The Malaysian gay-rights coalition Seksualiti Merdeka was set to hold its fourth annual festival in Kuala Lumpur. But on Nov. 3 police ordered the group to cancel.

…deputy inspector general of police, Khalid Abu Bakar, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday, according a translation by Bernama…”When [Malaysians expressing themselves] crops up and threatens national security,” he said, “we have to take action.”

Threatens national security? Do the Malaysians think LGBT people are ninjas, as Sally Kern seems to?

Such arbitrary halting of legal gatherings by the police is not new in Malaysia. Human Rights Watch has pointed out abuses by Malaysia of its own constitutional freedom of assembly that arise from a 1967 law giving police broad powers to restrict assemblies. Malaysia’s constitution also pays lip service to freedom of religion, but apparently some religions are more free than others. Islam is the majority religion in Malaysia, and Muslim leaders there have been calling for a shutdown of Seksualiti Merdeka while making the usual slurs and comparisons to animals.

Abu Bakar is also reported as saying “the law in the country did not recognise any deviationist activity that could destroy the practice of religious freedom.” Notice that “religious freedom” for some people quite literally consists of the freedom to tyrannize other people. We see this over and over in the United States, where a favorite tactic of the Religious Right is to claim that its freedoms are being violated–the freedoms to badger public-school children to pray, force women to give birth, demand that gay people turn straight or remain celibate, and so on.

As a practical matter, apart from the fact that this festival has been held peacefully three times already, what makes this police decision even more obtuse is that no public parade was planned. Parades can occasionally get unruly, but this festival consisted of “forums, talks, and workshops,” as well as book launches, all of which were to be held at an art gallery. Book launches in art galleries tend not to pose a threat to public order, national security, or anything else except ignorance.

In Malaysia, penetrative anal and oral sex are punishable by whipping and up to 20 years in prison. Seksualiti Merdeka members have faced adversity already. A video campaign modeled on It Gets Better led to death threats to at least one of its brave posters.

According to its website, Seksualiti Merdeka represents a group of NGOs that include Amnesty International and the United Nations. As of this writing, neither of the above groups appears to have made a public statement condemning the Malaysian police action.

Dan, at GayPatriot:

Today, the debate on gay marriage is not about granting individuals the freedom to marry an individual of their same sex, but about whether the state should recognize such unions. When gay couples marry in states (or countries) which grant licenses for such unions and return to states which do not, they do not suffer the fate the Lovings did in the 1960s. The authorities do not threaten them with arrest, request that they leave the jurisdiction or demand that they live apart.

They merely fail to grant them the privileges they extend to different-sex couples who have secured a marriage license. Let us bear this in mind as we debate this most important issue.

Let us not turn to the government as the source of our liberty lest we become dependent on state action to take care of those things we can effect on our own — without their intervention, but be ever vigilant against its encroachments on our liberty.

Dan, you know I like you personally, but my god.

The idea of governments granting certain rights, privileges and responsibilities is not new. No gay couple is “turning to the government as the source of [their] liberty,” except in those ways which are already granted, and have always been granted, to different-gendered couples. No one is looking for “state action” in any special way except that which is granted to the rest of the population. And let us not pretend for one second that this has anything to do with religion, as heterosexual couples are free to marry, regardless of their religious beliefs or lack thereof.

We can play the “government should get out of the marriage business” game all we want, but it’s not going to happen in any of our lifetimes. The actual status quo is that the government of this nation provides a shitload of rights to married couples, and discriminates against same-sex couples based on medieval notions of what “marriage” is.

I appreciate the idea that we should not always look to the government to define our freedoms, really, I do. But let us not forget that the word “freedom” doesn’t just include “freedom to’s,” but also “freedom from’s,” which would naturally include things like “freedom from my husband being sent back to his nation of origin, even though he’s my sole caregiver, as I am suffering from AIDS, simply because my nation’s laws are not yet grown-up enough to recognize our relationship as a marriage.”

Simply put:  there is no purpose for civil marriage, save for the rights the government grants to the arrangement.  People do not get married in their churches for those rights — that sanctification is up to them.  But heterosexual couples sanctify their marriages that way with the implicit understanding that with that decision comes, again, a shitload of government-granted rights that are not available to non-married people.

So you are right — the government doesn’t grant the right of two men to commit to each other, to love one another, and to live out the rest of their lives together.  But it sure does hold the power to decide whether that relationship is worth a damn from a legal perspective, and unless you’re one of the 1% of the population [I know, I know, wingnuts all imagine that they either are part of that group or will be part of that group one day, but it's a silly pipe dream] who can afford to make all those legal arrangements on your own, you’re screwed without those marital rights.

So, please, have an argument with me about “liberty” and “freedom,” because I’m jonesing for it.

Sometimes my Google Reader likes to harass me by including Gay Patriot on the featured “What’s New” screen, which leads me to, oy vey, read it.  So, in the interest of moving on to other things,  here are two recent posts from the “Blatt” one, and why they are wrong.  First of all:  Is Debbie Wasserman Schultz anti-gay?  [No, and the premise of this one is particularly stupid, even for gay wingnuttia.]  Basically, Wasserman Schultz’s response to the Anthony Weiner Twitter Wiener scandal has been to shrug her shoulders and say “whatever.”  However, Dan Blatt points out [!!!11!!] that back in the day when “a male colleague”  [ahem, Mark Foley] was caught sexting congressional pages, she was a bit more outraged.  Is this, Dan Blatt asks, evidence that Wasserman Schultz is anti-gay?

[W]e should also note that she has called for a much harsher censure of the man sexually drawn to members of his own sex while seeking to excuse the behavior of an apparently heterosexual federal representative.

Could it be that she used the pretext of the 2006 scandal involving Congressman Foley to draw attention to these misdeeds of a gay man, so reminding people of the shibboleth that gay men regularly prey on teenage boys? And yet she finds it excusable that a married straight man would use electronic media to flirt with a woman less than half his age. This Democrat appears more ready to criticize a gay man than a straight one.

Uh. No.  The very Republican Mark Foley was INDEED sexting UNDERAGE TEEN BOYS, whereas Anthony Weiner was stupidly texting women who are of age. So for Blatt to take a victim stance over the “shibboleth [Dan loves him some $5.00 words.  Makes him feel smart.] that gay men regularly prey on teenage boys” is bizarre in the extreme, considering the fact that Mark Foley was preying on teenage boys.  It didn’t have jack squat to with his sexuality!  Debbie Wasserman Schultz didn’t need to remind anyone of anything, as Mark Foley was reminding the nation, as he sexted teenage boys, that he was, frankly, kinda pervy.

Now, we know that it’s uncomfortable for Republicans because Democrats’ sex scandals [even when there is actual fire] tend to involve people who are of age and/or don’t tend to involve anti-gay politicians caught tapping their toes for sexy cops in airport bathrooms.  We know.  Our sex scandals are boring.  No one is arguing that Anthony Weiner exhibited good judgment here.  But Republicans like Dan have to know, on some level, that the weird, paranoid, moralistic obsession with sexual purity and cleanliness that is part in parcel of the Republican platform tends to lead people, upon hearing of a Republican sex scandal, to ask, “live boy or dead girl”?  Because that’s just how their scandals go.

In short, the easy answer to the stupid question is no, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is not anti-gay.  If you’re going to try to  manipulate the facts on the ground to score political points, you ought to do so in more intelligent ways.

Okay, next post from Dan:  The Gipper Helps Explain My Discomfort With Notion [sic] of Equality.

Ugh.

Okay, gay wingnuts talk all the time about how they don’t support “equality,” because they have been so indoctrinated into their parents’ fear of the Red Menace that words like “equal” automatically mean Communism x Socialism x Islamofascism x Gay in their minds.  [Yes, even gay wingnuts freak out at things that are a little bit too gay, because they're trying to pass.]  They prefer the words “liberty” and “freedom,” because these are the buzzwords they have been taught to have good reactions to!  Also, they understand the correct definitions of exactly none of these words.

So Blatt has been reading some book about Reagan [their continued obsessive adulation of the very mediocre, even by Republican standards, Ronald Reagan, baffles me to no end, and creeps me out, quite frankly], and apparently “The Gipper” is helping Dan understand why he doesn’t support equal rights for gay people.  Because when you need a prop-up pillow for your self-hatred, go to Reagan!

Reading today in the the latest collection of the Gipper’s writings,The Notes: Ronald Reagan’s Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom, I caught this note which gets at my discomfort with all this “equality” rhetoric:

The real Am[erican] idea is not that every man shall be on a level with every other, but that every man shall have the liberty without hindrance to be what God made him. The office of gov[ernmen]t is not to confer happiness but to give men the opp[ortunity] to work out happiness for themselves.

The policy, it would seem, would then be to eliminate laws which constrain our freedom rather than to enact ones which (supposedly) ensure our equality.

Erm, good try, but no, as this is an absurdly limited understanding of the words “liberty” and “freedom.”  You see, for “every man to have the liberty [without hindrance] to be what [...] made him,” in a nation whose founding documents theoretically guarantee that all men are, um, created equal*, one has to presume that all citizens would have [ahem!] equal rights and responsibilities and freedoms and liberties, etc.  [Duh.]  Some of these are conferred by the government getting its hands off, such as a woman’s right to choose, and others are conferred with government intervention.  Marriage equality is one of those!  You see, everyone, the government is the one providing the benefits and responsibilities of marriage!  Therefore!  In order to pursue an agenda of wingnut buzzwords Liberty and Freedom for all Americans, one would have to support all Americans equal access to the institution of civil marriage.  There is nothing left to prove about the nature of sexuality that would make it anything other than a given that telling gay people that we can marry someone of the opposite sex is a ridiculous interpretation of equal access to this institution.  Same goes for things like ENDA, which would ensure that bigots don’t get to deny people access to jobs simply because they don’t like the genital composition of their sexual relationships.

Of course, assholes will argue all day long that that would infringe on bigoted business owners’ rights to hire and fire at will, and it’s for the same reason they still not-so-secretly hate the Civil Rights Act.  I don’t have to make a further point on that, do I?

I cannot believe I am having to explain these things, but then again, he was trying to score partisan political points above by whining that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is anti-gay because she went after a Republican politician for sexting teenagers, for god’s sake, so we’re at a very remedial level here.

Amanda Marcotte actually made a good point on this subject the other day, in a longer post about the bankruptcy of libertarianism as a philosophy, and it applies here as well:

The word for my beliefs is “liberal” or “progressive”. Or, if you like, “socially liberal”. Liberalism, at its core, is about maximizing freedom, but in a substantive and not glib way like so-called libertarianism is. We believe in civil liberties, but also other freedoms, such as the “freedom froms” that FDR spoke of: freedom from want, freedom from fear. Thus, regulating business and supporting labor maximize freedom for the most number of people. We consider the freedom to have a life outside of work for the working class to be more important than the freedom of the rich to make another buck, for instance. Using “libertarian” to mean “pro-freedom” is misleading; under a libertarian system, the vast majority of people live lives under the corporate bootheel and are not free people at all.

Ding ding ding! And now the corollaries: the government giving all the people equal access to marriage and an equal chance at employment and housing, etc., maximizes freedom for the most people! And paying lip service to a BS Republican idea of “freedom” and “liberty” means that whoever has the most influence and clout gets the most “freedom” and “liberty,” and the rest of the people pretty much get stomped on.

Liberalism: It’s freedom and liberty, but in a grown-up way!

*Yeah, “equal” is right there in the Declaration.  Thomas Jefferson, that f*cking Islamofascist socialist Kenyan communist.

The Christian Right’s year-old “Manhattan Declaration” — a manifesto to destroy true marriage and religious liberty, replacing both with Stepford marriages and Christianist theocracy — is circulating within the conservative echo chamber again.

Fueled by a manufactured controversy in which Apple Inc. removed the broadly defamatory Declaration from its App Store, a new round of naïve or disingenuous Christian bloggers call the declaration “civil,” “graceful” and other absurdities that should be apparent to rational people who respect individual freedom, reject piety, and know the history of the declaration’s sponsors.

Starting from the top of the Declaration, let’s examine what makes the Declaration a prime example of Christian Right defamation, incivility, ill health, sociopathy, and unholy immorality.
(Read More)

In the not too distant past, most Americans couldn’t tell a Pashtun from a cartoon, a Sunni from a Moonie or a Kurd from bean curd. Then came 9-11 and we learned our very survival depended on securing freedom for people we barely knew existed. Exorcising the region’ demons through democracy was so important, we were told, that America would pay for the effort in blood and bankruptcy.

Despite the bumbling and fumbling of the war effort, the bitter divisions in our country and the wheelbarrows of dough dumped in the desert, there was always the faint hope that a better Middle East might just emerge from the mess. And, whatever one thinks of the two wars, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were real villains who were vanquished.

The idea, of course, was that once these monsters were slain, they’d be replaced with the sane. But, the monsters have multiplied and Sasquatch has morphed into a bevy of Big Foots (or is it Big Feet?). It appears that for all of our sacrifice — and that of the secular Iraqi and Afghanistani people — the crazies are back in control. Or, at least fanatics have instilled enough fear that “mainstream” Iraqi and Afghanistani politicians are tripping over themselves to please and appease. (Read More)

Exodus International is the nation’s foremost organization claiming to use Christianity to turn LGBT people into “ex-gays.”

And while Exodus says it “loves” gay people, the Gay Liberation Network says Exodus’ fake attempts to change gays into straights is rooted in their “hatred of gay people.” GLN points out that Exodus opposes all civil rights for LGBT people; in just the past few months, Exodus has taken extreme actions to oppose the human rights, health, and safety of same-sex-attracted people.

In March, Exodus board member Don Schmierer traveled to Uganda to keynote a conference which declared that life imprisonment for homosexuals is too lenient and that tougher laws should be accompanied by involuntary detention in ex-gay re-education camps. More recently, Exodus joined the religious-right “Freedom Federation” which promotes the myth that conservative Christian freedom requires that liberal and non-Christian Americans be denied their own freedom and equality under the law. Exodus opposes laws that would require that violent crimes against gay and transgender persons be punished just as harshly as violent crimes committed on the basis of the victim’s race or religion; Exodus claims that the punishment of violent crime threatens the “freedom of speech” of antigay pastors, even though such laws contain safeguards for religious speech. Finally, Exodus refuses to publicly oppose ex-gay exorcisms performed against a 16-year-old youth by an amateur pentecostal church in Connecticut.

Every major professional mental-health association has denounced Exodus’s efforts to suppress and lie about individuals’ sexual orientation as potentially very damaging to the very people Exodus claims to “help.”

As the American Psychiatric Association notes: “The potential risks of ‘reparative therapy’ are great, including depression, anxiety and self destructive behavior, since therapist alignment with societal prejudices against homosexuality may reinforce self hatred already experienced by the patient. Many patients who have undergone ‘reparative therapy’ relate that they were inaccurately told that homosexuals are lonely, unhappy individuals who never achieve acceptance or satisfaction. The possibility that the person might achieve happiness and satisfying interpersonal relationships as a gay man or lesbian is not presented, nor are alternative approaches to dealing with the effects of societal stigmatization discussed.”

GLN invites Midwesterners to help expose the “ex-gay” fraud, and help show young LGBT people that there is an alternative to the damaging quack “therapy” that Exodus International promotes.

The Gay Liberation Network is organizing a protest against the opening of Exodus International’s annual “Freedom [from Gay Equality] Conference” and it invites you to join them:

6:30 PM
Tuesday, July 14
Wheaton College
500 College Avenue
Wheaton, Illinois
Related Facebook group

GLN is organizing transportation from Chicago to the protest, and may be able to offer it from some suburban locations. If you need transportation or are willing to offer it, please email LGBTliberation@aol.com.

Reuters and numerous blogs today announced the public formation of the Freedom Federation, a coalition of long-time members of the religious-right Arlington Group including the ex-gay member ministries of Exodus International.

According to Vision America and Liberty Counsel (via Ex-Gay Watch), the federation offers a “Declaration of American Values” including:

• freedom from contraception, phrased as “right to life”
• freedom from same-sex marriage and single parenting
• freedom from parental responsibility laws that protect children, phrased as “parental rights”
• freedom from non-evangelical religious faiths, phrased as “religious liberty [for conservative Christians]“
• freedom from undefined “indecency”
• freedom to use one’s property in ways that harm neighbors and community, phrased as “the right to property”
• freedom from international obligations and agreements, phrased as “national sovereignty”

The federation declares war against the legality of single-parent families as well as same-sex parents and their children. The federation does this by declaring as a top goal: “To secure our national interest in the institution of marriage and family by embracing the union of one man and one woman as the sole form of legitimate marriage and the proper basis of family.”

Overwhelmingly Caucasian and evangelical, the Freedom Federation defines freedom, in short, as freedom from freedom: Freedom from the beliefs, values, cultures, circumstances, and activities of people who are not conservative evangelicals and who are therefore deemed untrue Americans and untrue Christians.

This “true” freedom is sometimes called “Freedom in Christ” — which has come to be redefined by evangelical partisans as a freedom from responsibility to co-exist with liberal Christians as well as Jews, Muslims, agnostics, and others. (Read More)

Be warned: Those new National Organization for Marriage anti-GLBT actor auditions videos Wayne reported about this week are gone. NOM noticed that its evil ruse had been exposed and demanded that YouTube take them down. Even a clip of a recent MSNBC Rachel Maddow clip that included the audition tapes is gone. NOM’s reason: copyright infringement.

YouTube has to develop a bigger pair. The fact that a national organization is working to deny equality under law to millions of certain citizens makes the story newsworthy. Showing at least excerpts is fair use — under law.

Why are people so afraid of the anti-equality crowd? It’s so obvious that the organized fundies are the ones to fear. NOM was willing to lie, manipulate, and terrify the ignorant segment of the public, low-info types who can be compelled en masse to do what is right for their brand of Christianity, but wrong for anyone who really believes in basic American ideals. The tactic is cynical, selfish, immoral, and destructive. And it works: Remember Proposition 8?

At HuffPo, Lambda Legal’s Evan Wolfson provides a description opf the ads and refutes their vicious claims, so that at least some of those unable to view the outrage can see clearly the threat with which we are dealing. It’s a long excerpt, but it is an important one:

Consider what the actors in the NOM ad pretend to be:

A doctor who wants to discriminate against her patients, despite civil rights laws and medical ethics that the California Supreme Court upheld – in a case having nothing to do with marriage.

An officer of a New Jersey group that for years voluntarily operated a beachside pavilion with special tax-breaks that required it be open to the public – but then tried to turn down a lesbian couple. The case did not turn on marriage, since New Jersey doesn’t yet allow gay couples to marry, but, rather, basic civil rights laws about open access to public accommodations.

A Massachusetts parent who sought to dictate public school curriculum about the diverse families children will need to be aware of to thrive in a diverse world, and then wanted to remove her child from classes in a way that would have disrupted class and imposed unreasonable burdens on the school and other kids.

The law in California, as elsewhere, is that doctors can’t discriminatorily refuse to treat patients ‚Äî Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, gay or non-gay; that has nothing to do with marriage, and yet NOM incites fear. The law in New Jersey, as elsewhere, says that organizations running public accommodations such as restaurants or rental halls cannot discriminatorily exclude people ‚Äî African American, Latino, or Asian, gay or non-gay; that has nothing to do with marriage, and yet NOM says that the discriminators are somehow the victims. The law in Massachusetts, as elsewhere, of course allows parents to teach their kids whatever they want, and even to send them to private schools or do home-schooling. The law also rightly sets rules for determining public school curriculum without having every parent, or special interest with an agenda, coming in and imposing their views on everyone else’s kids ‚Äî yours or mine, gay or non-gay.

I encourage you to read Wolfson’s entire piece — he has worked on the front lines of this fight and knows the terrain. And he’s a lawyer.

National Organization for Marriage may believe that its copyright trumps our right to know the truth, but the group is wrong. Here is an opportunity to dtake action and do some good: Anyone with a thirst for a truly equal US will share descriptions of the ad — along with the truth about marriage equality and the fact that is is no threat to anyone, save those who need legal supremacy — with everyone they know. It is particularly urgent that we talk with those who question the need for civil-marriage equality. If we can’t trust YouTube to stand up to transmit the truth, we must do it.

Here is a debate between NOM’s Maggie Gallagher and Human Rights Campaign Joe Solmonese on CNN’s “Hardball,” where the HRC chief handily obliterates his opponent’s position using truth and fact.

HRC\’s Joe Solmonese on Hardball 04/08/09

Chris Delaney, ex-gay activist and poster boy for P-FOX billboards, admitted last month to the Chattanooga Times Free Press that, as a “gay” man, he sought male affirmation — not sex.

The apparent fact that he did not experience a lifelong, predominant, and unvarying sexual attraction to men — and that he wasted his “gay” years in bars instead of pursuing constructive relationships and hobbies — hasn’t stopped Delaney from boasting for 12 years that he achieved freedom from homosexuality.

His claim is ironic. If anything, he is more deeply addicted to the subject than when he claimed to be gay.

For most of this decade, his picture has appeared on billboards to aid P-FOX in its ongoing campaign to divide families and blame parents for their children’s predominant and unchanging same-sex attraction.

In November, Delaney joined other ex-gay activists and antigay church leaders to strategize against equality and freedom in Tennessee.

And last week, Delaney revealed to OneNewsNow that he is willing to distort science and smear researchers who have discovered signs of a naturally occurring, biological predisposition to same-gender attraction. (Read More)

Gay people in Los Angeles have long supported a local restaurant, El Coyote, thanks to the welcoming hospitality of its owner and a manager, Marjorie Christofferson.

But behind the friendly veneer, Christofferson was giving money earned at El Coyote — a small amount, $100 — to efforts to undermine gay couples’ well-being and take away their freedoms.

As a result of Proposition 8, thousands of California gay couples lost the guaranteed freedom to visit partners in the hospital and to inherit a shared home and property when one partner dies. And because of Proposition 8, marriages are nullified by a state government that grants favoritism to some religious beliefs over others.

When local gay customers found out that their hangout’s manager was voting away their marital and religious freedoms with a bit of money as well as her vote, the customers naturally lost their appetite and stopped eating at El Coyote. Christofferson belatedly resigned — and in a free country like the United States, she can find a rewarding job with an antigay employer that is willing to subsidize her future efforts to cripple her gay customers’ relationships. There are now plenty of antigay political organizations in California that appear eager to hire Christofferson as an outspoken victim of people who were relegated to second-class citizenship by Proposition 8.

Now Exodus executive vice president Randy Thomas chimes in — calling the betrayed gay customers a “mob” for defending their freedom. He also falsely and baselessly accuses the restaurant customers of accepting money from antigay Islamic countries:

Do you find it … odd … that the California anti Prop 8 mob will ruin a Mormon woman’ life over a $100 contribution to Prop 8 but will apparently take money from rich Islamic theocratically inclined countries who actually practice work-place discrimination against homosexuals? The Mormon lady simply wanted a legal definition of marriage … not to stone or throw homosexuals in jail.

Emirates airlines does impose work place discrimination against homosexuals … and it is illegal to do so in their new hub of San Francisco …

So … where’ the Prop 8 mob on this one? … I am wondering how many Christian ministries/businesses have been denied or run out of San Francisco?

In his gratuitious and ignorant slap at “San Francisco values,” Thomas apparently can’t distinguish between Los Angeles and San Francisco — 400 miles apart — nor between a restaurant’s gay customers and a politically-moderate major-city government that frequently puts a higher value on corporate welfare than on the environment and human rights.