Homegrown Sexual jihadists--Redux.

Earlier this week, I posted, and then deleted, a somewhat badly written post regarding Pat Boone's rather dumb World Net Daily post equating the protesters against Prop. 8 to the Mumbai terrorism and I basically was angling at his total uncoolness, and I deleted because, in exactly so many words, I had referred to him as being "kind of a douche." My deletion of the post had a bit to do with my recognition that I had been BUTI (blogging under the influence) and my recognition in the light of morning that one (even if that one is Pat Boone, who is quite possibly using a political viewpoint as a gimmick to kind of be relevant, which was my limping insinuation--all the worse if he actually does subscribe to the idea that terrorism and dissent are the same thing, mind you) is not "a douche" merely because one has engaged in a massively hyperbolic analogy, and also, I realized that name-calling was childish of me.

Now, I don't strive to be much of anything more than extant as a blog. But I think I can try to maybe keep a standard of not resorting to name-calling, and mischaracterization of people. So in the interests of assuaging my guilt over doing two things I don't really like: a) posting something so dumb even I have to delete it, when anyone perusing my back-issues can see I've let typos, rambling, and even banality stand in prior posts; and b) actually highlighting my foibles, which I have in abundance, and like many an egotist, I shudder at revealing.

Pat Boone's article specifically offended me because I do not equate protest, or even incivility, with criminal mayhem and murder. I just seem to recognize a difference, there. The issue in Mumbai stems from a long-time grievance between groups of people identified by religion as well as by history, and the actions that took place are reprehensible. The terrorists of Mumbai did nothing to actually promote anything like sympathy for whatever their cause might be. It was violent and vehement, but there was nothing but the violence to view. The actions were not an expression of civil disobedience in the sense of expressing a point of view. They were expressly about intimidation. And this was what made them especially foul.

To contrast, the people who protested, physically, against certain churches in the wake of the passing of Prop 8, which does owe a lot to the support of some churches, and which interferes directly in the lives of gay people in America, was a form of civil disobedience, and had a clear message. They may have been rude because emotion was high, but that was not murderous, and intimidation was not the point. The point was making it known that the self-determination--the very households, of real people were affected by support that came from these places. They wanted to let people see that there were real actual gay people out there wanting to marry and have the full rights of that--and they went to those churches because their lives were politically affected by what was said at those pulpits.

The separation of church and state has been confused here by the attempts to legislate religion-based morality, and dissent against it is only appropriate. The assumptions that a majority should control the access to rights of a minority, or that a thing is necessarily wrong because some creed determines it as such, or that what even holds for one sect within a given creed should hold for all, are invalid suppostions. Rights are rights, regardless of whether one's group is the majority or minority--and the idea that marriage is a religious-based term becomes absurd in the face of the reality that there are many religions, any of which may have different criteria and not all are inherently opposed to homosexuality. Let me start a religion--The Little Church of "Penguins Do It" The first precept will be, "Verily, because there are gay penguins, and even rats do it sometimes regardless of sex, and oysters will even change sexes, nobody should give a damn who marries who, because really, who can keep track? And weddings are awesome, especially open bar ones, and people living together and loving each other is really awesome, too."

Not all churches would be opposed to gay marriages, and that should tell you something. Would everyone be cool if circumcisions were made legally mandatory because many churches thought they were important to have? (Even though the practice is found to be useful insofar as the spread of AIDs is concerned, I know foreskin-having men who are rather fond of the old prepuce. I kind of dig it myself.) Would you want to be restricted as to what "tribe" you could pull your partner from? Would you want your goverment to tell you what to wear or eat because of some majority religious viewpoint?

The Prop. 8 protesters are legitimately mad, and not just gassing about and not even really very violently. The Mumbai thing is understood with a whole different frame work tht involves colonialism and partitioning and Kashmir, and some train explosion several years back and a whole bunch of other violent stuff.

They really can't be compared. But I will still say that Pat Boone is not cool,





and white shoes are dorky, and there should be a "Godwin's Law" corollary regarding terrorism, and also that Newt Gingrich is equally stupid for saying that there's something like a secular and gay fascism going on. And in a more general sense, here's another precept of The Little Church of "Penguins Do it":

No, religious people, you are not being persecuted if other people simply don't agree with you. Disagreement is not persecution. Asking you very nicely to stop persecuting other people is also not a form of persecution. If you are asked not to persecute, don't go all pout-ragy. Just go back to your faith and good works stuff. And try not to spend a whole lot of money on denying other people their civil rights. It's a recession, they say. You could've fed the hungry and what not. Clothed people. Erected shelters.

Also, "Homegrown Sexual Jihadists" would still make a very banging band name.