Massachusetts GODDAMN Massachusetts

Well I hope everyone had a good holiday. I spent a good bit of time editing my manuscript while totally ignoring this blog.

And now when I am ready to come back to it, an issue hits me in the face with the urgency of a runaway locomotive.

By now, everyone has heard what has happened in Massachusetts, so there is no need to rehash it. Check out this link if you are not aware of the situation.

What is happening gets me angry on so many levels. The first level, of course, is envisioning the press releases that will surely come from Agape Press and that bunch.

Trust me when I say that there is nothing more annoying than a self-righteous gloater.

On a more important level, I cringe to think about another go-round on the "marriage train fight."

I'm probably in the minority when I say that this fight over marriage equality has revealed a bourgeois element of our community.

This point was driven home to me when I read the article about how difficult it is for gay students to get gay/straight alliances started in high schools, despite the fact that the law is on their side.

Meanwhile us black gay men and lesbian women are still fending for ourselves, invisible to two communities that won't give us any respect or visibility.

I am all for marriage equality but gaining it is not the salve for the ills affecting our community. I know gay men who are out but have a negative view of our community. Some don't even know why we should fight for the rights that should be ours, including the right to take care of our families. Some have drunken the kool-aid of lies and actually believe that being gay condemns them to a life of loneliness and vapid sexual relations. Why? Because while there has been so much work about our legal rights, no one has said a word about our spiritual and psychological well-being.

Legal rights are good things, but having a positive spiritual and psychological foundation is more important. Having pride in ourselves is not something we can get from a clique of friends, going out to a club, our material possessions, or fighting for rights that some of us don't even feel we deserve to have.

We have been forgetting that for too long.

WHEW! My manuscript returns

I know that it's a stupid title but that was the first word that came to mind when I opened the package sent by my copy editor.

I have tons (and that's not an exaggeration) of work to do in applying the corrections he sent. As such, I will be busy for a while. I will cotinue to post but barring something major taking place(and with people like Peter LaBarbera and Lou Sheldon around, it is possible), count on me being less loquacious than I usually am.

Meanwhile, Jim Burroway of Box Turtle Bulletin wrote an excellent piece about the hypocrisy of the anti-gay industry - New Survey: 95% Have Had Premarital Sex

Hypocrisy in the religious right? No way.

More sarcasm on my part; it's starting to look like a trend.

Dancing around the Federal Equal Access Act

In Minnesota, some folks are all upset because while a school district brought in gay groups for voluntary staff workshops, it said no when they wanted to bring a conservative organization, the Minnesota Family Institute, to present "the other point of view."

The school district claimed that it said no on the grounds that the presentation is based "on religious beliefs and that schools avoid religion."

But based on what Abby Ludvigson, coordinator of the Institute's seminar program, is quoted as saying, the school district should base its opinion on the fact that the Minnesota Family Institute is going to tell lies:

"They're putting our children at risk by affirming a lifestyle that is dangerous and unhealthy."

The issue of gay student safety in schools is one that I am very point blank on. Students should be allowed to form gay/straight support groups and legislation that would keep gay students from being bullied should be passed with the utmost fervor. Also school staff should be educated on their gay students.

I personally believe that for the most part, gay children are our responsibility. We older gays and lesbians have a responsibility to make sure they are not only proud of their orientation, but that they also make the right decisions in their lives. We should be at the forefront of pushing for these things.

So I get angry when I hear people like Abby Ludvigson turn the tolerance argument on its head.

This is yet another tactic of the anti-gay industry. In court battles regarding gay/straight clubs in high schools and the like, they have been on the losing end thanks to the Federal Equal Access Act. This act guarantees the right of students to form clubs, including gay/straight alliances. With these alliances come the knowledge that schools have to be educated on the needs of gay pupils.

Seeing that they cannot use the courts to block students from forming these groups, the anti-gay industry has engineered a new tactic. They claim that students should have the "right" to hear the other side of "homosexual argument." They claim that school districts should show "tolerance" for the supposed "ex-gay" side.

They have also banded together and started the "Day of Truth" to combat GLSEN's "Day of Silence."

The "Day of Silence" speaks to the problems that gay students face on a daily basis in schools.

The "Day of Truth" is yet another way for the anti-gay industry to spread their Paul Cameroneque lies, which serves to villify gay youth and make them at risk.

Now I believe in tolerance for people who think that homosexuality is a sin. However, I do not believe in allowing people to come into schools and, in the name of tolerance, spread the lie that homosexuality is some sort of death sentence.

This argument for tolerance has created a stalemate between us and the anti-gay industry. What we need to do is to combat it with truth.

First of all, no study has ever said that homosexuality in itself is a "dangerous lifestyle." No study has ever said that being openly gay will guarantee a short lifespan or disease.

Studies do say that negative outside influences can lead to gay youth making bad choices. These negative outside influences include being bullied by classmates or not having access to proper information regarding one's sexual orientation. Or maybe being told by a well-meaning but ignorant wannabe authority figure that being gay is some sort of death sentence.

When gay children are given proper support, they grow up to be contributing members of society. However, what the Minnesota Family Institute wants to give are lies.

What's next? Saying that gay children need a lobotomy?

Who cares if its dangerous. After all, shouldn't one show tolerance for all opinions, even if some opinions are lies?

In case you couldn' t tell, that was sarcasm.

Careening towards the new year

A couple of things are happening.

First from Massachusetts, a victory for our side.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court said that it cannot force lawmakers to vote on a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. The court rebuked the legislature for not voting, but regardless, Massachusetts is still the only state that allows gay marriage and that won't change for a while.

However, the only joy I can take from this decision is that it will drive James Dobson and company out of their minds with anger.

I really don't like this new tendency to base the success or failure of our movement on whether or not we get marriage equality. The success of the gay rights movement will not be decided on whether or not we can walk down the aisle, but whether or not many of us feel that we deserve to walk down the aisle.

Meanwhile, former President Ford passed away yesterday and it got me thinking about Oliver Sipple, the man who prevented Ford from being assassinated in 1975.

What happened to him was a negative in the history of gay America. Sipple was a closeted gay man and because of his diligence, he found himself to be a "poster child" for gay rights, even though he didn't want to be. Sipple was outed by those who claimed to be on his side and slowly his life was ruined because of it.

This is not to blame anyone for what happened. If anything, it should serve as a reminder to those of us who are leaders in this struggle for equality to never forget the individuals they are trying to help.

Behind the movement are individual people with different lives and different circumstances. Some may be able to come out quickly, but others will take time; that is an unfortunate fact of life.

If it becomes okay to sacrifice the life of one person for the greater good (i.e. visibility), then we have lost our souls.

Remember that the next time a new controversy about a "closeted" movie, television, or singing star takes place.

Holiday over, back to the battlefield

I hope that everyone had a very Merry Christmas. Mine was nice and quiet - my favorite type of holiday. And I even managed to get some work done.

Which reminds me - I want to marry my copy editor.

Okay maybe not, but over the weekend, he spoke to me about my manuscript and gave me a bunch of excellent ideas for making my prose better. Thanks to him, I took care of a problem that had plagued me since I finished my manuscript.

And speaking of problems, a while back, someone wrote in (in a not very nice way) that our friend Robert Knight of the Concerned Women for America had moved on to the Media Research Center (MRC). The MRC is yet another one of those right winged, the world sucks until everyone does what we think they should do groups.

At the time, I wasn't aware of the move because I didn't see any press release and such. Apparently though, Mr. Knight has moved on.

Robert Knight figures greatly in my book due to his lying exploits with the Concerned Women for America and the Family Research Council. It really doesn't matter where he goes because Mr. Knight has created an interesting paper trail and I have copies of almost all of it.

Lastly, I think our friend Peter LaBarbera is slipping:

Chevron scholarships are available to students in the University of Colorado's School of Engineering who are in the "gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender" community or who support its activities through volunteering. WorldNetDaily reports that CU engineering students received an e-mail recently that offered $1,000 scholarships from Chevron for meeting those qualifications, and writing about their involvement in an essay. It was a move the story quotes a school official as saying is Chevron's attempt to benefit engineering field minorities that are "under-represented." Peter LaBarbera is president of Americans for Truth, a group that monitors homosexual activity in the culture. LaBarbera thinks the scholarship symbolizes a society that increasingly rewards people for sinful behavior. "It's a shocking thing when you come to the point where America is going to have affirmative action based on affiliation with homosexual practices," says the activist. According to LaBarbera, the practice of affirming homosexuality is everywhere -- from the educational and corporate worlds to the political realm. "America is becoming a society that is rewarding people for practicing homosexual sin, essentially -- and it's incumbent upon Christians to speak up and say how wrong that is," he adds. The Americans for Truth spokesman says a society cannot be healthy when it rewards people for what he describes as "unhealthy and immoral behavior."

No claims about the "short life span of gay men" or how Chevron is rewarding "dangerous behavior?"

Why Peter, are we getting to you?

First, three items

A victory for our gay and lesbian children - Appeals court backs ruling favoring straight-gay student group.

I wonder how long it will take before Agape Press quotes the Allied Defense Fund as to how much of a shame it is to push children into "dangerous behavior."

Items 2 and 3 don't exactly look good for us. According to the Conservative Voice, a Denmark study has claimed that "provides interesting and tantalizing evidence that the less stable or traditional a child's home is, the more likely that the child will turn to homosexuality as an adult."

Here we go again. Now I don't know what the study actually says. I do know that the anti-gay industry is notorious for distorting studies from the Netherlands to claim that homosexuality is evil; one of the most infamous being a study they said claimed that gay marriage was not a good idea.

Of course they failed to mention what the study was actually about and also omitted the fact that none of the gay couples in the study were married and that lesbians were excluded.

I chronicle this study and how the anti-gay industry distorted it in my upcoming book.

No doubt before we get the actual truth about the study the Conservative Voice referred to, anti -gay industry pundits will be citing it repeatedly on television and to their followers.

In Britain, a couple has been paid monetary damages for an incident in which the police questioned them regarding their anti-gay beliefs.

I am sure that Robert Knight, our friend Peter LaBarbera, and the rest will attempt to use this unfortunate incident to push the theory of a worldwide gay conspiracy to "harm Christians."

Oh vey!

Boot camp comes to a close

Next week, I should be receiving my manuscript from my copy editor and I am anxious to see what he thought of my book.

Since I am off of work until Wednesday, I should be working on the appendix and acknowledgements, but u know the old saying - the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

Not too weak though because I had to talk myself out of adding new chapters to my book. No sense in overwhelming anyone. Keep it simple and sweet.

So keeping that spirit, I thank everyone (even my wannabe spammers) for supporting my blog and keeping up with how my book is progressing.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Something I forgot to mention

Democrats are also supported by homosexual advocacy groups that routinely give organizations like NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association, positions in “gay rights” parades, where they proclaim such slogans as “sex by eight or it’s too late.” - Gary Bauer, National Review, December 20, 2006

Yesterday, I neglected to mention another tirade from a right winger. An online friend of mine pointed it out to me.

The above comments about NAMBLA and gays is from wannabe "pro family" activist Gary Bauer during a column he wrote for National Review talking about the Mark Foley scandal. For the benefit of those not wanting to read it, he rehashed the "Democrats are hypocrites, blah blah blah, Gerry Studds did the same thing" nonsense that so many others in the anti-gay industry tried to spin when the controversy broke.

Mr. Bauer's comments are so late that they transcend the "who the hell is he and why does he think anyone cares what he says" point. His comments border on "Geez, is that dumbass still around" territory.

Bauer used to be a big wig in the anti-gay industry. He led the Family Research Council for a time until an ill advised move to run for president in 2000. Rumor control has it that his decision pissed off James Dobson. And rumors that Bauer was having an affair with a female co-worker didn't exactly help matters either.

Of course, Bauer was very unsuccessful in his presidential aspirations. He is now president of American Values and chairman of Campaign for Working Families, but in all honesty, Bauer is totally irrelevant; except for when Agape Press or some other right wing and/or anti-gay publication wants a comment.

Hence his very late Mark Foley tirade.

I don't know what is worse about Bauer's comments; the fact that they are extremely late and add nothing new to the situation or the fact that his lies about gays and NAMBLA is such an old headless monster that even the stubborness of a thousand anti-gay activists can't hold it up.

These two weeks have been pitiful for the anti-gay industry. First Mary Cheney becomes pregnant, then James Dobson is caught three times misrepresenting legitimate studies. And now, Gary Bauer repeats lies that have been refuted so many times till it's just sad.

Bear in mind that I am not gloating. I know that there are a few people who follow Bauer religiously and believe every word that comes from his mouth.

But still, it's nice to watch the train wreck.