One of my pet peeves in gay activism is when people fail to understand that the fight for reproductive rights/health and the fight for LGBT equality are the same damned fight. It’s about people who are not straight, white, Christian men having access to full freedom and equality in this country, over our bodies, our sex lives, our access to the same Constitutional rights as everyone else — in short, it’s about all of our lives. When one fight suffers, the other fight suffers.

Here’s a real life example of that! The Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center has offered a pioneering HIV testing program for several years, which is open to all, regardless of sexual orientation. Until tonight, that is:

Memphis, TN, February 8, 2012: Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center (MGLCC) will be unable to offer Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) testing tonight and for the foreseeable future. For more than three years, MGLCC has collaborated with Planned Parenthood to provide the only regularly-scheduled, after-hours HIV testing in the Mid-South. This afternoon, Planned Parenthood representatives informed MGLCC that they do not have the funds necessary to provide the HIV testing for the foreseeable future because the State of Tennessee has denied Planned Parenthood access to grants for HIV prevention. The cut in funding for Planned Parenthood has put MGLCC’s model HIV testing program in jeopardy.

Despite MGLCC’s core mission to focus on the needs of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community, the HIV testing program offered at MGLCC has always been open to anyone needing a test. MGLCC does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. MGLCC believes that helping clients find out their HIV status and find access to appropriate HIV care is an essential service not only for the individual, but for the health and well-being of our entire city. More than 500 individuals have been tested by the HIV testing program offered by MGLCC since the program’s inception in 2008. Will Batts, Executive Director of MGLCC, says “Our strong collaboration with Planned Parenthood to provide HIV testing has improved the lives of hundreds of people every year. Losing this vital program will put the health and well-being of many Memphians at risk. MGLCC considers the setback to our HIV testing program a great tragedy, but we hope the setback will be only a temporary one.”

You see, organizations like Planned Parenthood, as well as local LGBT community centers, offer programs and services that benefit entire communities. Planned Parenthood does a hell of a lot more than just “abortion,” though that is one important thing they do. The Memphis Gay & Lesbian Community Center offers programs that benefit people far beyond the local LGBT community. And now the jihad against Planned Parenthood is directly affecting the center’s ability to serve people.

Wake up, people. If you’re not involved in both of these fights, you’re missing the big picture.

Presented without comment:

Background.

UPDATE: Also, read Amanda Marcotte on this. She’s one of the experts.

Truth Wins Out’s acclaimed Center Against Religious Extremism (TWOCARE), offers original, in-depth, and on-site reporting.

“Please, come join us,” insisted an attractive college student flashing her bright Aquafresh smile.

Before I was able to decline her friendly invitation I was gently pulled into a large prayer circle of thirty or so Charismatic Christians. “I’m sorry my hand is sweaty,” the girl said with a sheepish grin.

Those were the last words she spoke that I understood. We quickly surrounded a handful of young preachers who whooped and hollered before surrendering English for the unintelligible language of tongues.  The manic participants sounded like a cross between a prayer service and a Native American tribe preparing for battle.

Eventually, they raised their hands toward the sky pointing to God, which allowed me to escape and enter the seating area at Ford Field, where Lou Engle, founder of The Call, had gathered 27,000 fundamentalist Christians from across the nation on 11.11.11, a date that came to him in what he believes to be a divinely inspired vision. The majority of the crowd was Caucasian, however a significant number were African American. There was a large youth component, but the age of participants reached across the spectrum.

While I can’t speak for the entire conference, which was a 24-hour call to fast and prayer, I did spend 14 hours at Ford Field watching sermons, surveying sideshows, videotaping the gathering, and interacting with the hyped-up crowd. So, my observations, while not complete, do offer a significant snapshot of the 11.11.11 Detroit rally.

In a press release prior to the event I wrote that I expected 11.11.11 Detroit to be a “gay bashing” and “Muslim trashing” extravaganza. After all, The Call had chosen Detroit as its rally site in an effort to convert the region’s estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Muslims.

The Associated Press reported that Apostle Ellis Smith, Engle’s local “point person” for The Call, referred to Islam in a sermon leading up to the revival as a “false,” “lame” and “perverse” religion.

Engle had previously held an infamous event in Uganda that whipped up anti-gay hysteria. In 2008, the electrifying preacher organized a rally at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium in support of Proposition 8, a successful measure to prohibit marriage equality in California.

To my surprise, the festivities, which were aired on God TV, were appreciably toned down. Sure, there was red meat on the menu, but it was not the all-you-can-eat buffet that I had come to expect from Engle and other leaders of the 7 Mountains Movement (aka The New Apostolic Reformation) that he is a key part of.

Indeed, most of the aspersions on Friday evening and Saturday were deliberately cast though euphemism. Homosexuality was never explicitly mentioned, but was instead lumped together with other “sins” under the umbrella of “sexual immorality.” Other times, speakers camouflaged their anti-gay agenda by simply saying they supported “traditional marriage.” During the entire time I observed the event there was not one reference to healing homosexuality and no “ex-gays” were trotted up on the stage to tell tales of how they “prayed away the gay.”

However, the Detroit Free Press reported that Apostle Smith claimed that at the event, “a lesbian came from the homosexual community and said she has never experienced such love. And she is now working to change her lifestyle.”

(I’m sure this alleged lesbian was very stable and well adjusted because it is common for healthy and secure LGBT people to spend weekends attending revivals that consider them demonic.)

The conversion of Muslims was also downplayed and “Dearborn,” referring to the Detroit suburb with perhaps the nation’s largest Muslim population, euphemistically replaced the word “Islam.”

It took several hours to figure out what was really going on – but I gasped when the disturbing pattern finally revealed itself. This elaborate show had all the trappings of a modern religious revival – from the thumping music to the two gargantuan video screens suspended above the enraptured audience. But this ostensibly religious event was little more than a political front.

Its real aim was to peel African American support away from the Democratic Party in a swing state during a critical election year. Not only is President Barack Obama’s reelection at stake, Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow is locked in a tight race that includes social conservative and former GOP Rep. Peter Hoekstra. This cynical revival was not about “values” — it was about votes. It was not about worship, but winning office for Republicans by promoting what writer Ed Kilgore called in The New Republic, a “big-God, small-government creed.”

The amazing part was that the audience seemed totally unaware of the underlying motives and machinations. After all, the words “Democrat” and “Republican” were never spoken and there was only one local politician identified on-stage. It seemed that even some of the minor speakers might not have been privy to the overarching strategy. Nonetheless, a brilliant display of political subterfuge was unfolding as the oblivious crowd bopped to Christian rock with their hands swaying above their heads.

This is not the first attempt of white fundamentalists to lure black voters away from the Democratic Party. Immediately following the 2004 presidential election, social conservatives made a strong push to lure African-Americans. Rev. Lou Sheldon, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center hate group, The Traditional Values Coalition, hosted a right wing meeting of 70 black religious leaders in Los Angeles.

“In 2004, the religious right was concerned about re-electing George W. Bush,” said Al Sharpton at First Iconium Baptist Church. “They couldn’t come to black churches to talk about the war, about health care, about poverty. So they did what they always do and reached for the bigotry against gay and lesbian people.”

Unbelievably, at the Los Angeles meeting Sheldon played an anti-gay video featuring disgraced Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss. Remember, Lott had to step down as Senate Majority Leader after he publicly pined over Strom Thurmond not winning the presidency as a Dixiecrat. African-American columnist Leonard Pitts put Sheldon’s power grab in perspective:

“Whether the issue was slavery, segregation, lynching, voting rights or housing discrimination, social conservatives have always taken a position that history later judged to be ignorant and flat-out wrong….which leaves me at a loss to understand why any African American possessed of a functioning brain would give this atavistic bunch the time of day.”

Still, the attempt was gaining some momentum until Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, which badly frayed the burgeoning unholy alliance. The effort was further hampered by the emergence of Barack Obama as the Democratic standard bearer.

In this renewed effort in Detroit, Lou Engle and his minions were smart. They wisely figured out that direct attacks on the Democratic Party would not fly, nor would all-out verbal barrages against President Barack Obama, who still has strong African American support. They also understood that the baggage surrounding white Evangelical racism would have to be addressed and surmounted before real progress was made.

To overcome these obstacles and recruit African Americans to vote for the GOP they devised what seems like a five-part strategy.

1) Pick a key swing state with a beleaguered city that had an economically disadvantaged African American population

2) Create an emotional spectacle where tearful white people pleaded for forgiveness and repented onstage for past racism

3) Sharply define new wedge issue(s) and create a racially-based conspiracy theory that could ultimately be used against the Democratic Party

4) Exploit these emerging wedge issue(s) to the point they become more important than fixing the economy

5) Redefine voting criteria so candidates are primarily judged by where they stand on these wedge issue(s) – with the ultimate goal of leading many African Americans to conclude that they are best represented by the conservative GOP.

Lou Engle understands that much of Michigan is conservative. If he were able to peel off fifteen or twenty percent of Detroit’s black Democratic vote, he might be able to turn the state solidly red. The main wedge issue he selected to accomplish his plan is abortion. For good measure, he helped weave a conspiracy theory: Sinister white bigots who run programs like Planned Parenthood were using abortion to reduce African American birthrates.

“What Birmingham is to the civil rights movement, Detroit is to abortion,” bellowed Engle at the event. “Detroit has a calling…blacks and Latinos could lead the parade of history.”

Engle’s message was aided by a parade of socially conservative African American ministers.  One preached that black people must choose “BC (Biblical Correctness) over PC (Political Correctness).” The subtext was that the pro-life GOP is on the side of the Bible and thus should be the party of African Americans. Another pastor was even more explicit when he declared that African Americans had a choice: “God’s way or a political party’s way.” (Read More)

It seems that America could use a genuine pro-family movement instead of hate groups using “family values” as a cover for their anti-gay activities. According to the Census Bureau as reported in the New York Times:

** Married couples have dropped below half of all American households for the first time. Married couples represented just 48 percent of American households in 2010

**  Just a fifth of households were traditional families – married couples with children – down from about a quarter a decade ago, and from 43 percent in 1950

** 37 states, plus the District of Columbia, in which married couples make up fewer than 50 percent of all households, up from just 6 states in 2000

** Rising income inequality has divided American society, making college-educated people less likely to marry those without college degrees. Members of that educated group have struck a new path: they marry later and stay married. In contrast, women with only a high school diploma are increasingly opting not to marry the fathers of their children, whose fortunes have declined along with the country’s economic opportunities.

** 41 states showed declines in traditional households of married couples with children. In 2000, married couples with children were fewer than 20 percent of all households in just one state, plus the District of Columbia. Now they are fewer than a fifth in 31 states.

The statistics are quite telling and perverse. In the name of saving marriage socially conservative groups helped elevate anti-gay Republicans, which enacted policies that led to great income disparity — which depresses marriage rates. Nice going, fundies!

This is similar to the way social conservatives try to cut funding to Planned Parenthood, which leads to unplanned parenthood and higher abortion rates. Or, how they promote abstinence-only programs in schools, which also backfire.  It seems that right wing social engineering consistently boomerangs.

I think these new statistics are a good opportunity for “pro-family” groups to look in the mirror and realize that their politics have failed. Focus on the Family, the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council have obsessed about gay families at the expense of traditional marriage. If they had bothered to pull their noses out of our bedrooms and averted their eyes from our keyholes, they might have noticed the problem.

James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Brian Brown, and Maggie Gallagher have no one to blame but themselves for the disintegration of marriage in America. They wasted (and continue to throw away) gobs of time and money harming LGBT people — and ignored the challenges faced by the majority of working families.

Given the statistics and their professed aim to support families — one can only conclude that the leadership of these groups has been misguided, blinded by anti-gay bigotry, addicted to the money from anti-gay direct mail campaigns, or simply incompetent.

It is time for Focus on the Family and other such groups to refocus. Working to destroy our families has done little to promote family life for the majority of Americans. If they are looking for something to do, consider this:

The nation’s overall education spending grew at a slower pace in 2009 than at any other time in more than a decade, amid deepening state fiscal woes and flatter tax revenues, according to new census figures released Wednesday.

Less education = Less marriages. Now, “pro-family” groups — stop gay bashing and get to work solving real problems.

Awesome:

My only quibble is that pro-choice policies do far more to protect fetuses than so-called “pro-life” policies, so the sign sort of gives them more credit than they deserve.

More here if you’re interested.

It’s good that Chris Barron of GOProud is, for a change, standing up for a gay rights issue, but he’s sadly deluded if he thinks that “social conservatives” don’t care about hating gay people anymore.  Here’s what Chris had to say about Pawlenty’s calls to defund DADT repeal:

I understand that Pawlenty is trying hard to get people to pay attention to his campaign. Its certainly a challenge for someone with such little stature in the conservative movement to compete with high profile conservative leaders like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, etc. Unfortunately for Pawlenty, comments like this simply show how totally out-of-touch he is with the issues that rank and file conservatives care about. If he wants to show he is a committed social conservative he would be much better served talking about the need to defund Planned Parenthood, end federal funding for abortion, reign in an out of control judiciary and support for a parents rights amendment to protect home-schoolers.

Okay. Let’s take this apart. Besides the fact that it’s grotesque that GOProud is sidling up to patriarchal, ineffective forces in the so-called “pro-life” movement by supporting policies which have been shown to increase the need for abortion while simultaneously making it less safe and taking the primary healthcare provider away from many, many women* [seriously, just use Google for thirty minutes on the subject, or, you know, just go here and read and learn things], it’s laughable that he’s not including anti-gay issues alongside those other wingnut causes. When wingnuts talk about an “out-of-control judiciary,” half of what they’re talking about is judges who rule favorably in gay rights cases.

As I said, it’s good to see Barron standing up for something that helps gay people, because most of GOProud’s agenda is just wingnut talking points with the word “gay” inserted every now and then.

*I’d also add that Planned Parenthood does a hell of a lot for the gay community, when it comes to STD testing, prevention and education.  But normal wingnuts don’t have a damn clue what Planned Parenthood really does, so there’s no reason to expect any better from gay wingnuts.

Where’s your big gub’mint now, teabaggers?

The rate at which bastard children were born in 1963, when Lyndon Johnson launched the war on poverty, was seven percent. Meanwhile, we continue to maintain actual marriage penalties in our tax code, including the newly hatched monstrosity of health care reform. So we subsidize illegitimacy and penalize marriage, and we wonder why things get worse rather than better.

And President Obama intends to zero out the one budget item devoted to strengthening marriage in low-income communities.

The place to begin? By reforming state and federal budgets so that we no longer subsidize immorality.

It’s time to communicate in policy and not just in words that in America, we expect you to save sex for marriage, to have children only within the marriage relationship, and that we will no longer force American taxpayers to fund the expenses of children they did not conceive and with whom they have no relationship and for whom they have no responsibility.

If you conceive children out of wedlock, we will expect you and your families to find a way to take care of the expenses involved in raising that child. In America, that child is your responsibility and no one else’s. You may look for help to charities funded by private, voluntary, compassion-driven donations, but you may not look to government to force other Americans at gunpoint to take money out of their wallets and fork it over to you. We are no longer going to treat you as helpless little children; we are going to treat you as the responsible adults you can become. It’s time to grow up.

“We expect you to save sex for marriage”? And he wants the government to enforce this?! That’s just darling. If you ever needed any proof that when conservatives talk about “small government” (or most anything else, really), that they’re not talking about any deeply held beliefs, but rather just farting out buzzwords they heard on teevee, this is a textbook example. The Religious Right doesn’t want “small government.” They simply want to be the government. “For the white fundamentalist Christians, by the white fundamentalist Christians.” Note, of course, that the actual victims of the policies Fischer is imagining would be the children.

“Pro-family?”

My ass.

Fischer and the American Family Association, of course, don’t care about those children or their families. There’s more than a little bit of racist subtext in his piece. It’s heavily coded, of course, because it’s in wingnut Newspeak. And of course, if any of these people actually did care about the people they wish to victimize, they’d support universal healthcare, reproductive health services, contraceptive education and availability, and Planned Parenthood, since that organization is the primary healthcare provider for many poor single mothers. It’s useful to remember, also, that Fischer is a member in good standing of the Religious Right, many of whose leaders have signed on to the idea that abortion rights and Planned Parenthood are perpetrators of “black genocide.” So, which is it? Is Fischer’s heart just bleeding for the unborn black babies, supposedly the victims of a giant superpower machine that’s conspiring to eliminate them? Because he certainly doesn’t seem to give a damn what happens to actual children born into poverty, black or white, entertaining as he is a fantasy to punish those children’s parents for daring to have sex without his permission, and to punish the children for the “sins” of their parents. Or is Fischer simply a wingnut opportunist who’s unable to distinguish between his various bigotries long enough to see when they’re slamming up against each other like two freight trains in his wee little brain?

(h/t Kyle)

I’ve found in monitoring radical anti-gay Christian extremists that they’re usually not normal, rational people who happen to dislike gay people. Usually, they’re detached from reality on several fronts. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is apparently no exception. Cuccinelli, you’ll remember, decided to use his status as AG to direct Virginia’s colleges and universities to remove sexual orientation from their non-discrimination policies. Unfortunately for him, Virginia happens to be home to Smart Kid Schools, and smart kids and Christian fundamentalist windsockery go together like oil and water, and his efforts have been rebuffed so far.

He’s also embarrassing himself with his efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, which is the only primary healthcare source for many women.

But also? Cuccinelli seems to be a a hardcore birther, having been caught on tape having the following conversation:

Q What can we do about Obama and the birth certificate thing?

Cooch: It will get tested in my view when someone… when he signs a law, and someone is convicted of violating it and one of their defenses will be it is not a law because someone qualified to be President didn’t sign it.

Q: Is that something you can do as Attorney General? Can you do that or something?

Cooch: Well only if there is a conflict where we are suing the federal government for a law they’ve passed. So it’ possible.

Q: Because we are talking about the possibility that he was not born in America.

Cooch: Right. But at the same time under Rule 11, Federal Rule 11, we gotta have proof of it.

Q: How can we get proof?

Cooch: Well… that’ a good question. Not one I’ve thought a lot about because it hasn’t been part of my campaign. Someone is going to have to come forward with nailed down testimony that he was born in place B, wherever that is. You know, the speculation is Kenya. And that doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility.

Right Wing Watch has the video if you want to hear the Cooch for yourself.

This of course also reveals that Cuccinelli probably has race issues, since the birf certifkit thing has been so thoroughly debunked that only backwards knuckle dragging white people with inferiority complexes in the face of black men who are smarter than them still cling to the birther fantasies, the way they cling to guns and religion. (Hee hee.)

Okay, so let’s count. So far, Cuccinelli has

1. Major inferiority and fear issues where gays are concerned.

2. Major inferiority and fear issues where women are concerned.

3. Major inferiority and fear issues where Barack Obamas are concerned, going so far as to cling to fantasies that he is ineligible for the office of the presidency.

4. Probable Fear of a Black Planet.

Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that enough wingnut fear, enough wingnut neurosis, enough mental illness for one far right wingnut official?

Oh, for Christ’s sake:

In an overlooked recording from the campaign trail, candidate Cuccinelli told a crowd that he was considering not registering his son for a Social Security number because “it is being used to track you.” He also claimed that many others are not registering for Social Security numbers for the same reason.

Direct quote:

We’re gonna have our 7th child on Monday, if he’s not born before. And, for the very concerns you state, we’re actually considering — as I’m sure many of you here didn’t get a Social Security number when you were born, they do it now — we’re considering not doing that. And a lot of people are considering that now, because it is being used to track you.

Video:

Good lord!

Apparently, like Victoria Jackson, Ken Cuccinelli would be a lot safer if he wore a helmet. I’m worried he might hurt himself otherwise.

Anyway, here’s some music, just because it’s still one of the best responses to people like Ken Cuccinelli I’ve ever heard, and also because if Ken stumbles across this post, it might make him pee:

UPDATE: Another quick link for thee: Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog makes a solid case that Cuccinelli is not only a Birther, but also a Tenther (another fringe whackjob movement) and a liar (self-explanatory).