Words never to forget

This Massachusetts crap is bringing me down and is interfering with my usual blog posts.

We get it already. Democrats lost and got a much deserved wake up call. Lgbts are pissed and have been for a while and deservedly so (although between me and you, it seems that the only thing the community can do is not only be pissed, but think of cute little slogans to define how pissed we are).

So I want to throw out something tonight to remind us to never forget what it's all about. No matter how much we feel deserted by our supposed allies or how we feel put upon by those who will fight the idea of us living openly, proudly and with dignity, if we give in to seductive notions of self pity and anger without focus, we lose.

And that would be a shame because we are on the side of good.

And good never loses:

Rush Limbaugh brings up Mary Jo Kopechne and other Tuesday midday news briefs

Limbaugh on Brown's win: "This one's for you, Mary Jo." - No matter how low progressives feel, we can always count on Rush Limbaugh to make look morally superior. Thanks Rush.

Economist: Evidence backing gay marriage is in - And the evidence is mighty interesting.

Gay Rights Bills Threatened By Democratic Senate Loss - Well that's a possible given.

Natalie: I left over lesbian plot - Too bad. So sad.

Massachusetts! Massachusetts!

Politics is called the "eternal sea" (I got that from the Omen series) in that the only constant with it is that it always changes.

One minute one party has the advantage, then another minute, the other does.

So this thing in Massachusetts was bound to happen in one form or another. And if you pardon me for saying so, I would rather have something like happen now than in November.

I like President Obama, but he needed a good shaking. I'm hoping that he and the rest of the Democrats learn from this early lesson. Think of it as a political form of A Christmas Carol where Scrooge learned that he should change before it's too late.

But DAMN, Brown's victory is going to drive me nuts.

The pundits spinning this is going to depress the hell out me. And worse of all, I just know the teabaggers are going happy crazy. I'm going to have to hear about this "Massachusetts Miracle" nonsense for longer than I can stand.

And the very thought that the folks at Fox News, particularly Glenn Beck, will probably be comparing Brown's victory to the Allies storming the beaches at Normandy is giving me stomach pains .

Lastly, I'm ducking as progressives put on the bandaleros and go all Pancho Villa on each other like we always do when faced with a loss.

But it helps to put it all in perspective.

Despite all that will be said, this situation boils down to one thing.

Martha Coakley did not deserve to win because she ran a crappy campaign.

I'm sorry but when you have an advantage like she did, you do not sit on your ass and let your opponent gain on you.

You don't win elections by making hideous missteps.

You take every campaign seriously and you define your opponent before he/she has a chance to define you.

It reminds me of a state election down here in South Carolina. The incumbent was a Republican representative (Rick Quinn) who had served in Legislature for a long time. He even had the name recognition of a prominent family.

But he took his opponent too lightly. His opponent went from door-to-door campaign while Quinn did virtually nothing.

I don't have to tell you who won.

So basically those of us who are progressives are going to have to follow the advice of Katherine Hepburn in The Lion In Winter and take our wormwood like good men and women (sue me already, I'm a gay man. It's required that I make movie references).

We lived through Reaganomics, the Republican Revolution, and eight years of Bush/Cheney.
This should be cocktail canape.

But Obama and the Democrats should take note. Scrooge learned his lesson. If they don't learn theirs, it's going to be a very cold November for them.

A sidebar (that will not be noted) is that the lgbt community should take a lesson from this loss in Massachusetts. It is all about defining your opponent before he/she has a chance to define you. And how many times have we allowed the religious right to define us and our struggle for equality because we will not put them on the defensive over their tactics.

It's something to think about.

The Daily Show nails Massachusetts situation

Y'all (I used to say "folks," but I noticed that Peter LaBarbera has stolen the word), I'm trying to write on lgbt issues but today I can't.

All I can do is throw out this very appropriate clip of The Daily Show featuring Jon Stewart talking about the Massachusetts election.

He is very on point:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Mass Backwards
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

NOM involved in Massachusetts vote and other Monday midday news briefs

Hey Brown supporters: Don't shoot NOM, shoot the stances that spurred them into action! - NOM is involved in the Massachusetts vote. But do Brown's supporters want them there?
Uganda: Anti-gays launch campaign against US, UK, Canada... - Proceed at your own risks, guys.

Gay rights group targets Sen. Kean - This is interesting.

Liberty Counsel: Still Silent On Lisa Miller - This one slipped under the radar.

Martin Ssempa talks about 'poop' to demonize lgbts

You want to know how Martin Ssempa, a proponent of that awful Ugandan anti-gay bill, tries to convince people regarding the so-called evil of homosexuality?

Ariel Rubin of the Huffington Post gives us a clue. On Jan. 15, Ssempa held a conference to announce a Feb. 15th "million person march" in support of the bill.

That in itself is bad enough. What Ssempa did at the conference is even worse:

A captivating speaker and natural performer, (he was once the East African breakdancing champion), Ssempa clearly knows how to work a crowd. When a reporter asks why he is persecuting adults engaging in consensual acts in the privacy of their own bedroom, he quickly takes out his laptop to expose just what these acts are.


A pornographic slideshow of black and white photographs of men engaging in scatological fetishism is revealed. "I want to show you from their website", he proclaims, a devious smile forming. "I've taken the time to research what homosexuals do in the privacy of their bedroom. It is inhuman, it is animalistic, and it cannot be right. I want to show you these pictures." The audience lurches forward, leering at the pictures and groaning in disgust. Ssempa, enthusiastically goes on:


I want to say homosexuals eat each other's poop. Homosexuals stick their hands into their rectum. Homosexuals stick all sorts of deviant sexual things into their rectum. I want to show you this is from their website. So the first picture that I want to show you, you can see this man has just eaten the other person's poo poo and is rubbing it on his mouth, and I'm going to ask that we print for each of you a photocopy of this story so you get it fully.


Then, of course, they are grabbing each other's gentials, that is level number one, touching each other, grabbing each other. Then number three, now they are licking eachother's anus and are licking poop. And they call poo poo, chocolate. You see it is a change of words. I want you to see, Sheikh please forgive me but I want these people to see, they say a picture is worth one thousand words. This is a man eating the other person's poo poo, can you see that one? Please from BBC, I want you to tell them, we know what they do.

Point of fact - you can easily find the same outrageous sexual behavior on heterosexual webpages devoted to the sort of thing that Ssempa is accusing lgbts of. Strange and deviant sexual behavior is not indicative of the lgbt or heterosexual orientation.

What Ssempa is doing is the equivalent of pointing to the mugshots of African-American criminals (while ignoring the mugshots of criminals of other nationalities) to make the case that black people are inherently more violent.

Now people may want to laugh at Ssempa's behavior but to do such would miss the point.

We can't laugh at Ssempa. It would waste much needed time that should be devoted to exposing him.

In the early 1980s when the AIDS crisis struck and people were panicked, discredited researcher Paul Cameron came to prominence with junk science designed to demonize the lgbt community.

Psychologically, Uganda is at a place now where the United States was then - ignorant and totally susceptible to any demagogue or phony eager to exploit fear and religious beliefs.

I wonder how many of us laughed at Cameron.

Does Miles McPherson want to hide his gay = pedophilia belief from the Proposition 8 trial?

I read an interesting piece on the Truth Wins Out webpage regarding two San Diego pastors not wanting to testify in the ongoing trial regarding Proposition 8, the ballot measure in California that prevented gays from marrying in the state.

The two pastors are Jim Garlow and Miles McPherson:

Curiously, both San Diego pastors were subpoenaed to testify at the Perry v Schwarzenegger federal trial, also known as the Olson-Boies trial, on the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, which was backed, endorsed and aggressively promoted by both pastors and which eliminated the existing right of gay and lesbian Californians to marry.

Both Pastor Jim Garlow and Pastor Miles McPherson, through their legal representation — Brian R Chavez-Ochoa of Chavez-Ochoa Law Offices, Inc. — have filed motions to quash their subpoenas to avoid testifying in public. What follows is is the gist of their arguments against publicly continuing their anti-LGBT and anti-marriage-equality ministries before Judge Vaughn Walker in a court of law.

I won't dwell in Garlow because I find McPherson's reasonings rather interesting. The following are his justifications for not testifying:

I, Miles McPherson, hereby declare and make this declaration out of my own personal knowledge and if called upon to testify to the contents herein I could and would do so competently

1. We preached at our church – The Rock Church – marriage and issues surrounding Proposition 8.

2. We organized supporters of Proposition 8 based upon our belief in traditional marriage; which happens to contradict same sex marriage and other forms of marriage, other than one man and one woman.

3. My church and I have nothing but love for homosexuals and lesbians, but we reserve the right to disagree with those we love.

4. I am concerned about the precedent that this subpoena sets for all those who wish to speak out about their beliefs.

5. Because of my preaching on Proposition 8, 1 have received hundreds of e-mails threatening me and expressing hate towards me and my church.

I hereby declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States and the State of California that the foregoing is true and correct.

Executed this 7th day of January, 2010, at San Diego, California, County of San Diego.
MILES MCPHERSON

Pastor Miles McPherson’s motion to quash his subpoena can be found in the PDF file at this link.

That third point - 3. My church and I have nothing but love for homosexuals and lesbians, but we reserve the right to disagree with those we love - stands out mostly because I have an issue with it.

I wrote about it last year during the Carrie Prejean scandal. At the time, Prejean attended McPherson's church, the Rock Church of San Diego and I was pointing out the fact that McPherson was relying on the discredited work of Paul Cameron to claim that homosexuality and pedophilia are connected in a piece he wrote entitled Sodom and Gomorrah, a City Inflamed.

The piece has been scrubbed from on the Rock Church of San Diego's webpage. However, the following is a part of my post regarding it -  the part which clearly shows McPherson using Cameron data to make the inaccurate connection between homosexuality and pedophilia:

I looked at the church’s webpage and found there to be a lot of inaccurate information, particularly regarding gays and HIV:

male homosexuals are 430 times more likely to contract HIV than a heterosexual, while heterosexuals have a 1-in-750,000 chance of contracting the virus responsible for HIV, a male homosexual has a 1-in-165 chance of getting HIV. A 20 year old gay male has a 30% chance of either dying or contracting AIDS before the age of 30. They are also 23 times more likely to get other sexually transmitted diseases than a heterosexual.

But it’s the next section that caught my eye like a blinking light:

There are also moral repercussions stemming from homosexual behavior as evidenced by the fact that one third of all sexual crimes against children are committed by homosexuals even though they are representative of only one percent of the population. Pedophilia has even been called central to the gay lifestyle. The agenda of the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is to lower the age of consent so that sex with children will be legal.


The idea that homosexuality and pedophilia are linked is a lie that has been refuted continuously. The American Psychological Association, the National Association of Social Workers, the American Academy of Child Psychiatrists and the Child Welfare League of America all say that the homosexuality and pedophilia are not linked.

So where did that notion come from? The discredited researcher Paul Cameron:

In a 1985 article published in Psychological Reports, Cameron purported to review published data to answer the question, "Do those who commit homosexual acts disproportionately incorporate children into their sexual practices?" (p. 1227). He concluded that "at least one-third of the sexual attacks upon youth are homosexual" (p. 1228) and that "those who are bi- to homosexual are proportionately much more apt to molest youth" than are heterosexuals (p. 1231).

Does McPherson not want to testify to avoid being asked about his usage of junk science against the lgbt community? It is a good question in light of the fact that he is the second Proposition 8 proponent who is seeking not to be ordered to testify citing the same reasons (being threatened) while trying to hide past statements which show an ugly anti-gay bias.

Hak-Shing William Tam was one of five defendants who petitioned the court to be allowed to defend Proposition 8 . On January 6, he requested that he be allowed to withdraw from the case citing the possibilities of threats on himself and the lives of family members.

However, according to the Associated Press:

In the months leading up the trial, lawyers for two unmarried same-sex couples on whose behalf the case was brought complained that Proposition 8's sponsors were withholding evidence to which the plaintiffs were entitled by citing a letter they had uncovered written by Tam to members of his church during the campaign.

In the letter, Tam outlined what he described as the disastrous consequences for allowing gays to marry in California.

"One by one, other states would fall into Satan's hands," he wrote. "Every child, when growing up, would fantasize marrying someone of the same sex. More children would become homosexuals."

The contents could come up in the trial because one of the issues is whether the measure's backers were motivated by anti-gay bias.

So that's two Proposition 8 proponents who either claimed that same-sex marriage would make children gay or used discredited studies to claim that gays molest children at a high rate.

It sounds like McPherson (and Tam) want to hide what's increasingly obvious. Proposition 8 was passed via ugly anti-gay bias.

But lgbts and our allies already knew this.

UPDATE - Tam testified as a hostile witness. He stood by his beliefs regarding homosexuality and pedophilia but couldn't say where he derived them from.

Big hat tip to Truth Wins Out and Box Turtle Bulletin.