I Never Will Forget.

 I see the folks who are having a little problem with seeing a Gay Pride flag at the White House, and I am so sorry, but--

Protesters have breached the Capitol. They’re outside the Senate chamber pic.twitter.com/I021tKliUD

— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) January 6, 2021

The Trump fans brought Confederate flags into the Capitol and tried to run up a Trump flag. The pride flag is about honoring the human rights of some of our citizens and the Trump fans were literally carrying flags of treason. Every Trump flag is about denying a legitimate election in favor of the seditious, lying punk who tried to hoard state secrets for reasons as yet unknown. I will never forget that desecration. The Pride flag is not that. 

Why don't they focus on stuff that's way more hurtful, like the Nazi flags outside of Disneyland? 

Or do we already have the answer to that? 

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Marriage Equality

All things considered, I see the decision of SCOTUS to decline hearing out an argument to reverse the decision of lower courts to strike down bans on gay marriage as a pretty good thing. For one thing, as the court is currently constituted, I'd be worried about what kind of cartwheels they'd need to undertake to give "concerned people" the status to claim that allowing marriage equality harmed them in any way, and I'd really be shocked at seeing one of those "one-shot", not intended to act a precedent, rulings that manage to mangle things in favor of states banning gay marriage, without doing harm to the concept of states' rights. I think that, understanding that public opinion is changing on this issue rapidly, the court is probably in the right to let it go.

I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. And I've got a little schadenfreude for the tizzy that some of the NOM (et als) folks are in at the moment. (Countdown to Brian Brown having to get a real job continues...) (Because what kind of a job, seriously, is being an activist against other people's personal lives? Seriously, you busybody--can you file? Type? Handy with a plunger?*  Because working to deny other people basic rights is a shitty job to cling to.) And why, yes, why wouldn't the 14th amendment apply to gay people?  Forget redefining marriage--I take a hell of a lot of issue with someone redefining "citizens" in a way that excludes queer identities.

More couples--more families--breathe a little easier and make the plans that were a long time coming. And I would call that progress.

(Yes, I know the man is highly educated. Cold. Ass. Stare.)

Philadelphia is not yet fully civilized--

There was a genuinely horrific beating on a gay male couple in Center City Philadelphia this past Thursday. The perpetrators don't look like some kind of cretins. They just actually are.

Even  hip young things aren't always already schooled in "How to not assault people who are different from you." The stereotypes about whether they are more accepting of others and whatnot is not always borne-out. You could hope we have less homophobia about, but apparently, some people just aren't ready to fit in with polite society.

I like to think that as a middle-age urban person, I am rubbing shoulders with people who aren't actually knuckle-dragging and knuckle-swinging cultural troglodytes who express their limited understanding and fears about things they don't understand via fist-to-face telegraph. Apparently, however, fist-swinging low-brows can assume a disguise as normal people and behave in thoroughly fucked-up ways.

I wish I were more shocked, is all. These dumb-asses need to be so busted they creep from now on.

Just a Sample of Regnerus for The Uninitiated

I know people who aren't either homophobes or students of LGBT oppression probably are not familiar with Mark Regnerus, the author of the study usually gone to when homophobes try and cough up something like a sociological reason why same sex couples should not be wed. So I think a wee primer might be in order, since Mark Regnerus is a named expert witness for the defense in the case against the Michigan same-sex marriage ban. 

In addition to thinking that gay families are somehow less good than the families made by straight people, even though he had so much finagling to do to get that result, Regnerus believes gay marriage will have an effect on straight couples.   To wit: men will either want adultery or anal sex.

Because there is no time before the acceptance of gay marriage that men ever wanted to have some strange or anal.

That opinion right there is amazing to me as a mostly-straight lady. To my very basic experience, straight- experienced men have long had a yen for strange and have occasionally requested anal from their female partners. This knowledge predates the acceptance of gay marriage. I believe these requests were non-exceptional and actually representative of normal straight-male sexual fetishes.

I do not find it plausible that Regnerus is a good or even acceptable researcher when it so happens that not only is he not clear on what gay relations are about, but he has so entirely misjudged straight relations, so much so that any newsstand issue of Cosmo could straighten him out. Seriously.

I think his testimony is useless, but like that  it will be out there for the major debunking.

Judge Strikes Down Prop. 8 / and I address some hate.

via The LA Times:

A federal judge in San Francisco decided today that gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry, striking down Proposition 8, the voter approved ballot measure that banned same-sex unions.

U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker said Proposition 8, passed by voters in November 2008, violated the federal constitutional rights of gays and lesbians to marry the partners of their choice. His ruling is expected to be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

.....

Backers of Proposition 8 contended that the legal burden was on the challengers to prove there was no rational justification for voting for the measure. They cited as rational a view that children fare best with both a father and a mother.

But defense witnesses conceded in cross-examination that studies show children reared from birth by same-sex couples fared as well as those born to opposite-sex parents and that marriage would benefit the families of gays and lesbians.

I so wish this would be the end of it, but of course NOM and the usual suspects are already planning their appeal. I'll just let some of the choicer bits of stupid grace my blog for a bit so I can hold them up for what they are:

First up, Maggie Gallagher--

Judge Walker's view is truly a radical rejection of Americans' rights, our history and our institutions that will only fuel a popular rebellion now taking place against elites who are more interested in remaking American institutions than respecting them.

If this ruling is upheld, millions of Americans will face for the first time a legal system that is committed to the view that our deeply held moral views on sex and marriage are unacceptable in the public square, the fruit of bigotry that should be discredited, stigmatized and repressed. Parents will find that, almost Soviet-style, their own children will be re-educated using their own tax dollars to disrespect their parents' views and values.

Regarding the highlighted part--FUCK YEAH! Ms. Gallagher, your deeply held moral views on sex and marriage are not acceptable because you are baselessly passing judgement upon your fellow human beings and telling them how to live. No one died and left you "Bedroom Boss"! Your point of view is bigoted and should be discredited because it is simply not right, and regardless of the opinion of people who voted for this marriage ban for one specific class of consenting adults, the essential right to be treated equally trumps your right to dictate to them. You still have a right to your opinion. But you would be surprised to the extent that this so-called "re-education" is anything but. It's merely an education: that different people may want different things, and can live their own lives in way that, ahem, aren't even your business.

(I do not understand why this woman is making other people's business her crusade. There are so many more productive and healthy things she could be doing with her time. I worry about her lifestyle. If a small child asked me why she was concerned about other people's marriages, I don't even know what I'd tell them. Hmph.)

And from Bishop Harry Jackson, a splendid example of "not getting it"--

Prop 8 Decision Threatens Core Civil Right to Vote for Marriage -This is a travesty of justice. The majority of Californians - and two-thirds of black voters in California - have just had their core civil right to vote for marriage stripped from them by an openly gay federal judge who has misread history and the Constitution to impose his San Francisco views on the American people.

The implicit comparison Judge Walker made between racism and marriage is particularly offensive to me and to all of us who remember the reality of Jim Crow.

It is not bigotry it is biology that discriminates between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples. To make a marriage requires a husband and a wife because these unions are necessary to make new life and connect children to their mother and father.

Judge Walker’s slur will not stand the test of time and history. We demand that Congress and the Supreme Court act to protect all Americans’ right to vote for marriage.

Yes, Bishop Jackson, there is nothing like letting the voice of the majority decide who is and is not supposed to be treated as equal. I am sure that if the people voted on the ability of inter-racial couples to marry, they would have, in those days, been just as right as the Loving decision was. Just the same as the people all on their own would have recognized the inequality implicit in segregation, and rid themselves of it at the ballot box without the Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education decision.

And then we woke up.

Bishop--this decision isn't even about you! It's about gay people! They are people! And they happen to be gay. Somehow, they have worked out the biology issue--which accounts for only a tiny portion of anyone's life. The rest is about love, companionship, supporting one another, nurturing one another, wanting to live together, and wanting to even love that person unto death--that isn't a damn thing about biology. Fuck you, pardon my language, for reducing my heterosexual marriage to a question of biology, for the kids we aren't going to have, for the fact that only a little sliver of my own marriage even has to do with sex--you, sir, cheapen marriage when you put it that way! You don't have any especial right to vote for or against another person's happiness, and you are ridiculously wrong in your understanding of family and marriage.

"Connect children to their mother and father"? So much for adoptive parents, foster parents, step-parents! The sexual ability to reproduce isn't what makes good parents and there are many, many people with crappy biological parents who will tell you that the biological act of making them did not actually imbue those parents with any wonderful parenting magic. The thing that makes that parenting connection, that children since the beginning of humanity need to become self-actualized, happy adults, is love. And gay people have it, because sometimes that is all that keeps a community together when there are so many people who would make second-class citizens out of a minority group and even congratulate themselves for the privilege.

I'm sure more people will have more foolishness to say about this issue, but those were some really sad examples.

Mike Huckabee and the "Ick Factor"

This is few days old, but still interesting to me; Mike Huckabee, who was a candidate for the GOP nomination for the presidential race in 2008 and is still thought of as a likely contender for 2012, despite what he himself might have said about it, gave a pretty informative interview about his views lately on a number of subjects that might be relevant to his future political aspirations.

You know how those pieces are. They lay out a platform without really laying out a platform, and then smart cookies quote from it later on. So here's Huckabee about teh gheysecks:

But Huckabee doesn’t just want to leave things the way they are; he wants to change the Constitution to specifically prohibit gay people from getting married. He has called homosexuality “sinful and unnatural” and is fond of amusing audiences with the witticism “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

One afternoon in Jerusalem, while Huckabee was eating a chocolate croissant in the lounge of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, I asked him to explain his rationale for opposing gay rights. “I do believe that God created male and female and intended for marriage to be the relationship of the two opposite sexes,” he said. “Male and female are biologically compatible to have a relationship. We can get into the ick factor, but the fact is two men in a relationship, two women in a relationship, biologically, that doesn’t work the same.”

You know what else has the "ick factor" in that same article? For him, sex with Nancy Pelosi or Helen Thomas. So, some straight sex is out, too. And I think the idea that same-sex relations are especially "icky" is peculiar, when straight couples (or....some numerical equation in which straights are involved) can be, well, damned similar, when you think about it. What I'm boiling it down to is--all sex is private and potentially icky. Especially if you are doing it right. The "ick factor" is for people who still think in terms of "cooties." But grown-ups who've been around a bit? Most people get past the "ick factor". The same way picky kids learn to eat lima beans, or whatever. They get over themselves, and they can also mind their own business, too.

Like Huckabee should. And anyway, regarding the pic of Huckabee with fish--a handy analogy strikes me: fishing is fun for some folks, and eating fish is also fun for some. Not everyone likes fishing, and not everyone likes eating fish. And hardly anyone likes cleaning and gutting those darn fish--there's that "ick factor"--but you have to, or the fishing doesn't make any sense, and no one gets around to the eating. (Was that folksy enough?)

Now, I don't know if Mike or his missus cleaned that big old fish, but somebody sure had to, and if I have a good idea about these matters, nobody in the Huckabee household gave a good goddamn how icky the fish guts and scales and all were once they sat down to eat it. Because a little "ick" is sometimes a necessary thing.

I don't know why my analogy for gay sex involves eating fish, but I went there. Y'all come back now, y'hear?

Is hate a sacrament? (re-try)

I wrote a sprawling mess of a post last night about this story, so I decided I should start over and express my disgust a little more succinctly. A conservative group is challenging the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009:

(CNSNews.com) – A conservative civil liberties group is challenging the constitutionality of the recently enacted federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009.

The new law, attached to a defense authorization bill that President Obama signed on October 28, 2009, makes it a federal crime to attack someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. The Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center says it elevates people engaged in deviant sexual behaviors to a special, protected class of persons under federal law.

The lawsuit naming U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan on behalf of three pastors and the president of the American Family Association of Michigan.

All of the plaintiffs “take a strong public stand against the homosexual agenda, which seeks to normalize disordered sexual behavior that is contrary to Biblical teaching,” the Law Center said in a news release.

(Emphasis mine, naturally.) I'm pretty sure I engage in "deviant sexual behaviors"--in fact, I think I probably broke the law in Virginia once (or a few times, consecutively). And I'm heterosexual (well, mostly.) I take a strong stand against making gay-bashers a "protected class" just because they hide behind religion. It's very convenient to hate people and blame God. But the blame for anti-social and hateful behavior really needs to be dumped in the laps of those that spawn it--the haters and the bashers.

It doesn't "elevate" a group of people to say that they should not be physically assaulted, or that people should not be encouraged to physically assault them. It does not elevate them to say there should be no laws that particularly exclude them from fully participating in society, either. But it would elevate a few religions to let them dictate laws that exclude based upon their religious biases, and it would "elevate" them to give them a pass when they maintain that hate is just a crucial protected part of their religion.

These people think they know what "deviant" is--when the truth is, they don't know the half about the variety of human sexual experience and have no reason to know, because it very rarely affects them in their day-to-day lives. But violence and eliminationist rhetoric affect all of us--they are the ones who want to do harm by interfering in other people's private lives--whom they choose to make their families with, or simply love. Or even just mutally and consentually pleasure.

They can choose to believe that I, an atheist and a deviant, will answer some day to their God, if that's how they want to see it. But they have no right to make me, or any other "deviant" answerable to them by violence and intimidation. The law just imposes civility. It doesn't oppress them unless they think terrorism against GLBT folks is a sacrament. If that's how it is, I'm extra-glad there's a law. Because that is just crazy. And uncivil.

(Those poor oppressed things--unable to oppress others, and all!)

Sally Shills Xtian Shari'a, says sodomy spoils economy.

Oklahoma Rep. Sally Kern has been featured here before. She hasn't changed much since then. She's got a Proclamation for Morality thing she seems to believe might address our hard economic times. For the full impact, read the whole thing, here.

It goes something like:

WHEREAS I am from a district with its share of Bible-believing Christians, and

WHEREAS many people legitimately have been hit hard by the recession,and

WHEREAS I could address the economic forces regarding Wall Street excesses and banking fraud and so on, if I understood any of that, and

WHEREAS what I really can do is suppose it must have been God's doing, since He does everything, and is probably smiting us for some stuff, and

WHEREAS I like to blame stuff on teh sex, especially teh ghey sex, and

WHEREAS I also need to get a dig in at the current president, who hasn't sucked up enough to prayer-based people, and wants to honor the gheys by noticing they exist for a whole month, and

WHEREAS my aides have gone online and done a thorough search for anything a Founding Father might have said mentioning "God" even if we aren't sure they really said those things, like it matters, since it's a Christian nation, amirite? and,

WHEREAS bloggers haven't jumped on my behind for, like, a minute, I think we could really ask God to go smite somebody else with Economic Fail, and we'll really do better at disapproving of other people's personal business in God's name in the future!

Well, no. That wasn't exactly how it reads....but....

WHEREAS, the people of Oklahoma have a strong tradition of reliance upon the Creator of the Universe; and

WHEREAS, we believe our economic woes are consequences of our greater national moral crisis; and

WHEREAS, this nation has become a world leader in promoting abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery; and

WHEREAS, alarmed that the Government of the United States of America is forsaking the rich Christian heritage upon which this nation was built; and

WHEREAS, grieved that the Office of the president of these United States has refused to uphold the long held tradition of past presidents in giving recognition to our National Day of Prayer; and

WHEREAS, deeply disturbed that the Office of the president of these United States disregards the biblical admonitions to live clean and pure lives by proclaiming an entire month to an immoral behavior;

NOW THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that we the undersigned elected officials of the people of Oklahoma, religious leaders and citizens of the State of Oklahoma, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world, solemnly declare that the HOPE of the great State of Oklahoma and of these United States, rests upon the Principles of Religion and Morality as put forth in the HOLY BIBLE

It's not that far off, no?

It did start/it did not start, with Stonewall--it doesn't end there.

The point is the conversation--do we all have rights, or not? Do we all breathe the same air? Do we all have the right to live and love(end DOMA)? Fight for our rights--even in the military (end DADT!) It's kind of b.s. to point to one moment in the '60's as where a movement starts--how "Boomer-centric!" It's easy to point out that there isn't so much a movement, as disparate homosexual voices, realizing silence isn't an option. It's easy--and it's hard. The broader culture is still pretty hetero-normative. But acceptance is growing. Even if it sometimes feels like....


We're up against a stone wall?


No, just up against people who don't know and need to be told. There is a history, and that is why there is Pride. "Pride" is about still being here, until just being here isn't a thing anyone needs to be proud about anymore: it's just a thing that "is."