I’m usually the snarky one who’s not fazed by wingnut nonsense, but this is disgusting:
If you’re a high school in Mississippi and you really don’t want your students bringing same-sex dates to the prom, what are you to do?
Well, you could try to ban them from coming to the prom, although that’s illegal. Or, if you’re the Itawamba Agricultural High School, you can cancel the prom altogether and punish everyone. That’s right. No gay couples. No straight couples. No prom.
Isn’t it amazing the depths folks will go in order to continue homophobic policies? That this school wanted to stop a lesbian student from bringing a same-sex date to the prom was outrageous enough. But to cancel the entire prom just to take aim at this student is punishing every single person in the school. So much for school’s acting in the best interests of their students.
The school is called Itawamba Agricultural High School. So I have two questions for the Itawamba County School Board:
1. Exactly how many self-loathing closet cases are on your board? Because this is extreme, even for Mississippi.
2. What’s wrong, Mississippi? Were you worried that Virginia was out-wingnutting you this week, and you had to do something grotesque to prove that you’re the dumbest, most unreconstructed bigots in the Union?
Later in the above quoted piece, we hear from the lesbian student:
The student at the heart of this case is a senior named Constance McMillen. Reached by the Clarion Ledger, McMillen said she was absolutely disgusted that her school would try to punish her by canceling the prom for everyone.
“Oh, my God. That’s really messed up because the message they are sending is that if they have to let gay people go to prom that they are not going to have one,” she said. “A bunch of kids at school are really going to hate me for this, so in a way it’s really retaliation.”
Oh, but we’re supposed to believe that the Wingnut Right really cares about bullying of LGBT students? No, as Timothy Kincaid pointed out last year, some of their leading “pro-family” voices indeed view bullying LGBT students as a Christian duty.
They are the true sick people. Not happy, healthy LGBT people. We’re fine.
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.
You see, behind every obnoxious book is a secret gay author!
Dianetics? Richard Simmons.
Atlas Shrugged? J. Edgar Hoover.
Twilight? That would be Bruce Vilanch.
Jewel’s book of poetry? Wanda Sykes!
This is the world according to gay-obsessed Scott Lively, who’s most known around these parts as the man who went to Uganda and told an audience there, among other grotesque and dishonest things, that gays were responsible for the genocide in Rwanda, essentially handing David Bahati one of the proverbial guns he needed to get the genocide going. Now he’s popped up again, e-mailing a blogger named Benzion Chinn, who had been writing about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,to let him know that there’s a theory out there that maybe it was written by George Bernard Shaw! Here’s Lively’s e-mail:
At the Library of Congress is an obscure book by Samuel Igra which makes the case that “The Protocols…Zion” was actually written by George Bernard Shaw. I don’t remember the title, but I read a portion in DC when I was researching another book by Igra and I remember thinking at the time that his case seemed quite plausible, though I don’t remember the details now.
It is common knowledge that Shaw was a close friend of the homosexual poet Bruce Douglas, the “translator” of the Protocols.
Regards,
Dr. Scott Lively
He’s just sayin’! Here’s a thought, you know, maybe it was written by one of my super-homosexual boogeymen!
Chinn, of course, handily disposed of this notion after doing a bit of research on Lively’s obsession with blaming gay people for every evil that’s ever befallen the world:
Samuel Igra, Lively’s source, seems to have been one of the main originators of this Nazism and homosexuality link with his 1945 book, Germany’s National Vice. According to Igra, Hitler was a homosexual prostitute in Vienna and then in Munich from 1907-1914. (See Gregory Woods A History of Gay Literature: the Male Tradition pg. 251-53.) Obviously there were Nazis who were homosexual. The most famous example is Ernst Rohm of the SD. While an early member of the party, Rohm was killed off in the infamous “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934. Considering the very real persecution of homosexuals under the Nazi regime, saying that Nazism was a homosexual movement (as opposed to individual Nazis being homosexual) strikes me as the height of perversity.
Bruce Douglas was the young lover of Oscar Wilde’s, whose father got into a libel suit with Wilde, which eventually brought about the downfall of Wilde in English society. Douglas did do one of the first English translations of the Protocols in 1919, nearly twenty years after it was first written. The Protocols came out of Russia, and while it was plagiarized from many sources, including one French anti-Semitic tract, it is clearly a product of reactionary Russian circles. Personally I find the idea that George Bernard Shaw would have written the Protocols to be offensive. I would have no problem accepting Shaw as an anti-Semite along the lines of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. But to think that Shaw would have written such a piece of garbage as the Protocols, boggles the mind. If Shaw had wanted to write a book about Jews plotting to rule the world, this book would have been a model of wit and would have me convinced to become an Elder.
Heh. And what is Chinn’s expertise? Oh, just Jewish History. In other words, Chinn sort of knows what he’s talking about.
So anyway, that happened.
But wait, there’s more! Lively got a bur in his britches over Chinn reprinting the e-mail on his blog and sent another e-mail, wherein he called the (conservative!) Jewish History teacher an anti-Semite! Really. No, seriously, really. You cannot make this stuff up:
Dear Mr. Chinn,
I offered privately what I thought would be a helpful research tip regarding a source you were not likely to have discovered, not a personal conviction to be publicly ridiculed. It was a friendly gesture to a stranger. Your incivility is unbecoming a man of letters.
If anti-Semitism is the dehumanization of people because of their beliefs and values, I’m sorry to say you have become your own case-in-point.
It’s very strange, though, that Lively would be bothered by this. He has, after all, made a career based on just cold making things up about gay people in order to make us look like murderous maniacs, pedophiles and what-have-you. This fits right in with his pattern.
You really should go read Chinn’s entire response to this. It’s fair to say that there are things in there that, in another situation, I would disagree with fervently. Bear in mind that this is a conversation between a conservative religious person and an irrational, insane,and most importantly, malevolent homophobe. I’m willing to grant that there is a difference. But Chinn seems like an honest broker. Not so, Mr. Lively.
So anyway, there you have it. If you’re interested, the discourse just keeps going and going… Somewhere in the second link, Lively tries to defend his work in Uganda, but you know, we have the video, and it says otherwise. As I said before, it’s a discourse between a conservative Jewish man who I could spend hours debating (but will not, because there comes a point when it’s boring) and the extremely disturbed, delusional homophobe Scott Lively. So it gets a bit tiresome.
I think we’ve covered the parts of this that are important.
Left Behind series? Ghostwritten by RuPaul, but I’m sure you figured that…
This morning I lost my virginity… my TV interview virginity, that is.
Those who know me, know me as a fairly quiet person, so the last place they would expect to see me is on a live TV broadcast on ETV morning news, talking about international matters. Come to think of it, that’s the last place I would expect to see me. Never the less, I found myself there this morning, a bundle of nerves, like a lamb being led to the slaughter. (Read More)
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church says that, although the church views homosexuality as a sin, homosexuality is a personal choice.
Patriarch Kirill says gays and lesbians must not be persecuted or discriminated against in any way, though the church still opposes same-sex marriages.
But it’s a positive step, nonetheless. Russia has major problems with vile, violent homophobia*, so for the Patriarch of the largest and most important church in the nation to call for an end to persecution and discrimination (sort of) is a good message.
I take issue with the headline, though: ”Russian Orthodox Church embraces gays.” Uhhhhh, no. That is not “embrace.” That’s the Church trying to split the difference between condemnation and outright hatred and violence.
Like I said, it’s progress of a sort, but I’d like to see more than a general perfunctory statement along the lines of “We believe ‘x’ is bad, so if you could possibly consider thinking about cutting it out, that would be helpful, but if that’s not amenable to you, I’m sure we can work something out.”
South Africa as yet, has remained completely silent on the issue of pink human rights in Africa, specifically Uganda - presumably on the “head-in-the-sand” principle employed by the ostrich – if you ignore it long enough, it will probably go away. Perhaps they are right, but then who am I to criticize? I live in a country which seems increasingly desperate to imitate that other bastion of third-world lunacy, Zimbabwe. (Read More)
I have great respect for GLBTI pastors and ministers – and straight clerics, who support their faith’s central ethos of love, peace and tolerance – surely they have to bite their tongues a lot! I doubt I could manage it, but then as an activist I am not expected to. (Read More)
National Jamaican Boycott Campaign Kicks-Off in New York City With ‘Rum Dump’ at Birthplace of Gay Rights Movement
Stonewall Inn Owners Dump Stock of Myers Rum and Red Stripe Beer in Sewer; Urge Other Bars To Follow Lead
Gay advocates launched a national boycott of Jamaica in New York City at the famed Stonewall Bar – birthplace of the gay rights movement. The bar’s owners and boycott supporters dumped Jamaican liquor – Red Stripe beer and Myers’ Rum – down the sewer.
Human rights activists have given Jamaica the infamous title: “The Most Homophobic Place on Earth.” Gay people have regularly been beaten and murdered on the island, while authorities do little to stop the violence.
“We, as the owners of the Stonewall Inn, birthplace of the Gay rights movement, refuse to support, in any way, shape or form, the oppression of any people especially our gay brothers and sisters in Jamaica,” the Stonewall Inn said in its statement. “We ask all people of all walks of life to send a clear message to the Jamaican people and their government, that as long as they continue to allow and condone violence and hatred toward the Gay community, we will neither buy their products nor support their tourist trade. To do so is to tacitly support the current climate of oppression.”
“If you love your gay friends and family members, you won’t visit Jamaica,” said boycott co-organizer Wayne Besen. “If you care about the human rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, you won’t buy Jamaican products. We hope that all gay and gay friendly bar owners and restaurateurs across the nation will participate in ‘rum dumps.’ We can no longer subsidize our own slaughter.
GLBT activists Michael Petrelis, Wayne Besen and Jim Burroway launched this boycott after a State Department report highlighted the violence faced by GLBT people. According to the report:
The Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG) continued to report human rights abuses, including arbitrary detention, mob attacks, stabbings, harassment of homosexual patients by hospital and prison staff, and targeted shootings of homosexuals. Police often did not investigate such incidents.
The West Coast portion of the boycott took place earlier this month with a rum dump in San Francisco that featured Petrelis and city Supervisor Bevan Dufty.
A study appearing in the September issue of the Journal of Homosexuality suggests that negative ex-gay and antigay attitudes — not homosexual behavior or same-sex orientation — worsen mental health and sexual health.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have published a study showing that the degree of internalized homonegativity (negative attitude towards homosexuality) among homosexual men is what predicts poor mental and sexual health – not the act of being homosexual.
Simon Rosser, Ph.D, is the study’s principal investigator and a researcher of the university’s School of Public Health.
“Given the debates in many religious denominations about homosexuality, and in society about homosexuals and civil rights, it’s also timely,” Rosser said. “In particular, the old advice to gay men to fight, deny, or minimize their homosexuality likely only increases depression, greater isolation, and poorer sexual health. In short, viewing homosexuality as a disorder is not only inaccurate, it may be harmful as well.”
This research, which is part of the HIV prevention program – funded by the Minnesota Department of Health – has also been shown to be effective in reducing unsafe sex.
The anti-life, religious-rightist LifeSiteNews last week distorted the results of a British study that came to the same conclusion. LSN falsely associated depression and self-destructive behavior with “a homosexual lifestyle” despite findings to the contrary, and cited the discredited work of antigay activists Paul and Kirk Cameron for additional support.
Meanwhile, a new paper in Science, Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits, finds that social conservatives may be more biologically predisposed to respond to fear and threats than the general population. Might these conservatives then assume, wrongly, that everyone else will (or should) react to fear and threats in a manner consistent with their own reaction?
ScienceBlogs provides detailed analysis of the paper. One take-home point:
For example, consider if the “conservative” psychology is typified by a heuristic & bias which orients toward conformity to current norms. In contrast, the “liberal” psychology has a more relaxed heuristic and is less biased toward current norms. That means naturally that liberal personality types would “random walk” out of the the central tendency of the population more often, so that you would see average differences between the two groups. But, that doesn’t define the distribution itself. What is conservative in 2008 might very well be rather liberal in 1950. For example, arguing against gay marriage but accepting the possibility of civil unions.
Visit Skipping to the Piccolo for pro-tolerant religious reaction to the Journal of Homosexuality study.
This morning I lost my virginity… my TV interview virginity, that is.
