After being repeatedly shut out, pro-gay Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson will be allowed to participate in the next GOP debate, on Fox:
Although Johnson announced his candidacy in April from New Hampshire, and he was allowed into the first Republican debate in South Carolina, organizers have shut him out ever since because of low poll numbers. Each debate organizer decides at which threshold it will set the bar for entry. Fox and Google are sponsoring the debate in Orlando, Florida, on Thursday, and their rules require hitting 1% in five recent national polls.
Here’s the important part. I would disagree with Johnson on a whole lot of issues, but it’s refreshing to see a Republican making statements this strong:
When candidates such as Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann (and later Rick Perry) signed a pledge from the National Organization for Marriage to ban same-sex marriage in the U.S. Constitution, it was Johnson who scolded them.
“If candidates who sign this pledge somehow think they are scoring some points with some core constituency of the Republican Party, they are doing so at the peril of writing off the vast majority of Americans who want no part of this ‘pledge’ and its offensive language,” said Johnson. “The Republican Party cannot afford to have a presidential candidate who condones intolerance, bigotry and the denial of liberty to the citizens of this country. If we nominate such a candidate, we will never capture the White House in 2012.”
So often, the overtures made by Republicans to gay conservatives are completely milquetoast, imbued with absolutely no respect for the dignity of LGBT Americans. This, though, is the sound of a different tune.
This is, um, “Pastor Kellan Criswell,” and he is talking in this long winded video about whether gay people can be Christians, or whether Christians who don’t hate gay people are “bad Christians.” In it, he uses every Christian euphemism available to replace the inner sentiment, “God Hates Fags,” including the number one hit “God loves homosexual people, but!”
Anyway, about two minutes in, he explains how he used to support gay rights, but when he was twenty years old, something traumatic in his life happened which caused him to “meet the Lord,” (or something…I’m skimming with my ears), and ALSO caused him to renounce veganism. Got it? Start hating gays + eat some meat = SAVED!
Just after that, he agrees with the bible verse forbidding having sex with a woman who’s having her period and makes an “icky!” face and says it’s gross to do that. This is all his lead up to Leviticus 18:22, which no one has ever heard before. Certainly no scholars (who tend to be smarter than the average fundie) have ever analyzed this verse and found that it’s not as simple as it appears to uneducated bigots!
Fast forward through the rest: gay people can’t be Christians. This is an asinine statement, but it’s something that fundamentalists say a lot, to make them feel better about their fears about the reality of the world around them. We all know that there are lots and lots and lots of gay Christians. LOTS.
Anyway, the last thing I notice about this video, because I had to turn it off, due to the fact that I remembered that I was listening to Jimi Hendrix a little while ago and had that paused, is that dude is sitting in front of a bunch of lockers. Ew. Creepy to think people like that could be broadcasting from schools.
Watch it if you’re totally bored.
Notice the tattoo? Yeah, that has about the same level of condemnation for fundamentalist snakes as it does for “homoseckshul relashuns.”
I knew I was going to have to quote this again at some point in the near future. It came up during the mid-term elections. It came up during the 2008 elections. It always comes up. A rift starts within the liberal demographic, among people who believe in most of the same things, but who approach voting very differently. In the comments on this post and this post, I’m having to explain the very real consequences of protest-voting for non-viable third parties or not voting at all, if that opens the door for one of the ideologues the GOP is running for president. Amanda Marcotte is over at Pandagon having to explain to some of her readers that, yes, elections actually do have consequences, yes it does matter which party is in power, especially when it comes to Supreme Court appointments, and yes, Roe is in danger. Right now!
Has the Democratic party or President Obama done everything we’ve wanted and tied it up with a bow for us? Heavens, no. Has he been perfect in every way? No. I can give you a list of things about the Obama administration that have pissed me off. However! This is the American political system, for the foreseeable future:
We have exactly two viable parties. One is a centrist party dotted with a few true progressives here and there. The other one has been taken over by far right ideologues with no regard for the future of this country, no regard for minorities, no regard for the widening gap between the haves and the have nots, and a neo-conservative foreign policy worldview that has done great damage over the past decade, at home and abroad. We do not have a parliamentary system where lesser parties actually have a voice when they lose.
We also still face a lot of problems in this country, and none of us can afford to be single-issue voters. The actual meaning of liberalism is that we vote and support that which brings about the greatest good for the greatest number of people in this country. And we have to work with the system we have, rather than the one we might wish we had.
So, in that spirit, I will again quote from what is perhaps my favorite blog post ever, written by TBogg, in response to a dead-end Nader voter in 2008:
Let me see if I can explain it this way:
Every year in Happy Gumdrop Fairy-Tale Land all of the sprites and elves and woodland creatures gather together to pick the Rainbow Sunshine Queen. Everyone is there: the Lollipop Guild, the Star-Twinkle Toddlers, the Sparkly Unicorns, the Cookie Baking Apple-cheeked Grandmothers, the Fluffy Bunny Bund, the Rumbly-Tumbly Pupperoos, the Snowflake Princesses, the Baby Duckies All-In-A-Row, the Laughing Babies, and the Dykes on Bikes. They have a big picnic with cupcakes and gumdrops and pudding pops, stopping only to cast their votes by throwing Magic Wishing Rocks into the Well of Laughter, Comity, and Good Intentions. Afterward they spend the rest of the night dancing and singing and waving glow sticks until dawn when they tumble sleepy-eyed into beds made of the purest and whitest goose down where they dream of angels and clouds of spun sugar.
You don’t live there.
Grow the fuck up.
I will bring that quote out as many times as I feel like between now and the 2012 election, because it sums it up so simply.
We lost the House for myriad reasons in 2010, but let me tell you something: when the Obama administration announced it would no longer be defending DOMA in court, the Republican-led House jumped up and down and said “We will!” Guess what the Democrats, who I’m quite sure are awful, terrible, secretly homophobic, and whatever else is mixed into the fever dream these days, would have done in that situation? Nothing. They would have said, “Cool, let’s go do something else.” When Teabaggers swept across the country and took over state legislatures from coast to coast, what did they do? They immediately started screwing with unions, women’s reproductive rights and everything else. Elections. Have. Consequences.
So, please, vote however you need to vote as we move toward the 2012 election. But please, please, please: vote based on the system we actually have, rather than the one we might wish to have.
John Shore is one of my favorite Christian writers [yes, even atheists can have favorite Christian writers, if we want!]. He has a particular way of dealing with the intersection of faith and sexuality, and a way of speaking to and of fundamentalists that I really enjoy. The headline of his latest on HuffPost? Come Out of the Woods, Christian Soldiers: World War Gay Has Ended.
And I’m already giggling. So the piece is about how, now that we’ve reached the tipping point where every credible poll shows that marriage equality has majority support in the United States, and since we also know that civil rights battles never go backward in public support in this country, we are virtually assured of an ultimate victory against the Christian Fundamentalists whose inflated ideas of their “religious freedom” necessarily include making our lives as difficult as posssible. The deed is done. As I’ve been saying for months now, people like Maggie Gallagher and Peter LaBarbera had best be either updating their resumes or making sure their IRAs are healthy, because their work is now worthless, even for their own lives.
Anyway, I really enjoy the analogy Shore uses to open up this piece:
Unaware that their cause had been lost, a small number of Japanese soldiers deep in the jungles of the Philippines continued waging guerrilla warfare against an imaginary enemy years after World War II had ended.
Via dropped pamphlets, newspapers left everywhere and even relatives at the jungle’s edge hollering at them through bullhorns, the diehard soldiers got the news the war had ended. They just didn’t believe it.
It’s as obvious as a stunning rainbow in the sky that within, say, 10 years, any church or denomination still fighting against the marriage of gay couples and the ordination of gay clergy will be like those recalcitrant Japanese soldiers living amongst the mangrove trees of Lubang Island long after everyone else has accepted peace as a fact and adjusted to the new world order.
Told you he was funny. You should read the whole thing, really. At the end Shore admits to readers that yes, he is very happy that things have reached this point, not least for his more conservative friends who have wasted their lives crying about the Gay Menace:
For verily am I already just ever so slightly weary of calling into the jungle through a bullhorn for the deeply confused, bizarrely obdurate combatants in there to come forward and step out into the open — to enjoy the sunshine, to relax, to get a hug, to finally be at peace with an enemy who isn’t even there.
Hahahahah, read that paragraph five times, anti-gay twits. That’s not mean old atheist Evan Hurst! That’s one of your fellow religionists, telling you to get a grip and smell the flowers and maybe enjoy life for a second. I mean, damn, we on the side of fairness and equality have been doing so the whole time, and we’re the ones who are having to fight to simply be treated as equal citizens!
I mean, the anti-gay set is, of course, entitled to cling to their mantras about how “every time the people have voted blah blah blah,” but their majorities are gone nationwide. Sure, it’s lopsided — I mean, Mississippi still has a hard time with interracial marriage, but I don’t think any readers would suggest that we should have waited for that state to wrap its head around that concept before Loving v. Virginia could be enforced. And moreover, it’s gotten to the point that, when the Religious Right goes in front of a judge and tries to argue against gay rights, the only variance in the rulings these days seems to be just exactly how throaty the laughter is with which the judges are laughing them out of court.
So yeah. They’re entitled to keep digging that same hole if they want. Or they can, you know, stop hurting everyone they can manage to reach on the way to their inevitable failure.
There are gay conservatives. I know this. When I have the sense of humor for it, I try to read their words and figure out where they’re coming from, and how they got there. There is a common, oft-repeated complaint among gay conservative bloggers and pundits [all three of them] that the Big Gay Left constantly carries water for other liberal causes. They assume that this is something that happens without forethought, which is always strange to me, because liberalism and LGBT equality go hand in hand.
Indeed, it’s actually conservatism, with its competing strains — disproven economic theory meant to serve Wall Street and Wall Street only vs. libertarianism which hates Wall Street; making the government so small that you can drown it in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist so famously said vs. a social conservatism that hates democracy and seeks to use the government to damage the lives of LGBT people and women from coast to coast, and so forth — that is anything but an aligned movement. Liberalism? Not so much.
Amanda Marcotte highlights this in a larger post about John Edwards’ troubles, lamenting just how sucky it is that Edwards has turned out to be such a giant ass in his personal life, as his presidential campaign was one of the few in recent history which actually tied together all the different arms of liberalism into one defining philosophy, and who explained it in terms that made sense to the average voter. And it really is one defining philosophy. She outlines the three major arms of liberalism and starts to connect the dots:
1) Economic justice. This is labor movements, anti-poverty initiatives, fair taxation, health care reform, social services, government that is functional, etc. Anything that helps secure the middle class, bolsters the economy, and lifts people out of poverty.
2) Social justice. Feminism, anti-racism, gay rights, anti-colonialism, things like that—anything that divides people against each other on the basis of identity hierarchies.
3) Environmentalism and rationalism. Preserving the planet, promoting science, basically using the now to work towards a better tomorrow.
Obviously, a smart person sees how these are interrelated and that you really fail at anti-racism if you don’t think about poverty and that you’re not a good environmentalist if economic justice isn’t part of your worldview, and you’re not an effective feminist if you treat science like it’s a lark.
They really all do go together. I’d add that you’re not really going to understand the gay rights struggle if you aren’t a rationalist who believes in science, and you’re not going to understand the need for marriage equality fully if you don’t understand the real economic results of policies that serve the whole population well — as opposed to just those at the top. This seems like a good time to point out that gay conservatives tend to be upper-middle class white men, or those who dream of one day being so, and are willing to overlook where they actually are in service of who they might be, maybe one day, if things go well for them. And Amanda’s right — there are a million other intersection points between those three arms.
One thing I’ve been encouraged by over the past year has been that, more and more every day, Truth Wins Out readers are coming from more and more diverse areas out of the greater liberal spectrum. Surely there is a huge case to be made for why moderates and conservatives should also support equality for LGBT people, as there is really no philosophy aside from theocracy that it doesn’t fit into. But for those who wonder why educated gay rights activists also tend to support the rest of the planks of liberalism as well, well, now you know why.
It’s good to see that the First World is taking notice of the brave, courageous gay activists of Uganda:
Ugandan gay activist Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera has been given the prestigious Martin Ennals rights award.
The 10 organisations which make up the award jury said she was courageous and faced harassment because of her work.
[...]
In January, her colleague David Kato was murdered not long after suing a paper that outed them both as gay. Police denied the killing was because of his sexuality.
Three months before the murder, Uganda’s Rolling Stone newspaper published the photographs of several people it said were gay, including activist Mr Kato, with the headline “Hang them.”
The name of Ms Nabagesera, the founder of gay rights organisation Freedom and Roam Uganda, also appeared on the list.
Still standing with the bigots in Uganda? Notable American conservative Evangelicals. “What’s new?,” says we.
It’s nice to see that American Catholics are paying less and less attention to what comes out of their church leaders’ mouths. Here are the results of a new study:
Catholics are more supportive of legal recognitions of same-sex relationships than members of any other Christian tradition and Americans overall. Nearly three-quarters of Catholics favor either allowing gay and lesbian people to marry (43%) or allowing them to form civil unions (31%). Only 22% of Catholics say there should be no legal recognition of a gay couple’s relationship.
When same-sex marriage is defined explicitly as a civil marriage, support is dramatically higher among Catholics. If marriage for gay couples is defined as a civil marriage “like you get at city hall,” Catholic support for allowing gay couples to marry increases by 28 points, from 43% to 71%. A similar pattern exists in the general population, but the Catholic increase is more pronounced.
Beyond the issue of same-sex marriage, Catholic support for rights for gays and lesbian people is strong and slightly higher than the general public. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of Catholics favor laws that would protect gay and lesbian people against discrimination in the workplace; 63% of Catholics favor allowing gay and lesbian people to serve openly in the military; and 6-in-10 (60%) Catholics favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to adopt children.
Here’s Lawrence O’Donnell’s report on the same study:
Apparently, you see, Japan is full of atheists, and God decided to grab them by the throat and shake them in order to show them his love.
I think clips like this are important because they really show us what sorts of people we’re fighting against for our equal rights. Here we have a girl who obviously thinks that she means well, but is so brainwashed into her belief system that she not only does not understand that the shifting of the earth’s plates has absolutely nothing to do with the religious beliefs of the people living atop them, but also that the idea of a deity who would destroy and kill in order to show his “love” would be called an sociopathic abuser, if we were talking about a human.
Warped conception of love? Glaring disconnect from reality? Yep, that’s what we fight against for our equal rights.
UPDATE: Some people think this is a Poe. Discuss in comments. This is the thing about Poes, though, and it’s kind of the point. If you are not familiar with Poe’s law, it is this:
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.
They are often indistinguishable. This is why so many people continue to be taken in by ChristWire.org.
[N]ew regulations on hospital visits that took effect this week are providing protection for same-sex couples or others whose closest relationship is with a non-family member.
The regulations, ordered by President Barack Obama last spring, state that hospitals should not “restrict, limit or otherwise deny visitation privileges on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or disability.”
Hospitals now must have written visitation policies, and patients or their representatives are to be informed of their rights to designate their visitors. The rules apply to all hospitals receiving federal Medicaid or Medicare money, and hospitals that violate them risk losing that money.
Administration officials say requirements for same-sex couples should not be more cumbersome than those for opposite-sex couples, who generally do not have to provide legal documentation to be considered a patient’s support person. The guidelines suggest that hospital policies require such proof only when there is a dispute over a patient who cannot speak for himself.
This is one of those issues that wingnuts, when they’re trying to look loving, claim to support, but when the chips are down, it bothers them just the same.
In a long interview with Kerry Eleveld about the role Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has played in bringing LGBT equality to the forefront at home and around the world, we learn that, unfortunately, as much good as she’s been doing, she’s somehow still not willing to take the plunge and support full equality. This is less of a criticism than a friendly encouragement, because Hillary really is so good on so many issues. Eleveld describes a gay pride celebration held at the State Department last summer:
Displaying an uncanny depth of understanding for the challenges that many LGBT youth experience, Clinton spoke of tragedies that would only come to national attention months later after a spate of heart-wrenching teen suicides dominated headlines for weeks. She called on the staff members before her to help create a safe space for gays and lesbians everywhere, “Particularly young people, particularly teenagers who still, today, have such a difficult time and who, still, in numbers far beyond what should ever happen, take their own lives rather than live that life.”
Men and women around the world were being “harassed, beaten, subjected to sexual violence, even killed, because of who they are and whom they love,” she said.
“This is a human rights issue,” Clinton told the rapt audience. She ad-libbed, recalling an oft-quoted line from a landmark speech on women’s rights at a U.N. conference in China: “Just as I was very proud to say the obvious more than 15 years ago in Beijing—that human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights—well, let me say today that human rights are gay rights, and gay rights are human rights, once and for all.”
But yet…
Marriage seemed like the place to start, since Clinton had been caught off guard by a recent inquiry on the issue while visiting Australia. Her husband has said that he now supports full marriage equality: Many of his gay friends are in committed relationships, former president Bill Clinton said in 2009. As far as marriage goes, he said, he had just been “hung up about the word.”
Did she share his experience? I wondered. Was she at odds with President Barack Obama’s stated position in support of civil unions but against marriage equality?
But on the phone, Clinton is circumspect about her husband’s comments. “Well, I share his experience because we obviously share a lot of the same friends, but I have not changed my position,” she says without elaborating. The secretary wasn’t taking any political bait, nor was she going to tangle with anything that could figure negatively for her boss.
Unfortunate.
But I’m going to make a prediction here: both the President and the Secretary will be on record supporting marriage equality soon after the 2012 elections. Cowardly, yes. But such is politics…
