conversion.” It was an important addition to the literature and I respect his work.
His reporting is an accurate representation of “ex-gay” therapy and echos the abusive practices I witnessed in my book, “Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth.” Strudwick began his article with the alarming news of the extent “ex-gay” therapy has spread in the United Kingdom:
According to a report by Professor Michael King of University College London, one in six UK psychiatrists and psychotherapists have sought to reduce or change a patient’s sexual orientation. And with the help of the American conversion therapy movement, practitioners here, along with a clutch of international “conversion” organisations, are becoming co-ordinated and unified. They plan to gain credibility, university backing and government funding. In some cases, the NHS is even paying for the treatment.
The journalist also made the smart connection between these programs and political power:
After the conference I look David up online. As I’m researching his practice and qualifications, I see a reference to Iris Robinson, the scandal-stricken Ulster MP who in 2008 famously compared homosexuality to child abuse. In an interview with the BBC, she mentioned she knew a “lovely psychiatrist” who “tries to help homosexuals to run away from what they are engaged in.”
Strudwick pointed out how they twist language to make it appear like homosexuality is a mental illness:
Like those at the conference, she doesn’t say “gay”; she only uses the term “SSA”.*
The writer highlights how these quacks ignore the inconvenient fact that homosexuality has not been listed as a mental disorder for three decades and mislead clients:
I ask how she (Lynne, the therapist) views homosexuality – as a mental illness, an addiction or an anti-religious phenomenon?
“It’s all of that,” she replies.
Lynne explains that it’s about “reprogramming” and going back into my early developmental stages. “Parts of you have developed but there is a little part of you that has stayed stuck,” she says.
Focus calls a bill prohibiting violence on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity “pro-gay” and criticizes the proposal for not only prohibiting violence, but also inserting lessons against such violence into the curriculum.
Focus instead wants any antiviolence program to deny the existence of gay and transgender students.
Focus on the Family today celebrated opposition in Wyoming to the Anti-Defamation League and a program by the ADL called “No Place for Hate.”
Focus objects in particular to the program’s repudiation of hatred toward LGBT students — and applauds two schools in the Platte County School District for siding with local bullies who demanded that banners exclude LGBT students from the anti-hate message.
Weekly Column
I was impressed with British journalist 
