I've talked about the After the Ball distortion of the religious right more times than I care to count. In a nutshell, it's like this - the religious right claims that there has been a long-term plot to take over America following the blueprint of a book called After The Ball, which was written by two gay men.
The only problem is that very few gays have ever heard of this book and after they spin the original lie, the religious right don't have anything else to go on to push this belief. They can't tell you the specific names of who is involved in this "plot," any planning sessions, or anything else.
Because it is all a sad conspiracy theory.
Of course when have facts ever stopped the religious right before? And now there is a televised expose on this pathetic nonsense.
Lawd, these people . . .
6 comments:
I need to get that book! Dang. Missed it laying there right next to the toaster I won after recruiting my wife.
Interesting that our "agenda" that is so scary is basically to be treated like regular human beings and citizens of the U.S. The tactics we use to do that, that any group uses to do that, are legitimate and interwoven through this piece among all the scary Chairman Mao stuff. You know, maybe Mao is the new Hitler and the Chinese Communists are the new Nazis. You just can't seem to have political disagreement without the "n" word being thrown around. Now, we can use the "m" word. :)
you know it always astounds me to see when people think we're this organized. It just shows how little they know about it.
I never had any idea that we had that much power. I can barely get the free time to destroy ONE Christian church!
They are obsessed with that book, aren't they? Do you know a used copy on Amazon is $76 and a new copy is $216? (at last look.) Amazing -- and in decades of reading virtually everything I could find on this confounded subject I never heard of it until I got Tony Perkins Family Research Council's "homosexual information packet" -- it's a strange book in that not one of the hundreds of gay men I know ever heard of it, nor has a copy, nor can I find it in any library -- we'll it's a mystery book indeed. Perkins calls it a "Manifesto" though the word doesn't appear in the book itself. Strange.
I read "After the Ball." It's pretty basic marketing and social networking, pre-internet. The authors basically want to "sell" the gay community ("sell" is meant metaphorically) to the larger het community as an inoffensive, people-next-door movement. The book was controversial when it came out as it was seen as a pernicious example of gender-normative assimilationism by the liberationist gays. I liked it okay, I mean, it said stuff like: Our gay rights organizations should use our words, like "gay", rather than sounding generic, like "human rights" because when we use "gay" we help normalize the word and it ceases to seem weird and foreign. That's what I remember, 30 years later, anyway. Hardly revolutionary; and far less aggressive than the way the Christianists market themselves and their ill behavior.
A used copy is $76? Maybe I should sell mine! It was one of the first gay-themed books I bought in college when I was working toward coming out. I thought it was decent enough at the time, but I've been amazed to see the anti-gay loonies latch onto it.
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