Remember Eddie Long? You know, Bishop Biceps, the homophobic, muscle shirt-wearing megachurch pastor who settled out of court with four teenage boys who accused him of coercing them into sexual relationships?
Well guess what? He’s now a king. Just ask him.
According to a CNN article, Long held a “crowning ceremony” at a recent Sunday service at his New Birth Missionary Church outside of Atlanta. In it, a man purporting to be a rabbi (but whose ordination is dubious, according to Rabbi Hillel Norry, an established Georgia rabbi) wrapped Long in a Torah scroll that he claimed had been recovered from the Auschwitz concentration camp.
After that astonishing display of disrespect, four congregants lifted the seated Long and paraded him in front of the assembled worshippers as the questionable rabbi, Ralph Messer, proclaimed Long to be a king.
Norry pointed out to CNN that the alleged “Holocaust Torah” most probably did not pass through Auschwitz because its large size meant it would have likely been detected in the concentration camp. Still, the mere fact that Bishop Biceps felt comfortable participating in such a profane ceremony at all, much less one that mistreated a scroll with that kind of story attached to it (regardless of its authenticity), is incredibly disturbing.
Looks like the gays aren’t the only group that Eddie Long has no problem flagrantly disrespecting.
As reported on this blog and elsewhere, the ex-gay industry operates a number of “camps” or “clinics” in Ecuador, where lesbians undergo rape and torture, many of them put there by their parents. Credo and Change.org circulated petitions; the latter site garnered 100,000 signatures, pressuring Ecuador’s Ministry of Health into agreeing to meet with LGBT activists and work on shutting these camps down for good.
Hooray for social media and for sunlight as disinfectant, and hooray for the brave women who told us what it was like in those places, at great personal risk.
It’s true that Dan Savage has made offensive remarks in the past. I’m not denying, explaining, justifying, or defending that, because a.) it’s not my place to speak for him, and b.) Dan has already addressed them himself. I’m also not in any way trying to minimize or downplay what I have no doubt is the very real, acute pain that anti-trans bigotry causes, or the way anti-trans language, regardless of intent, reinforces that bigotry. Look: as a gay man, not to mention a married one, I am keenly aware of the sting of bigotry. I feel it every day, both through my own life experiences and those that many of you share with me and the rest of us here at Truth Wins Out. As much as anti-gay bigotry hurts, though — as heavily as it weighs on my heart, and as much as I abhor the construction of a hierarchy of oppression — I recognize the privilege that I possess as a white, cisgender gay man. I simply cannot fathom the magnitude of the journey my trans kinfolk are on, nor do I possess a vocabulary sufficient to convey my admiration for the courage it takes each and every one of my trans friends to be true to hirself and to own, embrace, and love that truth.
But Savage’s glitterbombing still disturbs me profoundly. The reason? Dan Savage is not the enemy. As Bil Browning, another veteran LGBT activist, points out, trans people are not alone in their journey. All of us cisgendered individuals — even those of us in the LGBT movement — are on a journey too, into an ever-greater understanding of the perspectives and experiences that our trans siblings bring to the table and the unique issues, circumstances, and difficulties they face. Our movement is most effective when we fight forcefully for our human rights and dignities against those who oppress us while at the same time dispelling misconceptions by telling the stories of our lives, educating people about our orientations/identities/expressions and the injustices we face because of them, and awakening in all of us the realization of our common humanity and the fundamental rights and protections to which that humanity entitles us.
Even the most outspoken and well-intentioned of us have warts. But Dan Savage is not a trans enemy. Warts and all, his heart is in the right place and he is an ally in the struggle for equality on behalf of our entire community — lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. What’s more, Savage is one of the most visible members of our community. He has a high profile that almost none of the rest of us have, and that enables him to be an especially forceful advocate for the LGBT movement. Absolutely nothing is gained by attacking him; if anything, those who engage in these repeated attacks run the serious risk of silencing one of our most powerful assets.
All of us, including the so-called “trans mafia,” should take care to remember who our real enemies are. It shouldn’t be too hard; there are plentyofthem. Instead of directing our frustration and anger inwards at obviously supportive and well-meaning community members who have a less-than-immaculate record on every single LGBT issue, we need to direct it outwards and upwards towards the Tony Perkinses, Rick Santorums, Keith Ablows, and Laura Ingrahams of the world. Instead of vilifying people for what they don’t fully understand, we need to meet them where they are and bring them further.
Circular firing squads cut all of us down, and guess what? After the last shot is fired, our enemies are still standing.
Let’s be better than that. Our rights and our lives depend on it.
Postscript: I’d like to encourage readers of this article to head over to Bilerico and read this brilliant piece written by Austen Crowder, titled “The ‘Trans Mafia’ Stifles Allies.”
A lot of wingnut worldview hinges on a belief that there is natural–NATURAL!–can’t fight it, libs!–hierarchy that informs human existence. And that at the top of this hierarchy is straight white men. Why straight white men? Because they’ve done everything, you see. They’ve created everything (yes, yes…just pretend with me more a moment), fought all our wars (yes, yes…just pretend with me for a moment), and are just plain neater than everybody else. Smarter, stronger, more interesting. When you believe this, it makes it much easier to defend structural racism, misogyny and homophobia.
The problem is much of the world–certainly not all, my gosh, no…I wish!–is starting to question this worldview. And when we question this worldview, naturally we begin to think minorities and women are kinda neat, too. Most people don’t think it’s acceptable to bully gay teens. Most people don’t think it’s acceptable to treat women poorly in the work place. Most people think that blacks and latinos have a right to partake of the American dream. Slowly but surely, the world is “liberalizing.” And entertainment, naturally, reflects this. Thus, you may occasionally see a sympathetic, non-caricaturish portrayal of a gay person, you may see a woman portrayed as strong and capable, you may see a black person portrayed as heroic or brilliant. You may hear a message that says it’s ok to be gay, or that maybe feminist sentiment has made the world better (for everyone.) In that way, yes, the entertainment industry is liberal.
And so I can see why wingnuts feel like they’re under siege nearly every moment of the day.
Indeed. Wingnuts whine [and complain and weep and gnash teeth] when we explain that their current homophobia comes down a direct line from their [supposedly] former racism and misogyny. It’s all part and parcel of the same thing, and the writer above nails it when describing their beliefs of white heterosexual male superiority as being natural. This is the root of what NOM and others are talking about when they feign intellectual with arguments about “natural law.” They think it presents as a high and mighty argument, but it’s coming from a very small place. And indeed, for eons, it was taken as a given that straight white men were at the top of the totem pole. What these wingnuts are coming to terms with, slowly and painfully, is the reality that, though they did once enjoy carte blanche supremacy, it was never anything they earned. They sort of stuck a flag in it a long time ago, but it turns out that once the rest of us started to stand up, that flag was anchored down in quicksand.
So, you know, they complain a lot and have the most pathetic victim complex about every little slight, real or perceived.
This is welcome news, indeed, from Jamaica, which has a reputation for being one of the most anti-gay nations on the planet:
Jamaica’s newly elected first female prime minister, Portia Simpson Miller, says discrimination against gay people is wrong. “No one should be discriminated against because of their sexual orientation,” Simpson Miller said during a recent election debate, adding that unlike her predecessor she would be open to appointing a qualified gay person to her cabinet.
It doesn’t mean the nation will change overnight — has the United States? No — but to have such a prominent voice arguing against discrimination is huge.
If you missed this story, last week, Janice Daniels, mayor of Troy, Michigan, embarrassed herself quite a bit when one of her Facebook posts started going viral. In it, she complained that she would have to throw away her “I Love NY carrying bag” now that “queers” are allowed to get married there.
This prompted a lesbian couple named Amy and Tina, who have children, to show up at the city council meeting and explain a few things to Ms. Daniels. The resulting video is amazing:
This classic study, published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1996, used a delightful technique called “penile plethysmography” to measure porn-induced “tumescence” in men who self-identified as “exclusively heterosexual.” Its abstract concludes: “Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.”
More fun facts:
In the homophobic group, 20% showed no significant tumescence, 26% showed moderate tumescence, and 54% showed definite tumescence to the homosexual video; the corresponding percentages in the nonhomophobic group were 66%, 10%, and 24%, respectively.
Think about it. Of the penises belonging to this group of straight-identified homophobic men, 80% got more engorged while their owners were watching gay porn. Eighty percent. Of those belonging to non-haters, about a third did. Think about that, homophobes.
The perception that marriage equality was a poisoned pink chalice persisted up to the 2008 election, when even Obama was careful to clarify that he wasn’t in favour of gay marriage…Yet in this year’s debates between the ragtag pack of Republican presidential nominees, the usual rhetoric denouncing gay marriage has been noticeably absent….
What changed in those few short years? In many ways the transformation of attitudes has been ongoing for decades, accelerated in large part by the impact of Aids, which reconfigured gay identity around community and relationships. In TV shows such as Glee and Modern Family, gays are no longer comic stooges or punchlines, their relationships treated with the same respect as those of their straight counterparts. … To young gay men and women today the idea that they will be able to marry and raise kids no longer sounds outlandish or controversial. It sounds axiomatic. …
…Looking back it’s clear that this dramatic metamorphosis, from poppers to paninis, represented a broader shift in gay culture, or – if you believe the commentator Andrew Sullivan – the “inexorable evolution” towards the end of gay culture itself. …When I became editor of Out, it seemed pertinent to ask what function a gay magazine would serve in a world that, if not yet post-gay, seemed to be heading that way.
…One of those small internet anecdotes that suddenly go viral came to my notice. It was a conversation between a mother and her six-year old son about the TV show Glee that had been posted on her Tumblr account, and it went like this:
‘”Mommy, Kurt and Blaine are boyfriends.”
“Yes, they are,” I affirm.
“They don’t like kissing girls. They just kiss boys.”
“That’s true.”
“Mommy, they are just like me.”
“That’s great, baby. You know I love you no matter what?”
“I know…” I could hear him rolling his eyes at me.”‘
I find myself thinking about that conversation a lot, and how much it would have meant to me growing up to have role models that offered a template for what I might expect from life. And what it might have meant for the straight kids around me to see homosexuality not as something strange and peculiar, but as something familiar and equal. That six-year-old boy might grow up to be gay, or he might grow up to be straight. Either way, he will hopefully grow up without ever thinking it necessary to emphasise the distinction. Then we can truly talk about post-gay.
The House of Representatives in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico is likely to vote this week on an amendment to the island’s penal code that would strip sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression from the 2004 hate crimes statute, according to Michael Lavers of EDGE Boston.
The proposed changes, approved last week by the Puerto Rican Senate, would also eliminate hate crimes protections for people victimized on the basis of religious beliefs and ethnicity. Leaders of Puerto Rico’s LGBT and Dominican communities held a joint press conference yesterday to criticize the legislation, which is being considered in an extraordinary session convened by Governor Luis Fortuño.
According to Pedro Julio Serrano of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, LGBT-identified Puerto Ricans face violence on an “epidemic” scale. In July, Serrano reported that twenty LGBT people have been murdered in Puerto Rico since January of 2010. The 2004 penal code requires the authorities to investigate whether the killings were motivated by the victims’ sexual orientation or gender identity; however, Lavers writes that the Puerto Rico Department of Justice’s own reports reveal that “prosecutors have yet to convict anyone of a bias-motive crime on the island.”
Puerto Rico joins a growing list of places around the world where LGBTs face orchestrated legislative bullying, including Nigeria, Russia, Uganda, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe.
The recent turn of events in Nigeria, where they are rushing a homophobic bill into law, is unbelievably lamentable. This is a country of 158 million people, a country which, like all countries, faces actual, serious social and political problems. (Not that bigotry’s damage is limited only only to its direct targets, of course.) As Wayne Besen points out, homophobia is a mark of a country’s backwardness:
Leaders of such lands desperately look for scapegoats to distract the public from noticing their dismal failures….Homophobia virtually never stands alone. It can only flower in corrupt environments that lack basic freedom, devalue education, limit liberty, have huge income disparities, degrade women, discourage religious pluralism, mock intellectuals, and promote superstition at the expense of science.
For those of us watching Nigeria embarrass and uglify itself, there’s a petition to sign and an article to read. Nigerian journalist Chude Jideonwo writes with conviction of his disappointment and shame at this bill.
Our legislators were hard at work over a considerable number of weeks while the rest of sane Nigeria, in a state of suspended disbelief, ignored them; convinced that, in a country with pressing issues such as fuel subsidy removal and debilitating insecurity, this frivolous legislation would not see light of day.
Until yesterday when, of course, it did.
Dead cliches like “God did not make Adam and Steve” continue to get excited choruses from sedated congregations and people still declare with ignorance that “homosexuality is not a part of our culture”, conveniently skimming over historical evidence of the practice in the East and North of the country; and blissfully unaware that the origins of homophobia in our societies can only be traced to the influx of foreign religions.
Indeed, you have to weep for a people that decry “foreign imperialism” on one hand, and then ignorantly hide under the cover of colonial influences to perpetuate intolerance.
It’s the same country whose ex-president recently paid a ‘courtesy visit’ to appease confessed terrorists; the same country where four men who savagely raped a girl and recorded it on video were defended by a police chief as “dealing with snobbish girls.” Indeed, what else can one expect from a Senate that houses a member who defiled and took for a wife, a girl barely in her teens only last year?
But gays — who only pray for the right to be left alone since they do the rest of us no harm – are the mortal threat to our “moral fabric”. They severely threaten the moral fabric of a nation which finds its place in the bottom of corruption rankings years in a row thanks to politicians like Mark who have sodomized the populace for decades now.
Today, I am ashamed to be Nigerian.
This bill didn’t come from nowhere. A look at the ugliness aimed at Jideonwo in the Twittersphere gives you a sobering sense of how pervasive homophobia already is in Nigeria. Fortunately, many Nigerians are applauding the article, too.
Remember Eddie Long? You know, Bishop Biceps, the homophobic, muscle shirt-wearing megachurch pastor who settled out of court with four teenage boys who accused him of coercing them into sexual relationships?
The House of Representatives in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico is likely to vote 
