I don’t even like Adam Lambert.  I don’t like American Idol.  I did not watch the AMA’s.  So, in reality, I do not care what did or did not happen there, whose crotch was where, what got shoved into what, or any of that other funny business!*

But I’m now thinking about these things, and it’s Alex Blagg’s fault.

As you may know, Adam Lambert’s performance on the AMA’s was controversial. He did some gay-ish things, some straight-ish things…in short, he was pushing the envelope.**  This brought about the expected fainting-couch-hitting from the usual suspects, and also some FCC complaints.  Well, The Smoking Gun filed a Freedom of Information Act request and now we get to see some of those complaints, and some of them are hateful, some are sadly misinformed, and some are just straight-up funny.  (Often these are overlapping categories, obviously.)  Usually, when we deal with homophobia, we’re responding to public statements by notorious hatemongers and homophobes “pro-family” leaders. But in this instance, we get to see it unfiltered.  Let’s have a look at a few, and then you can go to The Smoking Gun to look at the rest!

How many times have you been to “Bancok,” sir?  Interesting Freudian spelling, I think…but that one’s not so bad.  How about this one for some unfiltered hatred?

Nazi?  I wonder where they got that!

This one is just funny:

That’s right, get that frickin’ lesbian off my screen.

The last one I’m going to post is more serious, and it’s revelatory of the fact that the anti-gay side, for the most part, simply doesn’t understand how things work in the United States of America.***

“Freedom of speech does not include the freedom to offend.”  Uhhhh, actually? Yes, it does.  That’s the entire point of having freedom of speech.  I’m very sorry, but the fact that some people apparently have such fragile worldviews that they cannot bear seeing or hearing things they find disagreeable does not mean we should censor ourselves.  And what is it with gays?  What is it with straight people?  Why are they always making kissy kissy with each other and bein’ naughty and humpin’ stuff on the Desperate Housewives program and on the soaps, I mean, where’d my America go, the days where I could sit on the sofa and watch my stories and not have to worry about all kinds of straight people showin’ their boobies and their whozits and their jingle-jangles?  Well, I never!****

Anyway, there are so many more where that came from, and they run the gamut from offensive to funny to laugh-out-loud funny in a different way, and there are even some supportive ones.

And again, I do not care about Adam Lambert.  For the record.

Also, read Gawker on the same subject.

*Also, you kids, GET OFF MY LAWN!

**Nothing that David Bowie didn’t do thirty years ago, and better.

***These people tend to be the ones who “want their country back.”  It’s bizarre, because they seem to want a country that never actually existed.  Or as John Oliver showed on The Daily Show the other night, what they tend to want is a return to simpler times, when they were children, because children don’t have to worry their little heads about grown-up stuff.

****I said, GET OFF MY LAWN, YOU KIDS!

The American Civil Liberties Union is requesting that Senate Bill 909, the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, be amended to include additional free-speech protections that are already contained in the House version of the legislation, H.R. 1913.

According to The Washington Blade:

Linda Paris, an ACLU spokesperson, told the Blade that [Sen. Sam] Brownback’s [free-speech] amendment is insufficient and that her organization wants the specific language found in the House version of legislation included in the final passage of the bill.

The language ACLU is seeking reads: “Evidence of expression or association of the defendant may not be introduced as substantive evidence at trial, unless the evidence specifically relates to that offense. However, nothing in this section affects the rules of evidence governing the impeachment of a witness.”

Paris said passage of this provision from the House bill would “reduce or eliminate the possibility that the federal government could obtain a criminal conviction on the basis of evidence of speech that had no role in the chain of events that led to any alleged violent act proscribed by the statute.”

The Human Rights Campaign contends that the legislation’s existing protection for religious speech is sufficient. Nevertheless, Chris Anders of the ACLU says House lawmakers are likely to insist upon the revision in conference committee.

The Family Research Council on Feb. 26 sent out an e-mail to constituents which contended that penalties for felony violence threaten religious liberty.

The enactment of so-called “hate crimes” legislation is a long-stated objective of the homosexual agenda. What this legislation does is lay the legal foundation and framework for investigating, prosecuting and persecuting pastors, business owners, and anyone else whose words and actions reflect their faith.

The act would establish a new FEDERAL offense for so-called “hate crimes” and add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as specially protected classes. It will mandate a separate federal criminal prosecution for state offenses.

FRC sidesteps a basic fact: Existing hate-crime laws punish felony violence — murder, rape, and severe battery — not speech. Adding sexual orientation and gender identity to the existing laws merely ensures that such violence won’t be ignored or treated less harshly by local authorities.

Why does FRC, year after year, defend a special right to felony violence against gay and transgender persons? Perhaps because its constituency of far-right pastors considers bullying and incitement to violence by far-right Christians to be valid forms of religious expression against the religious and social freedom of others.

FRC adds that punishment of antigay felony violence is equivalent to punishment of “thought crime.” FRC concludes by asking donors to sign a worthless online “petition” which tells signers that they are fighting hate crimes — even as they exempt antigay and anti-transgender felony violence from full prosecution under existing hate-crime laws which already protect other at-risk demographics.

Sign our Petition TODAY to say that equal protection under the law means equal protection for ALL.

FRC seems to reinterpret the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution so that it guarantees “equal protection” only to those persons who continue to be excused by prejudiced law-enforcement agencies for acts of systematic violence against gay people.

Despite what some prooftexted Bible verses may claim, felony violence is never a legitimate form of religious “speech” in civilized society. Furthermore, it is the victims of felony violence — not the perpetrators — who are denied religious liberty.

For FRC’s culture-war constituency, bullying and incitement to violence against entire sectors of the population remain necessary tools in their war against religious and social freedom and individuality.

The Fairness Doctrine is a defunct federal policy which required that federally licensed users of the publicly owned airwaves allow diverse voices to air their perspectives on public property. The doctrine was phased out as cable TV and the Internet greatly broadened opportunities for expression beyond old-fashioned radio and TV.

The intent of the doctrine was to maximize free speech and minimize the role that costly broadcast infrastructure plays in silencing perspectives which aren’t supported by the executives of multibillion-dollar media companies.

To Focus on the Family Action, however, the expression of diverse opinion on public property is a form of “censorship”. Focus seems to suggest that federally owned airwaves should be wholly controlled by those lucky few who have millions of dollars in cash and billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure at their disposal.

Limiting media access to large companies, according to Focus, preserves free speech. Granting diverse taxpayers a voice on government-owned airwaves, Focus says, is “censorship.”

Valid arguments can be made for and against the Fairness Doctrine. But Focus takes the low road, projecting its own desire for suppression of free speech onto those who defend diverse, robust, and civil public conversation.

The Family Research Council today criticized a joint New York Times op-ed by the antigay advocate David Blankenhorn and gay libertarian Jonathan Rauch, in which both authors recommend a compromise federal civil-unions law that would preserve robust rights for religious organizations and individuals to deny recognition of such unions.

David Link of the libertarian-leaning Independent Gay Forum points out:

The compromise tests the veracity of the claim that religious believers worry civil recognition of same-sex relationships will invade their belief system through the enforcement of civil rights laws which require gays to be treated equally. The right has been able to scare up a few anecdotes about this misuse of civil rights laws: a wedding photographer forced to photograph a lesbian wedding; a same-sex couple who wanted to take advantage of a church-owned gazebo, which the church offered for use to the public; and churned them into a froth of paranoia about governmental intrusion into religion.

I’m with Jon in offering this proposal up publicly. I am happy to let the right know that we are dedicated to stopping this cascade of anecdotes. If they want additional assurance that the first amendment’s separation of church and state means what it says, I will be on the front lines to add a statutory “and we really mean it” clause.

But I don’t think anyone will take us up on this offer, since I don’t think this is really their worry. It is not the first amendment they are concerned with, it is the fourteenth. It is equality that is the problem for them. Any government recognition at all of same-sex couples is more equality than they can bear.

I think Link is correct: FRC has effectively admitted that it respects neither the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and freedom of religion, nor the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee that all Americans shall receive equal protection under the law.

Last week, the anti-family American Family Association and Focus on the Family protested a decision by some privately owned TV stations not to carry a paranoid antigay infomercial titled “Speechless: Silencing the Christians.”

Both organizations believe that private broadcasters should be forced to carry sectarian religious propaganda against their will, and that a refusal by private broadcasters to air wealthy organizations’ pro-prejudice advocacy somehow “silences” those sectarian groups.

This week, Focus on the Family took the opposite position regarding the Fairness Doctrine, a defunct federal policy which once required private broadcasters using the public airwaves to carry a balance of ideological perspectives.

Today, Focus on the Family argued that broadcasters should not be forced to carry liberal viewpoints with which they disagree.

It’s still perfectly OK, in Focus’ view, to force broadcasters to air its self-pitying antifamily paranoia.

The Family Research Council declared this afternoon that religious and political critics of Rick Warren are seeking to “silence” all of Christianity by denying this one superficial, controversial, and sectarian pastor the privilege of serving the inaugural invocation for President Obama:

[The Human Rights Campaign's] desire to exclude Pastor Warren from the inaugural, based upon his religious convictions, proves the validity of the concerns over the homosexual desire to silence the Church.

According to that logic, FRC and Rick Warren are seeking to “silence” the entire Roman Catholic Church, all of Judaism, and all the world’s atheists, by denying them a spot in the invocation.

According to Warren:

It’s interesting, the mainline [Christian churches] died. It’s an irrelevant word. The mainline is sidelined. There are more Muslims in America than there are Episcopalians. There’s less than two million of ‘em. We’ve had a 40 year decline in all the mainline denominations while the independent and charismatic and the evangelicals kept growing and growing.

Warren’s contempt for mainline Christianity may be, by itself, sufficient reason to oppose a role for him in inaugural prayer ceremonies that are intended to unite U.S. religious communities.

Addendum:

Pastor Dan observes:

Nobody likes Warren. The Religious Right think he’s a flake because he’s too liberal, and everybody else thinks he’s a flake because he’s a shallow idiot. From where I’m sitting, as the victim of an extremely expensive and extremely rigorous theological education, Obama could have gotten a better invocation from Stuart Smalley. It would have as much depth, and at least it would be doing a Democrat a favor. …

Mainline Protestant pastors are opinion leaders in their communities, and they tend to appreciate their GLBT friends and not appreciate slick weasels like Rick Warren.

Addendum II:

Focus on the Family avoids FRC’s foot-in-mouth disease.

As noted by TWO, Richard Cizik, Washington lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, resigned his post last week because of controversy over his nationally broadcast support of gay civil unions. The NAE and right-wing political organizations are applauding his departure with words both questionable and unkind.

During a Dec. 2 interview on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air,” Cizik told host Terry Gross that he voted for Barack Obama in the Virginia primary and said Christians should not fear supporting pro-choice and pro-LGBT candidates. Cizik also said that his views on marriage were “shifting” and that he supports civil union.

The comments made by the lobbyist — formally known as NAE’s vice president for governmental affairs — caused a huge stir in evangelical Christian circles and the controversy led him to resign his job. In a statement to the organization’s board members, the association’s acting president Leith Anderson explained his departure, saying Cizik’s radio remarks caused “a loss of trust in his credibility as a spokesperson among leaders and constituencies.”

It turns out that Cizik’s views are evolving even more. For years, he has been one of the rare evangelicals banging the drum for addressing climate change. The DC-based Institute on Religion & Democracy’s Mark Tooley told OneNewsNow that “Cizik has been very outspoken and in some ways ‘off the reservation’ for the last five or six years in terms of his global warming activism, which the board of NAE had initially somewhat disavowed — but that had not discouraged him.”

Cizik’s civil-union support was an apparent step too far from the reservation. “The National Association of Evangelicals has official positions strongly supporting traditional marriage and opposing same-sex marriage, and certainly by implication same-sex civil unions,” Tooley said. “So it seemed to be a very clear case where Cizik was ignoring the very obvious and official positions of his own organization, for which he is supposed to be the chief spokesman and lobbyist in Washington.”

Evangelical support for Cizik’s resignation is voluminous, the criticisms harsh.

Ingrid Schlueter, co-host of evangelizing radio show Crosstalk America said, “Those who are at war with God, the author of life, should be publicly confronted by evangelical Christians. Instead, they are aided and abetted in their evil by craven leaders like Cizik.”

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council is expectedly meanspirited: “This is the risk of walking through the green door of environmentalism and global warming – you risk being blinded by the green light and losing your sense of direction. How else can you explain enthusiastic support for what will probably be the nation’s most pro-abortion, anti-family president in our nation’s 232 year history?”

Janice Shaw Crouse, director and senior fellow of Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute, takes a broad swipe: “I think, perhaps, my dear friend Rich has been inside the Beltway for too long and has swallowed too much of the NPR and Vogue magazine Kool-Aid.”

I suppose the nasty talk has to be over-the-top. After all, Cizik has the ear of millions of Americans. People listen to him. You can see it in the responses on the FRC blog, where faithful Christians responding to Perkins’ statement wonder why caring about the environment or supporting Barack Obama contradicts their beliefs. Time magazine even named Cizik one of the world’s 100 most influential people this year. That’s a lot of clout to for the evangelicals to overcome.

Consider the response of NAE supporters of Cizik — and there are many of them. According to US News and World Report, “a coalition of roughly 60 evangelical leaders (mostly of the non-Christian right variety) has written to … Leith Anderson pushing for a successor [who, like Cizik, is] not beholden to the Christian right… [one] who embraces more progressive causes like combating global warming.” Read the full letter here.

David Gushee, a college professor and progressive evangelical activist who helped write the letter to Anderson, said this in an interview with USNWR:

I think Leith and the executive committee are going to take their time and let the furor over this die down. I personally think they need to find somebody who can promote all seven of the policy commitments in the NAE’s Health of Our Nation statement. There’s one on sanctity of life and one on climate change and one on poverty. There are always pressures from the right that the two fundamental issues of our time should be abortion and homosexuality. I think there will be pressure to hire somebody to make those the top priority.

I can tell you from some feedback that if the NAE makes the mistake of rolling back to the classic Christian right agenda, they would lose support of a lot of people who are currently happy to be working with them.

Yes, this comes from within the NAE.

The good news for Cizik, if he is sincere in his evolution, is that his message is being heard across the nation. It’s evident in the growing support for legal recognition of same-gender couples and for humane and just treatment of LGBT citizens. It is reflected in the fact that an increasing number of people are realizing that “gay” isn’t something that needs to be prayed away. Even the vote that passed California’s obnoxious and un-American Proposition 8 was a close one. Cizik is but one of many Americans who are slowly but surely understanding that being a Christian does not require denying compassion and equality to LGBT people.

Let’s hope this good man is snapped up by a progressive evangelical organization so that his vast influence — and his personal evolution — can continue. And let’s hope those questioning evangelicals continue searching their hearts and minds.

After the passage by antigay Californians of antifamily Proposition 8, peaceful rallies for gay equality and the freedom to marry were held in more than 300 U.S. cities.

Religious rightists ignored the peace, unfortunately, and looked for excuses to portray themselves as victims of those who lost the freedom to marry.

Antigay activists pointed to one incident (on video), in which protesters in San Francisco’s Castro district pushed antigay “Christians” out of the neighborhood, accompanied by a heavy police escort. Antigay activists’ complaint: Castro homosexuals are intolerant and inhospitable to peaceful Christian believers.

Ex-gay advocate Warren Throckmorton was among those who pandered to religious-right victimology and baselessly alluded to gay violence. (Throckmorton did, in fairness, acknowledge the hard feelings of those who unsuccessfully defended California’s freedom to marry from people like Throckmorton.

As facts emerge, however, the fairy tale of innocent Christians and intolerant gay people is being not only refuted but reversed.

Joe.My.God has discovered that some of the “Christians” were actually Christian Dominionists belonging to “Joel’s Army.” Joel’s Army — led by Focus on the Family rally organizer Lou Engle — advocates that gay Americans be stoned to death and teaches a religious mandate to violently overthrow the U.S. government and the nation’s non-fundamentalist places of worship. After executing, incarcerating, and silencing millions of supposed infidels and seizing the nation’s churches and temples, these hateful egotistical zealots would replace the Constitution and representative democracy with their own fundamentalist reinterpretation of the Bible.

Given that information, it appears that the Castro crowd was more than hospitable in its efforts to chase away provocateurs who have vowed to kill gay people if given an opportunity.

Hat tip: Box Turtle Bulletin

At the University of Toledo in Ohio, administrators apparently made the mistake of hiring a bigot to administer university hiring policies which forbid discrimination on the basis of race, religion and sexual orientation.

In an April 18 article in the Toledo Free Press, Crystal Davis Dixon, associate vice president for human resources for the university, declared her support for discrimination on all three counts:

• she was willing to enforce her own antigay religious views upon university employees and students possessing less-homophobic, more-genuine religious beliefs,
• despite university hiring policies to the contrary, she denied that gay people have civil rights or that discrimination victimizes them, and
• she implicitly denigrated gay African-Americans.

Dixon also denied the natural existence of intersexed and gender-variant people who might apply for jobs at the university — and threatened God’s wrath against such people:

She concluded: “My final and most important point. There is a divine order. God created human kind male and female (Genesis 1:27). God created humans with an inalienable right to choose. There are consequences for each of our choices, including those who violate God’s divine order.

Dixon was fired for flouting the policies that she was hired to enforce, and religious-right media have been in an uproar ever since — accusing the university of discriminating racially and religiously against Dixon because it would not permit her to deny religious freedom to others, nor to arbitrarily violate campus hiring and employment policies with impunity.

Two ex-gay activists have now leapt to Dixon’ defense with a bizarre assertion that antigay African-Americans somehow enjoy a special racial and religious right to discriminate against others on the basis of victims’ religion and sexual orientation, whatever local laws and employer hiring policies may say to the contrary.

(Read More)