Religion

Mark Foley blames crimes on being abused

Priest comes forward to tell of his inappropriate behavior with Mark Foley when Foley was young.

Let me make it really clear:

I was not molested as a kid. Most of my gay friends were never molested as kids. I have several friends who were molested. Some of them are straight and some are gay, and there seems to be no correlation whatsoever between the gender of the person who molested them and their current sexual orientation.

Many studies over the years have shown that there is no causal relationship between sexual molestation and homosexuality.

Also — I’m a 38 year old woman. The woman I love is 34 years old. I’m really quite tired of having our loving, nurturing relationship being equated with pedophilia, pederasty or predatory sexual behavior of any sort, and I’m really hating that I’m reading tons of that crap coming from the religious right currently.

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Marriage, children and equal rights

Good As You presents an especially apt point about the fallaciousness of the “reserving marriage for the nuturing of children” argument:

Hmm..you know why the judges “ignored is that marriage is not primarily about adults; marriage is about the nurturing and development of children?” Because marriage certificates don’t legalize unions with the caveat that those unions produce children! Marriage is one thing; reproduction is another!

Saying that this legal, civil arrangement is all about a non-required by-product of the coupling is kind of like saying that one’s obtaining of a driver’s license is all about the the car, not the legal right. In reality, the person may just want to be recognized as a legal driver, and they might want the license solely for ID purposes. In fact, this New Yorker has a legal license AND a car, but he hasn’t driven in four years. Doesn’t make my license any less legal! And while it may sound insensitive or callous to compare a car to a human child, the comparison in this instance is quite apt. You can’t deny one the ability to obtain any sort of civil permit or license simply because they don’t utilize the legality in the way that you see proper!

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Mark Foley, and “real” gay relationships

In an opinion piece for the LA Times, Michelangelo Signorile says that the media should have “outed” Mark Foley as gay soon after his hypocritcal votes in favor of anti-gay legislation. I agree with Signorile about “outing” hypocritical public figures, and always have. But there’s something else in the article that I wanted to highlight…

Foley lived in a glass closet in Washington, where many people, we’re now being told, assumed he was gay, even as he orchestrated a lie for the voters of his district with help from the media both in Washington and at home in Florida.
Foley’s closet wasn’t just about protecting his political career. He seemed to be filled with shame. According to one gay man quoted in the Washington Post last week who challenged Foley on his voting for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, Foley justified marginalizing gay marriage by saying, “I could never compare any relationship I have ever had to the nature of my mother and father’s relationship.”
For Foley, homosexuality meant second-class status.
That kind of self-loathing is bound to play out in harmful ways. Would Foley have made online sexual advances on teenagers if he were openly gay or if he’d been reported on, truthfully, by the media as a gay man long ago, and faced the consequences? It’s quite possible the answer is no.

I find the phrase I highlighted above just heartbreaking, for Mark Foley’s sake as well as for my own.
I love my parents, and the people who are especially my role models for a good marriage — my paternal grandparents, who are just wonderful people. But do they somehow have a more “valid” relationship than mine? Of course not. When I see my girlfriend, I see someone as important to me as the members of my own family; someone that I love, adore, want to become a better person for, to live with and build a life with.
If I can live up to my grandparent’s example even half way (I’ve referred to them in the past as living examples of “happily ever after”) then I will be more successful as a spouse than 95% of heterosexual married couples are. And I love Stephanie so much that I want that for her and for me. I want a relationship like my grandparents have, with love and stability, surrounded by family and friends.
As loathsome as I think Mark Foley’s behavior was, I hope that someday he finds a relationship that moves him in that way, too — an equitable relationship based on respect and honesty and concern for the well being of his partner, and not taking advantage of people over whom he has power.

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Homophobia and anonymity online

Kim Ficera of Afterellen.com does some research on anonymous posters and homophobia on youtube.com and in online sites like myspace.com, after reading the story of a woman who had a fake myspace page created by her disgruntled students, who falsely claimed she was gay. After delving deep into the world of anonymous webspaces and open displays of anti-gay prejudice, Ficera admits she feels pretty squicked out.

It’s very hard to find words to adequately describe how I feel at the moment. Glad to be in a loving lesbian relationship? Happy to be committed to a woman who can spell? You bet! Betrayed? Sad? Soiled? Beaten ? Yes, all of the above, but to the power of hundreds of clicks and thousands of degradations. I am dispirited, broken by a combination of meanness, vulgarity and ignorance.
I know that there are very dangerous, damaged and just plain mean people in the world. I thought them scattered, though. You know, a Jeffrey Dahmer here, an Osama bin Laden there, and tiny clusters of Ann Coulters, James Dobsons and Mel Gibsons everywhere. I never imagined that I’d find so many crude bullies and emotionally retarded cowards, all feeding off of one another on the web.

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The purser wants you to stop that

New Yorker article on a gay couple who were ordered to stop kissing on an airplane:

Shortly after takeoff, Varnier nodded off, leaning his head on Tsikhiseli. A stewardess came over to their row. “The purser wants you to stop that,” she said.
“I opened my eyes and was, like, ‘Stop what?’ ” Varnier recalled the other day.
“The touching and the kissing,” the stewardess said, before walking away.
Tsikhiseli and Varnier were taken aback. “He would rest his head on my shoulder or the other way around. We’d kiss—not kiss kiss, just mwah,” Tsikhiseli recalled, making a smacking sound.
In the row behind them were Leisner and Jackson. “They were like two lovebirds,” said Leisner, who is a classical guitarist. Frobes-Cross, a Columbia grad student who was sitting across the aisle, had overheard the stewardess’s decree, too. “First thing I catch is ‘You have to stop touching each other,’ ” he said. “And I’m, like, Whoa, that’s really weird.”

After discussing the issue further with the crew, the pilot of the plane told them that they needed to shut up or he would divert the plane. The airline officials also refused to speak to the when the plane landed.
The airline tried to claim that the policy was in place for all couples, but when people called in later to ask, they admitted that straight couples are not prohibited from kissing each other on the plane.
I would so be in trouble for this, because Stephanie and I hold hands and kiss all the time.

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Rosie O’Donnell and Christian Terror Cells in the US

The American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, Faith and Action and World Net Daily are all busy bashing Rosie O’Donnell for saying “Radical Christians are no different than murderous radical Muslims.”

God damn it. What she said is way tamer than what I said in the recent past with a big fat list of armed, dangerous Christian Terror Cells in the United States.

Why the heck aren’t all these people crying out against me?!! Huh??! I’m doing far more than my share to piss of the religious right, and I’m just not getting any credit. Harrrumph.

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War’s Critics Abetting Terrorists, Cheney Says

article on the Washington Post:

“They can’t beat us in a stand-up fight — they never have — but they’re absolutely convinced they can break our will, [that] the American people don’t have the stomach for the fight,” Cheney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The vice president said U.S. allies in Afghanistan and Iraq “have doubts” the United States will finish the job there. “And those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we’ve had in the United States,” he said. “Suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists.”

The person validating the strategy of the terrorists is you, Mr. Cheney, by inducing panic and fearmongering while eroding the foundations of freedom and the civil rights of U.S. citizens, none of which makes us safer from terrorists, but all of which plays into your personal political agenda (and coincidentally lines your pockets at the same time.)

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Brad Pitt: I’ll marry when everyone can

via Shakesville, this article on Yahoo:

“Angie and I will consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able,” the 42-year-old actor reveals in Esquire magazine’s October issue, on newsstands Sept. 19.

That is pretty awesome. I have to admit that at each of the three weddings we’ve been to in the past year, although I was deeply supportive of the happy couple, there was a part of me that resented their ability to get married.

It’s also pretty awesome that Zack, contributor to Shakesville, is proposing a “band together in solidarity” pledge for straight couples to not get married until we can. That is not only helpful, but necessary if we ever hope to make change.

But the most awesome thing of all is what some of the people said in the comments to Zack’s post — how their 80-year old parents got divorced with the help of lawyers for family charges in protest that their gay kids can’t get married. Man alive! That’s cool as hell.  You can contact attorneys help for your family law claims to help you out in this situation. As divorce has negative impacts on child growth,they have suggested that you can consult child custody lawyers serving Richland to help you legally. Hire a Schaumburg divorce lawyer to handle the legal aspects of your divorce while you sort out personal issues.

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Fighting Terror with Anti-Terror

Bruce Schneier says what I’ve been saying since day one of the London Terror Plot, only more eloquently. Perhaps he wasn’t burdened with someone poking him with a sharp stick constantly.

Another thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn’t engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn’t write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn’t use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we’d reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed.
It’s time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation — and not focusing on specific plots.
But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show’s viewership.

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Picking apart Gary Welsh’s coverage

Gary Welsh has a blog post about a recent Washington Post article on the London Terror Plot, in which he takes the opportunity to make some swipes at my blog posts about the event.

“While many bloggers opposed to President Bush’s policies for fighting the war on terror scoffed at initial reports that Islamic terrorists were planning to bring down U.S. airplanes headed from London to the U.S. this month…”

Wrong. I never scoffed at the plot itself, I scoffed at the government’s spin job on the terror plot, and the media’s hysterical reporting of the overly-hyped, politically-timed reports from the government. You quoted me yourself, Gary: “(Let me clarify that — I don’t think they’re constructing a terrorist plot out of whole cloth to scare us. I think they’re making a mountain out of a molehill, and that we’re not really in any danger.)”

The reality is that we were never in any danger. As you can see yourself in the Post article, the attack wasn’t anywhere near imminent, and the British government was monitoring the proceedings almost from the start. I was about as likely to be killed as I would be to suffer a farming accident. The government reports of “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” were completely out of line, if not criminally negligent.

The bloggers who were quick to doubt the original terrorist plot claim are saying little about today’s news.

Possibly because I didn’t read the Post article, Gary. I’m not a right-wing nut, so I don’t read that paper with the religious fervor that you apparently do, considering you equate that one article with all of “today’s news.”

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